Now (and Again)
Re-enactment and the moving image
BFI Southbank
27-28 April
<http://www.unreal.as/nowandagain/now.htm>

Now (and Again): In 1898, American Vitagraph re-enacted the Battle of 
Santiago Bay in a bathtub with paper boats and cigar smoke. Since the first 
years of cinema, re-enactment has been a central, if controversial, 
practice in documentary, but it has grown increasingly important to a range 
of other moving image forms. Fiction filmmakers and artists have staged 
re-enactments to explore the vicissitudes of memory and historical 
imagination, or to frame the drama of identity as it is acted-out in social 
space. As theatre or therapy, re-enactment offers new ways of understanding 
the media and the social world. In conversations between artists, 
filmmakers, curators and writers, we explore the particular contemporary 
resonance of re-enactment and the moving image.

Cinema’s first images are not originals, but re-enactments. Four different 
versions of Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Factory were shot (the initial 
print soon destroyed by repeated projection), each version a meticulous 
re-enactment of cinema’s original wonder. Cinema promised to show us the 
world anew, but it was a world made anew not only by the cinematic act of 
reframing it, but also by the theatrical gesture of re-staging it. Naval 
battles were re-staged in bathtubs and boxing matches replayed in studios 
(using blow-by-blow newspaper accounts as shooting scripts). Everything 
from coronations to executions, anything that would sell was re-enacted for 
film.

Such re-enactments were sometimes passed off as actuality, at others their 
artifice was an attraction in itself. Repetition and theatricality seem, 
perhaps perversely, to have intensified the charge of immediacy and sense 
of authenticity felt by early audiences. Re-enactment allowed a sense of 
being present, after the fact.

Some hundred years and countless centuries of recorded and preserved moving 
pictures after cinema’s birth, we stand ‘after the fact’ of its passing 
into something else: into a universe of technologies and economies that 
recycle and replicate images across media with a greater intensity than 
could have ever been imagined in the days of the kinetoscope, bioscope, 
vitagraph or cinematograph.

After this fact, the practice of re-enactment persists, and perhaps more 
variously than ever. A perennial strategy of the mass media (from the 
Hollywood re-makes of European art house to the news feature crime 
reconstruction), it is also an instrument of those critiquing it - 
increasingly deployed by artists working with moving image in gallery 
contexts, by documentary filmmakers and independent fiction filmmakers 
alike. And as a browse of youtube will demonstrate, re-enactment is also a 
pursuit of enthusiastic amateurs.

As a creative strategy it has opened space for new modes of performance, 
addressed challenging political and philosophical issues, raised sometimes 
troubling ethical questions, and led to new ways of understanding the media 
and the social world.

After the Fact, a season of cinema and studio screenings, events and an 
international symposium, all running parallel to Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s 
major gallery exhibition, explores the historical and contemporary 
significances of re-enactment for moving image cultures. In particular the 
season considers the way in which the theatricality of re-enactment reveals 
the drama of our social roles, offers new angles on the telling of 
histories and the remembering of the past; but above all else, the season 
asks, if unconscious repetition is often a symptom of trauma, how might 
re-enactment offer insights into the fraught relations between the image 
and trauma today?

To book tickets, call the box office on : +44 (0)20 7928 3232, or visit the 
BFI Southbank online box office: <https://tickets.bfi.org.uk/welcome.asp>



----------------------
A A Piccini
BA (UBC), MA (Sheffield), PhD (Sheffield)
Research Councils Academic Fellow
Drama: Theatre, Film, Television
School of Arts
University of Bristol
Cantocks Close, Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1UP
T: +44 0117 954 5449
E: [log in to unmask]
Skype: aapiccini
W: www.bris.ac.uk/drama/staff_research/angela_piccini/

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