Netherlands Film Academy (Cinema on the 2nd floor)
We invite you to join our Master of Film public lecture 'Walking through = not working through: from performance to re-enactment and the documentary power of repetition' by Stella Bruzzi (Italy/UK)
Why do documentary filmmakers so often return to reenactment? What role does repetition play in getting at (or at least nearer) the truth?
In this public lecture: Stella Bruzzi will extend an understanding of performance in documentary to repetition and, specifically, reenactment, using as a loose framework Freud’s ideas of walking through and working through trauma. Examples used will include Jean-Xavier de la Strade’s television series, The Staircase, which since its release in 2004 has gained a cultish following, James Marsh’s Academy Award-winning Man on Wire about tightrope walker, Philippe Petit’s, walk between New York’s World Trade Center towers, and Sarah Polley’s cinema release feature, Stories We Tell, which uses reenactment to tell her family’s complicated history.
Does ‘working through’ inevitably follow on from ‘walking through’?
Stella Bruzzi has just started her second term as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London (UCL), UK. Prior to joining UCL in 2017, she taught at the universities of Manchester, Royal Holloway University of London and Warwick. For distinction in research, she was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. She has published widely in the areas of film, television and documentary studies and her books include: Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997); New Documentary (2000 and 2006); Seven Up (2006); Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-scene in Hollywood (2013). Her most recent monograph, Approximation: Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality (2020), was the main output from a 2-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and forms the basis for these workshops and seminars. She is not a practitioner; however, she did spend three years prior to taking her first academic job as a researcher for BBC television and has taught and supported practice in universities).
