Animating the Real as Published

7/31/2019 Animating the Real as Published

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Animation:

An Interdisciplinary Journal

6(3) 335351

The Author(s) 2011

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DOI: 10.1177/1746847711418566

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Article

Corresponding author:

Agnieszka Piotrowska, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street,London WC1E 7HX, UK.

Email: [email protected]

Animating the Real: A Case

Study

Agnieszka Piotrowska

AbstractThe ethics of collecting testimonies in documentary filmmaking has been the subject of academicdiscussion for decades, in particular since Claude Lanzmanns landmark film Shoah (1985). Thereare occasions however when a subject of a potential film would like to tell his or her story but

for some reason is unable to speak. Language breaks down when an attempt is made to symbolizethe trauma. This article gives an account of the authors experience of such an instance in makinga three-part documentary series for the National Geographic about refugees coming to London.

The article uses Lacanian psychoanalytical thought to give a theoretical framework to the eventsleading to the use of animation in the series.

Keywords

animation, documentary film, hybrid media, Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma

This article offers a psychoanalytic perspective on the issue of representing trauma in a hybrid

documentary film entitled Running for Freedom (2003/4) which I directed a few years ago. Inparticular, I focus on my decision to employ stylized animated sequences in order to enable the

narratives to be told at all. I evoke the project here in the mode of autoethnographic writings not

because of some self-serving reflection but in the spirit of a personal account, which in some way

offers the missing story.1 It also has been possible for me to process the possible meaning of the

decisions we took after a certain amount of time had elapsed indeed in a process of a psychoana-lytical phenomenon called a deferred action about which I shall write more in due course.

This article is therefore in a way a result of the deferred effect on my part, as it is only in the

context ofmy subsequent reading of the theoretical debates surrounding the ethical issues in docu-mentary making many years after the event ofmy actually going through the process that I can

begin to understand what might have taken place during the production of the films, and to be

ready to share some of these experiences.


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336 Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

Running for Freedom (2003/4)

Running for Freedom (2003/4) was a three-part series of 30-minute films which I produced anddirected through my company, Rivercourt Productions, for the National Geographic Channels

International. The style of the series was a hybrid of mixed media: live action combined with

animated sequences that accompanied the stories of the subjects past.The series dealt with the pain and suffering of refugees coming to London following sometimes

unspeakable experiences, including physical and mental torture. The final result was broadcast

around the world on the National Geographic channels from the end of 2003 to 2005 to some criti-

cal acclaim, although its form and content was very different from the channels usual diet. What

is interesting about the making of the series is its unusual process, which, in the context of the

debates about the ethics of testimony surrounding documentary filmmaking, might be of value.

The sheer facts of the production are as follows. In late 2002, I suggested to the then commis-

sioning editor at the National Geographic Channel International in Washington, an Australian,

Brian Smith, that it might be of interest to look in some way at migrants and refugees moving from

one country to another for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, there are the issues of globaliza-tion with migrants moving from one culture to another, thus impacting the shape of the world; and

on the other, the wars and repressive regimes that have been forcing people to abandon their homes.

After a period of research, we identified a number of different issues that caused people to leave

their homes, and two emerged clearly as the most important: economic and political ones. We

decided to focus on political refugees coming to London. We were given a development budget and

a researcher set off to find suitable characters for the subjects of the films. We were quite quickly

completely overwhelmed with the kind of tales that presented themselves of pain, suffering and

unspeakable torture.

As a filmmaker, I usually research my own stories and subjects but, on this occasion, I was

introduced to a number of potential candidates for the films by my researcher (an unusual situationin itself simply because at the time I had been immersed in other commitments). After a prelimi-

nary look at samples of the stories offered and having briefly met the people whose stories they

were, I quite quickly realized that the refugee project might well be untenable for the simple reason

that our potential interviewees were not able to enunciate their stories. The issue was not just their

linguistic difficulties stemming from the fact that English was not their first language, but rather

their difficulty in speaking at all about their pasts; the refugees speech would crumble and disin-

tegrate, they would cry and stumble, and were unable to offer any narrative at all, never mind a

coherent one of their suffering.

