Recording Memories from Political Violence

A Film-maker's Journey

Cahal McLaughlin

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781841504360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstlehre

Chapter 1

Raising Heads above the Parapet: Research Questions, Context and Methodologies

A bird skeleton in a British Army watchtower at the Maze and Long Kesh Prison. © Cahal McLaughlin

Introduction

After thirty years of political violence, Northern Ireland is undergoing a peace-process, however falteringly.¹ My documentary filmmaking and writing have emerged out of personal and professional experiences. Living through much of the Troubles – experiencing and witnessing moments of violence – was undoubtedly one of the reasons that my professional work, even when (and possibly because) I was based in London, kept returning to this theme. It was central to the decision to make it the subject of my research when I moved to an academic career. In this chapter, I describe the overall aim, methodologies and context that have preoccupied me over the last ten years.

Research Questions

The research journey can be summed up as describing and analysing the use of documentary filmmaking in the recording of trauma memories from political conflict, with particular emphasis on Northern Ireland. Three distinct but interrelated questions can be identified. The first and most consistent addresses the significance of collaboration between the filmmaker and the participants in a society emerging out of violence. Collaboration with participants was one of the preconditions that made these recordings possible and also directly influenced how the documentaries were filmed and exhibited. These chapters describe the range of collaborations that were negotiated and their significance for each production. The second questions the effect of location on the performance and structure of story-telling. Returning to the site of the original traumatic event that is remembered offers not only a visual guide to the participant and the audience, but directly impacts on what is remembered and how it is articulated and performed. The third asks to what use the edited material can be put in both personal and public spheres. The exhibition of the material attempts to reflect original intentions and addresses the relationship between private memory and public story-telling. Throughout, I tentatively reflect on the healing claims for public acknowledgement of past trauma in each of these areas. I offer these as observations only, since this is not my area of expertise.

Context

During the 1980s I had worked in Northern Ireland as researcher, camera operator and director for a community cooperative, Belfast Independent Video (BIV),² which combined producing material for community groups with programmes for broadcast television. A personal relationship brought me to London in 1989 and I began working as a freelance producer/director, where I found myself drawn repeatedly to the subject of the Troubles. I co-produced and co-directed, with Lin Solomon, Pack Up the Troubles (Solomon and McLaughlin, 1991) and directed Behind the Walls of Castlereagh (McLaughlin, 1992). I also directed many episodes of ‘The Slot’, a three-minute access programme on Channel Four Television, which included stories from Belfast, for example, on the changing role of the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).³ My professional experience operated within the context of a hierarchical commissioning structure, a legal framework of public broadcasting and a political climate of military conflict. At Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL), when I was offered the opportunity to begin academic research, I decided to re-visit many of the themes that I had already covered, which also involved the re-negotiation of the conditions of collaboration with subjects, as well as production relationships and technologies. Inevitably, this also involved a review of aesthetic strategies.

One area that had consistently cropped up in my professional work was the sensitivity of working with survivors of political conflict. Even those not directly affected expressed strong reservations about ‘raising [their] head above the parapet’ in a society where violence was always under the surface when not explicit. This quote came from a young professional show-jumper whom I interviewed about contributing to a documentary on politics and sport, Kicking With Both Feet (Martin & McLaughlin, 1993), funded by the Community Relations Council and the Irish Film Board. She eventually declined to take part because of fears that others in her neighbourhood might discover that her training schedule included Sundays. She lived in an area known as the Bible Belt of North Antrim, where disapproval of breaking the Sabbath was widespread. Another example concerned a young loyalist ex-prisoner, Jennifer Peoples, who was to give an interview for Behind the Walls of Castlereagh. She would only do so if a representative of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) was also to be interviewed in the programme, which we arranged. This seemed less like political manipulation than the need for a sense of safety that comes from having a ‘neighbour’ in the programme, an issue that I will return to later in this chapter. These questions of negotiating conditions of participation, of collaboration and of ownership of the material were to form a central theme of the research.

I also found that the location of where the interview was recorded had a profound affect on the nature of the story-telling. Interviews in Behind the Walls of Castlereagh were recorded in a reconstructed interrogation cell in a studio in Belfast. Unprompted, Jennifer stood up from her chair, freeing herself from the sitting position, and re-enacted the abuse that she alleged had been perpetrated on her by RUC police officers. I wanted my research to develop this question of location and its effect on narrative structure and performance in front of the camera. This strategy became noticeable by its very absence in another production, A Prisoner’s Journey (2001), which I refer to later.

