Seminar Response - “Opening up the re-enactment for film theory” - Megan Carrigy

Megan Carrigy is a PhD student at the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales.

Megan Carrigy discussed the issue of opening up the realm of re-enactment in cinema for greater acceptance by film theorists and within the film studies discourse.

Carrigy described re-enactment as being commonplace in film theory, only within the realm of historical reinterpretation. She explained that in the mind of the critic, film re-enactment took place in individual scenes rather than being afforded its own genre. To the critic, film re-enactment authenticated dramas and fiction, and dramatised documentaries. Carrigy cited David Roddick as describing film re-enactment as “cinematic metaphor” which she argued was an apt description of the thematic device.

Carrigy argued that film re-enactment was more than just a filler injected in to authenticate the delusional fantasies of the writer or to bring home the truth about the past. Instead she argued that film re-enactment was a legitimate genre and theatrical form, characterised by a self-reflexive, performative strategy.

Carrigy then introduced the history of the genre and discussed the idea of early film re-enactments in the period from1898 to 1907. This was a period of vast improvements in both skill and technology, which resulted in an increase in film production. This time period saw an increase in the number of documentaries, topical films and biopics; many of which were on the subject of the Spanish American War which called for a mass demand in film topicality. The need for the masses to see the gore and horrific nature of war re-enacted, was echoed in Carrigy' citing of Tom Gunning's theory of a 'cinema of attraction', wherein the viewer wishes to see that which attracted them in the first place – the hyperreal re-enactment of the horrific nature of the subject.

Carrigy's seminar was framed around the question of theatricality and reference in the genre of film re-enactment and was structured by her comparative case study on a modern depiction of film re-enactment in the realm of television realism – the indexical inter-object trace in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-present). Carrigy discussed the re-enactments played out within the contexts of the diegetic world of the television series, with particular emphasis on the indexical trace between objects that afford a forced direction on the viewer. She argued that it displayed a sense of 'ultra-realism' and was pivotal to the narrative of the drama. Carrigy argued that this displayed a sense of cinematic metaphor; of cinema and spectacle – an idea at the basis of film re-enactment.

Carrigy concluded her seminar by restating the importance of film re-enactment within contemporary cinema, with the possibility of opening it up as a legitimate genre within film theory and history.

Cinema of Attraction – Tom Gunning

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 - present)