Documentary filmmakers look for emotion; this is what we do. By 2002, I had already success-

fully filmed a number of extremely difficult and emotional tales. However, the refugees accountswere different, their pain too raw, and I began to feel that any attempt at making the project might

be a mistake; it would be crossing ethical lines I feared would be exploitative and voyeuristic, even

if the subjects could tell their stories narratively (which was doubtful). And yet, without any knowl-

edge of Emmanuel Levinass philosophy of the infinite responsibility towards the Other, or other

issues raised by theoreticians including the practitioner and documentary historian, Alan Rosenthal,

about using the pain of others for entertainment, I just knew instinctively that what we were about

to do was getting very close to lines that perhaps should not be crossed; and if we were going to

cross them, we should be very sure that it would be for the right reasons if one can ever be sure

of such a thing. When people are too traumatized to be able to talk about their suffering, should a

documentary filmmaker not just walk away from the project? That dilemma resonates deeply withthe famous scene in Shoah (1985) in which the barber from Auschwitz interviewed by Lanzmann


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says, I cant go on, to which Lanzmann replies repeatedly, you must go on, you have to, and so

Abraham Bomba does, his face tortured, tears in his eyes. As a filmmaker, I too have been known

to prevail upon people who didnt really want to talk to me on camera, to do just that, to talk and

bear witness because I felt it was important for posterity, for others to know. And yet it is never

completely clear whether, perhaps unconsciously and certainly without meaning to, one doesnt

commit an unforgivable violence to the other.

I shared my grave concerns with my research team who were very reluctant to give up on the

project. As the stories all took place in the past, there was also an urgent practical issue of how to

deal with peoples personal history in the films; what archive could or should we use? Were there

any photographs or personal footage available at all and how would they affect the subjects?

Should we attempt some kind of dramatic reconstructions with the actors (something I felt could

end up being phony and disrespectful)? Persuaded by my researchers, I re-interviewed the potential

contributors to the films, voicing my own (ethical and practical) doubts about the viability of the

series, given that it was not going to be an academic book but a television programme, a spectacle

of some kind after all. For the first and only time in my career as a filmmaker, which now spans

two decades, I really felt we should abandon the project as too difficult. I offered my thoughts to

the potential interviewees and some of them indeed agreed with me. The project was as good as

dead.

At that point I was only dimly aware of the massive theoretical debates surrounding the ethical

issues of documentary filmmaking as I had not yet made my crossover to the theoretical and psy-

choanalytical realms, some of the concepts of which I will now discuss.

To begin with, the story of Alain Resnais deciding against making a documentary film about

Hiroshima and instead succeeding in talking his funders into letting him make a feature film

(Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959), resonates with Krzysztof Kieslowskis statement (1992) that thereare some things that a documentary simply cannot and should not attempt; some things that are too

intimate or too traumatic are best left alone or left to fiction.2 Resnais was reportedly traumatized

during the editing process of his acclaimed documentaryNuit et Brouillard(1955), suffering fromnightmares and hallucinations, and for that reason he also opted for fiction (Caruth, 1996: 24).

Cathy Caruth begins her paper onHiroshima Mon Amourwith a description of the opening scenesof the film, the entwining bodies intercut with each other, the bodies of those who are dead with the

bodies of the films lovers. It is clear that language is not the only thing that the protagonists of the

film rely on for communication. The key question ofHiroshima, and for any work dealing withsuffering, as Caruth has suggested, is a matter not only of what we see and know but also of what

is ethical to tell (p. 25). In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the key tension is a disagreement about thepossibility of communicating history at all (p. 27).3 That very question is at the heart of the docu-

mentary process because at some level a documentary is always a testimony. The tension though is

particularly palpable where witnesses are called upon to testify about their own painful and inti-

mate experiences.

Words or silence?

It is hard to make documentary films about trauma because of the ethical implications of what the

act of giving testimony might do to the witnesses themselves. Is the element of exploitation a nec-

essary evil in these encounters, or are there ways that can minimize the emotional impacts of rep-

etition of trauma for those who are called to speak up about their suffering? Arguably, the whole

debate about the ethics of documentary film was initiated, consolidated and developed byLanzmanns film Shoah. While there may be no comparison between the monumental Shoah and


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my humble three 30-minute series for National Geographic, still, a similarity lies in the attempt to

put the testimony of a suffering person on public display.

