28th June 2008

The Thin Blue Line

Errol Morris 1988

After having come across Errol Morris’s recent articles on re-enactment in film, especially in relation to his 1988 work The Thin Blue Line, I began thinking about Shoah again and some of the things we had discussed in relation to it. It’s interesting that we actually watched The Thin Blue Line during our Sussex retreat but didn’t really make any specific response to the film afterwards – perhaps Morris’s writings on the New York Times website give another opportunity to think about these ideas both in relation to that work and to Shoah, perhaps a part of trying to bring in references to more contemporary films.

In the first of three posts, Morris goes into detail about his use of slow motion re-enactments in The Thin Blue Line – a film that centres on the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the murder of a Dallas police officer, and which contributed to Adams’s eventual acquittal – before opening up wider debates on the implications of using reconstructions in documentary film-making. Morris claims that he uses the technique to focus the attention on otherwise neglected details of the story being told (for example the thrown milkshake – a metonymic device that stands for the numerous inconsistencies in the events related in the story of the murder). As such, the reconstructions serve as goads to memory, and, to some extent, to logic: “My re-enactments focus our attention on some specific detail or object that helps us look beyond the surface of images to something hidden, something deeper – something that better captures what really happened.” Morris’s reduction of the crime down to what he calls “essential questions” isolates his faith in his reconstructions to function as lenses through which the viewer/filmmaker can better engage with the materiality of the narrative (so to speak), getting some kind of always already implicated handle on the shifting terms of the event in question. It can repeat the sequence from innumerable angles, waiting for significant details to emerge, or even recede from dominant view.

Elsewhere in his articles, Morris highlights the resistance of many critics to re-enactment in documentary film (regarded with a suspicion that is coupled with the generally held opinion that a director should be ‘hands-off’), but suggests that he is convinced that this is the only way that a filmmaker can engage with a story “from the past”. This may well be debatable, and it does raise questions about Lanzmann’s approach to Shoah (as well as his direct contribution as a directorial presence in the film itself) – if Lanzmann’s project is somehow ‘presenting the past’ (i.e. allowing it to remain past in the sense of not showing archival evidence, whilst rerouting [another form of 'showing'?] it through the present), how else but in the collision of past and present that a re-enactment essentially stages could this be achieved?

Obviously, there are huge differences between what is being attempted in Morris’s film and what is occurring in Shoah, but I think it might be worth thinking about the similarities also. Morris’s concern in The Thin Blue Line concern the minutiae of a specific crime – a fleeting event that, whilst not uncomplicated, is obviously on a much reduced scale to the vastness of the criminal events surrounding the holocaust.

Morris describes our perception of reality as being assembled from small details, and so his focus in The Thin Blue Line is often on disputed accounts, objects, gestures that form component parts of what unfolded – it is in the crucial details that the nature of an event might be apprehended. In the case of Shoah, there again is the presence of countless intimated details, gestures, etc. but ones that cumulatively amount to an assemblage that might be beyond our ability to accept it, of such dimensions that it will never really form for us. When Morris speaks about trying to assemble details into something that has what he calls a “consistent narrative,” one wonders about Lanzmann’s approach to the detail, and how he manages to negotiate the general within his re-enactments. This reference to consistent narrative is interesting – this is arguably not something that Lanzmann has in mind when setting up the re-enactments of people’s experiences during the war. Using the real people, as well as combining it with verbal testimony – a curious mixture of privileging of oral testimony over imagery, text over image.

There seems to be an important question here as to whether there are any re-enactments in Shoah in the first place. It’s fair to say that they are not re-enactments in the same sense as those employed in The Thin Blue Line, and that the examples we can point to in Shoah are much more complex and unsettling. Lanzmann does not construct straightforward reconstructions but rather platforms for testimony. The sequences have a curious relationship to fabrication – in some sense they are not re-enactments at all, but simply ‘enactments’ of the survivors’ memories. There is very little relation to the measurement of events being alluded to (there is no kind of superimposition in the way it is filmed, so to speak); there is no concession to any reconstructive authenticity; it is a tangential, almost incidental connection with the actuality of past events. The way Lanzmann presents these scenes there is never any doubt as to what we are seeing. There is no confusion as to what is real (there will be no absurd confusion as when a viewer thought Morris ‘was there’ the night of the murder), but there is a genuine conflation of past and present, the here & now and the there & then, in the fact that the Srebnik is AGAIN SINGING ON THE RIVER, Bomba is AGAIN CUTTING HAIR, such that there is a direct, material / physical link between what they are recounting and where they are, what they are doing. The scenes are ritualised, aimed at facilitating the ‘transport’ of the contributors, as well as other witnesses, into those events – a poultice drawing out further information.

