Yarn Documentary Club

Reenactment as narrative device

Staging something that already happened, not to illustrate it but to get at it. Indonesian death squad leaders restage their own killings as film genres and one of them starts to feel it. Nathan Fielder builds a replica bar to rehearse a conversation. Reality is a drama whose every word is the FBI's own transcript. When the reenactment is the argument rather than the filler, this is what it can do.