Early on, Rimini Protokoll adopted the term “experts” for its performers, in the sense of people who are experts in particular experiences, knowledge and skills. It is a concept consciously opposed to amateur theater. Those on stage should not be judged by what they cannot do (in other words, acting) but should instead be assessed by the reason they are on stage at all. The experts decided the order the evening would follow, which themes would be cut short or extended, and which characters, texts and spaces were created. In this way, the methods usually used to evaluate a theater performance were rendered meaningless.
Technical skill, nuance, depth, imagination: none of these were satisfactory criteria. Charisma, presence? These are deceptive notions in any case, and they are not enough to define the qualities of Rimini’s performers. What someone has experienced or what wonderful stories they bring with them has never really been that important. More often, what was sought for a project was a relatively ordinary biographical trait or piece of professional knowledge the performer possessed, actual experience, a social function, or a particular relationship between these.
In the beginning, Rimini found people interesting above all because of their particular physicality. The first were the elderly ladies in Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp, with their “multiply coded voices” (Kaegi), their slowness and the palpable risk that came with their fragility. They were followed by the restless, energetic and overly eager young men in Shooting Bourbaki. Deadline, a piece about dealing with death; Sabenation, go home and follow the news, about the bankruptcy of the Belgian national airline; Schwarzenbergplatz, a piece about diplomacy; and the model railway world of Mnemopark brought types of work and other areas of interest, in the broadest sense of the word, onto the stage. Wallenstein Eine dokumentarische Inszerıierung (Wallenstein. A Documentary Staging) and Karl Marx. Das Kapital. Erster Band (Karl Marx. Capital. Volume One) are more complex in terms of the nature of their roles: the first dealt with Schiller’s thematic motifs and characters, the second with the various effects of economic theory and philosophy on private lives.
Although there was no actual list of functions, roles or types of performers that had to be present, it was clear that Wallenstein would have been incomplete without certain themes (failure, betrayal, morality, war). In Sabenation, the absence of a real airline pilot was glaring. In the end, the role was played by a man who would have loved nothing more than to fly commercial aircraft but, because one of his legs was shorter than the other, was limited to amateur flying. “He sat there telling anecdote after anecdote, and without realizing it he changed the whole cast and outshone all the other pilots.” (Wetzel) Similarly, the absence of a judge (a role taken on by the audience) created a gap in Zeugen. Ein Strajkammerspiel (Witnesses. A Criminal Court Play). Ultimately, it was the experts who were available who determined the concept.
So much so that when Rimini began work on Urauffuhrung: Der Besuch deralten Dame (Premiere: The Visit), which used contemporary witnesses to reenact a real historical event (the legendary premiere of Dürrenmatt’s play fifty years earlier), the lack of experts led them to consider keeping people off the stage entirely. Instead, they moved silhouettes made from original photographs across the stage in time with voices coming from offstage. But then some suitable performers were found, and the paper figures were demoted to the status of props.
Other projects deliberately set the threshold for selecting experts as low as possible: for Deutschland 2, people were sought to represent every member of the German parliament. In total, 237 experts were reached; anyone who could grasp the idea was admitted to the play. Similarly, Call Cutta, a mobile-phone audio tour controlled from a call center in India, was open to anyone who met the job criteria. “Above all, we had to avoid misunderstandings. Thirty highly motivated young Indians came to the first two castings, and we basically had to explain to them that we were offering no prospects of promotion or bonuses if they landed any job.” (Wetzel). Likewise, 1oo% Berlin, which presented a demographic cross-section of Berlin in January 2008 to launch the Hebbel Theater’s centenary celebrations, did not aim to find special connections between different groups. “Instead, people were to be lined up one after another like pearls on a string; everyone knew why they were there, but they would be arranged without any direct relationship to one another.” (Wetzel) As in Midnight Special Agency in Brussels, the theater was used as a tool to bring to the fore people who would otherwise at most be members of the audience, and often not even that. Rather than adding further layers of narrative, these portraits simply frame what is already there.
