Recording Memories From Political Violence: A Film-Maker’s Journey by Cahal McLaughlin (review)

Aptly subtitling this book, A Film-Maker’s Journey, Cahal McLaughlin takes his readers on a decade-long journey navigating the complexities of recording and exhibiting stories of people in societies emerging out of political violence. As he produced television in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and worked as an independent producer and director in London, he found himself continually drawn back to the stories of the late twentieth-century conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles. This became his focus as he turned to an academic career. The first chapter of the book explains the methodology that McLaughlin applies to his projects, as well as the context and challenges of the research. Chapters 2 through 8 deal with seven different projects. He uses various approaches and he reflects on what he learned from each of the earlier projects. The book’s concluding chapter provides an overview of the “theoretical and practical insights gained” (11).

McLaughlin’s early work in Northern Ireland, with people who experienced trauma and political violence, laid the foundation for the invitation to go to South Africa to record the stories of those who survived apartheid. In Ireland, the awareness of who is an insider and who is an outsider is constantly present. Although Irish himself, McLaughlin had lived in Belfast, and therefore he too was one of the Others (a term he uses to describe outsiders, or people on the Other side of a conflict) to some, and this had an impact on his research, as did being an outsider when doing research and documentation in South Africa. In societies that have experienced political violence, the idea of the Other is prevalent, where a person is a victim to one group, a perpetrator to the opposing group. McLaughlin’s work strives to help the public understand the individual human experience of the Other’s side of the conflict. The South African project, “We Never Give Up,” demonstrates the international nature of the challenges of recording the memories of people who have experienced political violence.

As McLaughlin’s experience grows, the reader can see how he thinks through each project more carefully and how he learns lessons from each, the lessons enriching each subsequent project. For some projects the finished result is a complete documentary presented in a theatrical environment with the participants’ interviews intercut to create a familiar, narrative structure. He explains that some of the later projects did not lend themselves to this documentary style for exhibition. Instead, the stories of the individuals were left intact and screened as thirty-minute films using jump cuts with no additional image coverage. No matter the documentary style, however, McLaughlin consistently shows that a good filmmaker strives to show heterogeneous examples of people affected by conflicts, which draws parallels in human experience between prisoners and prison guards, for example, or prisoners from both sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

McLaughlin took great efforts to think through and negotiate the collaborative nature of the projects. He quotes Bill Nichols (Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, 2001) who warns, “Filmmakers who set out to represent people whom they do not initially know but who typify or have special knowledge of a problem or issue of interest run the risk of exploiting them” (28). In order to avoid such exploitation, McLaughlin’s projects established the participants’ veto power prior to the interviews, which allowed each project to evolve into a collaborative enterprise whose goal is to create mutual trust and ensure the continuing collaborative nature of any public exhibition of any portions of the interviews or their use within a documentary or other display.

A traditional oral history interview generally consists of an interviewee and an interviewer being recorded to audio or video with the interviewer initiating and guiding the topic(s). In the “Prison Memory Archive” project, McLaughlin intriguingly directed a series of recordings inside the abandoned Armagh Gaol, an...