Documentary: The Margins Of Reality

‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it "the way it really was" … It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it … Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.’

We shall approach this question of documentary representations of history via discussion of films that have used different techniques of ‘reconstruction’ in how they depict their chosen events. Through the discussion of The Battle of Orgreave, The Peterloo Massacre (Justin Hardy, 2003, UK) and The Peasants’ Revolt (Channel 4, 2004, UK), we shall explore how highly-charged historical events are revived, reconstructed and re-enacted for these films. As we shall see, there are different reasons for this in each production, and also different consequences. What they have in common is, as Walter Benjamin intimates, that they ‘seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’. They wish to work through and understand not only ‘what happened’, but how, why, and what the consequences were for those involved. Furthermore, there is a strong sense in all of these films that there is a need to intervene and redress an imbalance; to tell ‘the true story’, so to speak. What we therefore get is a kind of polemical ‘living history’ that falls outside of what most people would commonly, straightforwardly define as ‘documentary’. But it is this marginality that gives these films their added political potency. They are ‘about’ the events depicted, but they are also ‘about’ the way that those events have been m/s-represented in the past, how they have been hidden, shunned or covered over.

The technique of reconstructing or re-enacting scenes from history is hardly new, and has been with us since the beginnings of cinema (and arguably before that). There are many examples from the early cinema period where scenes such as the Boxer Rebellion, or famous prize fights were completely re-enacted and then advertised on the basis of their ‘authenticity’ (see Musser 1990: 200–8, 255–8; Winston 1995: 120). The overriding reason for such ‘deception’ was of course that cameras were not present at the original events, so if people were to be able to view a ‘record’ of those events then they would have to be reconstructed. Thus, there is an ‘evidential’ basis for reconstructing or re-enacting: that is, it is not accurate to assume that the only (or even the main) reason for using reconstruction is for its perceived ‘dramatic’ impact. This might also be the case, but it is important to remember that reconstruction and re-enactment does also have a more ‘serious’ and evidential basis, as well as the hard-headed pragmatism of recognising the lack of original record of certain events. Even if there is an original record of the events – as is the case with the events that are re-enacted in The Battle of Orgreave – there are all sorts of reasons as to why a revisiting of those events, via the processes of re-enactment, can lead to a fuller documenting and understanding of what happened and why.

This film stemmed from Mike Figgis’s filming of the Jeremy Deller/Artangel project that re-enacted the notorious ‘battle’ between police and striking miners on 18 June 1984 at the Orgreave coking plant, near Sheffield, at the height of one of the most bitter industrial disputes in British history. The documentary is therefore in part a record of a ‘live’ event, ‘performed’ by many people who were involved in the original confrontation, as well as an organised body of well-drilled historical re-enactors. The project was conceived by Deller and Artangel, and carried out with logistical precision by Historical Film Services (part of the EventPlan group). Howard Giles directed the action in real time, and the result was filmed by Figgis for a documentary for Channel 4.¹

What is interesting here is the status of what we are looking at and listening to. It is not a straightforward ‘documentary’ by any means. The film itself is a ‘record’ of the process of re-enactment, but the film also explores the very meaning of the term ‘re-enactment’ and the political and emotional resonance that re-enacting those events have for the people involved. The ‘realism’ of the event makes for quite a bizarre viewing experience: time and again we are shown bone-crunching collisions between ‘miners’ and ‘police’; missiles are thrown, truncheons brandished. These people appear to be really fighting. Yet this is interspersed with on-site interviews with various participants, reflecting on what it means to them to be involved in the re-enactment. This both intensifies and undercuts the ‘power’ of the battle scenes: undercuts in the sense that it clearly demonstrates that these people are performing, playing a role, (re-en)acting; intensifies because there is an active reflection on the process of performance itself, how the re-enactment ‘measures up’ to the actual historical events. The Battle of Orgreave is therefore an extremely interesting variation on the ‘performative’ in documentary. (We shall return below to the notion of the ‘performative’ documentary and how it is inflected in this film.)

What is at issue when we discuss the very specific type of reconstruction that is re-enactment is, as Bill Nichols makes clear, proximity. In other words, how close to the real, actual events is the representation? ‘Close’ in the sense of authenticity or accuracy, but also in terms of temporal proximity; needless to say, these are crucial elements for any historical discourse. Nichols sets out one of the key problems thus:

What Nichols is pointing to here is the fact that what we actually watch during any documentary that has deliberately ‘re-enacted’ scenes from history is something that is clearly divorced from that which it represents (that is, the events themselves). If we watch a documentary that contains scenes of battle, and we know that the filmmaker was actually present at the time, these images are of a different order than those that involve clear re-enactment. Furthermore, these re-enacted scenes are rendered with the same indexical fidelity as actual scenes captured at the time they occurred. For Nichols, this renders their status problematic, precisely because they ‘anchor’ those very images to the (re-enacted) present, rather than the (actual) past.

