The movie “Awara” directed by the Indian director Raj Kapoor has been repeatedly adapted in Turkey. Furthermore, if you happen to encounter its original in Indian, perhaps you will not be able to easily recognize that it is a dubbed version, because the voices of the same men and women in the early years of Turkish cinema makes the movie so natural for us, who are very familiar with the movies of Yesilcam (The Turkish Holy wood), that if it weren’t for the Indian music in the movie, you would think it to be a typical Yesilcam movie or vice versa.

Of course, the reasons for this fact can be attributable to Turkish film industry sector’s borrowing its melodrama tradition roots from its Indian counterpart. Following the Lumieres’ first public exhibition of the moving pictures in India in 1896, the first Indian film which was shot three years later and India has become the leading movie producer in the world as time went by. Some 800 pictures are shot a year and the cinema has practically become the sole entertainment source for the poor people of India, the population of which is almost 1 billion. The cinema is so crucial for the Indians that, “An Indian would die, if he/she did not go to the movies”, we could easily say. For them, the cinema where they sleep and have rest can also be called a shelter that they take refuge against both the hot and the cold.

In post-World War Two, the Indian cinema has considerably affected not only Turkish cinema but also that of many other countries in the world through its original films and adaptations. These adaptations have made their public appearance in two ways, that is, either by the screenplays or the songs and the lyrics dubbed in Turkish. This was the case for most of the countries, which did not have the strength for shooting any film in post-World War Two. Cinema is the most popular form of entertainment among those imported following the India’s declaration of independence against the English. Besides, new films being attractive to other countries in which the songs were being singed and the dances performed started to be shot as soon as the sound had been added. So, the cost has increased because of the introduction of the voice and the theatrical dialogs have started to sound. While the sound ensured the protection of regional productions, it strengthened the Indian cinema in the field of competition with the other countries’ film industries. In the aftermath of the world crisis, a formula of “a star, six songs, and three dances” was devised so as to revive the cinema. As it is the case today, the Indian cinema has significantly affected Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and accordingly established its hegemony in most of the Asian countries. The cinema, which had been addressing mostly to the urban middle class during the period of dependence, won an enormous mass of new spectators of villagers who had left their regions and settled down in cities. The Indian cinema is the only one which produces Hollywood-like movies, but which the Hollywood films could not financially take under their dominance. Since the Indian cinema is a huge sector and frequently imitates Hollywood, it is also called Bollywood as film production companies have their place in Bombay. Protection of the national cinema in India is not attributable to a social progressiveness, but melodrama and dance passion of Indian people. Because, Bollywood is very successful in the field of shooting easily the local version of Hollywood films rather than expressing its own realities. India is the only country where Hollywood has no material dominance but only cultural as its Indian imitations are shot with the local cast. This is much more obvious within the framework of the new world order shaped by the recent changes.

Let us come to the new Indian cinema from Indian arabesques such as “Awara”. Social cinema examples had started to appear in India thanks to Satjayit Ray and subsequently dimension of poverty in India was thoroughly displayed. Ray shot his first film Pather Pançali in 1955 as the first of the Apu triology and addressed the real India. Thus, the first qualified Indian movie excluding any songs or dances has been shot. The new Indian film industry pursued the tradition of Ray and continued to make productions in addition to the commercial Indian movies thanks to its famous film producers such as Mrinal Sen, Ketan Mehta, Grish Karnard, and Shaii Karun. The films of “new movie makers” are both a view on the poor India and a means aimed at eliminating the traditional values and the superstitions. In view of the fact that the social life in India is structured by the system of caste and that the religious beliefs are deeply rooted, one can easily realize that what they try to do is a difficult one to accomplish.

The changes in all fields in India take place more slowly than those in Turkey. Thus, production period of the commercial pictures in India resembles ours, which were once shot by the cooperation of producer and manager. As mentioned by Shaji Karun, first an agreement is concluded with the actor/actress and then the money is received in advance from the owner of the movie theaters. Thus, movie theater owners have the release rights of the movies in the beginning. Today, the Indian producers who want to make films against the commercial cinema can stand only by means of festivals and national contests. However, their films barely have the chance of release. Seeing that India is an enormous country and that there are virtually 200 different spoken languages, it is almost impossible to address the whole country. Therefore, film productions take place regionally. These films are even more effective where the communists rule.

Besides, the common problem of the third world countries is that the films and their producers& directors whom we know well and who win awards in the festivals abroad are not well known at homeland. This is the case for not only Monsoon Wedding which was bestowed Venice golden lion award, but also Turkish and Iranian cinema that have enjoyed great successes in recent festivals. So, an inevitable question comes to the mind; “Is the festival cinema the concern of the west towards the east, or is it the one which emerges by the presence of this concern?”. The reviews of Mira Nair regarding her own country from a western point of view are much criticized at homeland. Mira Nair who still lives in New York is a director who pursued her education in the United States. Her latest film Monsoon Wedding got the biggest award in Venice Film Festival. She is one of the most renowned Indian directors abroad who successfully treats the cultural values of India by a contemporary interpretation and attracts the attention of the West through the rhythm in her films. Nair has entered the film industry by the documentaries. Following her first long film “Salam Bombay”, she shot “Kama Sutra” and “Mississippi Masala”.

