The Reenactment in Contemporary Screen Culture

Carrigy offers a brilliant look at how reenactments work as meta-historical representations that re-embody the past but also comment on it in surprisingly complex ways. Her book is an invaluable addition to the literature. Replaying the past promises to illuminate its mysteries but it also reshapes our grasp of what has happened in a remarkably wide variety of ways as Carrigy vividly demonstrates in this wide-ranging, insightful work. --Bill Nichols, Professor Emeritus of Cinema, San Francisco State University, USA Historical recreation, biographical film performance, television crime drama, and movie remakes - moving image reenactments are everywhere. And they befuddle us as they simultaneously seem to be accurate and inaccurate, authentic and inauthentic, and trustworthy and false documents of the past. Megan Carrigy takes us on an illuminating tour of such materials, showing how this indeterminacy operates to interrogate the aesthetic, evidentiary, and ontological status of the moving image. She powerfully demonstrates how the reanimated performance oscillates between theatricality, repetition, and documentation. As a result, The Reenactment in Contemporary Screen Culture, more than a study of a particular representation mode, is an insightful inquiry into the complexity of what we so easily push aside as fake. --Charles R. Acland, Distinguished University Research Professor, Concordia University, Canada