This might be part of the reason why the re-enactments in Shoah are unsettling and particularly powerful to watch. There are no illusions as to what is occurring, in terms of what these people are being encouraged to do (or re-do) but the action is not presented as a ‘complete’ reconstruction that we might stand outside looking in. We are very much implicated in the generation of the re-enactment, witnessing the act of remembrance as framed by simulations that both hold and fall away. The re-enactment is performed in the actions of the survivor in front of the camera – an unstable territory always a mixture of the unprovoked and the set up. When Morris brings in references to R. G. Collingwood by quoting from The Idea of History: “History is the re-enactment of the past in the mind,” one might suggest that this is what Lanzmann is probing for in his subjects by placing them in these hallucinatory blends of what is no longer and what lives on – the generation of history, watching it happen like a web being spun. Morris claims to share Collingwood’s “impassioned dream” that we might “faithfully re-enact the thoughts of the past in the mind, that history is the combination of evidence and our attempts to rethink the thoughts that produced it.” The notion of inhabiting thought is particularly powerful in relation to the way certain scenes are played out in Shoah – as Morris says: “Experience is not unlike history – just closer to us in time.”

Morris makes a very interesting comment in the third post: “People think that a re-enactment is a faithful replication of an original event. But it can also be an attempt to recall an event. (…) But if the idea of re-enacting something is to wait around until it happens again, that’s something altogether different. That’s not re-enacting something, that’s repeating something or hoping that something will fortuitously repeat itself. It would be like waiting around on Hampton Road for the shooting of the police officer to happen all over again.” Could there be something in the suggestion that in some way Lanzmann is waiting for something to ‘happen again’?

Gary Weissman, in his book Fantasies of Witnessing: Post War Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (which I have not fully read yet), claims that Shoah is a “non-visual” or even “anti-visual” film, which is an interesting idea that seems to have connections with a lot of what Jacques Rancière has written about the distribution of the sensible, word & image, etc. and which should be worth further investigation. [Weissman also suggests that Lanzmann’s film “betrays a desire to illustrate the annihilation,” and claims that this is most clearly seen in the sequences concerning the gas chambers – more on this later perhaps.] Morris also suggests a distance from the visual: “Re-enactment is not so much a visual activity, as it is a conscious activity. It is the process through which we imagine and re-imagine the world around us. The important thing to remember is that everything we consciously experience is a re-enactment. Consciousness, itself, is a re-enactment of reality inside our heads.”

Morris’s article brings in specific references to fraudulent use of re-enactments – where filmmakers attempt to pass off their own footage as being from a specific time and place. He makes specific reference to Mighty Times: The Children March (2005) in which archive footage is mixed with faked re-enactments (as well as inaccurately assigned stock material), without any clear demarcation between them. It is disputed as to whether or not the filmmakers, as part of their so-called “faux doc” technique, identify the re-enacted scenes by showing sprocket holes at the borders of the image. This ambiguity throws the authenticity of the entire construction into doubt and leads some to suggest that all re-enactments should be labelled as such (imagine some unsubtle method of keeping the word ‘RECONSTRUCTION’ in the top left hand corner like on Crimewatch), though one has to wonder about the function of re-enactments that disappear into the fabric of a film, and question not only is validity, but whether it is being used in the most effective way. For Morris, who acknowledges that some re-enactments “serve the truth” and others “subvert it,” the key question remains how re-enactments are employed, what effects they produce (in relation to intention), and how they relate to our capacity for credulity when presented with ‘convincing’ images (what is a ‘convincing’ image?).

Lanzmann’s decision not to include any archival footage in Shoah arguably allows him to avoid many of the issues concerning the overuse of imagery, the substitution of ‘generic’ footage that may not correspond exactly with the what is being discussed or ‘otherwise shown’ – the relatively common abuse of images that are deemed to ‘look appropriate’, etc. But there are other problems that such a decision brings in that can be used productively. Lanzmann is clear that he doesn’t consider Shoah to be a documentary, but it’s not clear exactly what it is – perhaps the very reason for its power. If the director’s aim is for the film to hover at the borders of generic definitions, never settling anywhere, this ambivalence seems to be translated wholesale into the awkward, ‘hallucinatory’ (according to Rancière) scenes of re-enactment.

Can it be a re-enactment if the real people involved in an event are persuaded to ‘go back’? In some ways, perhaps it is a compromised re-enactment, a mixture of resemblance and dissemblance, in that everything around them is faked in order to allow them to have some kind of genuinely enacted re-experience? If you look closely, perhaps you can see experience come again on their faces – an experience both of this present world and the one they know as absent. Interestingly, in one of the many interesting comments on Morris’ articles, there is a reference to Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. The comment raises the point about Morris using an actor to play Leuchter in order to get the character to “participate in the director’s editorializations about his understanding of the situation he found himself in – standing by the side of the road as cars whiz by, examining an electric chair, etc.” These scenes are clearly ‘shot’ by the filmmaker and represent an artistic statement about his subject…but the illusion that the subject participated in these shoots overwhelms the artistic content of the imagery for me.”

We spoke a bit previously about Lanzmann’s role and it continues to be an important element of the re-enactments. Lanzmann in never absent from these scenes, often interjecting from behind the camera, prodding the survivors to take in their current surroundings and to cast their minds back. It is as if getting the body ‘there’ was part of this process of recall and provocation. The level of manipulation is a central question here, as is the degree to which the experiences that the survivors/witnesses go through is some sort of catharsis or therapy staged on film. It raises questions about Lanzmann’s ‘artistic ego’ and its effect on the way the film is put together.