TY - JOUR

T1 - The truth of reenactments: reliving, reconstructing, and contesting history in documentaries on genocide

AU - Koch, Julian Johannes Immanuel

N1 - Julian Johannes Immanuel Koch is a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies. His project examines the representation of perpetration and perpetrators in documentaries on genocide. His previous research focused on the poetics of the image in the twentieth-century German-Jewish poet Paul Celan and French-Jewish poet André du Bouchet. He has also published on philosophies of the imagination and the image.

PY - 2023/8/28

Y1 - 2023/8/28

N2 - This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005), Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), it contends that reenactments in documentaries on genocide problematize the associations of an image’s supposed indexical link to a past event with truth. Instead, reenactments confront us with the constructed nature of historical narrative and enable us to see affective, factual, and ethical truths of the past unavailable through the archive.

AB - This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005), Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), it contends that reenactments in documentaries on genocide problematize the associations of an image’s supposed indexical link to a past event with truth. Instead, reenactments confront us with the constructed nature of historical narrative and enable us to see affective, factual, and ethical truths of the past unavailable through the archive.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Reenactment

KW - Documentary

KW - Truth

KW - Archive

KW - Genocide

KW - Historical narratives

U2 - 10.1080/17503280.2023.2244131

DO - 10.1080/17503280.2023.2244131

M3 - Journal article

SP - 1

EP - 18

JO - Studies in Documentary Film

JF - Studies in Documentary Film

SN - 1750-3280

ER -