Making Documentary Film

EMINE THE PROSTITUTE (YATIK EMİNE), 1974

Turkey | HDD, Colour, 84’ |

Director: Ömer Kavur

Cast: Necla Nazır, Serdar Gökhan, Bilal İnci, Nubar Terziyan, Mahmut Hekimoğlu, Güzin Özipek

AYSEL, THE GIRL FROM THE SWAMPY ROOF (AYSEL BATAKLI DAMIN KIZI) , 1935

Turkey | Digibeta, B&W , 80’ |

Director: Muhsin Ertuğrul

Cast: Muhsin Ertuğrul, Ergun Köknar, Talat Artemel, Cahide Sonku, Hazım

Körmükçü, Hadi hun, Müfit Kiper, Sami Ayanoğlu

Is it just a coincidence that Muhsin Ertuğrul, the first director in Turkish cinema who approached to the cinema of the West, and Ömer Kavur, our first director with formal film education with a long-lasting career, have each made a “woman trouble” film that have never been surpassed? Woman trouble is one of the first “troubles” that imposed themselves on our cultural lives and film in the Republic era. Male directors, especially, have circled around this issue; sometimes opportunistically and other times mercifully. Woman trouble is both titillating and heart-wrenching. In his 1934 film Aysel, the Girl From the Swampy Roof, Muhsin Ertuğrul, who came from a theatre background and worked as an actor and director in Sweden and Germany during 1910s and 1920s, adapts Victor Sjöström’s 1919 melodrama Tösen från Stormyrtorpet . The film specifically resembles the Russian cinema of the era which examines rural life–such as Dovzhenko’s certain films. Ayselstars Cahide Sonku, the only blonde star at the time, the Marlene Dietrich of Turkish cinema, whose role as the titular character at the mercy of the men in her village brought her huge success. The film not only includes observations on woman trouble, but also polarities such as landlords vs. villagers, educated urban women vs. illiterate village girls, being a master of one’s destiny or not. In that sense Aysel is a “homeland film”. Ömer Kavur’s Yatık Emine (1974), which he directed immediately after graduating from IDHEC film school, is an adaptation of the story of the same name from Refik Halit Karay’s book Memleket Hikâyeleri / Tales of Homeland. The story chronicles the last days of Emine who is exiled for prostitution to a remote town in Anatolia during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Yatık Emine is not only the story of a woman coinciding with the modernisation period of the Ottoman Empire, but also a first in our cinema with its Bressonesque minimalist storytelling and perhaps an indirect expression of a feeling which Nuri Bilge Ceylan named as “passionately loved, lonely and beautiful country,” at the awards ceremony at Cannes…
Taking off from this character, who is left alone in a far-off place–a touching example of woman as representation of country/nation–we can say that “we are all still Yatık Emine, we are all exiles in a provincial place”.

Fatih Özgüven

THE BUS (OTOBÜS) 1976

Turkey | HDD, Colour, 91’ |

Director: Tunç Okan

Cast: Tuncel Kurtiz, Tunç Okan, Aras Ören, Hasan Gül

THE PHOTOGRAPH (FOTOĞRAF), 2001

Turkey | Betacam, Colour, 66’ |

Director: Kazım Öz

Cast: Feyyaz Duman, Nazmi Kırık, Mizgin Kapazan, Muhlis Asan, Zülfite Dolu, Mehmet Ali Öz

A busload of men with thick mustaches, wearing their only jackets and shoes, their last pennies in their pockets and holding on to many hopes, pose for the camera as they stand in front of the bus at the rest stop. The scamming driver, who is about to drop the poor wretches in the middle of Stockholm penniless and without passports, can’t get enough of talking about his camera: “Look at this machine! It’s the latest American invention. Press the button and receive the picture. I love civilization…” It’s worth noting that a very similar praise for Western technology exists in Fotoğraf as well. Although, their stories are about very different roads, they have more in common than meets the eye. The buses are men’s domain. The trip is a men’s trip. They curiously watch erotic films and talk about the importance of not indulging women. Men in uniforms stop them and ask for their papers. They interfere with where they can go and where they can stop. Are they at a place where they don’t belong? Where do they belong to? In Otobüs the trip is to the West, to Europe. The bus in Fotoğraf goes to the East, to Kurdistan. The uncertainties, expectations, hopes, dreams, and fears are completely different yet very much alike. The poor men of Otobüs probably have their concerns as they leave their villages for the first time, hoping they will be saved once they make it to Europe, but the worse is yet to come.
Two of the young men sitting next to each other on Fotoğraf’s bus don’t mention that one is going to join the military and the other to the guerilla. Even though they don’t know what awaits them, at least they believe in the road they take. One can know things even when he doesn’t, and the road creates sympathy. These films portray two stark and equally striking journeys. The look of realisation that appears on the faces of young men, who shoot at each other, when they figure out that they are both tarred with the same brush is unforgettable, so is the expression on the faces who are lost while running from the police in a city with grand squares and blonde people. Fight for bread and problem of identity are the two unrepairable malfunctions of the “bus” we call the Republic. Contemplating Otobüs together with Fotoğraf could be a promising journey.