Mira’s latest film “Monsoon Wedding” tells the story of the wedding preparations of an upper-class family living in New Delhi, the problems among its members and the wedding itself with a happy end. The parents get off their daughter Aditi with a computer engineer working in the United States whom they have never seen. The extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage, which coincides with the monsoon rains. The film also includes the additional events such as the revealing of the love between the maid and Dubey, who arranges the marriage, and the harassments of the uncle from the United States. And the other India…..Nair turns her camera to the daily life during the flurry of the wedding preparations. Beside the enormous expenses for the wedding, she displays the other face of the city in poverty. And it is what the “original” is for the film. On the other hand, upper-class Indians live in prosperity behind the high walls of their big houses with and immense garden after the colonial rule of the British. Although organized in accordance with the traditions of one of the poorest countries in the world, the marriage ceremony is ostentatious for such a culture whose members wobble between leading a British or Indian lifestyle and in which the cliff between the Indian social classes has widened since the independence was declared against the British colonial rule. Even if cellular phones, American magazines as well as the latest-design cars in the film show what kind of changes India undergoes, the dominant part of the traditions also appear, i.e. spouses taking part in traditional arranged marriage and the narratives regarding the love between two teenagers (Dubey and Alice). Apart from the streets and the avenues in which the poverty is displayed, the cameras stroll through them for two purposes; the former is for shooting an ordinary television show and the latter for showing the pretended relationship of the upper-class Indians who came together during the golf. Nair shows for what cause India has changed by the banality of the show and the requested loan on the golf pitch. On the other hand, she contradicts herself to the extent that she would justify the critiques as the traditional arranged marriage in India, where much pressure exists on women, seems to be very easy and free of problems in her film.

“I did not watch Salaam Bombay, however Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra was just like an exotic Indian goods ” said Fatih Ozguven from Radikal (a Turkish daily) in his article on Monsoon Wedding. It is the case for Monsoon Wedding, as well. “You could easily get something like Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding if you combine the Turkish serial Kaynanalar (Mothers-in-law) with the uproar of Robert Altman together with the objectionable themes of The Festival ”, he adds. I am not prejudiced against Mira Nair, because Kama Sutra is the latest film of the director that I watched. Besides, “Salaam Bombay” is the continuation of Ray films. Kuma Sutra appears to be an Indian fairy tale which does not tell anything about the life of the Indians. However, Mira Nair proved to be more careful in Monsoon Wedding than Kama Sutra. To see the difference between the people having a Mercedes and those sleeping beside the Ganj makes a good example to show what happened to India in the near past. Because, this country possesses many engineers who are exploited on a low-based salary by the international market and the golf pitches in each city at the same time. Moreover, Dubey, who organizes the wedding preparations and is a member of the Indian middle class that is steadily developing, is the concrete example the changes experienced. At first sight, he is not attractive because of his cellular phone and diligence. We start to feel sympathy towards him with the love between Alice and him. After Alice asks “Is it tap water” (because lower classes neglect cleaning with water in India), he notices her and then he is much affected as she knows about e-mail and such things. Only the loves in this film may be coverted into a soup opera. And what is more is that the director continues matchmaking until the end. Many songs are signed and dances performed as it is the case in Indian melodramas. However, the songs signed in Indian melodramas are related with different times and places. They are outside of the life itself and theatrical. On the other hand, those in “Monsoon Wedding” are inside of the life because a wedding ceremony is narrated. Furthermore, festivals have always been very important for the Indian people despite all the troubles.

As far as I am concerned, whenever I think about India, the color orange comes to my mind. This feeling has strengthened with this film. Of course, the clothes produced there are original and the soil colors are dominant. So, the orange flowers which decorate the garden during the wedding ceremony strengthens this impression. The reason why I mentioned all these is that everything in the film belongs to the Indian culture, including the names Mira Nair used. It can be easily understood that Mira Nair will continue to transfer the Indian culture to the West with all its rhythm. Additionally, that the uncle from America was send back to his home and the people who had wobbled between Western and Oriental traditions chose their own cultures expresses much for the Indian cinema as regards the present traditions.

To the memory of Mehmet Emin Toprak

Turkish cinema, as in the whole Europe, encountered a very deep crisis at the beginning of 90s. While Hollywood films’ box offices were becoming more successful with the interest of the young generations which are grown up by neo liberal values in 80s and impact of the cultural imperialism, the audience of the local cinema was decreasing dramatically. The solution was very simple, to fight against Hollywood with its weapon which created a very clear distinction in Turkish cinema. At one side were the commercial films which became successful with the reproduction of the techniques and dramatic structure of the American cinema. These films are only for the local market.

On the other side a new generation of the filmmakers began to shoot their films with their own way of doing cinema which is more universal compared to the commercial films. Different from the earlier directors they were prolific and successful in telling their own stories. It is not easy to categorize these films – and I will not choose a simple solution like calling them “new Turkish cinema” – but some common characteristics may be drawn. First of all most of the new films are minimalist in the means of not only budget but also the staff of the film. Some of the directors like Nuri Bilge Ceylan act also in their own films. Second, in contrary to the growing tension in the society the stories of those films are told in a very humanistic way which is also true for the political films. I believe even the films with most brutal subjects stress on humanism metaphorically. Third, although Yilmaz Güney is still the main reference for the Turkish cinema, the references for the new filmmakers are mostly from abroad, directors like Ozu, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Kiarostami or writers like Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. Finally, while the interest of the local audience for new Turkish films decreases because of the Hollywood domination in the market, the international popularity of the films is increasing gradually.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the most well known and successful representative of this new generation. Before his cinema career Nuri Bilge Ceylan was a professional photographer. “Because I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do more. I studied electrical engineering, but after university I didn’t want to work as an engineer. I was a photographer too, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So to decide – which is the most difficult thing in life – I started travelling. …I came across Polanski’s autobiography Roman. And it fired me up, this life that started out in the ghetto but changed a great deal, and I began to think: Maybe I could go into filmmaking. So I started reading books about the technical side of cinematography. And that’s how I decided to become a filmmaker. I came back to London, this time to study at film school. But it was very expensive, so I went back to Turkey and studied there for two years instead. But after that it took another ten years to get started – because starting out is the most difficult thing of all. Everything about it seems hard – human relationships, organisations…”(1)

