Ashes and Snow

Diversity in classifying films regarding some common characteristics gives birth to many different genres. This may result in both having more organized pattern to think on films and also adopting stereotyped way to interpret them. This confusion directs my attention to “contemporary-contemplative-cinema (CCC)” which I found a bit controversial type of grouping due to its similarity to “modern” narratives. Henry Tuttle highlights the differences btw modern and contemplative cinema). This term is first articulated by Henry Tuttle and defined as “the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere alone, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and the star system”. 1 Major characteristics of contemplative cinema or unspoken cinema (CC) are listed below but a film does not need one and all in order to be categorized within CC, different combinations are possible.

· Plotlessness: no obvious (forefront) drama, no beginning, no denouement, open-ending, no drive to go forward, no major narrative gimmicks (flashback, multilayered stories), simplicity, atmospherical depiction, distanciation of protagonist(s) with background action, no imminent threat, no external forces pressuring the protagonist(s).

· Wordlessness: laconical interactions (or silent protagonist), no plot-drive expository filling, no psychological arguments, no voiceover, direct-sound (no score), body language.

· Slowness: long takes, static shots/slow camerawork, patient pace, uneventfulness (down time), "unnecessary" mundanity, uncut movements, activities filmed in their entirety, extended wait/pauses, conscience of time.

· Alienation:disconnectedness,wandering/idleness/listlessness,solitude, fatalism, ennui / melancholy / depression, non-conformity, no intellectualized existentialism, distanciation of protagonist(s) with the world, with other characters, emptiness, empty frames, distanciation of the camera from the subject. 2

Works of Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar-Wai, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos Gus Van Sant, Andy Warhol, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Lavrente Diaz, Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Bruno Dumont, Weerasethakul, Sharunas Bartas, Kore-eda, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sokurov, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa and Roy Andersson are reflected as the auteurs of contemplative cinema. Considering the main features and examples of contemplative cinema, two main concepts attract my attention; space and time. Unspoken movies create a space for spectators to be rooted in an act of thinking and it plays with the limits of action and narration, which allows both spectator and filmmaker to play their own limits of seeing and contemplating. CC also plays with the state of mind and let different ideas to intersect within a scene, within a moment. Although cinematic time comprises elements like montage, sequences, cuts that make it synthetic, contemplative films present temporal illusion of immediacy and provide spectators to experience the sense of being here and now. 3 The pace of time makes the biggest difference between contemplating and mainstream movies, “slowness, an urge against the over-praised fast pace, the infatuation with feverish quickness, as it has become idolised in life as well as film”. 4 This type of understanding of slowness recalls the concept of boredom, which is actually, praised in contemplating movies. Filmmaker Raoul Ruiz define boredom with its productive aspect as; not spending the present moment preoccupied with past or present concerns, nor being distracted by restless ennui, but instead using the present moment to capture and anchor oneself to “an intense feeling of being here and now, in active rest.” The moment of boredom thus becomes a “privileged moment”: This privileged moment, which early theologians called “Saint Gregory’s paradox,” occurs when the soul is both at rest and yet turns on itself like a cyclone around its eye, while events in the past and the future vanish in the distance. If I propose this modest defense of ennui, it is perhaps because the films I’m interested in can sometimes provoke this sort of boredom. 5

In order to help capturing the sense of boredom in this respect, contemplating films uses silence as a tool for contemplation and Susan Sontag’s statement about silence corresponds to CC’s purposes on using silence.

“Silence is a metaphor for a cleansed, noninterfering vision, in which one might envisage the making of art-works that are unresponsive before being seen, unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny. The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn't demand from the spectator his "understanding," his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.” 6

In my perspective, contemplative cinema creates a personal space or a nothing space for spectators to experience the “stream-of-consciousness” and to be introduced with different layers of the thinking process. Through contemplating movies spectators are merged to perceptual thinking with timeless images. By means of their “freedom” across those images, they renew their beings by reshaping their understanding of what a film can do to mind and how it leads spectators to a state of mindfulness. Unspoken cinema assigns spectators an active role because these films refer parataxis in its narrative style and this gets spectators to be creative and to fill the gaps.7

Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow (2005) creates a magical sphere for spectators to be get involved with a deep thinking process. The thing that impresses me most about the film is the power of its form; more specifically, the structure of Ashes and Snow’s cinematographic items significantly alter visual and mental perception about the film. All scenes are captured in slow motion, which contributes to general understanding of time in contemplative cinema

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http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/

http://almayerinn.blogspot.com/2006/10/what-is-contemplative-cinema.html

Deleuze and CC: http://gravity7.com/blog/film/2007/01/what-is-contemplative-cinema.html#ixzz17j8gOgYlü

Chronology of CC: http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2006/10/chronology.html

Ashes and Snow : http://vimeo.com/13187776

Köprüdekiler / Man on the Bridge

Although I don’t understand why should we categorize films as national or transnational, it is obvious that this type of analysis somehow needed and used to categorize films. It is a crucial point that in what terms we could call a film national or transnational. Is it the director or screenwriter or producer or the editing crew that make a film national or transnational? I think this kind of analysis should be made both in concept wise and economic wise, and decided on which made that film “that film”.

When I thought about the national films in terms of story and concept, the most (recently) applicable films that fits to the description of national films in my mind is Köprüdekiler / Men on the Bridge (Of course now, I don’t count Yılmaz Güney’s films). When I search about the production and when look into the details of the film crew, I came across with lot of names from other countries. And that raise the question whether or not “Köprüdekiler / Men on the Bridge” is national or transnational.

In terms of script and direction, it is obvious that Köprüdekiler is a national film. It is a story about lives of people who have a common that is the Bogaziçi Bridge. We see different lives, different stories of people, however they all have some kind of a relationship with the Bogaziçi Bridge. When you watch the film, you feel like you are very familiar with the people or with the stories of them. Because the theme is Turkey actually. I don’t think that there is another place like Bogaziçi Bridge in another place and therefore there are no children on that nonexistent bridge selling flowers. This is all “Turkish”. Whole film is therefore Turkish.

Additionally, in terms of the cast, it is totally national. Most of the characters are the real characters of the real stories. Children who are selling flowers on the bridge is actually selling flowers on the bridge in their lives. You can easily come across with them at the bridge. The couple that has problems about their marriage are also real. So that cast is totally national, too.

But what about the production and the producer? What about the people supporting the film financially? Fabian Massah (Berlin) is the co-producer of the film and the other producer is Aslı Özge, who is the “creator” of the film. I said creator because she is the one who writes and directs the film. Who is the one go and find those characters on the bridge talk to them and make them act in her film. She is the one who go and save the boys from police when they are arrested because since they don’t have and IDs. However, since Fabian Massah is the co producer, is this movie transnational? Since it is also supported from international sources, and since there are people from Berlin in the crew, is this film transnational?

And also, it is showed in Bruger Novo Cinema Festival, Premiers Plans d’Angers Film Festival International Rotterdam Festival, Rennes Clair-Obscur Film Festival International Belgrad Festival, is this film transnational?

Since it is the co-production of

ENDORPHINE PRODUCTION
YENI SINEMACILIK
KALIBER FILM
BAYERISCHER RUNDFUNK
ZDF/3SAT
RUSH HOUR FILMS

should it write Turkey-Germany-Netherlands Film on the web pages?

I am not a big fan of the origins, or I am not a person who tries to make borders between nationalities, and also I am not a nationalist at all but if we need to categorize films as national and transnational, those questions should be asked.

PS: It is also funny that the official website is www.menonthebridge.com not köprüdekiler.com. And when you go in to that web page, you come across with the “international” poster of the film. Another question here, huh?

Stereotype and Multiplicity

Think of organizing your DVD collection. What would be the most easy/quick categorization? Most likely, sorting them alphabetically! Taking their genre or their directors or their stars or their producers etc. into account, as a criterion, surely gets the decision-process longer and harder as one encounters with intersections and creates a need of sub-categories to answer the question ″where to put that one?″. And think of taking the criterion as ″nation″, then one should answer the question: Nation of what/whom? Nation of the director? Nation of the leading actor? Nation of the production company? Related nation of the setting? Related nation of the story?... Probably today, this kind of a categorization gets inextricable with the existent films... But, what about having a section of European Cinema?