Çağdaş Günerbüyük

THE KING OF STREETSWEEPERS (ÇÖPÇÜLER KRALI) , 1977

Turkey | Betacam, Colour, 90’ |

Director: Zeki Ökten

Cast: Kemal Sunal, Şener Şen, Ayşen Gruda, Erdal Özyağcılar, İhsan Yüce, Mürüvvet Sim

MOMMY, I’M SCARED (KORKUYORUM ANNE) , 2004

Turkey | Digibeta, Colour, 126’ |

Director: Reha Erdem

Cast: Ali Düşenkalkar, Işıl Yücesoy, Köksal Engür, Şenay Gürler, Arzu Bazman, Turgay Aydın, Aydoğan Oflu, Bülent Emin Yarar, Ozan Uygun, Esra Bezen Bilgin

The old school neighbourhood life of Istanbul represents some kind of a “semi-open commune”: to where strangers don’t ever happen on; whose residents travel to more chaotic and open-to-uncertainty centres of the city to work, shop or stroll around, but they are eventually social units where a closed-circuit life is lead. The concept of neighbourhood, which increasingly plunges into nostalgia thanks to rapid transformation of the city, both protects and limits the individual with the community mentality it offers: On one side is the warm neighbour relations people yearn for, on the other is the “neighbourhood pressure” that comes as the “price” of this very same warmth. Zeki Ökten’s Çöpçüler Kralı and Reha Erdem’s Mommy, I'm Scared are amongst films which depict “old Istanbul neighbourhood” in thorough detail. As a product of late ‘70s, Çöpçüler Kralıputs social issues at its centre in accordance with the spirit of the era. The overriding theme in the film is rural to urban immigration. Janitors, street vendors, cleaners, and garbage men who represent the lowest class of municipal employees… They are the new residents of the city. The “masters” live in apartment buildings. Though, they don’t seem to be much attuned to the culture of the big city. Yet, they have no qualms about proceeding with aristocratic arrogance and bossiness. The municipal police officer, who is proud of being a government employee yet is a complete “mother’s boy” in his private life, acts like he is the administrator of the neighbourhood. There’s only one thing that determines the direction of romantic relations: The social status which is on shaky ground. Unlike Çöpçüler Kralı, which is a realistic reflection of its time, Mommy, I'm Scared is a nostalgic depiction of colourful neighbourhood culture which was about to disappear at the time it was filmed in 2004. Everything’s fine on the surface; there’s no need to be “afraid” because family members and neighbours are all helping each other. As a matter of fact, social classes are unimportant. But underneath, the existence of a social system–disguised as protectionism–which hinders the formation of the individual, who is shaped through family ties and crucial for a healthy commune, is detectable.

Yeşim Tabak

MY AUNT (TEYZEM) , 1986

Turkey | Betacam, Colour, 101’ |

Director: Halit Refiğ

Cast: Müjde Ar, Haldun Ergüvenç, Yaşar Alptekin, Tomris Oğuzalp, Serra Yılmaz, Mehmet Akan, Necati Bilgiç, Ayşe Demirel, Uğur Yücel

DON’T LET THEM SHOOT THE KITE (UÇURTMAYI VURMASINLAR) , 1989

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 100’ |

Director: Tunç Başaran

Cast: Nur Sürer, Füsun Demiral, Ozan Bilen, Güzin Özipek, Meral Çetinkaya, Sevgi Sakarya, Yasemin Alkaya