Right: Scaffolding in a corridor of Armagh Prison. © Cahal McLaughlin

Because a collaborative imperative ran throughout the research journey, the sources of the productions stemmed from evolving relationships. This meant that on occasions I took the initiative to develop an idea and approached participants, while on other occasions I was approached by participants’ organisations to develop an idea with them.

Story-telling

While most of the interviews in this research deal with recent historical periods, it is important not to consider them as historical documents but as interpretative documents of that past. Because of this transparency of construction, memory offers us many opportunities to engage with our contested past. Elizabeth Jelin suggests, ‘It is in the cracks between one and the other [memory and history] where the most creative, provocative, and productive questions for inquiry and critical reflection emerge’ (Jelin 2003: 59). Memory is subject to forces, conscious and unconscious, that make us wary of its reliability. What is remembered and what is forgotten? How much of that which is remembered is articulated and how much is held back? Despite these questions, memory’s usefulness lies in its providing evidence of how people interpret their past at a personal level, which is an invaluable contribution to other documentary evidence and provides a rich texture to our understanding of historical developments. Stephanie Marlin-Curiel, commenting on artistic responses to South Africa’s TRC, writes, ‘Memory, though unreliable, nonetheless enables a witness to communicate an embodied reality and solicit an empathetic response to victims of violence’ (Marlin-Curiel 2002: 49). The clinical psychologist, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who has researched the role of the TRC, addresses the relationship between memory and reality and the ‘presentness’ of the past in memories:

When the rupture of one’s senses is a daily occurrence – as was the case in South Africa’s violent political past – old memories fuse with new ones and the accounts given by victims and survivors are not simply about facts. They are primarily about the impact of facts on their lives and the continuing trauma in their lives created by past violence. (Gododo-Madikizela 2001: 26)

A methodological approach that allows for the development of these ideas around embodiment and performance, as well as avoiding a more historical approach with its claims to factual information, is the life-story methodology. Selma Leydesdorff et. al. points out the advantages of:

[a] life-story approach [that] allows room for contradiction, a holistic richness, and complexity. It gives the opportunity to explore the relation between personal and collective experience, by focusing on remembering and forgetting as cultural processes. (Leydesdorff et. al. 2004: 12)

In the context of a past that involved violence and which is still subject to contested interpretations, this approach acknowledges the inherent discontinuities and fragmentation of trauma memories. The occasions when story-telling is pulled towards truth-telling occurs in those documentaries where the participants are campaigning for legislative or judicial intervention. In Telling Our Story (2002), Brian O’Kelly announces his hope for an independent inquiry into the British Army shootings of 1972. In We Never Give Up (2002), the participants give testimonies which they had hoped would influence the South African Minister of Justice in deliberations on apartheid reparations. In Unheard Voices (2009), Jimmy Irons finds himself a ‘lone voice’ in seeking justice for his brother’s death. Since I had not sought to produce investigative documentaries (for example, by interviewing the British Army for Telling Our Story) and there is no claim to omniscient truth-telling, the memories are no less important for that, even in a judicial context.

Reparative memory

While claims should not be exaggerated, there appears to be a consensus that the public telling of stories about past traumatic events has a potential to contribute to the healing of survivors’ psychic and community wounds. Patricia Lundy and Mark McGovern write, ‘Evidence from other countries emerging from political violence shows that public recognition is cathartic’ (Ardoyne Commemorative Project 2002: 1). The psychoanalyst Dori Laub, who has recorded testimonies from Holocaust survivors for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, suggests that when some survivors told their stories to him they began to find a narrative and uncover connections that were lost; important processes in the healing of wounds caused by trauma that threatens to overcome the present. His summary is clear: ‘Survivors need to tell their story in order to survive’ (Laub 1992: 78). Filmmaker and survivor of the Rwandan genocide of 2004, Gilbert Ndaharyo, translates his grandfather’s advice: ‘In Rwanda, a saying goes “ujya gukira indwara arayirata”; that is, “if one wants to be healed from a sickness, he must talk of it to the world”’ (Broderick 2010: 232). This sense of compulsion is taken up by Cathy Caruth, who claims, ‘trauma seems to be more than a pathology or simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in an attempt to tell us a truth or reality that is otherwise not available’ (quoted in Leydesdorff 1996: 14). Renos Papadopoulos, a psychologist who has worked with Bosnian ex-camp prisoners, acknowledges that ‘there were times when our shared silence was honouring the unutterable’, but he concludes:

Thus, ultimately, the healing of these painful experiences due to atrocities may not lie in devising sophisticated therapeutic techniques but in returning to more ‘traditional’ forms of healing based on assisting people to develop appropriate narratives. The healing effect of story-telling, in its multiple variations, has always been a well-known phenomenon. (Papadopoulos 1998: 472)

Similarly, the report Guatemala: Never Again!, which collected and analysed oral testimonies from thirty years of political violence in Guatemala, notes that, ‘Compiling testimonies is a key component of developing a collective memory that enables people to find meaning in what happened and affirm their dignity’ (Recovery of Historical Memory Project 1999: 89). Referring to the affirmative attribute of story-telling, Michael Jackson claims:

Story-telling mediates between them [the subjective and the social] providing strategies and generating experiences that help people redress imbalances and correct perceived injustices in the distribution of Being, so that in telling their story with others one reclaims some sense of agency, recovers some sense of purpose, and comes to feel that the events that overwhelmed one from without may be brought within one’s grasp. (Jackson 2006: 36)

In the context of South Africa, Chris Van Der Merwe and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela concur: ‘Narrating one’s life is about finding structure, coherence and meaning in life. Trauma, in contrast, is about the shattering of life’s narrative structure, about a loss of meaning – the traumatised person has lost the plot’ (Van Der Merwe & Gobodo-Madikizela 2007: 6). In a comparative study of the effects on Protestants living in border areas and the relatives of those killed on Bloody Sunday in Derry, Graham Dawson observes:

Twenty-five years later, the medical concept of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] had contributed to a widespread and growing awareness in Northern Ireland of the persistence of psychic scars created by the violence of the Troubles, and associated notions of the importance of story-telling as a means of mastering, or coming to terms with, these intractable psychic realities. (Dawson 2009: 126)

However, he warns against the individualising of these representations: ‘Narrated memories are never purely individual productions, but are generated through a collective practice of “intersubjective” telling […] [where] [p]ersonal stories adapt to both listeners and to the narratives of others’ (ibid. 141), which places story-telling firmly in a social context. Clare Hackett and Bill Rolston comment on the political potential of reclaiming agency when they write, ‘[t]he view that story-telling is an individualized process does disservice in particular to those story-tellers who are acting consciously as agents of change’ (Hackett & Rolston 2009: 357). Dawson agrees:

[…] the work of campaigning, being centrally concerned with telling and listening to stories, seeking and bestowing social recognition and widening the circle of memory, provides in itself a vehicle of reparation and the integration of the traumatic past, for both the individual psyche and the traumatised community. (Dawson 2007: 177)

But caution needs to be attached to any such healing potential, especially in the context of the hesitant peace-process in Ireland, where no long term political settlement has yet been firmly established at the time of writing. The documentaries in this research project, while hesitant to claim any healing potential as suggested above, were produced within ethical principles of accountability that, at the very least, should support such healing.

Reception

Story-telling requires listeners. While Inside Stories was produced with little sense of who the audience might be, the other documentaries were produced with specific, if various, audiences in mind. The literary critic Soshana Felman develops the issue of the relationship of a testimony-giver to the audience in considering Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985). She argues:

To testify is not just to record a fact, but to address another, to appeal to a community. To testify is not only to narrate, but to commit oneself, and the narrative to others […] to take responsibility for the truth, which goes beyond the personal, in having general validity. (Felman 1992: 204)

In this sense, participants are communicating not only with the filmmaker, but also with future audiences. Another interpretation of this issue of responsibility is offered by Stanley Cohen, who highlights the distinction and development between knowledge and acknowledgement when he writes, ‘Acknowledgement is what happens to knowledge when it becomes officially sanctioned and enters the public discourse’ (Cohen 2001: 225). This awareness of public discourse is, of course, historically dependent, and currently there are few opportunities for comprehensive and agreed ‘official’ acknowledgement for victims and survivors of the Troubles. Hackett and Rolston claim, ‘In Northern Ireland, where in many ways present disputes revisit the divisions of the previous conflict, many people do not get the opportunity to hear stories from other groups or reject out of hand the validity of those stories’ (Hackett & Rolston 2009: 370). Concerning the challenges that still need to be negotiated, they point out:

At the individual level, trauma and fear may lead to silence rather than speech, while at the social level there may not be spaces in which stories can be told and listened to sympathetically. That victims should be able to testify and be heard is a simple truth, but the reality of establishing mechanisms to enable that to happen is difficult and complex. (ibid. 356)

The ending of significant violence in Northern Ireland, beginning with the ceasefires of 1994, has seen the emergence of...