The value ofShoah stems from its raw and uncompromising testimony of what happened duringthe Holocaust, and the controversy lies in Lanzmanns relentless interviewing techniques. In

essence, the debates about the ethics of giving testimony in a documentary brought into sharp focus

by Lanzmanns epic can be divided into two camps: the first camp argues that giving testimony is

more important than any possible ethical implications such as the colonization of the other, a pos-

sible additional pain caused by the testimony, not to mention the fact of obtaining painful testimony

not in a court of law but for a spectacle to be put on public display for entertainment and not in order

to further knowledge. Risking some oversimplification, one could say that the pro-testimony camp

was led by Shoshana Felmans seminal book on testimony (Testimony: Crises of Witnessing inLiterature, Psychoanalysis and History, 1992) written with psychoanalyst Dori Laub who inter-viewed the survivors of the Holocaust for the Yale Video Archive. The second camp, conversely,

advises caution at best in working on films that demand dealing with witnesses of painful events

who can sometimes be made to take part in the films almost against their will, as was sometimes

the case in Lanzmanns Shoah. At times, some writers have condemned the attempts, calling themobscene, deeply unethical and self-indulgent on the part of the filmmakers. Voices particularly

prominent in the latter camp have included LaCapra (1998), Winston (2002, 2011) and Rosenthal

et al. (1989, 2005).4 Felman insists that there is paramount value in speaking about atrocities both

from the point of view of the general public, posterity and history, but also perhaps from the point

of view of those who have suffered, as they are given a voice that both breaks the silence of their

suffering and can offer a light in the darkness experienced by others. She thus also cites Elias

Canettis (1974: 4) correspondence with Kafka who notes:

In the face of lifes horror luckily most people notice it only on occasions, but a few whom inner

forces appoint to bear witness are always conscious of it there is only one comfort: its alignment with

the horror experienced by previous witnesses.

It is for that reason, if no other, that Felman and her supporters advocate a recording of testimonies

for others to take comfort from.

Jacques Derridas (1998) paper on Maurice Blanchots short essay The Instant of my Death(1994) offers a way of thinking about what happened in the production ofRunning for Freedom.His paper resonates with the issues connected to bearing witness and giving testimony. However,

Derrida adds another dimension to the debate by defining a desire to give testimony, conscious or

otherwise, on the part of the witness, as a desire to remain a desire to overcome time and death

by their account which will remain a long time after the physical presence of the witness has

perished. That thought at first glance might appear almost opposite to Freuds death drive, but I

would venture that, instead, it is similar to Lacanianjouissance, an expression of the joy of knowl-edge and acceptance of the temporal nature of momentary blissful experience that affirms life,

while carrying in itself the internal fury at the inevitability of ones destruction and the destruction

of those we love. The difficulty here, not to say impossibility, is getting at a truth without tainting

it with fictional accounts or even lies.

In his essay, Derrida offers a defence of a fictional account based on a lived experience, or at

least a fictionalized account, in any attempt to get close to ones life experiences, fantasies and

fears. The knowledge of a fictional lie at the core of any enunciation, however truthful, again reso-

nates with the much more recent pronouncements by Jacques Rancire (2009) that documentarybelongs to the realm of fiction insofar as it belongs to the system of perception and creation of the


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Piotrowska 339

artist and not some kind of replication of reality. There is a further clear echo here with the psycho-

analytical deferred effect (Nachtrglichkeit), a term first coined by Freud and developed byLacan, in which the true meaning and consequences of any action, and trauma in particular, can

only be known with hindsight aprs-coup. A documentary film, or a hybrid documentary filmsuch as the one I am describing here, offers this kind of opportunity for those whose stories are the

basis of the film; it is a chance to reflect on what happened to them in the past and to give these

events a different meaning, a chance to symbolize them in some way within a collaboration with

artists. In the case ofRunning for Freedom, the collaboration is with myself, the director, as wellas with the researchers and the animators.

A desire to remain?

After thinking that my project would not continue, something curious happened, something that

one does not read about in the literature surrounding ethics debates in documentary film. Some of

the potential interviewees became strangely insistent that they did not want to give up on the films.

Having been approached by the researchers, they now felt they did not want to forgo the chance totell their stories to the wider public, despite the fact that they could not articulate their pain suffi-

ciently clearly for it to be of broadcast quality! I am saying this brutally here because that too was

a real issue. Instead, they wanted me to find a way of making this unviable project viable. I was

now in real trouble. Clearly, I did not want to let anybody down. However, creatively and ethically,

the issues we were facing were serious. This was not a challenge this was a real problem. We

were stuck. This is when I began thinking of using animation instead of any reconstruction or

archive. At the time, there was a group of us trying to experiment with different ways of represent-

ing reality, and the issues of blurring documentary and fiction. Some friends, such as the fine artist

Julie Innes, began taking formal courses in order to learn computer animation, thinking that com-

puter animation might be the way forward since computer programs have made animation muchmore accessible. However, I really had no idea how feasible that would be because, in order to

create storyboards even of the most basic kind, we would have to have some narratives and that

presented a major issue. After all, an animated sequence is not like a painting; there needs to be a

sustained sense of an unfolding storyline images need to be sustained by words, and those were

lacking too.