In his writing, Thomas Elsaesser shows the difficulties of moving from national cinema to European Cinema which is also hard to define by asserting that today either considering European Cinema as a gathering of national cinemas or regarding directors standing for the nation lacks to explain what it actually is. He explains the reason behind this lack by pointing the change of the meaning ″national″, since in the 1990s West European countries become multi-cultural, their population become transnational and their politics post-national. (p.66) He suggests there is still apperance of ″national cinema″ in films’ signifiers of national, regional or local specificities in Europe as a cultural protection in the competition with Hollywood but this ″national cinema″ is neither essentialist nor constructivist, but it is something joined to the other categories of a movie which uncertainly floats over a film’s ″identity″ (p.70-71).

Reading Elsaesser reminded me Elif Şafak’s talk in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in which she tells that when her first novel written in English came out in USA, a literary critic told her that he liked the book but dissapointed in the issue that there were lot of international characters but only one Turkish character and who is a man. She explains that as the novel takes place in a university in Boston it is normal to have international characters in it more than Turkish ones, but she adds that the actual reason of this dissapointment was the expectation to see the manifestation of her identity as a Turkish woman in her novel. She goes on saying that ″We often talk about how stories change the world but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. ...Writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own. But as the representatives of their respective cultures. ...When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger.″ Moreover, she offers that in creative writing courses today, the very first thing taught to students is writing what they know, she opposes this idea by offering that ″Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about... We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next.″

Both literature (a book) and cinema (a film) are the consequences of the creative process of the writer’s or the director’s, the senarist’s who has roots in specific nations and cultures. And for sure it is expected to find echoes and reflections from their nations and cultures in their works. But it is not a ″must″ that films produced or novels written in specific countries obliged to reflect stereotypes of nations, identities and cultures. In artistic process people may find inspiration in their own culture or in other cultures, they may blend and represent both of them etc. Changing attitude, looking from different perspectives, discovering, not sticking to limitations, mixing supports the manifold of art which blossoms in multitude and multiplicity.

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Links:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html

Where are you from?

What makes a film peculiar to a nation? This was a question that engages my mind for a long time. First of all it is not the actor or actress that makes a film belong to a nation. If we look at the examples it could be observed clearly. Actor or actress is like a play dough. Director shapes them and they become what the director wants. They also put their acting intelligence but it is not something that affects the film’s direction. All they do is to use their acting intelligence according to the directions of the director. Secondly, it is not the director itself that makes a film national. There are Italian directors whose work are not called as Italian. For example “The Good, The Bad, The Ugly” was directed by Sergio Leone, a well known Italian director, but the film is known as a Hollywood film. There are also Ferzan Özpetek and Fatih Akın who are Turkish but their films can be discussed whether Turkish or not (For me they are definetly not.). Likewise, the producer is not the answer that I am searching either. The location, city or country, also does not designate the nation of the film. One answer that comes to me logical is the language of the film. Without knowing who is the director or producer, who are the actors, what it’s subject or where it takes place by simply looking it’s title we derive a conclusion about film’s nation.

This makes more sense when we think about it in real life. We immediately associate people with nations by only looking their languages or accents. However maybe this is not an enough critera to assign a notion to a film or other things. One thing in the article by Thomas Elseasser ImpersoNations can be count as an important point. When he talks about European cinema and gives examples like Remains of the Day or Pianist we can easily talk about their nationalities. This maybe bacouse of the use of the history in the films. In Remains of the Day we hear some diologues which belongs to England, and also the film is not about England we can say that the film is English. Similarly, in Pianist although the language of film is English, the film subjects the Germany and Poland and uses their history this film can be count as Polish or German but not English.

But one comes as a question how can we associate films when their subjects are not national. Maybe we should not question their nationalities at all. Films can be directed by different directors and played by different actors and actresses and they also be shot in different locations. I think categorizing films like, Hollywood, European or Asian is a political issue. As they are different continents and the competition between them force us to categorize them. There would be no problem at least for me as long as the film remains universal.

Mask vs. Bad Guys = Funny Bad vs. Serious Bad ?