He made his first film Cocoon in 1995 which was a short. After Cocoon he made four feature films. The Small Town (1995) was in the “Official Selection” section of the Berlinale. Clouds of May (1999) was chosen for the Berlinale competition. Distant (2002) and Climates (2006) were both at the Cannes Film Festival competition. Distant is the most powerful product of his cinema which was awarded with “grand prix” and best actor prizes in Cannes. The grand prix for Distant was a milestone for the international popularity and prestige of the Turkish cinema. Nuri Bilge Ceylan dedicated this award particularly to Yilmaz Güney who was able to take the same prize 20 years ago.

In fact this remembrance was nothing more but a kind of salutation of the preceding generations of Turkish filmmakers. Because Ceylan’s minimalist cinema is far from the great political films of Güney, which portrayed the distressing transformation of Turkish society in the 70s. Nevertheless he found a significant way to tell his own stories and the roots of his cinema leans elsewhere. “I am the sum of everything that has influenced me in my life; my observations, my own life, other films, everything. Tarkovsky is one of the filmmakers that have influenced me but even more than Tarkovsky I would cite Ozu; not only with his films but also with his decisions. As a filmmaker he became more and more sophisticated and in his final films he reduced things such as camera movements to the bare minimum. The subject matter also narrowed and this kind of attitude especially influenced me. Also, I think Ozu has a great amount of compassion for his characters and for people in general.”(2)

Ceylan does not like to work with a crowded crew and anxious to organise people on set which determined his style. He writes his own scripts, uses the camera himself, does the editing and even he played the main role in Climates. His films are made by a minimalist way. He does not like to make expensive attractions with the camera that helps to create a still atmosphere. Most of the actors, especially that play main roles, are amateurs. They are relatives, acquaintances or friends of the director.

The stories of Ceylan depict both the simple life of the countryman with his worries about the future and the life, and the loneliness and alienation of the middle class. Confrontation of those two main characters forms the tension. The middle class member either tries to exploit the country people (Clouds of May) or avoid them (Distant) if they are not useful for him.

Muzaffer Özdemir and Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Ceylan’s stories flow from the province through Istanbul. All four feature films are connected to each other only the focus changes. The Small Town portraits province of Turkey. The main character is young Saffet (Mehmet Emin Toprak) who tries to build himself a future but the opportunities in a small town are very limited. Although everyday routine is repeating itself continuously he likes to live in this town. He understood that he was somehow connected to that small place and the people of his town when he went to the military service. With his expectations, plans about the future, Saffet represents the progressive side of humanity while the members of his family are all done what they wanted to do in life and they have already started to live in the past. And of course the family is against the Saffet’s plans which identify a conflict between generations. Beside Saffet and elder representatives of the family the film discloses also the children of the family and the primary school of the town that are naïve, curious and at the exploring phase of the life.

In the Clouds of May a new character is included in the story, the director that lives in the big city and comes to make his film to the small town. Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir) is very eager to shoot the film of his childhood and ignores everybody. He shoots his parents’ bedroom secretly, lies to Saffet who wants to leave the town for a better work in the big city and promises to help him in Istanbul. Saffet, as in The Small Town, works as an assistant to Muzaffer voluntarily and represents the countryman who wants more than the province offers to him but this time he is more direct and simple which indicates the difference between two films. The Small Town was the film about the childhood of Nuri Bilge Ceylan who certainly wanted to leave once upon a time like Saffet and because it is a film of the past it is composed of the mixture of the memories and the books –e.g. literature- Ceylan read. That’s why it is more literary. On the other hand Clouds of May is a film about present day dialogues are more direct and local. Saffet no more speaks like a character from Chekhov’s stories.

Muzaffer exploits everyone in the small town and forgets immediately his commitments after he finishes his film. Introduction of the Muzaffer as a middle class member from a big city connects the story to the third film, Distant in which we will know him better. What makes the distant so successful is beside the maturing cinematographic style of Ceylan the confrontation of two main characters in first two films the young man from the rural area and the middle class member of the metropolitan. This time their names are Yusuf and Mahmut respectively. In the search of better economic conditions and future Yusuf comes to Istanbul from the small town and as the many immigrants do in Turkey he stays with his relative Mahmut. Mahmut, who is a photographer and lost his desire against life facing a typical middle class situation, is very reluctant to staying with his visitor. The conflict is very clear: Saffet has desires, searches a job at a ship to go overseas, and follows a young girl in search of a relationship on the other hand Mahmut experience a kind of depression. He tries to avoid people to live in his nutshell without doing anything. Despite the endeavours of Yusuf, Mahmut refuses to build a relationship and Yusuf suddenly leaves the life of Mahmut as he came.