After much discussion, we decided that the three-part series might consist of three stories: Farid,

an Iraqi who escaped torture and prison and worked in London as a dancer and choreographer;

Teresa, a refugee from Columbia who arrived in London a few years previously with her young

children, following oppression in Columbia; and then the third was a kind of compilation story

looking at what might happen to the refugees in future.Teresas story was the hardest to begin to conceptualize as it involved almost incomprehensible

moments of not only losing her beloved husband but then somehow going through a life-threaten-

ing procedure of recovering his body, culminating in excavating graves and looking through a

number of corpses for him. It was almost unbearable and, in the final analysis, took the longest to

get through. I am not sure at all if we did it justice but, on the other hand, it was arguably the most

successful from the point of view of the relationship between the pictures, the interviewees and the

words. Teresa subsequently was also able to use the film for her own humanitarian purposes. The

final story entitled Roxanas Journey was unashamedly a complete construct. We featured a baby,

Roxana, a third generation descendant of Jewish and Pakistani refugees, who supposedly narrated

the third film. That text was written by me using interviews with her English-educated parents. Inthinking about the stories, before any concrete work was done, I decided to have one image, one


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key metaphor for each film. It would be the result of the collaborative work between the interview-

ees, the animators and myself.

Showing what cannot be said

The above heading is borrowed from the chapter title of a book by two Lacanian psychoanalystsabout psychosis induced by war trauma, Francoise Davoine and Jean Max Gaudilliere, entitled

History Beyond Trauma (2004). The books thesis is that when words fail, psychoanalysts mightchoose to use images to begin the process of re-learning the Symbolic, i.e. language (Davoine

2004: 72). Davoine and Gaudilliere draw from Lacan who spells out the notion of the unsymboliz-

able nature of the trauma, which forms part of a register outside language which he calls the Real.

To put it simply, in attempting to get at a trauma, words fail. In constructing our films, we, too,

began with the images.

Animator Julie Innes and I began the process of thinking of a visual language for Teresas film,

which then became a template for the other two. Julie and I had long discussions about visual refer-

ences and what techniques could be used. We decided on a visual language, which was in someway reminiscent of the work of surrealists such as Breton and Mir. We were very wary of attempt-

ing any realistic representation, which would be too figurative because we did not want to pretend

that somehow we were able to capture the tragedy of the pain of our contributors. But, similarly, it

was important that the animated images could in some way support the broken narrative.

Teresa

Teresas story involved a wild whirlwind romance in her youth between her and a beautiful and

clearly domineering Orlando, who was seven years her senior and, even early on, involved in dan-

gerous political activities against the totalitarian regime in Columbia at the time. She rememberedthe time of their courting as a magical fairy tale time (Figure 1). In order to be with her beloved,

she abandoned her parents and had her first child when she was not quite 17, which was deeply

controversial for her family (Figure 2).

They never married, which was quite a scandal in a profoundly Roman Catholic community.

But close to the time when he was disappeared by the regime, Orlando himself, at that time

already a father of two young boys, began regretting that they lived in sin and started talking at

length about marrying her. As a proof of his intentions, he started drawing a wedding dress for her

for the wedding that never took place. The drawings of the wedding dress did not survive. Teresa

always broke down when she talked about that wedding she never had and the imaginary dress her

lover wanted her to have. She did want to talk about that particular aspect of her story repeatedly a process that was startlingly reminiscent of the psychoanalytical notion of repetition (Lacan,

2008[1966]), in which the unresolved kernel of a trauma is both repeated by the subject in the real

life and also in psychoanalysis.

A documentary film too, by its very nature, is a repetition which might either hinder or help the

subject with dealing with the effects of the traumatic deferred action; the filmmaker interviews a

person about something that happened in the past, even if that past is just a moment ago. The inter-

view is often repeated in the course of making one film just as, in psychoanalysis, the analysand

often goes back over and over again to particularly important moments in his or her past. In the

edited film, there are always images supporting that interview which offer a kind of interpretation

of what the interviewee has said. Simply put, one could argue that a film is a symbolization of a


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Figure 1. The garden of love (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Julie Innes, director AgnieszkaPiotrowska).

Figure 2. The baby (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Julie Innes, director Agnieszka Piotrowska).


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deferred action that goes beyond words. In the Running for Freedom experience, particularly inTeresas film, it was strange which elements were almost foreclosed and which (unconsciously)

demanded repetition: and they were certainly not at all what we had expected.

