A do-over for history

The revolution may not be televised, but it will probably be reenacted.

Around for decades, re-creating historical events for television is flourishing as never before. Once viewed as unsophisticated, hopelessly inaccurate and at times even cheesy, the reenactments are now a documentary staple able to inject thrilling action sequences and emotional complexities into the conventional, staider format of narration, static visuals, archival footage and talking-head interviews. Although the hybrid technique of combining the documentary and docudrama style is winning newfound respect, it still rankles traditionalists concerned over the blurring of reality and fiction.

The technique recently rocketed to national attention as E! Entertainment began unrolling its daily reenactments of the Michael Jackson trial. While Jackson redux continues to draw smirks and darts from cultural critics, reenactments nevertheless are being credited with attracting a new generation of demanding, some might say ADD-suffering, audiences.

Last month, venerated PBS broadcast two highly regarded documentaries -- “Slavery and the Making of America” and “Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State” -- that, among other things, dramatized scenes of antebellum slave auctions and Nazi decision makers determining the fate of European Jews. The History Channel later this month will run a four-part series called “Conquest of America” about the early European explorers of North America that shows the mutiny of Henry Hudson’s crew and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s slaughter of Native Americans.

Such reenactments are no longer the exception but the expectation, particularly for programs courting a bigger audience. Indeed, the vast majority of documentaries greenlighted these days at PBS, History Channel and other stations feature reenactments, which range from a few moments of dialogue-free action to full-blown epic re-creations.

Certainly, broadening television markets and technological advancements in camera and special effects equipment have played a key role in the rise of reenactments. The performances themselves have greatly improved, with many shows seeking out theatrically trained reenactors rather than mere weekend enthusiasts.

But as much as anything, the most powerful force behind the trend is that history-loving, channel surf-happy audiences now demand them.

“People are impatient. TV now has to move fast now. It’s hard to move fast if all you can show is a landscape where something happened,” said Michael Rosenfeld, an executive producer of an upcoming documentary based on UCLA professor Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel” for PBS using reenactments slated for airing this year. “We are storytellers, and reenactments gives you a bigger palette to work with.”

In this visual age, with the camera seemingly omnipresent, the public has become accustomed to witnessing dramatic events in ways never known in human history. A tsunami devastating a small Indonesian village, an American beheaded in Fallouja -- it’s all on tape and shown on television or the Internet.

In part, because of the instant availability of these often gruesome realities and because of the rising quality of the reenactments themselves, audiences now expect “the camera to be everywhere and anywhere, even in the privacy of bedrooms and boardrooms,” said Joe Saltzman, a former documentarian and now a journalism professor at USC.

However, the trend toward reenactments is not without debate. Critics regard it as further evidence of a dumbing-down of America. Cable stations scramble to fill huge programming gaps with cost-effective, often sensationalized reenacted historical tales, while a recliner-bound audience waits to be spoon-fed a version of events driven more by ratings than a commitment to the truth, detractors argue. Even reenactment supporters worry about this natural tension between historical accuracy and entertainment and ultimately how that struggle will come to color the past.

“I don’t mind filmmakers enriching their stories with reenactors if they do their homework,” said Robert C. Doyle, an associate professor of history at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, who has consulted on a number of documentary and feature film projects like “Hart’s War.” “But that’s the rub. Most times, history is messy and disorderly, and believe me, filmmakers hate that. They like it tight. Trouble is real life isn’t that way, so sometimes they feel they have license to rewrite history, and that’s where the real problem lies.”

Other critics, such as widely acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns, are more pointed: “I’m against the laziness of reenactments because what they suggest to the audience is that everything can be fudged and nothing is true. If you’re going to go that far, why not just make a dramatic film?”

“Reenactments are prettified pictures of the past, they’re an elaborate vamping,” continued Burns, whose most recent work, “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” aired this year on PBS with no reenactments. “I hate them.”

