In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema delineates a new performative genre based on replay and self-awareness. The book argues that in-person reenactment, an actual person reenacting her past on camera, departs radically from other modes of mimetic reconstruction. In Person theorizes this figure's protean temporality and revisionist capabilities and it considers its import in terms of social representativity and exemplarity.Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini's proposal that in neorealism everyone should act his own story in a sort of anti-individualist, public display (Love in the City and We the Women). It checks the convergence between verit? experiments, a heightened self-critique in France and the reception of psychodrama in France (Chronicle of a summer and The Human Pyramid) in the late fifties. And, through Bazin, it reflects on the quandaries of celebrity biopics: how the circularity of the star's iconography is checked by her corporeal limits (Sophia her Own Story and the docudrama Torero!).In Person traces a shift from the exemplary and transformative ethos of fifties reenactment towards the un-redemptive stance of contemporary reenactment films such as Lanzmann's Shoah, Zhang Yuan's Sons, Andrea Tonacci's Hills of Chaos. It defines continuities between verite testimony (Chronicle, and Moi un Noir) and later para-juridical films such as the Karski Report and Rithy Panh's S21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine suggesting the power of co-presence and in person actualization for an ethics of viewership.

AcknowledgementsIntroduction - Estrangement and Exemplarity: In Person ReenactmentExemplarityStages of ActualizationIn Person the bookChapter 1 Casting Relatives: The Spectrum of SubstitutionOrson Welles' Four Men in a Raft (It's All True) Endurance: Kinship and the Exceptional BodyReenacting Heredity: SonsChapter 2 Neorealist Reenactment as postwar PedagogyZavattini's "Last Judgment" CinemaThe Story of CaterinaFootprints: Streetwalkers and Maggiorani's BackAttempted Suicides: Antonioni's SingularitiesStar Anonymous: Donatella Marrosu, Anna MagnaniChapter 3 Celebrity Reenactment, Biopic and the Mortal BodyHer Own StoryBazin's CinemythographiesCinema's Existential ArenaTorero ReplicantsMexican cin?-verdad, Carlos Velo, Hugo Butler, ZavattiniChapter 4 A Sort of Psychodrama: Verit? Moments 58-61Role-play: the Real in BalanceProvisional Closure: Reflexivity and Death in The Human PyramidChronicle of a summer (1960-1) as Autocritique (1958)A "Nascent" register: Group Dynamics and the WorkerChapter 5 Ascetic Stages: Reenactment in post-holocaust cinemaPedovision: ritual, wandering wordsMarceline Loridan, Testimony with (out) an "I"Splitting: Oumarou Ganda's SoloKarski's Report of a reportFilming and Re-filming: Phatic reenactmentAscetic Stages, nextChapter 6 Trial Stages: Rithy Panh's Para-juridical theatreSolo Routines: the Critical valence of AlienationPaintings, desks, files and faces: Reflexive PlatformsS21's Judicial ContextPara-juridical Scenarios and the confessional imperativeAn Internal Chorus: Files and FacesChapter 7 Reenactment and A-filiation in Serras da DesordemWhen is Carapiru?Twenty Years Later: Brazilian films on "first" and on recurrent contactLeading to SerrasThe Actor as Agent: Carapiru, Pereio, TonacciA-FiliationDisrupted TransmissionConclusion- Senseless MimesisSelect Bibliography