Telling a story from a child’s perspective is a method that directors frequently use. If cinema is a shadow-show screen, it has to talk about the meaninglessness of the real world governed by the rules laid down by grown-ups. Who can do this better than children? Two of the most beloved tear-jerkers of our cinema, My Aunt and Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite use that same method. The title character of My Aunt, adapted by Halit Refiğ from a screenplay by Ümit Ünal, is Üftade played by Müjde Ar, but the story is told by her nephew Umur. Only her nephew tries to understand Üftade who is left alone by her family and immediate environment to go mad. The oppression and abuse by her retired sergeant stepfather has turned her life into a prison, but nobody believes her. It’s not for nothing that only Umur sees the ghost of her stepfather wandering in her room. Upon their first meeting, his aunt invites him not only into a play world, but also to an alliance against the authority in the house. In Tunç Başaran’s Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite, the narrator is an adult, but the main character is a child. This time the prison is not symbolic. The film takes place in a women’s ward. The closest friend of five-year-old Barış, who lives with his mother in prison, is political convict İnci. The narrative of the film is based on İnci’s recollection of her memories with Barış following her release, but the story focuses on the child’s perception. The naïveté of Bariş when he asks why a kite–drawn with chalk on the courtyard of the prison–doesn’t fly reveals the absurdity of the prison authority who tries to shoot a kite in the sky. The other factor which brings these two films closer is that both Umur and Barış are children of the coup era. My Aunt, which takes place immediately after March 12, reflects the sentiment and despair of the time it was filmed in (1986) more than the time its story takes place. When Umur looks back in time, he carries the sadness of not being able to save his aunt. That’s why the film is pessimistic. Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite is a “September 12 film”. It was shot during the time when martial law was in effect. Maybe that’s why Başaran’s film, despite all its sorrow, is hopeful of the future.

Engin Ertan

AAAHH BELINDA!.. , 1986

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 100’ |

Director: Atıf Yılmaz

Cast: Müjde Ar,Macit Koper, Yılmaz Zafer, Güzin Özipek, Füsün Demirel, Tarık Pabuçcuoğlu

DAYDREAMS OF MISS CAZIBE (CAZİBE HANIMIN GÜNDÜZ DÜŞLERİ) , 1992

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 105’ |

Director: İrfan Tözüm

Cast: Hale Soygazi, Uğur Polat, Macit Koper, Suna Selen, Halil ERgün, Nüvit Özdoğru

Both Aaahh Belinda and Cazibe Hanım’ın Gündüz Düşleri would be one of the few films that can pass Yeşilçam’s test with fantasy. The main theme of both films is looking for variety while feeling suffocated by the flow of an ordinary life and getting scared and running away from it once finding it. Miss Cazibe feels like she is trapped. She is bored by her old mother whom she has to take care of. Her uncle who fancies her is just a beacon of indiscretion. Meanwhile, Miss Cazibe fantasises about having an escapade with Kürşat whom she couldn’t forget since her high school years, but Kürşat didactically reminds her that she should go after her dreams all the way otherwise she will lose the lover she created in her fantasies. In Aaahh Belinda the idea of identifying with Naciye–the housewife she has to play in a shampoo commercial–repulses Serap. She wants to stay away from (as the popular description of the time goes) “feudal relations”, the small lives of traditional families, neighbour relations, provinciality, all of which she always remained distant to, scared of losing her edge. As if all this wasn’t enough, her leftist friends accuse her of selling out for acting in a commercial. In both cases social realism and fantasy are entwined. When she meets with the “real” Kürşat and sleeps with him, Cazibe’s fantasies of many years go short-circuit. Serap escapes the world of shampoo commercial she was trapped in à la Twilight Zone and finds work at her old theatre, but her grandmother raids the theatre building saying “We’re not going to learn how to enter a theatre from you!” as if referencing today. Going in and out of the fantasy world enables the films to clearly underline the disengagement from societal reality. Still, these two extraordinary films, if nothing else, extensively bring into question whether Turkish cinema is at peace with the fantasy genre or not.