Often, documentaries will use re-enactments but do so with verbal testimony from those who were present at the time of the events recounted. As Nichols points out,

In the recent documentary Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2003, UK), for example, the two mountaineers recount their version of events, and we see parts of this re-enacted by actors. Here, the evidentiary status of the testimony ‘anchors’ the re-enacted scenes. In The Thin Blue Line verbal testimony is used in a similar fashion – that is, juxtaposed with re-enactments, as well as other material (for example, archive footage) – but to contrary effect: here, the purpose is to emphasise the problems of seeking one version of the truth, the overlapping and conflicting versions and re-enactments drawing out the complexity and contradiction of ‘what happened’. In many respects, then, The Thin Blue Line is about ‘the pressure of the past on the present moment of recounting’.

In the context of these points, The Battle of Orgreave is a key example. It consists of re-enactments and verbal testimony from those who were there that day, but these elements are not juxtaposed in quite the same way as is usually the case. A significant number of those re-enacting the events were present that day in 1984. We therefore have some sense of proximity in temporal terms – the events depicted are ‘recent’ – but there is also proximity in terms of the people. These are not mere actors, but people who have a definite stake in seeing this story told. As Ken Wyatt, who was an ambulance man on duty at Orgreave on 18 June 1984, says to the crowd at one of the rehearsals for the re-enactment: ‘These events are actually burned into our folklore, they’re burned into our community memory, and we’ll never forget them.’ This is precisely the kind of ‘seizing hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ referred to by Benjamin, and is a common theme running through many of the comments in The Battle of Orgreave. The participants, certainly those whose livelihoods were at stake, still want to talk about and remember what happened. But as Jeremy Deller points out,

One never gets the feeling that the miners who were involved in the original events and have come to re-enact are ‘embarrassed’ by what went on: they see this as a chance to have their say, and they are brutally honest in their evaluations. What we also see and hear, in exchanges that miners have with Figgis while they are waiting in the re-enactment field in lulls in the action during rehearsals, is some very cogent analysis of labour history and the place of the original events within that broad context. For example, one ex-Yorkshire miner, now working in Birmingham, talks about some ex-Nottingham miners who were going to come along and join in the re-enactment:²

The complexity and contradiction of what happened during this period is embodied by the figure of Mac McLoughlin. Born within sight of the Orgreave plant, McLoughlin was a miner in the 1970s and then served in the armed forces. He then joined the South Yorkshire police force and was on duty on 18 June 1984. His insights are therefore unique and compelling because he talks with authority from both sides of the divide. One thing that comes across from miners who are interviewed as well as McLoughlin is that the animosity was mainly between the striking miners and police officers from outside of South Yorkshire, drafted in to contain the pickets, from London and elsewhere. However, it became clear to McLoughlin that the police (including the local force) ‘were being trained up for a specific role’, and he talks about the various forms of riot training they were given. He is also brutally frank about what happened during the battle – ‘you get pissed off … it became like a civil war’ – but there is one statement that sums up the contradictions he feels and why his interview is as important a part of this documentary as the re-enactment. As McLoughlin puts it: ‘One of the reasons I joined the police force were I wanted to [pauses, clearly emotional] – I wanted to do something for community I came from. [Pause] And thanks to Margaret Thatcher, I did – I helped to destroy it.’

Although McLoughlin is not the only person we see interviewed in isolation, the fact that he seems simultaneously so detached from the re-enacted events and yet is such a critically reflective voice on ‘what happened’, is given added poignancy by the way his interviews are framed. In many respects, he represents the figure of the working-class man, pulled in different directions by historical forces, and yet fully able to articulate his contradictory position.

