I slept through it. In the early hours of 17 August 1999, a powerful earthquake of around magnitude 7.4 struck north-western Turkey, and I slept through all forty-five seconds. I only shared in the panic afterwards, when the aftershocks began and the full scale of the destruction emerged. More than seventeen thousand people died, and the public outcry over the collapse of so many buildings was aimed largely at substandard building regulations and the contractors who flouted them.
I had been working for a while in one of my only full-time facility jobs, as the Avid editor at Compugraf, the city’s second post-production house. Its owners, who included a director of Saatchi & Saatchi in Turkey, decided to produce a documentary to raise funds for the victims, to be made with Can Dündar, one of Turkey’s most respected journalists and a friend of the owners. Dündar would later report that Turkish intelligence had been sending arms trucks to Syria. His name would come to matter in the years after Gezi.
The busiest commercials editor in town at that time missed a step coming down a staircase in the quake and twisted his ankle badly. Fortunately for me, though not for him, while he recovered I picked up a lot of his work.
I admired Dündar and liked his politics, but unexpectedly, while loading in and reviewing the footage, we locked horns about how to structure a film about such a huge national tragedy. His approach was to show as much real, raw, emotive footage as possible. I had never experienced that in editing a documentary, before or since. My strong instinct was a forensic, analytical, chronological reconstruction of the catastrophe, arguing the case for better building regulations and oversight of contractors, with examples of where the rules had been lacking, short-cut or ignored. I wanted to get to the core reason why, for an earthquake of that size, the number of casualties was so high, when comparable quakes in places like Japan and California had killed far fewer, presumably thanks to their building codes. In retrospect I suspect his intention was to shock viewers into donating as much as possible, and that was the aim of the film. He didn’t speak English and I spoke even less Turkish then, so much of the nuance was lost through his assistant, our translator. But Can was the director and the boss, so I had little choice but to hunker down, let him lead, and add what I could by way of rhythm and pacing.
The old adage about working relationships in film is that a set is, at best, a benevolent dictatorship. Christian Bale, speaking as an actor, has said something like this: actors and crew are there to provide creative options for the director, and professionals have to give them up when the director no longer wants them. That sounds harsh, but it offers clarity for anyone wanting to get into film, because we won’t be in sync with every agency, director or producer. When I teach and assess interns as producers, it’s one of the first behaviours I look for evidence of growth in, since the emotional attachment you have to a creative project tends to vary with experience, and the less attractive, egotistical side can re-emerge, dig in its claws and make fools of novices. On the flip side, if you are the one producing or directing, the clearer you are about the aims of the project, and the more you can get everyone excited about them, the better the harmony. If you can trust your team leader or director, all of this becomes easier.
That said, documentaries are a fascinating area to edit in, one of my favourite forms of all. There are generally two kinds. The first is the highlights documentary, built mostly chronologically from archive and interviews. The A&E Biography of James Earl Jones, which I edited for Alan Weiss Productions, was one, and in a way the earthquake film took this form too. The second type is more scripted and shot: it has location shoots, custom abstract cinematic elements and interviews, which the producer has worked into a rough shooting script, often with example dialogue or draft interview responses to help build the structure. Here the filmmaker usually gathers a team of academics or specialists in the area. An example is The Right to Decide, which I edited for Planned Parenthood in New York, with interviews with a few of the doctors who broke the law and put their careers and freedom on the line to help women who might otherwise have injured themselves attempting self-induced abortions with home tools. At a time when female doctors faced professional misogyny and were rare, their willingness to take such risks, and their part in the change in the law, make it a good example of the level of personal risk and drama a documentary can carry.
Time Traveller, my commission for the 200th anniversary of the Devonport projection festival, was an unusual documentary format. It was still a sit-down affair, but on a wrap-around, immersive screen, and it proved hugely popular with visitors. The challenge was recreating history from before film, in the age of the Industrial Revolution, in a form that was more engaging and dynamic and less academic than the usual talking heads and archive stills. The archive images came through The Box, the local archive in Plymouth, by way of Real Ideas CIC, the production company that produces the city’s light and projection festivals.
I had not been a big user of AI. While teaching and assessing media students and taking my Master’s in Digital Arts and Technology, I found it a useful tool for giving academic work a structure, but you still had to rewrite anything original you wanted to argue, particularly a thesis. For this film I used it for the first time in a significant way, because the visuals I needed didn’t exist. I subtly animated old artworks, and archive photographs, without altering the original artists’ or photographers’ designs. The paintings could be quite dynamic, much like the animated Van Gogh pictures many people have seen: Drake sending fire ships into the Spanish fleet under cover of darkness, for instance, came alive on the screen. The photography worked best as a subtle addition to aerial shots of traffic, creating a high-resolution moving picture, or by using the dynamics of scale for a subtle 3D push-in on huge submarines in dry dock at the navy yards.
When you work on a documentary, nine times out of ten the crew falls in line with its social-justice aims. That was my experience on both the Biography of James Earl Jones, which simply celebrated the life and achievements of a great actor, and The Right to Decide, about the doctors who put their freedom and careers on the line.
A thread through the book
I keep coming back to Dündar because his story is part of the arc of this book. In 1999 he was a respected journalist I argued with in an edit suite, in a country that, for all its faults, was opening up. By the time I went back for Gezi, the arms-trucks story that bore his name was part of what the government was determined to bury. [He was arrested in November 2015, released in February 2016 after a Constitutional Court ruling, and later went into exile in Germany.] I left Istanbul at the end of that same year. It is the clearest example I know of what the encroaching authoritarian populism did to the people who had made the country’s open culture possible.
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