Abstract
N.L. was a Loyalist prisoner throughout the Northern Irish Troubles and now, years after his release, he has been approached by several media producers to collaborate with their projects. For one of them, he was told that participating could ‘help him heal’ and also that the family of the man he had allegedly killed wanted to meet him. Familiar with the constant misrepresentation in mainstream media, he declined the offer and later found out that the family was approached in the same way as he was. Later, the film-maker and researcher, Cahal McLaughlin, contacted him with an offer to take part in the Prisons Memory Archive project and for this one he consented. What made N.L. choose this offer over the first one? Simply because for the Prisons Memory Archive he would be able to tell his own story as well as be its co-owner, with the power of veto if not satisfied with the material and with what would be done with it.
This is one of the stories that Cahal McLaughlin narrates in his book, Recording Memories from Political Violence: A film-maker’s journey, in which he invites the reader to follow him on a journey to uncover the process of collaborative film-making in societies emerging out of political violence, such as Northern Ireland and South Africa. Released in 2010, the book is a good example of how research and practice can walk hand in hand. It shows the importance of ethics when dealing with sensitive issues, from the moment of approaching participants until presenting it to an audience. However, Recording Memories is not a ‘How-to-do-a-documentary’ book but a reflection of the author’s own experiences and it is his hope that it will ‘contribute in some small way to recording and exhibiting trauma memories in societies emerging out of political violence, so that ethical principles and creative use of technology can enhance the process of personal story-telling and public acknowledgment’ (p. 14).
The book is divided into eight chapters, with the first presenting a brief explanation about the author’s background, the research questions and the context. The following six chapters contain an analysis of the six documentaries produced by the author – five on Northern Ireland and one on South Africa – while the last chapter rounds up these analyses. In each chapter he critically looks back at the importance of collaboration between film-makers and participants, at the role of location in the story-telling, and at the challenges of making the material available to an audience.
Sensitivity is a key term in any society struggling to move away from political violence and which ‘has not yet passed the post of post-conflict’ (p. 101). Therefore, the author attempts to show in his reflection of each documentary that the term should not be forgotten at any stage of the film-making process. But sensitivity is not the only term McLaughlin carefully deals with; at the very beginning he devotes almost two pages to explaining some of the key terms that will be encountered throughout the book, such as the use of participant instead of interviewee and political struggle instead of terrorism. In the Northern Irish conflict vocabulary, for example, one term can have several connotations. To give a brief example: for the Loyalist/Unionists, the term Ulster is another denomination of Northern Ireland, while for Nationalist/Republicans, it is used to refer to one of the four ancient provinces of the island. There is, thus, a clear attempt from the author in ‘decommissioning his mind’, borrowing Dawson’s (2007: xxii) term, since McLaughlin is committed ‘to undoing the habits of violence and division inscribed within our language, our cultural orientation, our own subjectivity, in order to engage with this we may disagree with, across the divided formations of memory’.
The attempt at not taking sides is also noticeable in McLaughlin’s own film-making practice as he sought to include the voices of different sides of the conflict. For him, ‘a way of doing justice to the multiple and ambiguous character of human reality is by regarding the others not as inhuman, but as ourselves in other circumstances’ (Jackson, cited onp. 113). The documentaries analysed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 – on the Springhill Massacre and on South Africa, respectively – have survivors as participants, while Chapter 7’s film brings the voices of the families of victims. The documentaries examined in Chapters 3, 5 and 6 have focused on the prison experience; Chapter 3’s documentary heard from former prisoners who ‘have rarely been accessible in public discourse because of their categorization as perpetrators, the symbolic and political opposite of victim’ (p. 55). The documentary of Chapter 5 added to the prison discourses the voice of a prison officer which has been highly regarded as ‘the Other’ since their stories are rarely heard. These two documentary experiences led to a more wide-ranging project, the Prisons Memory Archive, in which 175 interviews were recorded inside the Maze and Long Kesh Prison and Armagh Gaol.