The more we talked to Teresa off camera, and these were more like broken sentences rather than

clear narratives, the more her memories of her relationship with Orlando became fantastical tales

of a grand love affair, which overcame all the obstacles, only to be thwarted by the evil in the end.

Teresa believed that the two of them did communicate without words they could just read each

others wishes and thoughts. Maybe that was why also she was interested in working on images

first, and let me worry about the words for the final cut of the film. It took us weeks to glean that

information and other information too, such as the romance being a little more volatile than she

now cared to remember. Perhaps she, too, was writing an account in her mind, which had both ele-

ments of complete factual truth in it and maybe a little bit of fiction. We were very clear that Teresa

had to be happy with whatever we were going to come up with. Only then, once we had the meta-

phor of the dress in place, were we able to talk about the rest of her horrific story. The dress there-

fore became almost more than a metaphor, it was indeed Lacanian metonomy, standing for her

broken dreams and idealized memories of her beloved as well as, in some way, her resolve to carry

on despite the actual narrative of life being so very different from her dreams.

There is no doubt at all in my mind that there was a deep transference between myself, the rest of

the team and Teresa. In psychoanalysis, the notion of transference is, in essence, the transfer of

(archaic) unresolved emotions which demand repetition on the part of the analysand onto the psy-

choanalyst who in his or her engagement with the analysand might also feel transferential (counter-

transferential) emotions. Emotions, that Freud (1958[1915]) had found both surprising and

disturbing, can feel similar to love and can create real psychoanalytical work. Lacan introduces the

notion of the analyst being, in the eyes of the analysand, the subject supposed to know le sujet sup-pos savoir, which can be helpful in the process of establishing rapport in the psychoanalysis. In adocumentary encounter, one cannot and must not identify the filmmaker with the analyst and the

subject of the film with the analysand. However, in theRunning for Freedom project, I must say thatI was indeed the person who somehow was supposed to know how to translate their silent pain into

a symbolizable story, and a clear attachment did develop between Teresa, Julie and myself.

Lacan defines transference as the enactment of the reality of the unconscious (quoted in

Feldstein et al., 1995) and has been known to often repeat that analysands fictions can be just as

truthful as any correct factual accounts. There have been many re-formulations concerning trans-

ference both by Lacan and other writers and psychoanalysts. Ian Parker (2011: 169), for example,

focuses on the fact that, for Lacan, transference is defined by the repletion of signifiers, those that

will be of specific value to the analysand and which appear in their speech as they produce a rep-

resentation of themselves to the analyst. In this instance, speech failed and the words and images,

i.e. the signifiers, had to be re-found. It is clear to me now that some transferential mechanisms

were taking place in the encounter between the potential subject of theRunning for Freedom seriesand myself, and indeed the rest of the creative team.

Maybe it is my own imaginary at work here, but I had a sense that part of the process was for us

to create a mythological story of what happened that Teresa could make her own. So we had our

first metaphor: the wedding dress that never was. Julie first showed me various ideas for the dress

and how it would literally appear to be floating in the air. We talked about different dresses and

settled on a shape that was romantic, but simple.

We then had a meeting with Teresa during which we showed her for the first time the images of

the floating dress, covered in rose petals (Figures 3 and 4). Both the dress and the petals wouldmove during the sequences. Julie and I were both very anxious before the meeting. We were, after


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Figure 3. The wedding dress (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Julie Innes, director AgnieszkaPiotrowska).

Figure 4. The wedding dress and the petals (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Julie Innes, directorAgnieszka Piotrowska).


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all, symbolizing her memory and maybe even her fantasy. It felt like a dangerous enterprise per-

haps too dangerous. We need not have worried. It was a huge breakthrough. Teresa loved the

images. Teresas wedding dress, the pretty floating wedding dress covered in petals, became the

leitmotif of the film and also the key to unlocking some of her words.

There was more work to do. Somehow we had to represent the events of digging up the graves.

When Teresa attempted to express her unspeakable fear when her beloved vanished and then her

near descent into madness, we decided to use simple images in which Julie drew imaginary mon-

sters next to more realistic figures (Figures 5 and 6), that made it easier for Teresa to begin to speak.

Personally, I found these accounts particularly difficult. If the wedding dress sequences had a sense

of dreamlike fairy tale about them, the excavating of the graves and her anxiety close to madness

had a nightmarish quality that had a very real and direct impact on myself and the animator. We had

nightmares, which featured these animated images. In the absence of any psychoanalyst, we

became each others confidante and supporter. We chose neither to mention these nightmares to

Teresa nor to the other animators, researchers or contributors. These counter-transferential emo-

tions became our secret because we felt we had to protect the rest of the team. We both had them

for some time after the films were finished.