The Climates focuses on Muzaffer/Mahmut, the middle class character. This time he is called Isa who has problems with his girlfriend, Bahar and is living a middle age depression. In a summertime vacation we understand that their relationship come at point that they can’t bare to each other. They separate but the life does not offer much to Isa who goes through a pathetic relationship with an old friend and tries to turn back to Bahar. It is interesting to see Climates to witness the evolution of his cinematography and stories but I do not take Climates as powerful as the other films for two reasons. First when the other side eliminated from the story that is build on the loneliness and alienation of the middle class man lost its multi-tier, multi dimensional structure. Second this character has a lot of parts from the director’s life which probably keeps the director from putting a distance in-between. This kind of films, like the films of Antonioni or Buñuel, become interesting if the filmmaker stays away distant from the middle class where he can observe them clearly, and sarcastically and heavily criticise the little bourgeois conformism.

Ceylan likes to stroll around with his camera and follow his characters to unveil the relationship of the man and the nature. From his short to last film nature plays a crucial role for his cinematography. The viewer is invited to observe the nature by the camera and with the characters. Even in the first film Cocoon, trees, fields and river are shown. Especially the flow of the water is depicted in a very Tarkosvkian way. In the following films the director found his personal way of shooting the nature. The same elements appear again in The Small Town at the background of the story. While melancholy is the dominant feeling in the atmosphere of The Small Town and the short film, Clouds of May has the joy and the anxiety of the creativity at the same time. It is a film about making of The Small Town and in contrast to the first two films it was shot in colour and during the spring. Melancholy appears again in Distant while we walk through the streets of Istanbul covered with snow behind Yusuf, and share his worries about life and future. In the last movie, Climates, nature plays more important role at a visual level but does not directly affects the characters, instead it stays separated from the mood of the protagonists as we compare with the previous films. But as the name of the film indicates, Climates has images from different seasons of the year. Nuri Bilge Ceylan is not in the search of displaying the beauty of the nature or image on the contrary he tries to show inner dialectics (the endless cycles of the nature against the timeline of the shoots) and outer dialectics (the expectations, worries, feelings of the man against nature) by visual means.

One powerful aspect which contributes to the realism of the Ceylan’s cinema is his actors. He uses the advantage of the small crew to relax his actors as much as possible and make them to perform naturally. He started to use his family and acquaintances in his short film till the Climates. His father M. Emin Ceylan and mother Fatma Ceylan take parts in each film and show a very brilliant performance. In climates the very lively moment of the film was when the father appears with a woollen hat on his head. The young guy from the small town is played by Mehmet Emin Toprak who is a relative of director and was actually living in the Ceylan’s hometown in the first three features he developed his natural performance film by film. Unfortunately we lost him in a traffic accident which was like a tragic joke resembling his disappear at the end of Distant. As an amateur became one of the most important actors of modern Turkish cinema. The partner of Mehmet Emin Toprak in Clouds of May and Distant was Muzaffer Özdemir who played the mad person of the village in the Small Town is also not a professional actor. He is an architect and he made equally successful career with Toprak. That’s why they both took the best actor award in Cannes competition for their performance in Distant. Muzaffer Özdemir reflected both the malicious intention against the people of the town in Clouds of May and the cold, lonely and distant protagonist of the Distant, and he exposed very well the underestimating manner of the both characters against the others.

Ceylan became most important figure of the Turkish cinema both locally and internationally after Yilmaz Güney. With his evolving style of cinematography he invented a new kind of realism which is authentic and original but has references to the masters of the cinema also. His work give courage to the new coming directors indicating that cinema is not only money, with little you have the potential to do much. His focus smoothly moved from past to today, rural to urban life as the story of the Turkish people in last 50 years. Nuri Ceylan completed first period of his work and this new expansion to the urban life has its own stories that are waiting to be told.

Notes

(Published by Thessaloniki Film Festival / Balkan Survey in 2006)

1) Beyond the Clouds: An Interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Geoff Andrew, Senses of Cinema (Australia), June 2004

2) A Quick Chat with Nuri Bilge Ceylan / Jason Wood, Kamera (UK), May 2004

Yasujiro Ozu is the one of the most widely known Japanese film directors and yet the essential elements in his films create maybe the most local style in the eastern cinema. This is the key to the fundamental tension present in Ozu’s complete corpus: He tells his unimposing stories on middle class Japanese characters with a technique adapted from the traditional Japanese culture: Zen, tea-ceremony, kabuki are most important influences construing the elements of his film language. However, through the most Japanese elements, Ozu’s films are stories about the universal human condition and maybe they even transcend it. My aim in this assignment is to take a closer look to the narrative and structure of an “Ozuan” cinema through his most well known movie “Tokyo Story”. This inquiry shall bring us first of all to answer the question “what is it that makes the movie so touching and remarkable for the non-Japanese, in particular western viewer despite its non-dramatic narrative and sharply eastern style?”

The process that the western spectator is going through when faced with Ozu’s taciturn character is what Paul Schrader calls “extracting the universal from the particular”. According to Schrader, Ozu’s films are made according to a “transcendental” style which exceeds the experience, transcending the immanent by definition. For Schrader it is the art form most near to the religion, based on a necessary structured, ritual-like constituted out of repetitions and harmony to express “the Transcendent in the human mirror”. What he sees as the conditions for the transcendental style in Ozu, I mark it as the source of the seemingly contradiction in Ozu’s cinema in general and Tokyo Story in Particular: creating a distance to the peculiarity of the characters and the undermining of the insistence on the reality of the representations with a cinema of mise-en-scène (with limited field of vision and a certain amount of primitiveness) arise from the adaptation of the Japanese understanding of art and therefore they are supposed to be the foreign elements to a the western eye. But these are the very elements that support a general inquiry of the universal human soul as such.