The author richly reflects back on the choice of the participants and what their gender, profession and political position have added to the storyline of the documentaries. Moreover, he also points out the reluctance from some participants in speaking up for simply mistrusting the media or for fear of legal prosecution.
How the editing was carried out – that is the timing for each interview, the inclusion of background material and soundtrack, and so forth – as well as what the story-telling strategy is, also involves strong ethical consideration and McLaughlin presents a good reflection of his editing choices in each chapter. As he put it, ‘the question of editing as an ethical and political practice, including the rights of editorial control, was a consistent theme … The film was transparent as it was viewed, giving its viewers an opportunity to reflect on its making as well as documentary practices more generally’ (p. 99).
With each chapter divided in several sections, Recording Memories is also as transparent as it is read and the author’s reflections about the role of participants, location and the audience in the film-making can be easily followed. One of the most positive things about McLaughlin’s writing is that, at any given moment, he says that the co-ownership method is the best and that it should be the one adopted by anyone interested in post-conflict film-making. What he does is examine critically each of his documentaries and point out their strengths and drawbacks.
Sometimes he was satisfied with the results and at other times he shows himself rather disappointed with what he achieved. In the third chapter, for instance, where he looks back at A Prisoner’s Journey, he identified several ‘creative’ problems from finding a richer texture to the use of archival material. However, his analysis of each documentary reveals that adopting a collaborative method was very fruitful in a society emerging out of political violence and he provides strong arguments for such assumption. As he put it: ‘co-ownership would create conditions that allowed for the fullest collaboration, there was a practicality to this approach as well as an ethical stance in that it made the project more likely to succeed where the theme was politically sensitive’ (p. 28).
Perhaps one of the richest reflections in Recording Memories is regarding the effect of location in the performance of participants and structure of the story-telling. As the author remarks, ‘how one remembers is strongly influenced by present circumstances’ (p. 95); therefore, McLaughlin attempted to go back to key places of the Troubles and let these places speak for themselves as ‘a stimulant to the memory recalling’ (p. 96). Moreover, he acted as a mediator and as an enabler, allowing the participants to share control of the directing while his camera was directed at their discoveries. Hence the author recognized that what he has achieved would have been different if the interviews had been recorded in a studio.
In a book with a rich analysis such as this, it is hard to find weaknesses since the author clearly attempts to be critical of his own documentary practice. It will certainly interest scholars from several disciplines or people simply interested in the Troubles or in the South African conflict. Here the reader can easily understand how collaborative film-making works; however, someone with a non-film studies background might miss a contextual discussion about the practices (collaborative, non-collaborative, linear, non-linear, etc.) generally carried out by documentary makers. Although he points out his three research questions in the very beginning, and fully addresses them throughout the book, it is unclear if there is a gap – academic or professional – that he intends to fill with his book. Therefore, the reader does not know if his motivation for carrying out such study comes from his questioning while working in the mainstream media or if it comes from the lack of academic discussions about collaborative film-making.
On first sight, having only one chapter about the author’s experience in South Africa and the other five about Northern Ireland may have made one wonder why he did not focus on only one country. However, by the end of Chapter 4 it is clear that the inclusion of South Africa was worthwhile since ‘the testimonies contained familiar narratives – similar patterns of trauma and grief, interplay between individual and collective narratives, as well as demands for disclosure, justice and truth’ (p. 69). Perhaps the final chapter could have included an overall comparative analysis of his experience in two contexts since the author only compares aspects of one documentary with another. As far as collaborative film-making is concerned, how does its practice differ in South Africa and Northern Ireland?
Recording Memories is very well written despite some minor editing problems. The reader does not need to be an expert on the Troubles or on South Africa to understand the author’s reflections. With nearly 20 years of production experience, McLaughlin’s reflection on collaborative film-making and his combination of written and audiovisual texts has certainly a great potential to contribute to several fields that deal with the aftermath of war.