The Battle of Orgreave is therefore a complex blend of interviews and re-enactment, but the relationship between these two modes – so often taken for granted and not truly reflected upon – is made part of the process of understanding that the film wishes to build. There is also a clear sense that such a reflective mode will lead to a more truthful version of events than was officially sanctioned at the time. An infamous BBC news report edited specific events so that the cause and effect chain was switched. On 18 June 1984, at one point, some police horses charged the miners, causing some miners to throw stones as retaliation. By the time this reached the evening news on BBC1, the film had been edited in such a way as to show the miners throwing stones, thereby (apparently) causing the police to charge them on horses. Tony Benn is interviewed in The Battle of Orgreave, remembering that the National Union of Journalists were ‘up in arms’ as they ‘could see quite clearly that the police charge and then the miners threw stones, and [they] were ordered to transpose the order in such a way as to give the opposite impression’. This comment from Benn is followed by a white on black caption that offers an extract from a ‘BBC letter of apology’ dated 3 July 1991:

As Tony Benn describes the sequence of events and how they were ‘doctored’, the film cuts to ‘framed’ black-and-white moving images with ‘re-enactment’ emblazoned across them in red. The first shot shows a miner throwing a stone, and then there is a ‘flash’, to signify a slight temporal ellipse, before we see mounted police charging into the assembled miners. There is an interesting use of irony in this sequence. Figgis deliberately draws attention to the ‘reconstructed’ nature of these shots, and specifically the way in which they are sequenced. The elliptical ‘flash’ is of paramount importance here, as it signifies that something is ‘missing’: the assumption in most cases would be that what has been cut out is mere ‘dead time’ (an assumption we have learned from the widespread standard use of ellipses in narrative – fictional and nonfictional – films), but what has been cut is, of course, far more than that. The very process of re-sequencing and re-shaping the material has gone – and the truth has gone with it. Of course, the whole of The Battle of Orgreave is based on a (film of a) re-enactment, and the main point of this part of the film is to emphasise the deliberate distortions of ‘what happened’, so it would fit the agenda of those who wanted the miners to be portrayed as the villains of this particular drama. In effect, Figgis re-enacts the original fraudulent sequencing of events (miner throws stone/police charge), but does so in such a way as to undercut what we are seeing.

The authenticity of the re-enactment is held up to scrutiny during the course of the documentary. A number of contributors, including Deller himself, talk about their nervousness and excitement because they are ‘uncertain’ as to what exactly is going to happen. This is a re-enactment, but it is also, crucially, an enactment. There are several comments about people taking it too seriously – one of the main police re-enactors says at one point ‘some of the extras don’t really know when enough’s enough’. The film then cuts to a group of miners laughing and joking in front of the camera, and one says (referring to the previous day’s rehearsal) ‘yesterday – we were playing yesterday, weren’t we? Today? Today – it’s for real. It’s for real … it’s for real…’ The dividing line between the re-enacted performance of past events and an actual, real conflict has clearly become very blurred indeed. It is here that the notion of the ‘performative’ in documentary is very useful.

As discussed in chapter one, Stella Bruzzi defines documentary in general as ‘a negotiation between filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance’ (2000: 154). She further states that those documentaries that can be specifically termed ‘performative’ are those that acknowledge the dialectical relationship between the real world of actuality and the performed actions of those people who appear in the documentary in question. In other words, the performative is about the processes of coming to understand, and often is based on an explicit attempt by the subjects of the film to reflect upon and appraise their situation. There are many moments in The Battle of Orgreave where people are quite clearly performing in the sense that they are ‘playing a role’, but this is complicated by the fact that this may or may not be the ‘same’ role that they ‘played’ in actuality in 1984. The self-consciousness that they exhibit on occasion is tempered by some moments of considerable insight into the events of the original Battle of Orgreave and its historical context. In its mobilising of re-enactment (involving many of the original participants), personal reflection and testimony, interwoven with archive photographs and sound (most notably, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’ speech)⁴, The Battle of Orgreave becomes an excellent example of folk art. Deller’s interest in folk art is clear from previous projects (for example the ‘Acid Brass’ project)⁵ and he is currently collaborating with Alan Kane on the Folk Archive, which looks to collect and curate an ongoing archive of many forms of folk art.⁶ As Jennie Syson puts it:

Folk art is basically that which is for the people, by the people and will therefore tend to revolve around the very regional, workplace-based, class-driven issues that this film is founded on. Connections can be drawn to the re-enactment societies (some of whom helped with The Battle of Orgreave) who ‘keep history alive’ by re-enacting key battles and other events, as well as traditions of other folk forms such as ‘mystery plays’. At the heart of folk art forms is often some notion of performance – this kind of art is often meant to be popular and ephemeral, rather than elitist and durable (with ‘durability’ translating into direct cash value, as the artwork becomes a commodity). Also central to folk art is the idea of keeping certain stories alive, of ensuring that the ‘official’ version of events is not the only one to endure. We see this in The Battle of Orgreave and its determination to counter the distortions of the Thatcher government and the BBC. We can also see it in slightly different forms in The Peterloo Massacre and The Peasants’ Revolt, to which we now turn.

