Casting Relatives

Abstract

This chapter briefly situates approaches to early cinema reenactment and embodied spectatorship (Allison Griffith, Kristen Whissel, Mary Ann Doane) as well as the reception for reconstructions of past events (Miriam Hansen and Dan Streible). It reflects on the notion of social representativity prevalent in 1930s cinema as well as the reasons why the choice of actual members of a family may or may not matter in reenactment (Joris Ivens, Robert Flaherty, and Georges Rouquier). The chapter focuses on attempts to address the limits of reenactment through genetic links or an overemphasis on literalness: Orson Welles’s Four Men in a Raft (one of the episodes [1942] projected for It’s All True and reconstructed in 1993); Leslie Woodhead and Bud Greenspan’s Endurance, the reenacted biography of Haile Gebrselassie the Olympic runner, cast with many of his family members; and Zhang Yuan’s Sons, where an entire family reenacts the period prior to the internment of the father for alcoholism.