Necessary fictions: from cinéma vérité to ciné, ma vérité(s)

Despite critical reconceptualisations of reenactment in theory and practice beginning in the 1980s, such scholarship has confined reenactment to a process that rests solely on substitution, actors, and actor reenactment. This article examines reenactment in which actual persons reenact their own pasts and memories in the context of contemporary Iranian cinema to bring about an embodied historiography. This collaboration between social actors and filmmakers shifts the focus from questions of substitution to questions of presence and proximity in representations of the past and personal memory. This article explores these questions of presence, proximity, and reenactment as a distinct mode of audiovisual autobiography through a reading of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film Bread and Flower (1996) as a case study

Contemporary Iranian Cinema ,

Mohsen Makhmalbaf ,

Reenactment ,

Autobiography ,

Embodied Historiography ,