We live in 'reenactive times'. Recent decades have witnessed a marked proliferation of various forms of reenactment across numerous cultural contexts and domains to the point that it is today seemingly impossible to enter museums, heritage sites, art galleries or even to turn on the television without encountering at least some elements of this veritable boom. In such a way, reenactment has become a ubiquitous cultural means of representing, commemorating and investigating the past, called upon for a variety of reasons, by a variety of practitioners and with a variety of effects. By bringing the autobiographical work of four experimental filmmakers from France and Belgium - Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), Vincent Dieutre (1960-), Boris Lehman (1944-), Agnès Varda (1928-2019) - into dialogue, Autobiographical Reenactment in French and Belgian Film: Repetition, Memory, Self considers them in relation to this broad cultural shift and explores the various forms of 'autobiographical reenactment' that their films contain. In the work of these four filmmakers, autobiographical reenactment offers a radical and varied technique of self-investigation and self-representation that sustains often challenging engagements with identity, subjectivity, memory, knowledge, time, feeling, loss, truth, reality and history, whilst leading us to continually rethink our understanding of what autobiography can be and can do.
Tom Cuthbertson is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University.