Tokyo story flows from the same source with most of Ozu’s movies. It is based on the story of a Japanese family of après-guerre generation in the rapid process of modernization. The process is painful since it must deal with the difficulty of cultural change but beyond that it is the modernization of a generation that has experienced the painful, destructive face of the world war two. Modernization in the sense of an adaptation to the western civilization is challenged by the ugly side of the west, the creator of the atomic bomb. The main tension is between the individualist west and the traditional Japanese family. The western materialism is for Ozu always a threat to the Japanese family grounded on the tacit communication of the members.

The movie runs in a simple narrative with a moderate climate and no surprises ever. This is mocked by Bordwell as:

It is as if stylistic organization becomes prominent only if the themes are so banal as to leave criticism little to interpret. (p.282)

An elderly couple visits their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the children pack them off to a noisy resort of spa. Returning to Tokyo, the old woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realize they are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can. By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: “Be kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach beyond the grave.” The last sequence is of the old man alone in his seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.

What creates the movie is beyond the plot: the combination of the stylistic features peculiar to Ozu with the touching details spread to the whole story. The first apparent characteristic of the film is its taciturn development. The destroyed ties between the parents and the children do not cause this silence, since the traditional Japanese family is itself foreign to verbal communication. So the non-verbal development of the narrative is the first sign of the dominance of traditional culture over Ozu’s style. This has the result that the not self-expressive characters become anonymous as “any family”, as the example of the universal family.

The second point is Ozu’s usual technical choice: the camera is located as an invisible Japanese guest sitting on the traditional tatami, three feet above the ground. But as pointed out in Bordwell’s article, Ozu maintains this choice even for outdoor shootings. So the camera cannot be truly identified with this invisible witness. This serves for a limited field of vision in total accordance with the two dimensional painting tradition of the east. In the entire movie there is one single, imperceptible movement of the camera: no pan, no zoom, no dolly. Between the indoor settings with little exception the only place where the narrative develops, there is a pause with an outdoor shooting of a landscape or an irrelevant work of architecture. For the use of this trademark of Ozu, I agree with Schrader’s view: they serve as mu – the concept of negation and void in the painting and gardening. Traditionally this void is not to underline the motive (action in this case) but the action underlies the mu. This is the transcendence in Ozu’s films: his aim is to deliver the spectator to the spiritual silence he can arrive at only by transcending the little human actions. And in order to draw attention to the non-communicable essence of life, Ozu chooses minor events in the plot. There is no drama, but bitterness and this bitterness is created by irony: as in the example of the mother staying overnight in the house of her widowed daughter-in-law, saying: “What a treat to sleep in my dead son’s bed.” Irony is the key to the transcendence.

The minority of events support the main link that connects Tokyo Story to the culture of Zen. In tokyo syory, every action takes place very slowly creating absolute no sense of a development in the spectator; it is only simple steps of the daily life following each other. Ozu even diminishes the dramatic effect of happenings like death shifting the climax of the movie to a very uneventful point in the story: The widowed daughter-law bursts into tears because of an ethical conflict in her heart, which the viewer is not much informed from except the point that she is disappointed from the common despair, absurdity and cruelness of life. Zen as a religious-philosophical activity is based on these unimportant commonplace activities. Like Schrader point out, it makes no distinction between the fine and manual arts, in fact Ozu is usually seen (and wanted himself to be seen) as a craftsman rather than artist. Every shot he uses in the movie seems to be a variant of another or even a repetition some shot from a previous movie, however for Ozu this is the source of authenticity. His style as a director seems to be only as a means for Zen to be at work and the humble style of the movie no matter how exactly defined and worked on draws no attention to any specialized human presence: not to the peculiar characters and not to Ozu himself, but only to the people of the universe.

Schrader uses the dichotomy between “primitive” and “classical” as the keyword towards an interpretation of his art; the basic dichotomy manifests itself in sub-dichotomies: irrationalism vs. rationalism, repetition vs. variation, sacred vs. profane, two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional, tradition vs. experiment and anonymity vs. individualization. This primitiveness doesn’t refer to an ancient phenomenon, although it has roots in the far history of humanity this is not an attitude left behind but on the contrary, it is a key to understand the situation of the man in the devastating nineteenth century. What Ozu is trying to establish in the hard-flowing time of Tokyo’s everyday life is the human transcendence resisting the affects of temporality. We can read this in the eyes of the old couple: filled with wisdom, irony, melancholy, tranquility and disappointment but hope and acceptance at the same time.

The rejection of the temporality can be detected from the fact that there is no past and no history efficient in the narrative. Everything happens and passes simply by; if it would be a play of Shakespeare we would have to face at least the ghost of the son who died in the war. But we don’t. Instead there is the general bitterness caused by the war. Again this is probably related to the transcendental elements based on the Zen culture, and again this is what makes the story for the spectator any story as such.

Tokyo Story is an example perfectly characterizing Ozu’s world, but there is more. It also characterizes our world and the international reputation of the film is more than normal, as expected as any climax in one of his plots.

References:

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Wisconsin: Routledge. 1986.

Paul Schrader. Transcendental style in film : Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1972.