Appropriately enough, The Peterloo Massacre is narrated by a dead man, 22-year-old John Lees, killed in the events of that day. This is a drama-documentary reconstruction of the inquest into his death. But it ends up being much more than that: it becomes a dissection of the infamous events of 16 August 1819 (and their aftermath), and a critique of class relations in nineteenth-century Britain. As part of a series of loosely connected programmes shown on Channel 4 about the ‘Georgian Underworld’ its remit was to reveal and tell a story that had previously remained hidden. By so doing, it is also revealing of the social and institutional structures that mask and distort specific things. In the same way as we see in The Battle of Orgreave, the class struggles inherent in British society are as much the ‘subject’ of this film as the specific events and characters it portrays. The role of the inquest, we hear, was not to investigate but to cover over the truth (there had already been several inquests that went that way). The dramatised documentary format in this context does not directly revisit and show the viewer a reconstruction of the events that happened in St Peter’s Field. Rather, it uses the inquest records and transcripts as a basis for a reconstruction of the investigation into what happened. As such, the very nature of the truth of what occurred, the different interpretations of people’s actions and the vested interests at the heart of the matter are all held up to intense scrutiny.

In chapter two we referred to Steven Lipkin’s discussion of ‘docudrama as persuasive practice’. In The Peterloo Massacre the emphasis is placed on what Lipkin would call ‘warranting’ procedures, or the foregrounding of specific data pertaining to the events in an authenticating context. In other words, the references to real people, actual testimony and existing historical locations are all embedded within a compelling dramatic narrative. It is in this combination of actuality and dramatic reconstruction that ‘warranting’ resides, according to Lipkin. Much of the drama in the film stems from the conflict engendered by class relations of the time: in essence, one ‘side’ wanted the truth to be told, while the other ‘side’ wanted it to be covered up. It is from the ebb and flow of that story, the search for the truth as mediated by the conventions of that most compelling of genres, the courtroom drama, that the historical importance of Peterloo eventually emerges. Basically, the film states things that a conventional documentary about Peterloo would not. In the same way as The Battle of Orgreave maps out the violence, contradictions, and iconic spectacle of the clash between the miners and police in 1984, The Peterloo Massacre takes the recorded statements of those present at the inquest into the death of John Lees, and uses them to prise open some of the hidden aspects of a conventional or received history.

This is why the sixth of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is so important in relation to this film in particular. Despite the accurate period details and settings of the film, it is not so much the mapping of the ‘way it really was’ that is important, as the recognition that histories are constructed – and specific battles won or lost – at what Benjamin calls ‘moments of danger’. History is about struggling, seizing, commemorating. And another thing is eminently clear: you need to choose which side you are on. This is not a neutral, ‘objective’ exercise. One has to believe that ‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy’ and act accordingly. The Peterloo Massacre does precisely that in the way it uses the story of one man’s death to effectively tell the story of a key moment in British history.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on the vexed notion of ‘taking sides’, as the films discussed in this chapter are prime examples of ‘revisionist’ history, where imbalances and biases are addressed in an attempt to ‘get to the truth’. The notion of a documentary or factual programme deliberately taking sides is often equated with that film being ‘biased’ or not having the requisite ‘objectivity’. The confusion here is between a supposedly ‘objective’ position that the documentarist takes in relation to their subject, and the idea that this somehow equals ‘neutrality’ or ‘impartiality’. This is flawed on two counts. First of all, there is no such thing as ‘an objective position’ in the sense that it is often meant; that is, as a position that is somehow magically ‘outside’ the socio-historical context that it is depicting. Secondly, the assumption in all of this appears to be that ‘neutrality’ should be the necessary aim of all documentarists and, furthermore, that by being perceived to be ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ (or ‘fair and balanced’ to borrow the US network Fox News’ rather inaccurate slogan) one somehow automatically achieves ‘objectivity’.

