Performing Violence Trauma and Reenactment in Documentary Film

This chapter explores the use of reenactment in three documentary films about 20th-century histories of mass violence. While different in scope, approach, and style, Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), and The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013) all incorporate imaginative reenactments within a documentary format. This approach violates the deep-seated expectation that documentary film provides direct, literal access to the (historical) real. Instead, these films suggest that the lived experience of traumatic histories and their protracted psychic and social effects can only be relayed to contemporary viewers through performative rather than documentalist strategies. Building on the work of, among others, Michael Rothberg in memory studies and Stella Bruzzi in documentary theory, this chapter submits that the performativity of reenactment works to implicate contemporary subjects in reverberating episodes of historical violence. Each in their own way, these films challenge comforting distinctions between atrocious pasts and the embodied “presentness” of their restaging. In so doing, they tend to erode the distance that contemporary viewers may hope to maintain from the traumatic histories addressed while raising ethical and epistemological questions about one's relation to the suffering of historical and cultural others.