Bill Nichols
How can we repeat something that was unique? How can we repeat the past? These questions have figured into the documentary tradition from the beginning, with Robert Flaherty reenacting aspects of Inuit life that were more typical of pre-contact existence than of the lives of the Inuit he worked with and with John Grierson buying into reconstructions of typical events that no camera was there to film in many of the 1930s British documentaries from Coal Face (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935) to Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936). Reenacting the past gives comfort and coherence; it brings back to life what had passed from it.