Another interpretation

It’s precisely the postmodern debate over the subjective nature of truth that has cleared the path for the greater use of historical reenactments. Nobody really knows exactly how or why events happen, particularly as one gets further away from primary source materials. Even if good sources exist, accounts often contradict and conflict with one another.

So why not offer another interpretation, enlivened by reenactments, that can animate the past and even exhume forgotten important episodes once too boring to read? It’s little different than reading historical fiction or applauding live reenactments of the Civil War and Revolutionary War, supporters say.

“We’re all in this business of speculation,” said Robert Brent Toplin, a history professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington who has written historical dramas for television. “Even when historians talk about, say, Coronado’s travels, they are just looking at fragments, they’re just guessing. The problem with film is you can’t hide behind words and quotations, you have to show what you think.”

This doesn’t mean that any interpretation is as legitimate as another, say documentarians who use reenactments; rather, it means the same set of known facts can often lead to different views on the causes and motivations of historical events. Unless reenactments are backed up by solid research, executed with careful attention to detail, they will fail anyway, they say.

Despite his railing against reenactments, Burns was quick to admit that he has incorporated traces of the technique in his works.

In his groundbreaking 1990 “Civil War” series, Burns used half a roll of black-and-white footage to give the perspective of Union soldiers making a desperate charge at Gettysburg. In his 1994 “Baseball,” he filmed “stylized” shots of a foot hitting a base, a cleat putting up a cloud of dust and a ball at the moment of impact with a bat.

“I realize I can’t be so righteously indignant,” he added. “But I think it’s the thoughtlessness, that [the reenactments] are so tied to the quick and dirty, and not tied to the art, not tied to a larger truth.”

Elevating the craft

But other documentarians stand behind their choice to reenact historical moments. The ability to reach a huge audience with thought-provoking material that otherwise would remain obscure to the mainstream more than justifies its use, they argue.

Further, filmmakers have made significant strides, rapidly, to elevate their craft. Research periods are longer, cinematography is more stylish and budgets are getting bigger. Filmmakers have also begun to pay particular attention to performances, which can make or break the realism of a reenactment.

Lisa Wolfinger, a producer for “Conquest of America,” used her theater background to recruit more experienced actors, some of whom had Shakespearean training. And as a writer, she followed traditional dramatic structure, giving her scenes a distinct beginning, middle and end as opposed to offering snippets of dialogue and action without much context.

“It really hasn’t been that long since documentarians figured out how to do dramatic reenactments that viewers will buy and not just be embarrassed by,” said Wolfinger, who oversaw a one-hour segment on Henry Hudson.

Rosenfeld of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” said that without technological advancements in graphics they never would have been able to bring the Pulitzer Prize-winning work dealing with chance advantages and the rise of early civilizations to television. Much like Hollywood epics such as “Troy” and “Lord of the Rings,” the documentary will be able to conjure through computer-generated images a “cast of thousands” for a battle scene between the Spanish and the Incas. In reality, there were less than a hundred extras for the scene.

“It was obvious from the beginning we needed reenactments,” said Rosenfeld, who is also executive vice president of programming and production at National Geographic Television. “The first hour is about the birth of agriculture, and there’s not a film archive in the world that can help you with that.”

Meanwhile, Wolfinger spent three months learning about Dutch explorer Hudson. She went to great pains to authenticate clothing, even hairstyles, and based the dialogue on personal letters and diaries of Hudson and his crew, which eventually mutinies and sets the explorer adrift.

“We take a person and bring them to life,” said Wolfinger. “Of course it’s interpretation, of course it’s an actor playing Henry Hudson, but hopefully by the end of the story the viewer walks away with a feeling they got inside his head, and that’s what makes people care about history.”

Whether that history has the ring of truth or the feel of a sweeps-month program remains up to the audience. But some aren’t sure whether the immediate reaction truly matters anyway.

“In the end, it will be the docudrama’s account of a historical or current event that most people will remember, not the event itself, which was never properly documented,” said Saltzman, an award-winning documentarian before coming to USC.

“As memories fade, as the principals die off, the docudrama will live on and will replace the actual event itself.”