WAM: Book Reviews

Cahal McLaughlin is Senior Lecturer at the School of Media, Film and Journalism at the University of Ulster. This book has its origins in his Ph.D. Its eight chapters are reflections on six participatory or collaborative documentary productions on which McLaughlin worked during the 2000s. These are: Telling Our Story: The Springhill Massacre (2000); A Prisoner’s Journey (2001); We Never Give Up (2002); Inside Stories: Memories from the Maze and Long Kesh Prison (2004); The Prison Memory Archive (2009); and Unheard Voices (2009). Five of these are recordings from Northern Ireland, and one is from South Africa. They all deal with memories of political violence, including reflections on the prison experiences of those charged or detained for acts of political violence. Recordings range from documentaries that were commissioned by representative organizations to ones that were initiated by McLaughlin.

These are indeed tragic, challenging and transformative events, as in the Springhill housing estate in west Belfast in July 1972 when British soldiers opened fire and killed five unarmed civilians, including two children and a local priest. Chapters are structured around three key themes. First is the significance of collaboration (notably, co-ownership for all participants, who remain authors of their own stories) between the filmmaker and the participants in societies emerging out of violence, with a view to accessing constituencies that would otherwise remain hidden from, or risk misrepresentation in, mainstream media. Co-ownership creates both the conditions for the fullest collaboration and a context of joint responsibility between filmmaker and subject, one that is underpinned by the use of veto. This requires “elaborate webs of communications to both arrange and supervise the productions” (p. 146). Co-ownership does not remove the imbalance of power that is inherent in film production, where a single person may, as in some instances here, record, direct and edit the material, but makes it transparent and controls it, particularly through pre-production discussions. For the participants, the process of production may be as or more important than the finished product. In the case of We Never Give Up collaboration occurred at all stages, from research through to identifying potential audiences and selecting themes, structure, participants, imagery and soundtracks, and agreeing the length and pace of the final edit. It involved the production crew, the selected participants of the commissioning organization, its executive and general membership. Great care is given to such considerations as the role of a narrator’s voiceover and to whether the authority of any such voice may enhance the distance between subject and audience and subvert the goals of communication and understanding, and to how such consequences might be avoided or minimized. Possible audiences vary: they may include other members of the community, children and future generations, government agencies and mass audiences. Some audiences may be problematic if, for example, they include people who could react negatively or violently to the content, or people who may be in a position to seek forms of legal redress for wrongs they believe have been committed. The spirit of collaboration requires that any such risks are anticipated, avoided or minimized.

The second theme is the effect of location (in particular, the return to sites of the original traumatic events) on the performance and structure of story-telling. This has the added advantage of aiding the goal of transparency in filmed records of memory work, while encouraging performativity of memory-telling. Participants’ memories, notes McLaughlin, become part of their physical as much as their psychological existence. Editing decisions tended to follow the chronology of participants’ journeys through the sites they revisited, rather than attempt chronological histories. The filmmaker attempts to minimize cutaway images in post-production and to make minimum intervention in interviews, in order to encourage survivors to tell the story in their own way. Here as in many other respects, this is a documentary form quite unlike that of mainstream television where the tendency, with this kind of material, is to use survivors to authenticate the current affairs reports as told by journalists and experts. McLaughlin notes that telling stories is an act of negotiation between speaking and listening, certainly not a typical feature of mainstream media. Questions are used to tease out the stories of participants and for clarification, rather than for interrogation and the challenging of motives. There remains a tension between the filmmakers’ striving for personal perspective, and the tendency on the part of some interviewees to tell their stories from the collective perspectives of their communities, professional groups, or political/military affiliations.

The third theme is the use to which the edited material can be put in be put in both personal and public spheres. Straddling all three issues is the challenge of the positioning in close proximity of representatives of communities that have had histories of conflict, including, in Northern Ireland, members of both Protestant and Catholic militant groups, prison officers and prisoners, victims and perpetrators. In at least one instance, a therapist was hired to run a workshop for the entire crew on the risk of re-stimulating trauma in both participants and crew. In another instance the author recalls that meetings with each participant before recording allowed them to be heard and validated. The author explains that his intention is to “recognize plurality and to open up understanding rather than suggest equivalence of experience or power relations” and in this way “provide space for audience’s negotiation of contested memories” (p.144).This has implications for what it is appropriate to place in proximity to anything else within the film. And it has implications for conflict-resolution and the possibilities of peace. Representation and questioning of “otherness” became a central preoccupation of this project.

The films ranged in style from conventional linear intercut narratives suitable for wide audiences, to installations with separate screens (e.g. in one case, three screens in three constructed rooms: one screen for each of the narratives of three subjects) more suitable for gallery exhibition, and even to interactive multi-narratives on one screen. In the latter case, the editor resisted the inclination to intercut, leaving the task of creating a whole out of the parts to the audience. The tendency was to create films that conformed to perceived audiences’ expectations. Participants were chosen to reflect the membership bases of collaborating institutions. Accompanying visuals were generally employed to reinforce the original interview content, and “rarely to suggest ambiguity, contradiction or other symbolic possibilities” (p.149).
This book should be essential reading for all students and practitioners of documentary, particularly documentaries that pertain to political violence and the memories of survivors. It would also serve well in the curricula of peace and conflict studies programs.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bowling Green State University, Ohio.