I remember once you needed me: the process of making

In 2018, I started work on a film explicitly exploring my experience of living trauma as part of an MA in documentary film directing.  

In the previous years, I had been dealing with a perpetual sense of being outsized by my experience. It felt like a monster under the bed I couldn’t remove, like a monolith that wouldn’t budge. A part of this was certainly to do with my decision to go to the police regarding some of my historical experience which led to a Crown Court case and later a workplace tribunal. The measuring up of what it meant to coexist with public knowledge of my abuse being questioned and challenged had acted as a violent and continuous reminder of the powerlessness I felt. It would also end up re-traumatising me, and many of my current triggers come from this era of fighting publicly to defend my memory. 

The theme of memory is what has defined my creative practice since I left art school in 2008. The way I saw memory was as a haunting, a ghost still present. Trying to describe this through film was incredibly difficult, even if it felt compelling. I thought that by dedicating time to my film practice I would not only strengthen my filmic language but also be able to dedicate time trying to decipher what my practise was trying to tell. 

It became clear to me early on in the process of starting my MA in 2018 that I was completely blindsided by my trauma, that in fact there was not much else I could talk about except that. I felt the resonance in everything I did, and how I operated. In the short time I had to explore a topic on film, it was clear what I would explore, because I couldn’t see past it. I also decided to use myself as a protagonist, as I couldn’t ask someone else to experiment with themselves in the name of my art, as a means of exploring memory.

I had joined a psychodrama group as part of my own therapy as the year had begun. Psychodrama is an action-based technique where you create a scenario as a group in which you can safely explore a memory as an individual. The memory holder explains the situation and piece by piece acts it out, placing group members into roles to hold the scene. At a certain point, they can stand aside and watch their memory take place. It was essentially a director setting a scene. I didn’t bring anything too dark into the group, but I did see how powerful it was to discuss issues in this way, how bringing to life old situations/dreams/fears could be given agency once more. I also knew that this was a technique which had been somewhat used in film before – Theatre of War by Lola Arias with veterans of the Falklands War – so it had potential. 

I had seen other reenactment works such as the Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer, which used reenactment as a means of documenting undocumented atrocities by the perpetrators of the 1965-66 genocide in Indonesia. I found that Joshua Oppenheimer’s approach, albeit incredibly powerful, actually risked re-traumatising many of the survivors; it felt vindictive in its goal to succeed. I had also been inspired by Clio Barnard’s The Arbor which utilised real interviews, written plays, and fictional performance to explore the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar. I wanted to find an approach which could pull together elements of each aspect whilst working safely. 

The process

I decided to base my film upon what I had learnt from psychodrama and use a key memory I had to explore power dynamics and consent. The memory was an assault which had happened to me years prior under the hands of a stranger who had stalked me from the street. The assault as it was happening had essentially acted as a reminder of my many years of prior abuse – this, to me, felt like my major takeaway, rather than the assault itself. As the assault itself wasn’t too long-term damaging for me, nor exceptionally graphic/violent, I felt like I could work with it in an honest way without too much risk of it becoming grotesque.

I worked with an auditioned cast, exploring under the theme of “intimacy amongst men”. I knew what my outcome would be but I also wanted to ensure that the process would be safe for myself and my castmates. We had 4 filmed workshops, in which we would explore what it means to be interpersonal with someone. They were filmed to ensure we got comfortable exploring difficult topics in front of the camera and also to start creating documentation. We explored physicality, emotional spaces, storytelling, roleplay, and we developed real connections with each other. The workshops were also grounded in mindfulness practice, which came from my background with yoga instruction. I made sure that at the beginning and end of each session we held space for the breath, for now. 

One of the most important exercises we explored was a roleplay in which one person acts as the vocal mouthpiece and tells another person what to do with the third person, who is passive. The fourth person stands facing the wall. It gave us insight and complex understanding into the power dynamics at play in many circumstances, in which there is a vocal operator, an acting aggressor, a direct victim, and also a witness, whether they see or not. This dynamic played a large role in how we would end up seeing what it means to both experience violence or to enact it ourselves, whether in the operator role or as an acting aggressor, who could also be considered a victim of the operating aggressor too.

These led onto our first experiments with dramatic psychodramas, which were in this first instance led by the cast I had assembled. The workshops acted as the foundation, they were the preparation which would take us to the main “dramatic” filming days. It also helped me to place everyone into “roles” for the ensuing psychodrama and to make sure they were all comfortable with where I placed them, even if they didn’t know the story yet – for now they would just be the aggressor, the victim, and the witness. I would play the director, the vocal operator.

The shoot was split into two days.

i remember once you needed me (trailer)

Filming day 1

On the first day, in a closed set, the cast would start the shoot with a meditation followed by a documented physical movement exercise. The exercise was designed to explore mutual physicality and a process of “extraction”. Using the body as a clenched fist which needs unwrapping, all of the group would help to unravel each other's bodies, from closed to open. 