Selim Eyüboğlu

HAMAM , 1996

Turkey, Spain, Italy| HDD, Colour, 94’ |

Director:Ferzan Özpetek

Cast: Alessandro Gassman, Francesca D’Aloja, Carlo Cecchi, Şerif Sezer, Halil Ergün, Mehmet Günsur

I LOVED A TURK (BİR TÜRKE GÖNÜL VERDİM) , 1969

Turkey | Betacam, B&W, 100’ |

Director: Halit Refiğ

Cast: Eva Bender, Ahmet Mekin, Bilal İnci, Osman Alyanak, Seden Kızıltunç, Aynur Akarsu, Murat Tok, Rabia Alyanak

...Soothing and seductive as the taste of Baklava, soaking and sedating as the vapours of the Turkish Bath: Those who indulge in these pleasures will soon be overcome, or even dead. That seems to be the underlying message of both I Loved A Turk and Hamam, the latter being shot almost 30 years after the former. In both of them, the heroine/hero falls in love with a whole country rather than an individual, even though personal relationships strengthen their love affairs. As the cinematographers of both films show by extended long shots, the country is Turkey with its mixture of oriental and occidental culture, its abundance of antique heritage and monuments witnessing the rise and fall of empires, its lavishing hospitality, and its laid-back sense of time –everything the pragmatic but receptive Westerner has been longing for all his or her life. And it is Turkey with its difficult language, its strange religious rites, its patriarchal social order, and its opaque scheming – everything the anxious and unconfident Westerner has always been afraid of.
Directors Halit Refiğ and Ferzan Özpetek have both been living abroad and have experienced the clash between cultures they are talking about in their films. It seems they are emphasising the incongruousness rather than the mutual attraction. In I Loved A Turk, a young German woman goes to Kayseri to meet her son’s father İsmail, a former gastarbeiter in Germany, and is rejected by him – only to meet her true love Mustafa and his family who charm her even into converting to Islam. Mustafa must pay for his unconventional choice, though: The jealous gastarbeiter shoots him to death even before the wedding night. In Hamam an Italian interior designer undergoes a similar process in Istanbul, apart from converting to homosexuality instead of Islam which he doesn’t survive, either. He is getting stabbed by a gangster hired by a female (!) investor whose plans he balked.
So there seems to be only one recommendation for all Turkey friends and lovers: Don’t violate written or even unwritten rules which is, of course, difficult. But then again just a matter of empathy and courteousness.

Daniela Sannwald

CLOUDS OF MAY (MAYIS SIKINTISI) , 1999

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 130’ |

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Cast: M.Emin Ceylan, Muzaffer Özdemir, Fatma Ceylan, Muhammed Zımbaoğlu, M.Emin Toprak, Sadık İncesu

EGG (YUMURTA), 2007

Turkey| 35mm, Colour, 97’ |

Director: Semih Kaplanoğlu

Cast: Nejat İşler, Saadet Işıl Aksoy, Ufuk Bayraktar, Tülin Özen, Gülç,n Satırcıoğlu, Kaan Karabacak

When Clouds of May made an appearance in Turkish cinema in 1999, it might have started the glut of provincial themed films that ended with 2013’s sardonically toned Yozgat Blues. With Clouds of May, the province emerged as a state of “boredom”, “guilt”, and “yearning” in male directors’ films. The main characters of these films were young men who wanted to be artists and they were willing to confront their pasts that were represented by the province. The young director in Clouds of May returns to his small town in order to make a film about his family. The family has no interest in the subject, but they have good intentions. So, in order to help their son, they agree to be actors in a film which they have no idea of its content as the son tries to capture the daily routine of his family. A film within a film; the film which is being shot is Koza / Cocoon. ButClouds of May is essentially about “time”. The wind blows, clouds pass by, poplars rustle, a small boy becomes obsessed with a plastic watch, he deliberately throws a basket of tomatoes down a slope as if just to spite the tyrant routine of the province and the slow passing of time. A young man dreams of a life away from the province to escape the same oppressive passage. The film tells us that the province is just made up of this ponderously slow passing of time, and this is actually a beautiful thing. In 2007’s Egg, the main character is a poet, who, upon his “mother’s” final call, returns to the province, which he thought he had left behind and completely forgot about while living in the city. The mother is not there anymore as a being, but she has plans for the “son”, ways she points out to. There is a future she reminds him which he thought he had left behind, but will realize that he didn’t. Province is the mother; the one who embraces. With their exquisitely poetic narratives, splendid visuals, and almost narcissistic beauty, both films make us think that whether it’s “distant”, “lonely” or has stubbornly “chosen to be lonely,” the soul climate of the place we call Turkey is some kind of a province and its state of mind is as “uncomprehended”, “not wanting to be understood”, resentful, and slightly broken-hearted as the young men in these films.

