Narrative Reenactments

    Memory narrativizes through reenactment; Reenactment is the sole “solution to a problem... of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are human.” (White 5) As true reenactment “cannot repeat itself in vacuo, … the new context” that the historian meticulously replicates “must be just as appropriate as the old,” (Landserg 5) earlier experience. The three mediums, The Murmuring, The Act of Killing, and Dunkirk, strive to facilitate reenactment through intense affect. Such sensuous encounter thus requires absorption and distraction (Landsberg 16) to welcome the audience into an “active interpretative mode” of “historical reenactment.” (Landsberg 6) 

    Absorption parts into two distinct faucets of experience: one must understand the evidence through “immediate consciousness,” then extend into a virtual imagination by “putting oneself in the position” (Landsberg 5) of the original experiencer. In this sense, The Act of Killing, a 2012 documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, falls short to fulfill the latter experience. In fact, the two-hour long reenactment is unique in that it succeeds to humanize Anwar, the notorious perpetrator of the Indonesian mass killing of 1965 that fervently swept over one million civilians: We are involuntarily exposed to scenes where he adores his grandchildren with pure affection, protects a group of injured ducks, and heartily dances around to trip. However, when we connect these childlike and humanized aspects back to his psychotic crimes, we lose all empathy and fail to position ourselves within his shadows. Thus, we are withheld from the absorption only to be left with an eerie friendship with Anwar.

Anwar and his grandkids

    Distraction, on the other hand, reenacts history through an objective mode of external shock that “provokes the awareness that one is thinking.” (Landsberg 6) Byun Young-ju’s 1996 documentary The Murmuring, tailors these shocks into various forms: raw and abrupt transitions, the director’s sheer interruptions, and the habitual lamenting and murmurings absorb the audience in full experience. However, it dwindles in its effort to fully distract: The precarious imagery (Butler 38) exploits the barren halmonies, the clueless young girls, and the overbearing han and shame thus creating a subjective, culture-specific, and Korean trope. Such tropes take away from full historical reenactment, leaving little inquiry by post generations and implicated subjects (Rothberg 1) for distraction, let alone political remediation.

From the scenes of The Murmuring

    Thus, we turn our heads to Dunkirk as an epitome of effective narrative in historical reenactment. The beautifully and ambitiously executed blockbuster by Christopher Nolan both absorbs and distracts: It absorbs by extracting the most personal emotions of shattering fear, despairing betrayal, and nostalgic hope that not only humanizes but also pleads for empathy: It further distracts with the unfamiliar yet trustworthy faces, episodic plotlines, and frenzied collisions. Thus, the audience effortlessly slips into the shoes of soldiers and braves through a war they have never before experienced. Such synthetic experience exploits the “fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation” to become a “powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity.” (Sturken 9) 

Tommy in war 

Citation

Dunkirk. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017. Film.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the Power of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. Print.

Landsberg, Allison. Engaging in the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia University Press, 2015. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, 2019. Print.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. University of California Press, 1997. Print.

The Act of Killing. Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer. Final Cut for Real DK, 2012. Film.

The Murmuring. Dir. Byun Young-ju. Docu-Factory Vista, 1995. Film.

White, Hayden. The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. Critical Inquiry, vol.7, no. 1, 1980: 5-27. Print.