Creating a trigger device
Between 2018 and 2019, I was enrolled on an MA in documentary film directing. I spent the year shooting material for a short hybrid documentary called ‘Man in the Dark’. The film was made up of dramatic and stylised reenactment footage of an assault which had happened to me about 6 years prior. The assault had ultimately acted as a memory retrieval device for much of my ‘forgotten’ earlier experiences.
In the film, I explored the assault from multiple perspectives and documented them all. During the editing process, I watched and rewatched myself as the protagonist coming to terms with what my experiences meant: I watched myself direct my own memory. Wanting to capture and translate that state of being, I dwelt in the feelings of what it means to be triggered, digging into my footage to craft the somatic experience of my fight and flight response, of my cortisol levels peaking.
By the end of the editing process, and my MA for that matter, I was fully fatigued but also highly activated. My health started to deteriorate, with widespread inflammation in my body, including some hand eczema (pompholyx) which blistered all over my palms. I would bandage my hands up for days, applying very strong steroid cream in the hope that it would calm down. It didn’t – in fact, it got worse and, in the months that followed, my physical health deteriorated completely to the point where I was unable to work. There would be multiple visits to the hospital for conditions which couldn’t be diagnosed or treated. I would get asked often if I was stressed.
What I was experiencing was emotional memory; trauma speaking through my immune system.
This was the culmination of a year’s work on my personal trauma – creatively, but also therapeutically – which had essentially led me to a breakdown. I wasn’t able to fully bring these facts together until much later as I had always felt pretty ‘weak’ in my body, but on reflection I now can see how much of what I was experiencing was emotional memory; trauma speaking through my immune system.
The short film I had edited was a successful piece of work: it had ‘punch’ and people responded viscerally to it. I remember people coming up to me after the student screening and telling me how it had affected them. I remember eyes of pity. I remember people saying it was “very powerful” and “important” and saying I was “very brave”. I also remember sending it to a family member who told me they were unable to watch more than a few minutes as it was too difficult, and implied they were triggered. When it had its first public screening as part of the Mental Health Arts Festival in Scotland, I started to become aware that I was actually unable to watch it myself – it triggered me too.
I had wanted to make a short film which showed what it was like to experience trauma, how a ripple event, like the assault depicted, can act as the continuation of a cycle you are trapped within. I wanted to express what it is like to live with trauma – how violent the experience is and how everyday life can feel dangerous. I had achieved that goal but I had essentially crafted a device which so accurately depicted my cycle of violence that I would become emotionally flooded for weeks at a time after a single watch. This reflection and reaction troubled me – if it had this effect on me, it could have that effect on my audience too. I started to carry a certain sense of guilt for inflicting a violent narrative onto other people, not to mention perpetuating a feeling of abuse on myself.
The film didn't offer a way out for me... it would ultimately be re-traumatising for me
Later, I began to recognise that the edit of the short film revealed some deeply held self-beliefs that the abuse I experienced was my fault and that perhaps my version of events was untrustworthy. I began to see that, though not stated explicitly, the violence I portrayed through my film was designed to affect a viewer and the output was designed to cause effect, to cause a viewer to say “how terrible” and “we should do something about that”, but also, and strangely, “why should we believe him?” (this last point perhaps because I used fiction to expand my memory).
The film didn't offer a way out for me, the survivor, and it felt like I would perpetually be a victim trapped inside a 12-minute edit. I could see that the blame for that fell firmly in my hands as the editor – it was hard to see things any other way. The unfortunate side effect of the making of this film was that it would ultimately be re-traumatising for me – the physical fallout was so severe that it felt like I had harmed myself and damaged myself deeply. I felt like the worst of my abusers.
I was doing my best to try and communicate something important, but I hadn’t released myself from the idea that the abuse wasn’t my fault. But it wasn’t my fault, as a filmmaker and editor, nor as a survivor, that I had been abused, and that I was living with trauma. I was simply doing my best to try and work through a state of being I had lived with for most of my life.
Creating healing
In contrast to the film itself, the process of filming, albeit challenging, had felt safe and collaborative – and it turned out to be life-changing. I had done myself a massive service in working collaboratively with my trauma, even if I went wrong in the editing. I had learnt about communication, about boundaries, about sharing experiences and feeling safe in encounters. I had learnt how to safely hold a space in which creatives could work on a traumatic subject with care, laughter and joy. I’m pretty sure we actually had a lot of fun too. None of that was in the film, but a lot of it was there in the footage that I had shot over that year. I had shot enough material for a (short) feature, so I went back into the footage and looked for a way to represent my story and my experiences more accurately.
This next editing process took place under the shadow of my father’s death and the end of a seven-year relationship, not to mention the beginnings of the first lockdown of the pandemic. Physically, and now also psychologically, I was exhausted. I had even considered stopping filmmaking entirely. But, instead of falling into wells of despair or grief, I allowed the creative process and ultimately the edit to become a partner in my own rehabilitation. Whether or not the film would work in the end didn’t matter; it had become a psychological necessity for me to complete it, to create a resolution of sorts to that year, and to my experiences.
The violence is not burning out of control – it’s held, it’s understood, and it’s soothed.
‘I remember once you needed me’ would consciously end up telling another story – focused on my journey into healing. The outcome is much stranger than I would have considered but it works on a level which allows the violence to exist, but only as a reflection of the space that can hold it safely; the violence is not burning out of control – it’s held, it’s understood, and it’s soothed. It proved that there was light in the darkness, that there was joy in my process, that I could own my own pain.
Through this new edit, I realised that I had the power to ‘contain’ the short film. I went back to it and added a voice-over to remind myself and the audience that we are watching someone who is triggered, someone who is unable to see the violence in their life or even remember that the violence is happening. I also added a small bit of writing at the end to acknowledge that this film was a process towards healing. This reframing made it safe for me to watch again, and it also made me feel better to screen it again under a new title – ‘I don’t know your name’. The title was in reference to the man who assaulted me, but also to acknowledge that I wasn’t always able to name what it was that had happened, or the words of what it meant.
— Julian Triandafyllou
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