Fatih Özgüven

BOATS OUT OF THE WATERMELON RINDS (KARPUZ KABUĞUNDAN GEMİLER YAPMAK) , 2004

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 98’ |

Director:Ahmet Uluçay

Cast: İsmail Hakkı Taslak, Kadir Kaymaz, Gülayşe Erkoç, Boncuk Yılmaz, Hasbiye Günay, Mustafa Çoban, Fizuli Caferov, Ahmet Uluçay

A TUGRA KAFTANCIOGLU FILM (BİR TUĞRA KAFTANCIOĞLU FİLMİ)

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 85’ |

Director: Emre Akay

Cast: Emre Akay, Gülüm Baltacıgil, Tuğra Kaftancıoğlu, Mehmet Demirtaş

The boom that the Turkish cinema experienced in the ‘90s through a few “auteurs” was the incubation period of a “rebirth”. Making a film was still a hard to reach goal. In the 2000s, a period of boom in film production began due to the irrepressible ripening of the society’s need to express and the cost efficiency of wide-spreading digital cameras. At the beginning of this period, two films were made which displayed a surprising competence despite their inexperienced directors and ultra-low budgets, and explored the madness of making a film: Boats Out Of Watermelon Rinds and A Tuğra Kaftancıoğlu Film. Boats Out Of Watermelon Rinds, in which the director Ahmet Uluçay, who lived his entire life in a village, returns to his childhood memories, is the story of first loves and impossibilities that range from making an actual film and trying to build a projection machine in order to hold a screening to the beautiful girl next door. But what Ahmet Uluçay narrates to the audience does not just consist of a simple love for cinema or the difficulties of “being a cinephile in a village”. Uluçay enriches his film with mise-en-scènes about how a filmmaker sees the world in the tediousness of daily life and how he cinematises that in his own perception by imagery that opens door to different evocations–partially Anatolian mysticism–without succumbing to symbolism.

A Tuğra Kaftancıoğlu Film, directed by Emre Akay and Hasan Yalaz, has a structure where documentary and fiction trade places instead of dreams and reality. Through misogynistic/sadistic director Tuğra Kaftancıoğlu’s efforts in building a game, which not only tries to direct the set but also life itself in order to make a “striking film”, many themes such as cinema’s relationship between the concepts of watching and being watched, fame addiction and what is permissible in the name of filmmaking are conveyed with a terrific sense of black humor. Whether its name or nature is passion or madness, there is only one rule when it comes to cinema. Like Tuğra Kaftancıoğlu says, “There are new things and I think we can partner on this… Please continue filming. Very nice. Yes…

Yeşim Tabak

MY FATHER AND SON (BABAM VE OĞLUM) , 2005

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 108’ |

Director: Çağan Irmak

Cast: Çetin Tekindor, Şerif Sezer, Fikret Kuşkan, Hümeyra

PURGATORY (İKİ BAŞLI DEV) , 1990

Turkey | 35mm,Colour , 97’ |

Director: Orhan Oğuz

Cast: Cüneyt Arkın, Fikret Kuşkan, Sedef Ecer

A friend of mine once told me. Can Yücel comes to Ankara for a book signing. When it’s my friend’s turn, the fan in him comes out and he starts babbling on: “I really love your poem ‘I Loved My Father the Most’.” Can Yücel asks him to recite the poem, and then signs the book. This is what he wrote: “I hated my father the most.”
Much beloved, much watched and guaranteed to make you cry, My Father and Son breaks the fragile balance, which fathers and sons build between love/hate and admiration/rivalry, knowing–with childish confidence–that it would be rebuilt, as it lures the audience eager to be captured by either side of this fragile balance, with the clatter of a large family. The film is based on the economy of survival which cannot be smart aleckly dismissed. It is sworn to protect childhood against the premature arrival of adulthood as if scared stiff of losing this warm, magical, beloved thing made of pure emotion. On the other hand, İki Başlı Dev is a film neither much beloved nor much watched. The insular, perfect world of Cengiz and Hakan–father and son–is slowly shaken with the call of adulthood, Hakan’s desire to grow up, and eerie encounters with sexuality and violence. What İki Başlı Dev calmly whispers is valuable. One: in the absence of the father, in the shelter where he thinks he can’t reach him, the son turns into his father. The father has already become an internal monologue. Two: Childhood is not something to cling on to, a precious commodity whose place in the heart should be protected.
Putting these two films side by side, you start hearing Kafka’s voice. The voice which believes that there are more important things than childhood, and is angry at the father who takes up all the space with his grandeur leaving nary a peaceful place to hide. The former is always by the side of the young adult who reverts back to childhood not to cling onto it or stay there but to renounce and bid farewell. Even though it would turn into a rattlebrained shadow.

