I See My World Shaking - A Deep Dive

Recently I started posting short films from my archives and I thought it might be interesting to do some writeups on these periodically.

Illustration by Joe Pettitt

I've written before about how I've learned from other people's mistakes and failures, as well as successes and use those to my advantage. And I thought that maybe some people might be able to learn from mine. So a "deep dive" such as this one serves as a sort of episodic account of how I made these films: how they came about as well as a bit of insight into the craft of making them. Part travelogue, part diary, part journal, they'll be a sort of behind-the-scenes discussion.

The one I want to start with is the first one I posted in this series. A documentary poem called "I See My World Shaking". It was never meant to be a film at all. And for the longest time, it wasn't. So how did it all come about?

In 2016 I was asked to got to Nepal for an aerial unit on a feature film. The shoot was only going to be a couple of days, but the trip would be for a full week. It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Now when I go to places, not on holidays generally, but when it's for work, I normally take my camera with me. That doesn't mean I necessarily have an agenda or indeed any idea of what I want to get out of a certain situation. But it's a very important starting point for me.

You see, when I look at the world through my camera, I look at it in a different way. I start to notice things I wouldn't otherwise notice. I start to really see things.

An inconsequential gesture by someone suddenly takes on a new level of meaning, a look or a glance becomes imbued with all the gravitas and pathos of the world. It's really quite something.

I urge you to try it for yourself. Take a camera if you have one (I find it doesn't really work that well with a smartphone, perhaps because it's a bit too snapshot-y), and walk down the street. You don't even have to take pictures. Just looking through a viewfinder makes you look at the world with different eyes.

Don't be intrusive, always be respectful of other people and if someone turns away from you, move on. But most people will just become comfortable with you being there and eventually ignore you.

And then reality somehow shifts. You start seeing connections that weren't there before. And once you string those connections together, an idea starts forming. Whether it's for a moment, for a scene, or for a story. If you pay attention, these things happen all by themselves. You discover a theme, and once you've found it, you find yourself searching for other moments that fit that theme.

I'll talk more about this some other time, when I go into my experiences of making documentaries. But for now and for this example, I want to focus on this one thing: connections.

Take a novel for instance where in the first quarter of your readthrough you're struggling to get into the story. There are seemingly random characters in seemingly random scenes doing seemingly random things. And then, finally, the author connects them somehow. And then it clicks and it all falls into place and makes sense. And now, instead of just isolated events and moments, you find yourself in the middle of a story. Finally, you're engaged and invested.

Back to our example. So you're out on the street and you're taking snapshots. A wall, a building, a man walking down the street, a woman having breakfast outside a cafe. A dogwalker. What do all these have in common? At first glance, not very much. And they might actually not have anything in common at all. But if you pay attention, you'll be able to find a frame of reference. You'll be able to find or construct a framework that unites them all. You'll find the connection.

Okay, so what about this example? What if, instead of on a random day, you choose to take these photos in London on the 24th of June 2016, the day after the Brexit referendum? London overwhelmingly voted Remain, so chances are the people you're photographing are disillusioned, downbeat, dejected. And the woman having breakfast now might be thinking, how long before I'm having my last croissant? Overdramatic, I know, but lots of things were incredibly heightened on that day. And the man walking might be uncertain about his future. And the wall might have a mural on it that promotes voting Remain. And the building might be one that was partly funded by the European Union. And the dogwalker might just be the happiest they've ever been because the vote went their way.

I'm making all this up but the point is, once you have a hook - a frame of reference, everything you see through that lens takes on meaning.

Back to the film. There was a devastating earthquake in Nepal in 2015 which left death, destruction and displacement in its wake. A year later I was in Kathmandu. I didn't really know all that much about the earthquake at the time, other than what I had seen the year before in the news. I certainly wasn't aware that the consequences would still be felt a year on.

We had wrapped the aerial unit on day three or four and had a free afternoon to ourselves to spend in Kathmandu. Our location manager Aurelia Thomas, who had been to Nepal on previous occasions, kindly took me around the city and of course I had my camera with me. And I went and filmed people and places throughout the day.