Jacques Ranciere describes ethical turn as not a ″re-turn″ to the norm of morality but as a turn / change in which the morals are absolutized definitely by the suppression of the division morals used to imply. To examplify, saying lie is not moral, but if a woman who gained weight due to her pregnancy asks her husband if she looks fat, her husband’s answer ″no honey, of course you don’t″, which is a courtesy lie, can be considered ethical due to having another morality intrinsically, not to hurt his wife’s feelings. So in general, in this fact the formed consensus is that the act of man is not against morality. However, ethical interpretations should be made according to the facts, making a generalization, asserting such an idea that as long as it is for the sake of not hurting his wife’s feelings, man’s telling lie is ethical, may end up with a total liar and people around him not accusing him of being a liar because he is not hurting his wife’s feelings! So, defining what is ethical according to few experiences causes such a consensus that deciding what is good and what is bad becomes blurred.

We may find examples of what Ranciere desribes in the fantasy-crime-comedy The Mask (1994). In the film, the protagonist Stanley Ipkiss is an inoffensive bank clerk who remains unresponsive to the people who often bullies him such as his boss, his landlady, his car mechanics etc. One day he finds a mask which has the power to unleash one’s inner-self, repressed desires and give superhuman abilities in strength, invulnerability, speed etc. As Stanley uses this mask he reciprocates the ones whom once bullied him and serves them out: He deranges his landlady, attacks car mechanist’s store and answers people’s bully acts in harsh ways: street gangs annoy him, he mocks and opens fire to them; a man sounds the horn impolitely, he breaks the windows of his car by using loud noise etc. in order to enter the nightclub Coco Bongo where he has not let in before, he interrupts the robery of the bank, where he works, by ″bad guys″, but robs it himself. He runs away from police arrest by amusing them, through singing and dancing with the song Cuban Pete etc.

His actions throughout the time wearing mask are not morally correct but reciprocating to ″bad guys″, legitimizes morally incorrect behaviours of The Mask and makes them less evil.

Observing examples of the ethical turn in a fantasy-crime movie is funny, but in real world approaching facts losing the sense of just, injust, legitimizing every unmoral act by consensus with the supporting ideas of the ″only violence helps where violence reigns″, ″evil repays evil″, the only way to overcome the ones who acts unmoral is acting with unmorality in return and settling this idea appropriate in ethics causes the ethical turn that Ranciere describes where the perception of good and bad dissappears but only evil and less evil remains. In order to prevent such perception Ranciere offers: ″Breaking with today’s ethical configuration, ...entails rejecting the fantasy of their purity, giving back to these inventions their status as cuts that are always ambiguous, precarious, litigious.″ (p.132)

Lastly, it can be offered what if Mask did not throw the mask at last, would not he become one of these ″bad guys″ (although –being less bad than them) whom he was against?

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Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_%28film%29

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110475/

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41XRU9S4SSL.jpg

Indivisibility

Bergson as a pre-existential philosopher, most of his theories about being and life. First of all according to him life is something fluid. There is no possibility to divide it into pieces or chapters. Like a river it just goes and with each decision it constructs its own riverband and branches. However in Waltz with Bashir as Ari remembers the past its like divided moments. We see that he remembers each part with the help of different people. It was not like he remember a moment and then could link the moments with each other. Rather like chapters, every trace took him to different piece of his past. What I mean can be understood clearly in the film Click. In this film, Newman can divide his life into chapters can travel from moment to moment. He could skip to future and turn back to past again. However he lost the sense of the whole of his life by dividing his life into chapters. In this point what Bergson says about the fludity of life can be proved. The life is a whole and there is no division between states of life.

What Bergson says about memory and forgetting is quite logical according to me. He claims that we always store what we experience in our memories. What we think that we forget is actually not erasen from our memories. It’s just the function of brain filter. We filter our memories and remember them and of course this may varies from situation to situation. So in Waltz with Bashir Ari has the whole memory of what was happened. By the help of right people and right objects he accomplished to remember the memory belongs shared with other people. However after the film audience can remember the each scene. For example in Before Sunrise throughout the film we see the characters in some certain places and times. At the end of the film we see the scenes again but this time without characters. However we as audiences immediately remember that they slept together in the park, listened music in a street and so on. However the experiences do not belong to ourselves our memory can remember each of that experiences. This is because we exposure to the images during the film and what we remember is actually not the action itself but the self that percieving that scene.

