Actors, Reenactors and Just People Being

Downton Abbey cast

            Aside from the fact that it is a really appealing, well-acted high-class soap opera, why does everyone love Downton Abbey so much? My guess is that it takes to another time, and a whole group of people we have come to know, who dress and behave somewhat differently than we do now (but not too much).  That’s the appeal of any “period piece” novel, movie or TV show, and there’s a lot of entertainment in imagining ourselves living in a different time (and that’s true of future imaginings, too).

            But since we live in the context of now—all our cultural, scientific, political, linguistic and social structure—and odors, too, or lack of them--and because each of us looks out on the world through our own perceptions and experiences, we can’t really know what it was like to live then.

            Re-enactors are groups who try as best they can to inhabit some other time: the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Old West. They are all over the United States, and their reenactments, some public, others private for their own members, strive in varying degree for authenticity.  One of the most knowledgeable and serious, who blogs under the name of “Historical Ken” has clearly defined the various degrees of strived-for authenticity:

“MAINSTREAMERS - use general-line clothing and accessories from sutler-row and usually exhibit a "this is only a hobby" mentality. Mainstreamers are generally accurate in their outward presentations.

PROGRESSIVES – are reenactors that reach the stage when they begin making an all out effort (within the limits of their finances) to get things as right as possible. They'll usually have an increased interest in doing Living History, and a 1^st Person mentality prevails.

HARDCORE - This is the big leagues where complete immersion is the goal. Finances be d***ed, there are no excuses to be made at this level. Do it right or don't do it.

And just for the sake of completeness, FARBS  are reenactors who spend relatively little of their time or money maintaining authenticity with regard to clothing, accessories, or even period behavior. The 'Good Enough' attitude is pervasive among farbs, although even casual observers may be able to point out flaws.”

If you have an interest in reenactments, I heartily recommend Ken’s website and all of his links.  It will introduce many readers to a fascinating subculture. They commemorate all sorts of events, with authenticity varying among Ken’s categories.

Dawn at the Alamo - 2013 reenactment

 Probably the most accessible reenactment to this writer is the yearly “Dawn at the Alamo,” staged annually by the San Antonio Living History Association to commemorate the fall of Texians defending themselves within the old mission and their Mexican besiegers on March 6, 1836.  I don’t know how Ken would rate it, but I suspect that the local association achieves the level of PROGRESSIVE.  It literally begins before sunrise on March 6, as did the actual siege.  Of course, everything around the Alamo is different now—even the façade of the mission itself—and there are plenty of floodlights, which I’m sure neither the Texians nor Mexicans had.

"Deadwood" Saloon Girl

Real Deadwood Saloon Girl

The most obvious reenactors we see are in movies and television.  The amount of authenticity for which they strive varies.  Grade “B” westerns of the 1940’s and ‘50’s are at best MAINSTREAMERS, or at worst, FARBS.  Even if they get their Western gear reasonably correct, their hairstyles, and, for the women, lack of corsets, give them away.  The other extreme, originating with Sergio Leone and still continuing (think Deadwood) is stylish scuzzy chic.  Corsets get lots of ribbons now, but a comparison of a saloon girl from the show Deadwood and a real one from the real Deadwood is quite eye opening.

We even have “Progressive Baroque”: films like Gangs of New York and TV series like Copper, where history becomes stylized by exaggeration (think Daniel Day Lewis with a very tall stove-pipe hat and his invented, intriguing but hardly authentic accent). I know that in the nineteenth century, the Five Points area of New York was a really sordid place, but it wasn’t on such a grand scale, accompanied by such thunderous music.

 

Daniel Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher

There are, of course HARDCORE Reenactor films.  The one that comes to my mind is Lucchino Visconti’s film Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.  Released in 1963, it evokes life in Sicily, particularly among the waning aristocracy, of a century before.  One of the most fascinating things about it is that you can accept it as an evocation of the 1860’s, so carefully is the period researched and presented, so much so that there is almost nothing to give the viewer a clue of when it was actually made.  Visconti was known as a stickler for authenticity, and in an interview, Claudia Cardinale relates that the corset she wore was so tight that it left a bloody ring around her waist at the end of the day.  A quick look at the IMDB website will also inform you that everyone was authentic right down to their underwear and handkerchiefs, even when viewer’s couldn’t see it.  Visconti even got descendants of Sicilian aristocrats to play their great-grandparents in the ball scenes.