The other films

The work on the film about Farid, the film of an Iraqi refugee escape from Tehran, was in a way

a lot simpler, although the key difficulty was the same: there were some important bits of informa-

tion of the story missing and some things just did not quite tally. But Farid was a strong young man,

a dancer and choreographer who still believed the future had more in store for him than the past.

He also went running by the Thames every morning so our key metaphor was right there: Farid

running (Figure 7). We also decided to have another leitmotif: the repeated packing of suitcases as

Farid had moved through many different camps and many different countries before ending up inBritain (Figure 8). The animator, Fergus Anderson, used a mixture of techniques but rotoscoping

was one of them and so some of the footage shot with Farid for the live action was also used in

some treated way in animated sequences. While we literally felt we could only film Teresa in her

home and once in a caf in order not to disturb her too much, we could work more extensively with

Farid, who was happy to let us film his dance classes, for example, and other sequences just for the

animator.

My interviews with him were also more varied although certain areas remained foreclosed. In

the actual film, I ask him at one point: Farid, I often ask you about your life in Iraq and you just

say I cant talk about it. Why is that? And Farid laughs nervously and says: I just cant, I cant.

There is so much and it is so painful and I would like to say things but I cant. So again we madedo with what we had, but Farid, as I mentioned earlier, was able to read his own narration and

seemed to make it his own.

Roxanas journey

The third film begins with a shot of a one-month-old baby called Roxana. The narration says My

name is Roxana and I have only just got here. Our key metaphor for the film was a flying baby,

Roxana, who kind of accompanied the stories from the past of her ancestors, the Jewish refugees

on her mothers side, and the Pakistani ones on her fathers side, offering a visual and actual link

between the present and the past (Figures 9 and 10). Our relationship with the main contributors ofthe film, Alkarim and Rebecca, were easier and perhaps a little more business-like, and we were


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Piotrowska 345

Figure 5. Monsters (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Julie Innes, director Agnieszka Piotrowska).

Figure 6. Teresa with monsters (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Julie Innes, director AgnieszkaPiotrowska).


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Figure 7. Farid running (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Fergus Anderson, director AgnieszkaPiotrowska).

Figure 8. Farid packing (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Fergus Anderson, director AgnieszkaPiotrowska).


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Piotrowska 347

Figure 9. The flying baby (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Caroline Espenhahn, directorAgnieszka Piotrowska).

Figure 10. The flying baby and her family (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Caroline Espenhahn,director Agnieszka Piotrowska).


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able to put together the whole film more quickly. Its main idea was to suggest that people from very

different backgrounds can fall in love and that love can bridge any differences. Roxana herself, as

the fruit of love of such a union, was both a real small person and also a metaphor for remaining

hope in the world, despite the atrocities and persecution. We then also had the task ahead of us of

piecing together a coherent narrative out of their traumas a framework with which the animators

could actually animate their images.

The narration

Narrative coherence was of crucial importance as the fragmented speech of the potential contribu-

tors presented a huge obstacle in a piece that still had to be documentary rather than fiction. The

work involved in the creation ofRunning for Freedom was both tortuous and rewarding. I wouldrecord tiny pieces of the experiences of the interviewees over a period of weeks and months, and

then attempt to write their narratives in the first person, consulting with them all the time. It is pos-

sible that many factual details were incorrect as there were large gaps in their accounts that I had

to fill somehow, and I did. Every word that I wrote was approved by the subjects of these films.The work on the narrative had to involve its final formal presentation. We had to establish which

bits of the filmed interviews were clear enough to be broadcast and which had to be re-written and

re-recorded. After weeks and months of collaborative work, one of the subjects of the films, Farid,

who had suffered torture and felt incredible survival guilt, was able to read and record his own nar-

ration in the first person. The other one, Teresa, whose beloved husband was first disappeared

in Columbia, then tortured, had to excavate his grave to identify him, and was still never able to

read the story I had written from her accounts. We had to then employ an actress who recorded

Teresas story, intercut with the excerpts of her interview. As Teresas language was often too bro-

ken, even for short pieces, we had to repeat in a narration what was being said in an interview.

During the recording of the commentary, Teresa was right next to the actress, giving her notes andcomments. She was completely calm and collected during that process but any attempt she made

to read her own story ended in complete failure: she could never enunciate the words that described

her loss. Roxanas journey featured the story of a union between a Jewish woman, a descendant

of a survivor of the Holocaust and a Pakistani man who had to flee because of fundamentalist per-

secution. In a way, that story was the most optimistic and easiest to make, offering a kind of

glimpse of hope for the multicultural nature of London.

