The Reenactment in Contemporary Screen Culture: Performance, Mediation, Repetition
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Overview
During the first decades of the 21st century, a critical re-assessment of the reenactment as a form of historical representation has taken place in the disciplines of history, art history and performance studies. Engagement with the reenactment in film and media studies has come almost entirely from the field of documentary studies and has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, even though reenactments are being employed across fiction and non-fiction film and television genres. Working with an eclectic collection of case studies from Milk, Monster, Boys Don’t Cry, and The Battle of Orgreave to CSI and the video of police assaulting Rodney King, this book examines the relationship between the status of theatricality in the reenactment and the ways in which its relationships to reference are performed. Carrigy shows that while the practice of reenactment predates technically reproducible media, and continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been thoroughly transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media.
Examines the pervasiveness of the reenactment as a form of historical representation in contemporary moving image culture, exploring its diverse manifestations across a range of genres and institutional contexts.
Broadens the study of reenactment in film and media studies, which has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, investigating connections between the uses of reenactment across fiction and non-fiction genres
Shows how the transformations the reenactment has undergone as a representational form are tied to changes in the photochemical and digital media environment
Develops new conceptual frameworks, drawn from film and media studies, for analysing diverse manifestations of the reenactment in contemporary moving image culture
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. ’To Do; To Perform’: In-Person Reenactment, Remediation and Documentary Performance
2. Between Document and Diegesis: Reenactment and Researched Detail in the Biopic
3. Dramatizing Forensic Crime Reconstruction: Investigation, Trace and Deixis in Police Procedural Television
4. Re-staging the Cinema: Reproducibility and the Shot-for-Shot Remake
5. Trial by Media: Fugitive Testimony, Demonstrative Evidence and Computer Animation in the Courtroom
Conclusion
References
Index
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.
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.
- Title: The Reenactment in Contemporary Screen Culture: Performance, Mediation, Repetition
- Author: Megan Carrigy
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 208
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501359378, 9781501380174, 1501380176, 1501359371
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501359378
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-08-20T22:43:23Z
Megan Carrigy is Associate Director for Academic Programs at NYU Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include contemporary film theory, reenactment, virtual reality, Australian cinema and the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak. Awards include Best Doctoral Thesis Prize (University of New South Wales), the Mari Kuttna Memorial Prize for Film Studies and English Association Prize for Best Long Essay (University of Sydney).