Re-enactment and Critical History
Angelos Koutsoukaris, University of Leeds
Wednesday 13th November, 1-2pm MAE101 – ALL WELCOME!
Reenactment as a mode on inquiry about the past and as an artistic practice has recently become prevalent. Reenactments of the American civil war, of WWI and WWII have turned to tourist attractions in the USA. Reenactment is also an in important mode of practice in television but also in theatre and performance art with many experimental groups, such as the Wooster group, re-enacting past performances by theatre practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski, but also documented events like the infamous Town Hall affair that took place in 1971 in New York. In cinema, recent films like The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence (2012) and Theatre of War (2018) extend a cinematic tradition of reenactment firmly rooted in the works of Jean Rouch, Errol Morris, and Peter Watkins.
In this paper, I intend to join the scholarly conversation on documentary reenactment going beyond the memory studies debates that have become prevalent in the academy in the past three decades. I am interested in thinking about reenactment as a mode of inquiry and practice that is not just in service of commemorating victims from the past. Instead, I want to look at how reenactment can enable us to recover untold stories from the past with the view to troubling linear approaches to history rooted in the Enlightenment paradigm.
Angelos Koutsourakis is a University Academic Fellow in World Cinema. He is the author of Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-editor of The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). He is currently co-editing (with Thomas Austin) Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