Once we had the main structure of the films in place, the animators got to work with preparing

animated sequences to go with the recorded narration. The detailed storyboards and animated tests

were then presented to our participants for approval. In Teresas story, both Julie and myself were

extremely anxious over the sequences presenting the excavation of her husbands body (Figures 4and 5) but she approved those too. Farid too was mostly delighted with the images. They felt and

this was crucial that they were in charge of the creative process.

We told Teresas story as a love story (which it was) not a political news story. I found the pro-

cess of re-writing her horrific experiences quite traumatic, possibly experiencing some counter-

transference myself yet again. Teresa conversely appeared to almost enjoy the work on the images:

as if the animated sequences and the slightly fictionalized story offered a distance which made it

possible to represent her deep trauma and, therefore, in some way, the experience became thera-

peutic. Did I somehow absorb her trauma whilst meanwhile she was working her way through?

That may well have been the case. Francoise Davoine (Davoine and Gaudillire, 2004: 66) quotes

Benedetti, a psychotherapist working with and writing about deeply traumatized psychotic patients,in which there is a process of introjection by the patient of the therapists words and introjection


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Piotrowska 349

by the therapist of the patients suffering. We were not psychotherapists and they were not patients

but some of these mechanisms clearly did take place during that production.

When the films were finished, the participants sent us lovely emails, thanking us. They all used

similar words: difficult but amazing, it felt right, it was important and liberating; they also

said they loved the colours and shapes of the animated sequences and said independently that

they were beautiful. Interestingly, they said nothing about the tortuous work on the narration

they simply appropriated the new narratives as their own. Farid said the film helped him find a

closure of a kind and so he decided to leave Britain not long after the making of the films and found

love in a country that was similar to his country of origin in some ways; he fell in love with a

Spanish girl and married her and they lived happily ever after. Teresa subsequently used the film

for presentations at international human rights conferences.

Shoshana Felmans collaborator Dori Laub (Felman and Laub, 1992: 91) felt that, under the

right circumstances, the process of giving testimony might have transformational qualities:

It is a dialogical process of exploration and reconciliation of two worlds the one that was brutally

destroyed and the one that is that are different and will always remain so. The testimony is inherently

a process of facing loss of going through the pain of the act of witnessing, and of the ending of the

act of witnessing which entails yet another repetition of the experience of separation and loss. It

re-enacts the passage through difference in such a way, however, that it allows perhaps a certain

repossession of it.

Creating animated sequences, quite simply, can sometimes make that repossession possible.

Conclusion

The challenge of makingRunning for Freedom was twofold. First, there was difficulty in obtaininga coherent testimony on the part of our contributors. Second, there was a striking lack of any images

available for the edit. We could not shoot much, there was little archive and no dramatizations as

they appeared too brutally literal and deemed untenable by both the subjects of the films and the

creative team. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the piecing together of a new slightly fictionized

narrative appeared to have given a voice to the participants which they appropriated gladly, perhaps

also as a result of the transferential relationships created by the team which offered a slightly differ-

ent meaning to a tragic story. (In Teresas case, it was the emphasis on the miraculous nature of her

love story, and not just the tragic elements of it.) The seemingly insurmountable issue of visual

representation of the trauma was diffused through a creative collaboration between the research/

production team, the animators and the subjects of the film, possibly returning them to a state ofchilds play on the one hand and, on the other, giving them a sense of creative and ethical control

over their stories, which they had not been able to enunciate on their own.

When we eventually hit upon the need to use animation to help tell their stories, in some way

making them both more dream-like and also more fictional, it felt curiously natural and was

embraced fully by the potential subjects. At the time, I did not know that there was a psychoanalyti-

cal justification for our choices. It just worked when nothing else did.

The non-literal animated sequences made it both possible to tell the stories in visual terms with-

out invading their intimate painful spaces and, also in part, created a fictionalized world in which

their traumas were still recognizably theirs but made more distant and therefore bearable through

the process of creating new images.


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Ethical dilemmas regarding the representation of trauma in documentaries outlined briefly in

this case study through the diverse opinions surrounding Lanzmanns Shoah were therefore cir-cumvented on this occasion. Curiously, the filmmakers were the ones who were interpellated5 by

the witnesses to help them find a way to speak up and not vice versa.

