Megan Carrigy - Opening up Re-enactment for Film Theory

Megan Carrigy’s seminar presentation entitled Opening up Re-enactment for Film Theory attempted to define re-enactment and its form of repetition, and to locate the concept within the spectrum of live performance. Carrigy identified her sphere of research as one which has been largely overlooked in contemporary film scholarship, in spite of the lineage of re-enactment based performance stretching back to the 15th century. Re-enactment also played an integral role in the emergence of primordial cinema, a point illustrated by Carrigy through turn of the century newsreels comprised of reconstituted footage of staged re-enactments of topical events such as the Spanish-American War, featuring rudimentary examples of techniques that would eventually become common parlance in filmmaking vernacular, such as continuity editing. Re-enactment has remained a prevalent mode of cinematic storytelling in features such as documentaries, biopics and history based narratives (war films, epics, ‘true stories’ etc), in conjunction with its existence outside the respective mediums of television and cinema in the form of battle commemorations and living history museums, continuing to play an key role in the perpetual evolution of the medium. As a device that “dramatizes documentary, and authenticates drama and fiction”, re-enactment constitutes something of a problem for historians who often struggle to reconcile historical accuracy with performance, even on occasions when the narrative makes the most earnest attempts to engender some sense of fidelity to the truth.

Carrigy concluded her discussion with an analysis of the re-enactments that appear in the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The re-enactments that punctuate this series can be considered particularly unique in that they are predominantly speculative (based on the wounds of murder victims, the re-enactments attempt to elucidate what may have happened) further problematizing the inherent claims of validity espoused by all re-enactments, appear repeatedly throughout each episode in various forms and from various perspectives, and are also computer-generated. Through this discussion of re-enactment in the context of CSI, Carrigy raised the concept of indexicality, which refers to the so called ‘truth claim’ of photography and its capacity to accurately depict reality, and is a highly prevalent theme in the film theory debates regarding spectatorship in the work of theorists such as Andre Bazin. Though speculative re-enactments of events that likely never occured, Carrigy argues that the re-enacted cinematic images that appear in CSI leave their own indexical trace as a result of their repetition, an example of her attempts to shift the theoretical terrain surrounding re-enactment to a more referent-based focus. In this sense her study can be considered the development of a new theoretical approach to film studies, informed by aspects of film spectatorship and film history, as well as media and performance studies.