Umut Tümay Arslan

DESTINY (KADER) , 2006

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 104’ |

Director: Zeki Demirkurbuz

Cast: Vildan Atasever, Ufuk Bayraktar, Müge Ulusoy, Engin Akyürek, Ozan Bilen, Settar Tandıöğen, Erkan Can

THE WELL (KUYU) , 1968

Turkey | DigiBeta, B&W, 86’ |

Director: Metin Erksan

Cast: Hayati Hamzaoğlu, Nil Göncü, Demir Karahan, Aliye Rona, Osman Alyanak, T.Fikret Uçak

The history of Yeşilçam is full of impossible love stories. “Lovers” can’t unite, because there are villains, unforgiving customs, and sometimes pride, which they say is a no-no in love, standing between them… These films harbour the dream of a utopian world where an endless love and respect will co-exist if destiny lets it.Kuyu / The Well and Kader / Destiny are films in which love breaks away from this innocence, and feelings that stem from pure appeal/interest/desire become an obsessive state of “ownership”, and unrequital produces evil. Both films take place in a crushing reality, away from the heart-tugging romantic melancholia of Yeşilçam melodramas. One important difference is that in Demirkubuz’ Destiny, unrequited love is lived as self-destruction, whereas in Erksan’s The Well it emerges as destruction of the object of affection. In The Well, Osman (Hayati Hamzaoğlu) is in love with his fellow villager Fatma (Nil Göncü). What Fatma feels about this is of no concern for him. The only thing that matters to him is his irresistible desire. He kidnaps Fatma, goes to jail for it, and his third attempt in forced compliance culminates in a tragic finale for both of them because of the young girl’s fatal revolt. Destiny’s hopeless lover Bekir (Ufuk Bayraktar) is better than Osman in assuming responsibility of his feelings. Instead of completely disregarding the psyche of the woman he wants to win over, he disregards himself, wasting his life in cheap night clubs and hotels stalking Uğur (Vildan Atasever) who never gave him any hope and is in love with another man–of course not without giving her a guilty conscience. His life before Uğur was merely constituted of chronic numbness, working a job he didn’t like, and being a husband to a woman he didn’t love. In this perspective, the film sees a “hopeless hope” for a “meaningful” life in Bekir’s self-imposed destruction. Unhappiness becomes the price of searching for meaning. In The Well there’s not a trace of this dark romanticism since Osman won’t accept unhappiness…

Yeşim Tabak

SOMERSAULT IN A COFFIN (TABUTTA RÖVAŞATA) , 1996

Turkey | 35mm, Colour, 74’ |

Director:Derviş Zaim

Cast: Tuncel Kurtiz, Ahmet Uğurlu, Ayşen Aydemir, Fuat Onan, Şerif Erol, Hasan Uzma

SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN (ARAF) , 2012

Turkey, Germany, France | DCP, Colour, 124’ |

Director: Yeşim Ustaoğlu

Cast: Özcan Deniz, Nihal Yalçın, Neslihan Atagül, Barış Hacıhan, Ilgaz Kocatürk, Can Başak