This is an example also demonstrating that the ethical dimensions in documentary encounter

can be a little more complex than the usual vision of the contributors being preyed on and colo-

nized by the filmmakers. In the instance ofRunning for Freedom, one could also say that some ofthe stories colonized the creators instead, a situation which I am sure is not unique amongst those

who try to record difficult testimonies The work on the animated sequences offered both a practical

solution in terms of telling a visual story but also a chance for the interviewees to be directly

involved in a kind of creative childlike play involved in arriving at the appropriate visual language.

This account perhaps can also serve as an example of the complexities of the issues at stake, which

simply do not lend themselves to easy generalizations.

Since the adventure ofRunning for Freedom, Julie Innes and I have worked together on anotherproject in which animations were used alongside live-action documentary material. Again it was

very effective, although used in a different way and for a different purpose. My film The Bigamists(2005) was both critically acclaimed and popular with viewers. Since then, however, and despite

the success of Waltz with Bashir (2009) and other documentary stories told with the help ofanimated sequences, I have personally found it impossible to convince broadcasters to commission

films that would use mixed medium to quite such a large extent. Perhaps global recession discourages

risk-taking in creative industries but these risks are important and necessary. It is clearly up to the

artists themselves to form collaborations and allegiances that might further explore these exciting

opportunities, sometimes outside the framework of broadcasting.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jeffrey Skoller for encouraging her to think of her practice as knowledge.

Notes

1. Tessa Muncey in her book Creating Autoethnographies (2010) states boldly that the aim of using auto-ethnography alongside other more established and more obviously scholarly research methods is to use

personal experience to tell the missing story in order to contribute to or subvert the dominant discourses

that underpin much of our research; strategies and techniques need to be found for portraying experiences

that dont rely on the affinity of shared assumptions (Muncey 2010: xi) Here the dominant assumption

is that it is a filmmaker who somehow prevails on those traumatized to speak and thus traumatizes them

further.2. Krzysztof Kieslowski talks about the difficulties that people making documentaries face in presenting

trauma:

I am frightened of real tears. In fact, I dont know if I have the right to photograph them. At such times I find

myself in a realm, which is in fact, out of bounds. Thats the main reason why I escaped from documentaries.

(Cousins and MacDonald, 2006: 316)

3. Cathy Caruths opens her book Unclaimed Experience (1996) with reflections onHiroshima Mon Amourand the place of telling in dealing with trauma. She refers to a sense of betrayal on the part of those

who live (p. 27). It seems on occasions that feeling can be transferred onto the spectator, which might

account for some criticisms levelled at those who attempt to gather these accounts.

4. Rosenthal (1988: 245) puts it bluntly: The essence of the question is how the filmmaker should treatpeople in films so as to avoid exploiting them and causing them unnecessary suffering.


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Piotrowska 351

5. The idea of interpellation famously comes from Althussers (2001[1968]: 182) idea of ideological state

apparatuses in which the subject is interpellated by the state system. This is illustrated by a scene in which

a policeman calls hey you to a passerby who then turns around, thus accepting belonging to that system.

References

Althusser L (2001[1968])Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press.Canetti E (1974)Kafkas Other Trial. New York: Schocken Books.Caruth C (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press.

Cousins M and MacDonald K (eds) (2006)Imagining Reality. London: Faber & Faber.Davoine F and Gaudilliere J-M (2004)History beyond Trauma. New York: Other Press.Derrida J (1998) The Instant of My Death. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. California.Feldstein R, Fink B and Jaanus M (eds) (1995)Reading Seminar XI. New York: State University of New York

Press.

Felman S and Laub D (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History . New

York: Routledge.Freud S (1958[1915]) Papers on technique: observations on rransference love (further recommendations on

the technique of psychoana1ysis. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-mund Freud, Vol. XII. London: Hogarth Press/The Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Lacan J (2008[1966])crits. New York: Norton.LaCapra D (1998)History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Muncey T (2010) Creating Autoethnographies. London: Sage Publications.Parker I (2011)Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity. London: Routledge.Rancire J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.Rosenthal A (1988)New Challenges in Documentary. Berkeley: University of California.

Agnieszka Piotrowska, BA, MA is a BBC-trained award-winning documentary filmmaker, nominated threetimes for an EMMY and also for a BAFTA. Piotrowskas film about women who love objects and not people,

entitledMarried to the Eiffel Tower(2008), has become a cult documentary shown at festivals and channelsall over the world, most recently winning a Special Prize at the Extravagant Bodies Festival in Zagreb in

October 2010. She has presented widely at international conferences around the world and is finishing her

PhD in Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Documents

Animating the Real as Published