“A film cannot resolve the social and political issues it raises. Instead it records to what extent those questions remain unresolved, their difficulty, misunderstanding, conflict, lack of a solution and sometimes their impossibility.”

Alejandra Riera, Maquetas-sin-cualidad, 2004.

“The works I have been producing can be viewed in general as different attempts to deal creatively with cultural difference (the differences both between cultures and within a culture). They seek to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, while inviting the viewer to reflect on the conventional relation between supplier and consumer in media production and spectatorship.”

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Identity and Representation,1996.

The film and video programme Prologue. Towards experimental ethnographies which we present in this year’s Barcelona International Women’s Film Festival, has its origin in meditations on geopolitical aesthetics, gender and globalisation which different audio-visual narrators have been producing in localised social and cultural contexts since the Eighties. Following on from the line of argument established in last year’s programme, this year the cycle continues its interest in recent documentary accounts that continue to look at the politicisation of gender narratives and the construction of subjectivities. Filmmakers Berke Bas, Hito Steyerl, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tracey Moffat, Sally Gutierrez, Caecilia Tripp and Lisl Ponger identify the new global conditions in which representations on class, race and gender are shown, through the creation of visual documents.

Prologue. Towards experimental ethnographies is part of a wider research project we are carrying out on the subject of documentary practices, from different locations and perspectives, with regard to a series of gender narratives that question the actual forms of representation and diffusion with which they work. Our interest lies in exploring and extending the idea of experimental ethnography proposed by Catherine Russell(1) based on the visual document. This narrative and research strategy extends through an itinerary of devices and activities that will take place over the coming months.

The programme of films in the festival is complemented, on the one hand, by a workshop run by the visual artist Sally Gutiérrez. Taking her own documentaries as a starting point, the filmmaker will focus the workshop on ways of inhabiting the urban environment, and on the various resistance strategies its inhabitants employ – particularly women – in between the gaps left by multiple global systems that are never completely controlled. On the other hand, and as its title indicates, this year the programme of films has been designed to act as a prologue to the exhibition Working Documents, which will take place at the La Virreina-Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona . It also establishes a direct link with the projection-debate coordinated by the artist Sandra Schäfer on the 13th June at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona on gender and representation policies in Afghan cinema.

The case study that gave rise to Working Documents as an itinerary of the visual document is found in the material filmed by Maya Deren between 1947 and 1954 on life and ritual in Tahiti, which led to part of the film “Divine Horsemen: the living gods of Haiti”. Deren starts to develop her theory of film in articles like “Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film” and “Cinema as an Art Form” (1946). In these, she emphasises the need to develop cinema as an art of context, endowing it with process, in contrast to the forms of spectacle and consumer culture, both elitist and popular, which are currently embodied by the Hollywood narrative, and which today are perpetuated in the focus of narrative as a process of narrative statement, conflict and resolution.

Maya Deren’s specific process-based ethnographic writing enables us to create a trans-historic link with a new type of documentary-making which emerges in the Eighties, and which brings with it the need to create visual documents that go beyond the different classical formats in which a narrative is transformed into a documentary. This urgent perspective of an immediate reality represents a paradigmatic change in ethnographic cinema, and imposes itself over the supposedly neutral notion of direct cinema and the direct account of an event, as shown in the “cinéma vérité” of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in “Chronique d’un été” (1961). In contrast, the feminist ethnography we present here offers a perspective on the idea of “experimental ethnographies” in which antagonistic bio-political practices of the visual document would be located.

The deconstruction, image of appropriation, staging and post-production of the narrative are clear symptoms of the post-capital era in which the image-document becomes the reading of social contexts. The documentary methods and examples we are screening act as spaces for mediation between the setting prior to the document’s creation and its launch into circulation, questioning the social context in which the images are read and interpreted. As a result the focus of interest of these films moves from the representation of the documentary narrative to the question of how the narratives inscribe themselves in the social and physical context, and how in turn they place themselves at the service of the subjectivities they inhabit.

The first part of Prologue. Towards experimental ethnographies includes a pioneering work in terms of the thought of the Eighties, which explores the cartography mapped out by “women in the developing world”: the film Reassemblage by the filmmaker of Vietnamese origin Trin T. Minha-ha integrates the post-colonial vision from a position that is critical of the cultural subject. Thus the shooting of the documentary itself becomes a reflection on the traditional ethnographical discourse in terms of who speaks, who films and how the subject situated on the other side of the camera is represented. In the film from Turkey “In Transit” (2005) and the film from the Philippines “Nazareno Negro” (2007), Berke Bas and Sally Gutiérrez reflect, from different contemporary situations, on the documentary perspective established by Trin T. Minha-ha, which is defined by the “outside in – inside out” nature of her position, enabling us to cross and enter into dialogue with the environment and its witnesses by bringing together multiple locations that locate us before a reflexive visual ethnography.

The second part features a variety of narratives constructed between fiction and the visual document, which break the established order of the symbolic to question the issue of cultural translation and to demolish the hegemonic vision of the oral and written tradition. Thus we recover the idea that Hito Steyerl raised in her text The Politics of Truth – Documentarism in the Art Field (2) , which is that in its function of structuring and acting upon the social arena the documentary adopts bio-political functions. So action through symbolic products can essentially develop in the field of culture, and it is there that mechanisms of diffusion will have to be built which will enable a new form of seeing and contributing to the uncovering of deception by the media hegemony.