The number of characters they used in their stage productions increased considerably over the years. In 2000, Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp featured four people; the 2007 Uraufführung featured 21. The team around the directors expanded to include dramaturgs, set designers, assistants, company managers, interns… For a while, casting was organized by others, who placed the advertisements and spoke with candidates on the phone. “That really changed the work. Before, the way we approached people and how we found them somehow became part of the text. That way we had some material even before the first meeting.” (Haug) That said, it is no longer even necessary for all the Riminis involved in a project to be present at casting.
At the same time, the growing professionalism of the casting process and, even more noticeably, Rimini Protokoll’s rising profile also increased the number of experts to choose from. The foundations of the trust that outsiders placed in the directors were strengthened by invitations from the Berliner Theatertreffen and the Mülheimer Stücke festival. After all, Rimini’s experts are (even if they are theatergoers) conservative theatergoers. Some of the performers in Uraufführung, as season-ticket holders of the Züricher Schauspielhaus, had passionately opposed Christoph Marthaler’s Artistic Dictatorship.
Fame in the German-speaking world does not mean much beyond its borders. This did not change much, especially when Stefan Kaegi worked in South America and Eastern Europe. The infrastructure was generally kept smaller, and neither Rimini Protokoll nor the Goethe-Institut paid Argentinian porters, Bulgarian truck drivers or Brazilian police officers very much. The job offer takes the form of a newspaper ad and is nothing more than an opportunity to scrape by. “Even so, or perhaps for that very reason, castings often ended in absurd scenes of relief when applicants realized that something else was going on. In Córdoba, the doormen in Torero Portero, all of whom thought a caretaker was being sought for the theater, immediately formed a brotherhood through their own life stories, which resulted in the spontaneous founding of a kind of union of unemployed doormen.” (Kaegi) During preparations for the Matraca Catraca bus tour, rumors began to spread in the theater scene of Salvador da Bahia that a foreign director had come to town. Kaegi, who had lived in Brazil for a time in his youth and speaks fluent Portuguese and Spanish, had to explain to the assembled actors that he was looking for someone with ten years’ experience as a bus conductor.
Ultimately, the real motivation for taking part as an expert in a Rimini production is the same in Western Europe as everywhere else. Rather than a particular interest in new, contemporary forms of theater or a desire for art, that motivation is the chance to tell one’s own story. This is as true for the conservative politician Sven-Joachim Otto in Wallenstein, who had the courage to appear on the stage of an institution whose budget he wanted to cut as part of his own election campaign, as it is for the police officers in the Police Training Opera in Caracas or in Chácara Paraíso in São Paulo. “At last, for once, to be understood as a police officer without being immediately met with hatred.” (Kaegi) What is at stake is a certain freedom of speech that no one wants to take official responsibility for, yet which everyone (even superiors) accepts. Unofficially and privately, everyone could do whatever they wanted. “That said, what a Brazilian police officer is or is not allowed to do when off duty is a fog of unwritten rules.” (Kaegi) To protect the participants, Stefan Kaegi and his Argentinian co-director, the writer Lola Arias, allowed the participants to remain partly anonymous, or even entirely hidden behind frosted glass. Police officers in a witness protection program.
The Theater of Rimini Protokoll
Translated into English by Daniel Belasco Rogers, Ehren Fordyce, Geoffrey Garrison, Mat Hand, Sophia New and Walter Suttcliffe. Translated into Turkish by Nahit Evre Uçarcı. This article has been translated and published on the Beykoz Kundura Culture Blog with the permission of Florian Malzacher.
Florian Malzacher is a writer, dramaturg and independent curator of the performing arts. He also served as curatorial advisor to the Ruhrtriennale in 2018–20.
