I See My World Shaking - A Deep Dive
Scintillating piece by London-based writer, director, producer, and cinematographer Stephan Bookas on the making of his short film inspired by Yuyutsu Sharma poem “I See My World Shaking,” from his book, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems.
https://www.movingpoems.com/2023/11/i-see-my-world-shaking-by-yuyutsu-sharma/
Recently I started posting short films
from my archives and I thought it might be interesting to do some writeups on
these periodically.
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 wasn’t 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 signaling
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?
https://www.stephanbookas.com/post/i-see-my-world-shaking-a-deep-dive