The selected narratives of gender establish an interplay of scenic representations which combine the strategy of the archive, the autobiographical narrative and the dissemination of images in the film “Lovely Andrea” by Hito Steyerl (2007). The symbolic translation of the cultural imagination in cinema, photography, dance, theatre, music and literature can clearly be seen critically in the film “Imago Mundi” by Lisl Ponger (2007). The resources of the theatrical set that the film-maker Tracey Moffat uses in Nice Coloured Girls (1987) deconstructs ethnographic films through the use of subtitles, and avoids the cliché of so-called realist reconstructions. This system of trans-cultural exchange is centred on the idea of the translation of local and global imaginations, as the film-palimpsest My Curaçao (2005) by Caecilia Tripp argues.

Seen overall, this selection of gender narratives represents the mediation, cultural agency and documentation of activist positions in the form of essays on the global representations that are today narrated to us.

(1)Russell, Catherine: Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1999.

(2) Steyerl, Hito: “The Politics of Truth –Documentarism in the Art Field”, in Vít Havránek, Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Bettina Steinbrügge (eds.): The Need to Document . Zurich: IRP Ringier, 2005.

Yeni Film, No.16, Nov. 2008

TOTAL WORK (1)

The socio-political events of 1968 caused an impact in the West, thanks to the liberation movements, which brought with them an understanding of the particularity, the difference and the specificity of the social and intellectual aspects that have defined postmodern thought. These changes have been projected into the dynamics of post-industrial society through the consolidation of service industries, on the one hand, and the application and use of new communication technologies, on the other. Within the sphere of production, the Fordist model, traditionally linked to the factory structure, to the assembly line, and determined by fixed units of time, place and action, has been succeeded by what is known as “immaterial work”, which appears as the node in the recent production/consumption relation.

The post-Fordist production model implies, then, that the traditional division between productive and reproductive work, between exchange-value and use-value, has undergone a process of flexibilisation, causing most of the capacities, until recently considered as pertaining solely to our private apace ad our time, to now become directly productive factors.

This redefinition of the concept of work has been analysed from the perspectives of different critical theories, including feminism which has assimilated it into “female work”. Thus, the affective, relational, creative, cognitive and symbolic qualities, which had been characteristic of reproductive activities carried out above all by women, are now a vital part of the productive process and increasingly demanded of the workforce.

To these developments, which have taken place in the global economy in past decades, we must add the welfare crisis and the privatisation of public services, increased unemployment and the resulting migratory flow. All this has accelerated the process of precarisation among citizens, submitted to a working system characterised by flexible working hours, temporary contracts, extensive workdays, work at home, unpaid holidays, and so on. These working conditions have led to a modification and a reinforcement of already existing social and economic hierarchies that have particularly affected those groups which are least favoured, most notably women, one of the most hard hit collectives.

The exhibition proposal that we present under the title Total Work offers a reflection on the shift from material work to immaterial work (although both still coexist and need each other) within the context of economic globalisation. It focuses its analysis on two processes: the feminisation of the workforce, a historical phenomenon that has grown in recent decades in response to labour deregulation, and the feminisation of poverty, which appears to find its most visible face in what are known as “alternative global circuits”-often transnational territories – but also in the big cities as a consequence of new market conditions.

Furthermore, as a topic secondary to the central thrust of this project, we include a discussion that addresses the sphere of artistic production, the qualities of which have also been reappropiated and made profitable by the capitalist market.

Thus, as cultural producers devoted to the construction and criticism of representation, and no strangers to job precariousness, we consider it to be of vital importance to place ourselves within the production system, to know what our situation is as consumers and as generators of symbolic and economic gains. Out of this conviction, Total Work approaches precariousness as a territory for investigation and as a way of life. Not as victimisation, exclusion or isolation, but rather as a place of political action and collective structuralisation.

We therefore propose a parallel reading of certain feminist discourses and strategies of representation so as to develop a politisation of our practice through symbolic production. This will help us to reveal other forms of visibility and resistance to what has been termed “female social precariousness”.

The proposals by Maria Ruido and Ursula Biemann from different perspectives (local and transnational) and approximations, and beyond mere documentation of a given reality, enter the labour world to produce, through word and image, a counter-geography of precariousness based on histories and subjective experiences.

Hence Biemann sets out a mapping of the sex trade in the information era, which incorporates gender, ethnicity and class variables, to explore, through different female voices, the routes these women follow towards transnational spaces, their conditions of life and work. Maria Ruido examines the conditions of immaterial work and the experience of precariousness in our lives, by reviewing, on the one hand, the antagonistic strategies of image production, and on the other, certain modes and spaces for self-management of groups of women striving for a transformation of labour conditions, inasmuch as they constitute venues for new forms of collective sociality and production.

Total Work has opted to exhibit a breakdown of the oeuvre of each artist which materialises through a dual process of induction and deduction. While Biemann follows a reorganisation process based on the deconstruction of her own filmed material in order to create a proposal that she has termed “World Sex Work Archive” –in other words a file assembled from interviews with different women, female sex workers and activists (partially show in Total Work)-, Maria Ruido combines different media (texts, films, slides and interviews) accumulated in the months leading up to the exhibition and those that she will add during the two months of its duration, using appropriation and register to underscore, through a subjective narration, the possibility of a plural history generated by personal experiences.