Mike Wayne usefully makes a distinction between ‘objectivity of the object (world)’ and ‘objectivity of the subject’. The former is a recognition that there exists an ‘objective’ world, ‘out there’, independent of human experience. The latter is the erroneous belief that it is possible for particular people (subjects) to take up an ‘objective’ position, where they can view (and comment upon) things in a manner unencumbered by their ‘subjectivity’:

The narrative of The Peterloo Massacre is clearly being related to us from a particular position, one that is seeking to redress the imbalance of the ‘official’ or ‘received’ version of events. The narrator, John Lees, becomes the symbol of class tensions that were prevalent in the early part of the nineteenth century. The mass movements calling for fairer representation were unsurprisingly centred on the recent influx of labour to urban areas like Manchester, which was due to the massive expansion seen in the Industrial Revolution. Only a few decades after another revolution, the French Revolution, the signs of ordinary working people organising made certain sectors of society very nervous. This led to a flashpoint on 16 August 1819, when the radical, Henry Hunt, went to speak at St Peter’s Field, near Manchester. The Manchester Yeomanry (‘shopkeepers dressed up in uniform on horseback, tradesmen with swords’ as Lees puts it on the soundtrack) attacked and killed and maimed over six hundred people. As already noted, the film in many respects follows the conventional structure of a courtroom drama, but the basis of what is said is the original transcripts. There is one key exception to this, of course: the voiceover provided by John Lees himself. This acts as an ‘editorial’ voice, offering ironic commentary on the events and introducing the main players. It transpires during the course of the case that Lees fought at the battle of Waterloo – surviving that day to then be cut down during apparent peacetime. It is also revealed that one of the prominent mill-owners, one of the main groups seeking to cover up the true nature of the events of the day, is actually John Lees’ father. Lees makes no secret of the fact that there are conflicts and tensions at play here: James Harmer, the lawyer who ensures that Lees’ inquest is not shut down like those before it, is also noted to be trying to ‘make a name for himself’. There are of course other typical ‘contradictory’ characters, such as Robert Hall, who ultimately betrays his class by siding with the magistrates and mill owners, and ends up paying for it. Hall, a cotton salesman, is recruited to tell the ‘official version’ of what happened – that is, that it was the crowd and not the Yeomanry who sparked the violence. (This inversion of what actually happened in favour of an ‘official version’ of course mirrors the charging police horses in the events at Orgreave.) Hall’s testimony is a disaster, both for him and the people who recruited him. He offers stilted, confused answers and has clearly been coached. At one point, as the coroner adjourns, Hall leans over and says to the lawyer whom we earlier saw recruit him (in one of the few scenes that we might term ‘speculative reconstruction’): ‘I didn’t know whether you wanted me to say it or not.’ Lees’ voiceover is derisory: ‘He really did say that! It was in the inquest transcripts. It was published in The Times. And he really was that bad…’ This draws attention not only to the ‘warranting’ procedures (such as the transcripts, published contemporary sources) and how they are an evidential route into what something was ‘really’ like, but also crucially emphasises the apparent accuracy of what we are watching – the reconstruction of the inquest itself.

The use of dramatic reconstruction to enable an understanding of historical events is the source of some controversy. This is based on the assumption (discussed in chapter two) that dramatic structure of necessity means that some ‘fictionalising’ has taken place. However, as Robert Rosenstone points out about all historical discourse:

The key is for a documentary representation of historical events not to capture the exact and detailed textures of ‘what happened’ but rather to communicate the underlying contextual forces at work, and thereby achieve some explanatory power rather than simply describing. In The Peterloo Massacre, an understanding of the importance of the events in St Peter’s Field is not communicated to the viewer by reconstructing those events (and thereby providing an ‘authentic’ or ‘pseudo-indexical’ rendering of them), but by playing out the underlying ideological conflict that caused the events to happen. Instead of a dramatic rendering of the events of 16 August 1819, the film offers a dissection of the class-based antagonisms underpinning those events, via a dramatisation of the inquest. The massacre itself is merely a symptom of a wider malaise, and it is this that is held up to intensive scrutiny during the course of The Peterloo Massacre.

