A new film uses re-enactment to tell the story of… | Little White Lies

Festivals

A new film uses re-enact­ment to tell the sto­ry of a bizarre social experiment

15 Oct 2018

A red and white fishing boat in the middle of the ocean, with a number of people on board and flags flying above.
A red and white fishing boat in the middle of the ocean, with a number of people on board and flags flying above.
Mar­cus Lindeen’s doc­u­men­tary The Raft reunites the par­tic­i­pants of a rad­i­cal social study.

In the sum­mer of 1973, anthro­pol­o­gist San­ti­a­go Gen­ovés saw his bold exper­i­ment become a real­i­ty. Fas­ci­nat­ed by the cat­a­lyst of human aggres­sion, he want­ed to cre­ate an iso­lat­ed envi­ron­ment with a sense of per­il where he could close­ly study human behaviour.

What dri­ves peo­ple to fight? How does desire take hold? Gen­ovés believed that all the answers lay with Acali, a small raft of his own design with no motor and only the means of steer­ing. He adver­tised for vol­un­teers to board the raft for a three-month long voy­age drift­ing across the Atlantic. From hun­dreds of appli­cants, Gen­ovés select­ed six women and five men to par­tic­i­pate in his study, rep­re­sent­ing a range of skills, reli­gions and eth­nic back­grounds. Removed from the wider world, Gen­ovés hoped his micro­cosm of soci­ety would answer his ques­tions about human sex­u­al­i­ty and vio­lence. It was only a mat­ter of time.

In his new film, The Raft, direc­tor Mar­cus Lin­deen invites mem­bers of the expe­di­tion to a large stu­dio to reflect on their time at sea – aboard a repli­ca cus­tom-built raft. Con­struct­ed to scale and dec­o­rat­ed to look like the orig­i­nal Acali, Lin­deen eschews talk­ing-head inter­views in favour of some­thing far more evocative.

Re-enact­ment has long been a very effec­tive tool in doc­u­men­tary. Errol Mor­ris’ use of re-enact­ment in 1988’s The Thin Blue Line arguably first demon­strat­ed that a doc­u­men­tary can be cin­e­mat­ic and doesn’t have to adopt a fly-on-the-wall vérité to deliv­er truth, while Joshua Oppenheimer’s deci­sion to have a mur­der­er re-enact his atroc­i­ties in 2012’s The Act of Killing pro­vid­ed a deeply dis­turb­ing form of cin­e­mat­ic retribution.

In his film, Lin­deen has the par­tic­i­pants re-enact key moments of the voy­age, and while the wood­en recre­ation gives us a sense of the inti­mate con­di­tions expe­ri­enced by those on board, the act of hav­ing them move around the ves­sel again brings forth some mov­ing con­fes­sions and insights of their time under Gen­ovés’ watch­ful eye. Lin­deen explains how he con­sid­ered the func­tion of the repli­ca raft with set design­er Simone Grau Roney: She and I had a lot of con­ver­sa­tions about how we would do this. She said that we have to think of the [repli­ca] as a kind of mem­o­ry theatre.”

Lin­deen is inter­est­ed in how the the­atri­cal envi­ron­ment of a stu­dio might affect his sub­jects. His first doc­u­men­tary, 2010’s Regret­ters, also uses a stu­dio as the set­ting for two Swedish men to speak frankly about their regret at hav­ing under­gone sex reas­sign­ment surgery. With The Raft, Lin­deen notes the ben­e­fits of using such an anony­mous space as a site for peo­ple to reflect: I found work­ing in the black stu­dio envi­ron­ment so fas­ci­nat­ing because it real­ly made peo­ple open up in a strange way, even though it’s real­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry because there’s a lot of peo­ple around and it’s a real­ly ster­ile envi­ron­ment. You don’t pre­sume that peo­ple would feel relaxed but some­thing hap­pens in the envi­ron­ment that some­how com­forts them.”

Lin­deen saw the repli­ca Acali as an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the char­ac­ters to go back into their mem­o­ries in a more pow­er­ful way,” and, while we are privy to plen­ty of 16mm footage aboard the raft in 1973, it is in these moments of reflec­tion in the stu­dio that the real impact of the study is felt. For Lin­deen, re-enact­ment is key to his film­mak­ing as he sees doc­u­men­tary as a col­lab­o­ra­tion between doc­u­men­tar­i­an and sub­ject. Peo­ple are help­ing me cre­ate the sto­ry of what they’ve been through”, the direc­tor explains. This is staged. This is not reportage… it’s play­ing with narrative.”

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