In this way, we have employed the archive as a method of ordering and organising knowledge and reality, so as to politically rethink and reorganise certain visual and conceptual orders. We could speak of a counter-archive as an open, dismountable, subjective and partial device, one that advances and rewinds –as a work involving a continuum of memory and re-elaboration demands- which is revealed as a potential way of establishing other more complex forms of representation of reality and other relation modes between the author and producer, on the one hand, and the visiting public on the other, which would reduce the distances existing between the two.

Total Work is set out in a discursive way based on a dynamic relation among artists, materials and their interaction with space, plus those elements that the different participating agents will contribute with their talks and presentations in the course of the exhibition. Thus, tools are suggested to the spectator for a critical reading, providing the means for him/her to appropriate this setting of work onwork.

(1)An exhibition (Barcelona, October 15 – December 7, 2003) curated by Montse Romaní in collaboration with artists Maria Ruido and Ursula Biemann.

About Writer: Montse Romani is a cultural producer based in Barcelona (Spain), with a major focus on curating and writing. She has worked extensively in the fields of post-Fordist work-conditions, self-organized cultural practices, the transformations of urban spaces, and visual culture. She was curator of several exhibitions, including Non Place Urban Realm (1999), Imaginando Identidades [Imagining Identities], (2000), Memòria Urbana i Espectacle [Urban Memory and the Spectacle] (2001), Total Work (2003), Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent (with Núria Enguita and Jorge Luis Marzo) (2004), What the hell does music have to do with industry and feminism in an art centre? (with Laurence Rassel/Constant) (2005). As a programmer, she collaborates with the International Women’s Film Festival, Barcelona since 2003. Is member of the artist group El Sueño Colectivo [The Collective Dream], with which she produced the video-essay Work Narratives (2005).

Yeni Film, No. 16, Nov. 2008

Mocumentaries can be considered as attempts at challenging the prevalent assumption of “seeing is believing”. Up until the mocumentary tradition, I think that in most of the documentaries we could talk about some kind of a quest for truth and objectivity, obviously mostly in expository mode, but also in observational mode etc. The documentaries having such a quest generally have a tendency of taking camera as an instrument which never lies. These assumptions remind me of three divergent schools of documentary; Kino-pravda of Dziga Vertov’s, realist school of John Grierson and the American Direct Cinema. Even though what these traditions understand from objectivity is very distinct from one another, in their styles we can talk about a scientific manner towards the world that they shoot. On the contrary to these traditions, mocumentaries can be said to be anti-scientific and in this tradition one can talk about a certain distance to this quest for objectivity. However, this is not to say that in these documentaries we cannot talk about truth. Rather truth is taken as contextual which depends on decisions and/or preferences.

This issue brings us to another interrelated issue of the presence of the filmmaker. On the contrary to the traditions mentioned above such as Griersonian school or the Direct Cinema Movement in which there is no trace of the filmmaker, in the mocumentaries such as Far From Poland (Jill Godmillow, 1984), the filmmaker is present to the fullest extent. In that sense, the point where the filmmaker stands gains an explicit importance and the quest for a purified and objective position towards the world is problematized once more. Rather than objectivity or universalism, multivocality and reflexivity become the basis of these documentaries. It can be pointed out that multiple voices, even the voice of the filmmaker is heard in Far From Poland.

In most of the documentaries coming before this tradition, there is the tendency of ignoring the process of documentary making. Even though there are instances of reflexivity in the early documentaries, for example in the Man with a Movie Camera, we cannot talk about a ‘reflexive’ stance in the proper sense of the word. I think that this is because even though Vertov situates himself in his film, he is still there as an independent ‘objective’ researcher. What differentiates the reflexive mode from the early modes of documentary the most is that, rather than seeing documentary as a means to measurement and observation, it is taken as an interpretative medium and accordingly its main aim is to interpret the daily life. In that sense relating the film itself with what is done behind the camera is an important step in order to turn the documentary to an interpretative medium rather than a medium for measurement. In that sense with this tradition the process of the film as a whole could be observed by the audience for the first time. For instance, in Far From Poland before we get into the depths of the film, we have a chance to see the filmmaker’s desk, her board and other material she uses for her film. As far as I am concerned, this makes the audience feel themselves comfortable and feel as if she is a human-being like them unlike other traditions of documentaries in which you feel yourself distanced from the filmmaker and the film. In that sense rather than appearing as untidy, these materials made me feel myself ‘at home’ in the film.

For Godard, despite its honesty, the camera loses two fundamental qualities: intelligence and sensibility with the American Direct Cinema. I think that with mocumentary and reflexive mode it regains what it has lost on its way. It regains an ironic attitude towards the world like the surrealist documentaries such as Luis Bunuel’s Los Hurdes. Even though Bunuel’s Los Hurdes was not a deliberately made mocumentary, its making fun of the conventional modes of documentary made it an early instance of mocumentary. However, mocumentaries run the risk of losing this Godardian intelligence and sensibility too if the filmmaker does not avoid to make foolish jokes out of his/her material. Because of their borderline character of documentary and tv shows, they might turn to consumption objects. At those instants they turn out to become one of the useless late night talk shows on TV which you can consume drinking your coca-cola and eating pop-corn. Rather than activating your mind, they might make you laugh in a stupid manner by making fun of people like Okan Bayülgen’s shows. At this point I think that an abuse of ethical issues comes into the picture as well. For example you might go and say that ‘I am going to make a documentary about you’ to someone and ask various questions to her and shoot her real life. But then you make it a mockery about documentary and make fun of that person and situation. This means that there might be an abuse of ethical rights and besides what you make is not consisted of irony or mockery but only contempt.