In the 90s, the chaotic universe that we had been living was like out of its final hinges. Unaccounted for murders and politicians in the centre of corruption were happily imposing their promise for “a car and a house.” Polarisation was unnecessary (see the collapse of the USSR!) and our freshly established private TVs advised us that we could overcome our lack of idealism with sportsmagazine and jolly singing. Somersault in A Coffin is a breaking point for our cinema with its in-betweenness, and detection of not belonging. Derviş Zaim was a pioneer of “guerrilla filmmaking with friends,” and had raised the “poor man in the neighbourhood” on a pedestal as the most marginal main character. Uncompromising of his humanity even though he’s been living like a hobo, Mahsun (Ahmet Uğurlu) was just borrowing a place to stay warm, a “one night comfort” when he was stealing a car. He stepped out of the Yeşilçam nostalgia by stepping out of the “mainstream order”. Getting in trouble as long as he’d stick to his own book, Mahsun’s state of immobility turns up once more in Somewhere in Between’s unbeatable destiny of the people of Turkey. Dreaming of a different future, Zehra (Neslihan Atagül) works at a resting stop on a trans-city highway–like a punishment of waiting between the two realms. The characters are obviously indications of the fears and anxieties that ail “modern” Turkey. Mahsun’s beloved Bosphorus neighbourhood is no different from Zehra’s smokey, tiny town, anyway. With the open air landscapes fixed on twilight, both films are examples of similar confinement and immobility. Reinforcing this emotion is the fact that the objects of desire are “about to leave.” A giant phallic truck dissipates Zehra’s, and a prickly syringe scatters Mahsun’s dreams of change, their circle of poverty and deprivation tightens. Escaping our little circle is possible neither through love nor through marginalism. At least Mahsun had gone completely insane and the hotdog commercial became the most ironic ending. The final hinge perhaps had gone off, and the proof was Zehra, succumbing to her fate, and marrying in a TV show.

Esin Küçüktepepınar

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND MODERNITY IN CRISIS

On the centenary of the World War I, the Istanbul Film Festival screens two films pertaining to post-war Germany.

Talk

Building a Nation Through Cinema

April, 15, 17.00

Within the scope of the special section prepared for the 100th anniversary of World War I, film critic Rüdiger Suchsland's documentary Caligari - Wie der Horror ins Kino kam / Caligari, When Horror Comes To Cinema and a masterpiece of German cinema Menschen am Sonntag / People On Sunday will be screened together in support of the panel where Suchsland will be speaking. Analysing the post-war Germany's Weimar Republic through the expressionist films of the era, Suchsland's presentation will touch upon the purpose of cinema as a cultural tool, its corresponding collective spirit, and the effects that cinema and society had upon each other during that time.

Speaker: Rüdiger Suchsland

Moderator: Engin Ertan

CALIGARI- WIE DER HORROR INS KINO KAM (CALIGARI: KORKU SİNEMAYA GELDİĞİNDE) , 2014

Germany | DCP, Colour and B & W, 52’ |

Director: Rüdiger Suchsland

Having served on both the FIPRESCI and the Best First Film juries of the Istanbul Film Festival, German film critic Rüdiger Suchsland’s directorial debut Caligari - When Horror Came into Cinema is about the cinematic reflections of expressionism and the Weimar Republic. Just as celebrated German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer’s cornerstone book on film history From Caligari to Hitler, Suchsland’s film also focuses on Robert Wiene’s expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari while examining the aforementioned era. Claiming that the Weimar Republic’s sentiment is not that distant from today, Suchsland remarks the rise of Expressionism in a post-war world engulfed in fear that madly consumes and on the other hand stricken with economic crisis. While analysing the globally celebrated examples of German Expressionist Cinema taking off from Caligari, he features archival footage from World War I and the Weimar Era, and selected scenes from many classics.

While Suchsland’s documentary emphasises the tension, political paranoia and pessimism in Germany, we see a different Germany in People on Sunday, which was made in the late Weimar Republic era. This 1930 film is not only significant in it that it brings together the master of the future such as Robert Siodmark, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Billy Wilder, at their early careers, but it also serves a document pertaining to those years as a non-expressionist film with external shoots. Observing five young people on a Sunday and their love relations, the film does not adopt the pessimism of Expressionist Cinema. This masterpiece which displays the daily life in Germany a few years prior to Hitler’s claim of power, and although it does not bring up political tension of the era in its storyline, it cannot be reviewed separately from Nazi Germany due to its cinematic significance because a few years later, the film’s creators had to emigrate to the USA and the free world reflected by People on Sunday had disappeared in 1933. – Engin Ertan

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY ( BİR PAZAR GÜNÜ) , 1929

Germany | DVD , B&W , 73’ |

Director: Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer

Cast: Erwin Splettstösser, Wolfgang Von Waltershausen, Christel Ehlers, Brigitte Borchert, Annie Schreyer