For example, it is made very clear that those that testified ‘against’ the Manchester Yeomanry at the inquest would have every reason to be in fear of losing their livelihoods (and possibly even their lives).⁷ The voiceover tells us as much when introducing William Harrison, a spinner who tells the story of what happened to John Lees. As the deceased Lees says of Harrison: ‘He had everything to lose – he was a widower with five kids to feed. But nothing was going to shut him up.’ Harrison’s testimony is an impassioned and angry indictment of the massacre, drawing a direct comparison with the Battle of Waterloo. This comparison is emphasised by a white-on-black title card, giving Harrison’s name and the quote ‘At Waterloo it was man to man’; a clear implication that the events at St Peter’s Field were, in the words of Harrison, ‘downright murder’. At one point in his testimony, Harrison flamboyantly acts out the movements of the mounted swordsmen as they cut people down and the coroner dismissively says ‘Oh, you act as well as speak’. Harrison’s rebuke is swift: ‘Sir, I am no scholar, but I speak the best I can according to truth!’ It is clear from the way that the characters are presented and the evidence damningly uncovered that this is a documentary drama that is setting out to redress an imbalance. The dramatic structure and use of nominating title cards gives witnesses such as Harrison the status of ‘experts’, rather than the deluded troublemakers the ‘official’ version of events might have us believe.

The official, authenticating voice in many historical documentaries is provided by expository voiceover or the expert, on-screen presenter. Lees’ voiceover in The Peterloo Massacre subverts the standard expository voiceover with its clear ‘stake’ in what is being shown to us, and his use of devastating irony. The shortcomings of the standard presenter-led historical documentary are made apparent by The Peasants’ Revolt. In this programme (an entry in Channel 4’s World’s Worst Century series, about the fourteenth century), Tony Robinson sets out to tell the true story of what happened in the uprising of 1381. There is a clear contrasting with how this story would be told in a conventional history documentary. As Robinson points out:

One of the programme’s best strategies is to eschew standard re-enactments or reconstructions. We periodically see people in period costume, and some of the key figures (Thomas Baker, Abel Kerr, John Ball, John Sumner, Wat Tyler) are nominated via captions and the actors who play them are seen in close up. For the most part, however, the use of reconstruction is very limited because the programme-makers are far more interested in locating these events of over six hundred years ago in the contemporary moment. Instead of dramatic reconstruction, the convention of the presenter recounting the events is used, but Robinson is always keen to draw out the ‘everydayness’ of what might turn out to be momentous events, how they might resonate for a modern-day viewer. For example, as he drives through some council estates in Thamesmead, to the east of modern-day London, and one of the areas where the revolt first gained momentum, Robinson makes an ironic comment about the location not looking like it is ‘full of history’. The opening sequence functions in the same way, when the modern-day Smithfield meat market is used as a backdrop for Robinson’s comments about how, in 1381, when it was simply a field just outside London, ‘it became the stage for one of the most significant events in British history’. When we are told about Thomas Baker organising and leading a deputation to confront a poll tax commissioner at Brentwood, Robinson tells us ‘no one knew it at the time, but that was the start of the Peasants’ Revolt’. Instead of the ‘self-evident’ unfolding of history, where important people do important things and ordinary people are precisely that – ordinary, there is a sense here of the contingency of events. As things are unfolding, no one knows they are immersed in something that will have an enduring historical importance. The programme therefore draws attention to the way that histories are structured and documented, it reflects upon the historiographical process rather than simply recounting or reconstructing events in a self-evident way. This attention to contextual detail is never clearer than in the sequence where the modes of communication used in 1381 are discussed. As Robinson states, it seems that the southeast of England ‘spontaneously combusts’ in June 1381. By this he clearly means that this is the standard historical explanation for the events – the peasants just started revolting for no apparent reason. What the evidence actually reveals is that the peasants were organised, had a set of objectives and an agenda for social change, and had been pushed into action by a series of inter-related events (higher taxation and its heavy handed collection being the main focal point). A significant number of them were not even peasants. The way this documentary is structured allows this more complex set of historical forces to come to the fore. In terms of the communication systems used – coded poems, read out in village squares – one contributor draws a comparison between this form of communication d the mass involvement to which it led, and the contemporary use of the internet to spread the word about activist movements and events.

All three of the texts discussed in this chapter seek to engage the viewer in documentary representations of historical events. In the case of The Battle of Orgreave, the events in question are in recent memory and there are extant media recordings of them (film, video, photographs). The interesting dilemma addressed by the documentary is how such a re-enactment of politically-charged recent events can actually ‘reclaim’ the truth of the matter, in the face of distortions on the part of the mainstream media and the state. In the case of The Peterloo Massacre and The Peasants’ Revolt, however, the events are in the more distant past and no direct recording exists (other than court transcripts and newspaper reports for Peterloo and chronicles for the Revolt). For these two films the use of dramatised reconstruction of ‘what happened’ is a more ‘obvious’ strategy, but they both manage to use it in ways that move beyond the conventional use and encourage the viewer to reflect on how histories themselves are constructed, dramatised and re-told for future generations.