"Il Gattopardo" with real aristocrats

Ah, but underneath all of this, there are still modern choices.  I assume that the actors could use modern bathrooms.  Much of the mood was accomplished by powerful stage lighting—even when candles were used within the scenes themselves.  The extended and beautiful sequence of the Cardinale character playing hide and seek with the Delon character through many seemingly interconnected, deserted palace rooms was filmed in an amalgam of three dusty attics in three separate Roman villas.  So there was a great deal of artifice used to take us into this time-warp

We want to lose ourselves in those long-ago worlds, and so do we really care that Daniel Craig’s progressively worn-down (yet elegant) leather jacket that he wore as he saved Jews and bumped off Nazis in the film Defiance, was actually made up of thirteen identical leather jackets, increasingly distressed in the wardrobe department, as the narrative spun out?  PROGRESSIVE, perhaps, but not HARD CORE.  Also, the real Tuvia Bielski wasn’t bad-looking, but nowhere near as cute as Daniel Craig.

Tuvia Bielski

 

Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski

 Maybe the closest we can get to an actual experience of What It Was Like Then is not through Reenactors, but through Enactors.  The series Apocalypse World War I produced by the French team of Isabelle Clarke, Daniel Costelle  and Lois Vaudeville (C C & C company), culling from three hundred hours of archival film footage, brings us into direct confrontation with that conflict in the most vivid way. First shown on French television in 2014, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary this war’s outbreak, it is currently playing on The National Geographic and American Heroes’ channels. 

            It took C C & C five years (one year more than the actual war) to produce their five-part series.  We are used to seeing silent film blurry and much faster-moving than normal.  Technicians got the film to proper speed, restored sharpness to the images, added color, background sounds, music and a narration.  The colorization is very discreet (the technicians call it “texturization”), and I’ve included a link below as to how the firm carried out their restoration.  Musical background is there, but quiet, and the net effect is more of an added sound effect than a dramatic element, as it is so often in contemporary film, and sound effects aren’t amplified to movie-level hysteria.

I realize that all of this is manipulation, but the result is eerily current. Czar Nicholas II, Emperor Franz Joseph and Kaiser Wilhelm II seem so alive that you could swear that if you opened your front door you would see them walking by.  More poignant are the soldiers of so many nationalities, struggling through trenches full of mud, working various weapons, marching endlessly, sometimes being killed (more often as so many corpses, though the editors have spared us severed body parts and spattered guts).  Every looks very, very ordinary: no fancy lighting, capped teeth or filters hiding bad complexions.  They hunt and remove lice, use latrines, smoke incessantly and eat. Marshal Von Hindenburg waddles like a duck, King George V is quite short, and General Pershing scratches his nose.  Facial expressions become vivid; I never realized how expressive Woodrow Wilson’s eyes were—we think of him as so stony--or the Grand Duchess Anastasia rolling her eyes during a solemn procession.

 

Enactors, "Apocalypse:World War I"

            The narration is in present tense, and this adds to the sense of immediacy.  The result is something very close to contemporary war footage seen on the nightly news; the main difference seems to be that since present-day nutrition is so much better, soldiers are taller now. Even stills from the program come to life more than mere photographs.  Maybe it’s because a still is part of a longer sequence, so there appears to be less stability in the poses of figures.

            So though even though a lot of work went into this production, there is an eerie feeling of reality to Apocalypse, World War I.  What’s missing, thank goodness, are the smells, all of the unthinkable stink of war, death, decay, detritus, diarrhea, body odors.  Thank goodness for that!  We want to watch the war unfold, but not wallow in it. Even enactment beyond HARD CORE has its limits!

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For a lot of information about reenactors and reenacting, with terrific links, see:(http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2012/05/extreme-reenacting.html)

For some of the technical information about the making of "Apocalypse, World War I:(http://tvo.org/program/204263/apocalypse-world-war-one)