Having served on both the FIPRESCI and the Best First Film juries of the Istanbul Film Festival, German film critic Rüdiger Suchsland’s directorial debut Caligari - When Horror Came into Cinema is about the cinematic reflections of expressionism and the Weimar Republic. Just as celebrated German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer’s cornerstone book on film history From Caligari to Hitler, Suchsland’s film also focuses on Robert Wiene’s expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari while examining the aforementioned era. Claiming that the Weimar Republic’s sentiment is not that distant from today, Suchsland remarks the rise of Expressionism in a post-war world engulfed in fear that madly consumes and on the other hand stricken with economic crisis. While analysing the globally celebrated examples of German Expressionist Cinema taking off from Caligari, he features archival footage from World War I and the Weimar Era, and selected scenes from many classics.

While Suchsland’s documentary emphasises the tension, political paranoia and pessimism in Germany, we see a different Germany in People on Sunday, which was made in the late Weimar Republic era. This 1930 film is not only significant in it that it brings together the master of the future such as Robert Siodmark, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Billy Wilder, at their early careers, but it also serves a document pertaining to those years as a non-expressionist film with external shoots. Observing five young people on a Sunday and their love relations, the film does not adopt the pessimism of Expressionist Cinema. This masterpiece which displays the daily life in Germany a few years prior to Hitler’s claim of power, and although it does not bring up political tension of the era in its storyline, it cannot be reviewed separately from Nazi Germany due to its cinematic significance because a few years later, the film’s creators had to emigrate to the USA and the free world reflected by People on Sunday had disappeared in 1933. – Engin Ertan

SPECIAL SCREENING

Aykan Safoğlu’s Off white Tulips looks for writer James Bladwin in Istanbul, while Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston searches for traces of poet Langston Hughes in Harlem through London. Both films weigh desire and creativity from a prism of memories.

OFF-WHITE TULIPS (KIRIK BEYAZ LALELER), 2013

Turkey| HD, colour, 24’

Director: Aykan Safoğlu

April 15, 21.30

Off-white Tulips is conceived as a fictional dialogue with James Baldwin that focuses on his prolonged stay in Istanbul. Found documents and re-signified objects are manipulated to layer Baldwin’s identity as a black gay author with the narrator’s personal history. The associative narrative extends with references to Turkish and American pop-icons, investigations into etymology and self-reflexive comments on visual representation towards a situated critique of racism. – İz Öztat

2013 Grand Prize of the city of Oberhausen

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON (LANGSTON’U ARARKEN) 1989

United Kingdom| Digibeta, B&W, 45’

Director: Isaac Julien

Cast: Ben Ellison, Matthew Baidoo, Akim mogaji, John Wilson, Dencil Williams, Guy Burgess, James Dublin

April 15, 21.30

Winning the Teddy Award at Berlin in 1989, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston floats between the past and the present–a limbo that befits the jazz poet, who never came out of the closet. Secretive about his sexuality, although widely considered gay, Hughes is known as one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement centred in the Harlem neighbourhood in New York, and which spanned from the 1920s to the 1930s. In Looking for Langston, Isaac Julien invokes Hughes as a black gay cultural icon, against an atmospheric setting that parallels a Harlem speakeasy of the 1920s with an 80s London nightclub. Extracts from Hughes' poetry are interwoven with the work of cultural figures from the 1920s and beyond, including black poets Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The result is a lyrical and poetic piece about the nature of gay desire that combines archival footage with fantasy sequences.

Certain scenes in this film depicting sexual situations or containing violence might not be suitable for minors.

MANAKI BROTHERS FILMS

Sunday, April 13

The complete restored works of Manaki Brothers, the first filmmakers of the Balkans, are being screened at the festival within the framework of the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Cinema. Photographer by profession, becoming the court photographers of the Ottoman Sultan in 1911 and of the King of Yugoslavia in 1929, Yanaki and Milton Manaki are regarded as the first cinematographers and therefore the first filmmakers of the Balkans. The two brothers made their first shoots with a 300 model Bioskop film camera that Yanaki bought from England. Recording local events and traditions, the Manaki Brothers cinematographed their films between 1905 and 1926 on 35 mm, black-and-white, nitrate film. In 1921, they started screening films nearby their home in the Macedonian town of Bitola in the open air, and later at a hall they set up in 1923.