Article

Animating the Real: A Case Study

Agnieszka Piotrowska

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3) 335351 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1746847711418566 anm.sagepub.com

Abstract The ethics of collecting testimonies in documentary filmmaking has been the subject of academic discussion for decades, in particular since Claude Lanzmanns landmark film Shoah (1985). There are 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 symbolize the trauma. This article gives an account of the authors experience of such an instance in making a 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 events leading 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. In particular, 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 psychoanalytical 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 of my subsequent reading of the theoretical debates surrounding the ethical issues in documentary making many years after the event of my 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.

Corresponding author: Agnieszka Piotrowska, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK. Email: agnieszka.rivercourt@btinternet.com

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Running for Freedom (2003/4)

Running for Freedom (2003/4) was a three-part series of 30-minute films which I produced and directed 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 critical 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 commissioning 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 globalization 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 situation in itself simply because at the time I had been immersed in other commitments). After a preliminary 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 disintegrate, 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 successfully filmed a number of extremely difficult and emotional tales. However, the refugees accounts were 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 knowledge 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 with the 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 psychoanalytical 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 there are 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 documentary Nuit et Brouillard (1955), suffering from nightmares and hallucinations, and for that reason he also opted for fiction (Caruth, 1996: 24). Cathy Caruth begins her paper on Hiroshima Mon Amour with a description of the opening scenes of 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 of Hiroshima, and for any work dealing with suffering, 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 the possibility of communicating history at all (p. 27).3 That very question is at the heart of the documentary 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 intimate 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 necessary evil in these encounters, or are there ways that can minimize the emotional impacts of repetition 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 by Lanzmanns 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 of Shoah stems from its raw and uncompromising testimony of what happened during the 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 possible 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 in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, 1992) written with psychoanalyst Dori Laub who interviewed 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 them obscene, 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 of Running 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 Lacanian jouissance, an expression of the joy of knowledge 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 resonates with the much more recent pronouncements by Jacques Rancire (2009) that documentary belongs to the realm of fiction insofar as it belongs to the system of perception and creation of the

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artist and not some kind of replication of reality. There is a further clear echo here with the psychoanalytical deferred effect (Nachtrglichkeit), a term first coined by Freud and developed by Lacan, 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 film such 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 of Running for Freedom, the collaboration is with myself, the director, as well as 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 to tell their stories to the wider public, despite the fact that they could not articulate their pain sufficiently 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 representing 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 computer animation might be the way forward since computer programs have made animation much more 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-threatening 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. In thinking 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 interviewees, the animators and myself.

Showing what cannot be said

The above heading is borrowed from the chapter title of a book by two Lacanian psychoanalysts about 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 might choose 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 unsymbolizable 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 references and what techniques could be used. We decided on a visual language, which was in some way reminiscent of the work of surrealists such as Breton and Mir. We were very wary of attempting 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 dangerous political activities against the totalitarian regime in Columbia at the time. She remembered the 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 interview 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 Agnieszka Piotrowska).

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 in Teresas 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 elements 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 metaphor of the dress in place, were we able to talk about the rest of her horrific story. The dress therefore 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 psychoanalyst who in his or her engagement with the analysand might also feel transferential (countertransferential) 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 suppos savoir, which can be helpful in the process of establishing rapport in the psychoanalysis. In a documentary encounter, one cannot and must not identify the filmmaker with the analyst and the subject of the film with the analysand. However, in the Running for Freedom project, I must say that I 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 transference 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 representation 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 the Running for Freedom series and 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 would move 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 Agnieszka Piotrowska).

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

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all, symbolizing her memory and maybe even her fantasy. It felt like a dangerous enterprise perhaps 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 monsters 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 emotions 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 information 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 in Britain (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 made do 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 of the film, Alkarim and Rebecca, were easier and perhaps a little more business-like, and we were

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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 Agnieszka Piotrowska).

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

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

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Figure 9. The flying baby (Running for Freedom, 2003/2004: animator Caroline Espenhahn, director Agnieszka 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 contributors presented a huge obstacle in a piece that still had to be documentary rather than fiction. The work involved in the creation of Running for Freedom was both tortuous and rewarding. I would record 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 possible 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 narration 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 broken, 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 and comments. 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 persecution. 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 4 and 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 process of re-writing her horrific experiences quite traumatic, possibly experiencing some countertransference 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 therapeutic. 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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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 making Running for Freedom was twofold. First, there was difficulty in obtaining a 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 different 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 of childs 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 psychoanalytical 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 without 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 circumvented 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 colonized by the filmmakers. In the instance of Running for Freedom, one could also say that some of the 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 of Running for Freedom, Julie Innes and I have worked together on another project 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 of animated 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 autoethnography 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 on Hiroshima Mon Amour and 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 treat people in films so as to avoid exploiting them and causing them unnecessary suffering.

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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 Sigmund 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 three times for an EMMY and also for a BAFTA. Piotrowskas film about women who love objects and not people, entitled Married to the Eiffel Tower (2008), has become a cult documentary shown at festivals and channels all 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.