Another point is about time. According to Bergson past is something that carries itself into present and the present turns into past and becomes a future. The present contains past and future in itself. We also cannot divide time into parts. As Deleuze mentions about Augustine, time is a problematic issue. Both Aristotle and Agustine deals with that problem and they conclude that there is neither present nor past nor future. We name them for the pragmatic reasons. As Ari remembers his past, all his memories become present. In this manner what he does is to make an illusionary division between moments and fill the spaces in his memory.

Representation of Trauma: The Fall

“Postmodernism as mourning work” by Thomas Elsaesser introduced me with illuminating concepts in the trauma theory. His approach to representation of memory and his way to connect it with psychoanalysis plays with the limits of a correlation between history and memory. His ideas impressively illustrated in or rather can be adapted to Tarsem’s spectacular film The Fall. For four years, Tarsem has been in 28 different countries to make this unique story blossom with/within another fictional history. The Fall is made of an interaction between Roy (a silent movie stunt man) and Alexandria (little girl), who met in the hospital that they have to stay in for a while. Roy, with a broken back and heart, tells a story to Alexandria, which is nourished by his personal wounds, traumas and history in general. But, this narration part is just one aspect of the story that proceeds throughout the film by getting mixed with actual time of the film. Apart from the verbal story, which is shaped by Roy, there is a visual story, which is filtered through Alexandria’s childish imagination. So, the limits of representing Roy’s memory are Alexandria’s memory.

Narration within The Fall addresses the concepts within the trauma theory as; integration (to tell one's story where the narrator is fully present to him in the act of telling) and assimilation (shift of perception and meaning). (p.196) In Roy’s story, his personal memories, experience of events, knowledge on historical tasks (the story involves Alexander the Great and Charles Darwin) and Alexandria’s family history, autobiography and perception of her environment, so in this respect the film fits into the work of Elsaesser. Further, Roy’s memories intersect with both linear and non-linear chronological time; in other words, at the present moment the story is linear with respect to the present time whereas, it is non-linear in terms of the past. Roy’s traumatic experience is interrelated with Freud’s term Nachträglichkeit; it is non-linear, deferred and belated also it proceeds depending on another place and another time (in Roy’s fantastic epic), or it is happening “neither inside nor outside, neither one place nor one time” (p.198). Trauma Theory points out the disparity between memory time and historical time and this incompatibility is highlighted in Roy’s story within the story of The Fall. Elsaesser claimed that the sense of memory time and historical time, as concepts, which he suspended, is related with the perceived sense of self, self-awareness and subjectivity of media experience. This idea can be adapted to the film by changing the term ‘media’ into the Roy’s and Alexandria’s ways of communicating with events around them and more importantly, how they really perceive and process their observations.

In addition to observation of those events, the visual and somatic impact of an event or the image on a person would also change the post-traumatic experience. In Roy’s condition, his love trauma, has a strong somatic aspect because he is bed-ridden and this worsen his sense of identity and the way he questioned his choices about his job, his relationship changes with respect to his actual physical condition. For what he lived he blames himself as in real time and reflects this sense of victimhood to the story he tells. He punishes himself by in the story and at the end, through this story, Roy relieves from this feeling of victimhood. Trauma Theory evaluated this concept under the name of politics of blame and The Fall is an example for the power of fantasy (l’imagination au pouvoir) and it’s impact on psychological relief. In The Fall ‘facts-fantasies-and-fictions’ are intertwined, that’s why we can say whole story refers to Elsaesser’s concept of trauma theory, which emphasizes memory and history. Moreover, Trauma Theory questions the separation of body and voice within the notion of trauma and The Fall gives this sense of separation in the transitions between the actual time and the story within the story. While Roy tries to finish story telling, her voice from the actual time composed with the fictional appearance in his fictional story, which may problematize the confluence of his character in the story and in the hospital. This case indicates that “he fantasized history in the form of his trauma” (p.198) His history recreated in a form of an “impossible history” which is full of irrationalities about narration, linearity of time or causal relationship and this history story can be called as a trauma.(p.200) Through the story within Roy’s history, he represents the non-representable trauma by filling the gaps in his memory and at the end he sooths his “anxiety about memory” (p.195). Roy and Alexandria build up an enchanted, imaginary world and with its beautiful sights The Fall makes turn this story into such a unique watching experience.