Reenactment and Neo-Realism

Abstract

What are we to do about reenactment? Here’s a term that seems to cover a multitude of sins and a myriad of forms — the Christian sacrament of communion, the activities of societies for creative anachronism, Shakespeare’s history plays, movies about the Alamo, art forgeries, a lot of pornography, most scientific experiments. Perhaps it is better to ask why supposedly sane academics have come to be interested in or pre-occupied by reenactment. One easy answer is to say of reenactment, as of sexually transmitted disease, that there is a lot more of it about nowadays. But reenactment has been around for 200 years or so. Its forms and frequency may have fluctuated but it has been a general feature of the culture of modernity, with its progressive view of history which figures change as both progress and loss. (Think for example of nineteenth and early twentieth-century world fairs, almost all of which contained not just evidences of modernity, but reenactments of the savage and the primitive).¹