This physical exercise was created to visually explore what it means to experience touch safely. But, on a personal level, I was also hoping that I could retrieve back someone I had lost many years ago – a part of myself I now call the cripple. They had started to emerge as this film became a reality, as the body of mine which had learnt to experience abuse as normality. The disassociated form I had been inhabiting wasn’t fit for purpose anymore, and I wanted them (the cripple) to be free in my body, not compressed or restricted. I called this a “building” process, a sort of reintegration with what it means to feel. 

To read more about the cripple and the process of reintegration – read The Story of the Joker, the cripple, and the boy.

Immediately afterwards, we would begin work on the psychodrama of my memory of the assault, in the style of a small therapy session. The group had no details of the story until the shoot itself, to allow them to ask questions, and figure out the details on their own. I would place each of them into their pre-assigned roles and we began to place together whatever memories I had left of the assault. Once the entire movement had been laid out, we explored what it meant, and what it looked like. There would also be imagined conversations between myself and my aggressor, moments which were unplanned but felt necessary in the moment. 

We repeated this process, of physical exercise and psychodrama, 3 times in total before ending for the day. Upon each repeat, the story became slightly different, played with more knowledge, and it started to form a cyclical narrative all on its own. At the end of the day, we shot a small scene in which the action breaks free from the room and becomes a fiction.

Filming day 2

On the second day of filming, we would dramatically direct the assault, with the psychodrama essentially acting as a rehearsal. The assault would be documented as a fiction now – an erotically-laced micro-drama with me purely in the documented role of director. We utilised an empty theatre and coloured lights to make this fiction, and the entire process was documented from start to finish. I directed it in the style of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder melodrama, intentionally evoking the Brechtian energy, and homoeroticism he employed, but also to implicitly trace his past as an abusive individual.

As a prior hero of mine, I wanted to question our relationship with imagery, with cinema and those who make it – to question their intentions, as much as mine should be questioned. Is this an erotic encounter? Or is this an assault? Why was I finding it hard to tell the difference as I was being assaulted? 

There would also be other footage shot – fictional cinematic reactions by the characters, fake interviews with them remembering the incident, and another recreation of the assault using the actors in a real world situation. In my extended cut of the film, I really wanted to question the authenticity of my process alongside the authenticity of memory; whether the incidents matter at all in the end when what you’re left with looks nothing like them anymore. 

Editing

I have written about this in detail in Creating a Trigger Device vs Creating Healing as well as in Visualising trauma: looking back at unconscious vs conscious portrayals. In brief, the edit was the most fraught process for me because I was on my own again and many of the situations I had set up for safety for the other participants, I no longer instituted for myself. In the creation of the short film “Man in the Dark” which was designed for my MA as a final piece, it moved me to subsequent breakdown. The personal isolation of an edit suite, and me alone with my experiences, became a lot for me to handle.

When I edited the same material for the feature “I remember once you needed me”, I had learnt from my mistakes and I managed to use it as a healing device once more. But that’s not to say that damage hadn’t already been done – there would need to be a lot of unravelling. It has taken years since completion to see the value in my process and to be able to stand behind it. My mistakes were not intentional, but were the cascade and result of living with abuse for so long. In many ways, just because the abuse stops doesn’t mean you aren’t still responding to the behaviours unconsciously within yourself. It was a very important step for me to recognise this, however, as I didn’t want my work to be continuing an act of violence. 

In reflection

The process had taught me very much that safe spaces could be made, and strong bonds could be formed in a safe and productive way even when dealing with trauma and abuse. The care and kindness shown by all of those involved was astonishing and there is not a second in which I felt that things were being done in vain. That said, it wasn’t always an easy process.

The day before filming started, I had to send one crew member home as they weren’t in the right frame of mind and were in their own way quite unwell. I couldn’t risk the production, nor my own balance, and so I made the difficult decision to send them 400 miles back home again.

At one moment on the first day, one of my performers started to question their own actions in the past (I would later include this in the final film). Our complex discussion on lines of consent had started to have a very real reaction. After filming was done, I would spend time with the performer, talking and listening, and checking in with them after. It felt like a large responsibility and was not a reaction I had anticipated in all of my ethics forms. I had always considered what it meant to be safe and make a safe space for both myself and others, but I hadn’t considered what it meant for a level of reframing to occur for others. 

On the first day of shooting, when I decided to confront the aggressor unannounced, I became very emotional and was no longer really present, which in my role as the director I had promised I would be. In the ambition to make art, or to heal, sometimes responsibility can get lost – violence is incredibly attractive and captivating. 

It was during the edit, that the violence became a primary factor – I really felt as though in order for the film to work it needed to hurt – and I, myself, was the first victim of that violence. If violence exists uninhibited it can cause perpetual damage, but when I reigned it in and gave it limitations, I found that I could look at it in the eye and know what it was. Creating this visibility, even in hindsight, is incredibly powerful. (See Breaking a Cycle of Violence)

— Julian Triandafyllou