But I wasnt really looking for anything in particular. I didn't see the connections. Not yet. But I did notice the aftermath of the earthquake was ever present. Signs at construction sites signalling rebuilding efforts. People carrying building materials and constructing houses by hand. Brick by brick.

But also other scenes. People praying, prayer wheels being turned, solemn faces. And then other things started falling into place. A funeral procession at Pashupatinath temple and then the cremation of bodies along the Bagmati River.

Although this was a year on and those funerals taking place here most likely had nothing to do with the earthquake, it was once again all about finding those connections. And once you have your framework in place, everything else you document will be always be seen as being part of that framework. That's just how the mind works.

So I gathered what I could on my trusty camera and we left the next morning.

And even though I had a rough idea that there could be a little documentary piece in all this, I couldn't really work out what that might be.

A few years went by and I think it was during the first Covid lockdown that I went through some of my old hard drives and rediscovered the footage from Kathmandu. I might have forgotten about it or maybe it was in the back of my mind, but never at the forefront.

And rediscovering this footage made me ponder how best to fit it into a format that would work for a short film. It was always going to be about the earthquake and about people's resilience. So with that in mind, I selected shots that reflected the theme and collected them on an editing timeline.

But the missing element, the missing connection as it were, was going to be a narration of some kind. Otherwise all you have is a collection of shots. I didn't want a classical narrator giving a factual account of the earthquake. I also didn't want interviews. This wasn't ever going to be a conventional documentary in that sense. Instead, poetry was my way to find access to the subject matter, in a similar way to the short documentary poem "Refugee Blues" which I co-directed a few years prior.

So I started my search for a poem that would be able to capture all that despair and destruction and a poet who would allow me to use it. I soon came across "Quaking Cantos", a collection of poems by renowned Nepalese-India poet Yuyutsu Sharma. The piece of poetry which struck me as really connecting the dots of the footage I had was "I See My World Shaking." Its haunting, lyrical and somber quality immediately stood out as one that would help make the film possible and make it come to life.

As the footage is observational in nature and illustrates the aftermath of the earthquakes, the first person narration of the poem instantly worked. Every stanza begins with the words "I see...". The narrator sees everything through his own eyes. He sees and it disturbs him, disrupts him, pains him. It's as if it was tailor-made for a documentary poem.

"I see the tops of our towers crumble..."

"I see the domes of our stupas crack..."

"I see shrines of our deities shake..."

The camera sees all those things as well. And although the poem is set in the immediate aftermath and the footage is from months on, it just clicks when I put the words to the images. The towers no longer crumble and the deities no longer shake, but the fragments are present. Some of the wounds have healed, others are still wide open. And the scars are visible everywhere.

At first I had someone else read the poem. A professional narrator. But then Yuyutsu offered to record the poem himself. And that worked so much better. It was more authentic and tangible. And full of genuine heartbreak and sorrow.

The film started taking shape. After about four iterations of the edit I arrived at something that had good pace and rhythm. I found different pieces of music that I combined into a soundscape to complement the poem.

And then I needed a way into the film. This couldn't be a documentary about the fallout of an earthquake without us seeing the actual event in question. We needed to see glimpses of it. Nothing gratuitous, but the devastation needed to be felt.

So I found clips of the earthquake, obtained permissions to use them by the people who filmed them and wrote an introductory text and that's how the film begins.

I want to go back to how I started this entry: connections. The odd thing is that this is probably the least narrative film of all the ones I've made. Visually there is a progression, the shots are grouped into scenes and there are three overarching acts: reconstruction, religion and rebirth. And of course there's a narrative arc in the poem itself.

But there isn't a story as such, or central characters to follow. So what keeps this from being just a collection of random shots? It's that they're set against the backdrop of the event: we are introduced to the event through the opening shots of the earthquake. We are constantly reminded of the event through the words of the poem, even when the images on screen don't directly reflect this. And when the film culminates in the scene at Pashupatinath temple and the images of loss and death, even if those images aren't necessarily directly related to the quake, the connection that's been established makes us believe they are.

A lot more can be said about this piece, even though it's short. But I'll leave it at this. If there's one thing I've learned from making this film it's that I need to keep my eyes open and seek those connections early on, be deliberate in my shot choices and in the kind of thing I'm looking for. I always shoot with the edit in mind, and what is editing, if not connecting things?