Alexander Verlag Berlin
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
Dramaturgies of Care and Insecurity
The story of Rimini Protokoll
Florian Malzacher
A man steps onto the stage and shows some slides about chickens. He talks about deep-litter systems, key issues in feeding, pest control and slaughter. The audience is bewildered or amused; three or four of them are annoyed. After the hour-long presentation, it is time for questions about poultry farming and about representation in the theater. Yet is the man on the rehearsal stage of the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen really aware that everyone there was expecting something entirely different, namely a real performance rather than a real person? And are the spectators really sure that Mr. Heller is a genuine expert in poultry farming and is not acting? The 1997 piece Peter Heller spricht über Geflügelhaltung (Peter Heller Talks about Poultry Farming) is a candidate for the prototypical origin of Rimini Protokoll’s theater. The idea came about in a student bar in Giessen, around a large table, over beer and schnitzel. Stefan Kaegi, who had just arrived in this small Hessian town from the F+F art school in Zurich, brought along someone who actually kept poultry. In fact, he had come for only six months, just to see whether there was anything to be learned at the institute, which had been founded by Andrzej Wirth in 1982. Because this was the place where René Pollesch, She She Pop, Showcase Beat Le Mot and (some members of) Gob Squad, among others, emerged to challenge or undermine traditional state-subsidized theater, the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung later described it as “the greatest source of mischief in German theater.” The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies is the only university department in the German-speaking world that combines theater theory and practice and devotes itself above all to contemporary and experimental forms of theater, and in this sense it remains unique to this day. In this context, Peter Heller was a quickly produced experiment, a theatrical game designed to irritate those who, through their studies, constantly had to deal with the irritation of theater. It was theatrical ready-made. For Stefan Kaegi and Bernd Ernst (who had arrived in Giessen the same year as Kaegi), it was the first in a series of inquiries into how powerful the black box is as a mechanism of representation, to what extent anything placed inside this box automatically becomes theater, and how the image of the black box is in turn changed by what is placed inside it. Peter Heller was followed by productions staged by Bernd Ernst and Stefan Kaegi featuring a purebred Great Dane and a neurotic ufologist. In 1999, calling themselves Hygiene Heute (Hygiene Today, as opposed to shabby German theater), they produced their first full-length show, Training 747, for the Cutting Edge Festival of the Staatstheater Darmstadt. The piece is a complex and playful story that draws mysterious parallels between two legendary airplane landings: the forced landing of Joseph Beuys’s bomber in World War II and amateur pilot Mathias Rust’s landing near Red Square in Moscow. At this point, their interest in theatrical ready-mades had already given way to a passion for creating complex theatrical events. Rimini’s origins, however, have other precursors as well. Marcus Droß, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, schoolmates from Giessen, had been developing performances since 1995 under the name Ungunstraum – Alles zu seiner Zeit (Unfavorable Space – Everything in Its Time). Above all, these performances served to discard theatrical mechanisms or to lay them bare. In doing so, they also repeatedly brought non-professionals onto the stage as “experts” for particular functions. The trio met on the set of a stage project by the composer and director Heiner Goebbels, who was then a visiting professor at the Institute. The students’ project was based on Kafka’s story fragment The Great Wall of China, and so Ungunstraum’s Stage 1 took us on an imaginary journey from Giessen to Beijing. The group went on to call almost the entire series of related performances and installations from that period stages (Etappen). There was no comprehensible narrative in the work, and indeed almost nothing comprehensible at all. Kafka’s text was replaced by real train connections. The performers, too, disappeared into an installation made of glass panels that could be written on and projected onto, along with all kinds of sound and technical equipment. The very essence of the performer was approached very critically (in such a way that the actor would reveal nothing about himself or herself). “Something had pushed us onto the stage, but then, the whole time we were on stage, we hid ourselves.” (Haug) The name Ungunstraum came from a brochure about China that emphasized “the difficulty of transporting people and goods in a country with extremely unfavorable spaces (Ungunsträume).” Droß, Haug and Wetzel wanted their own ‘unfavorable spaces’ to pinpoint exactly where, compared with other art forms, infrastructure seemed to dominate form and content in the theater. They were suspicious of technical perfection. Their task as performers was to operate and present the lighting and sound equipment, which was placed fully visible on stage, rather than to act themselves. The more elaborate and carefully constructed the settings became, the more unreliable their own appearances on stage became. Following the half-ironic maxim “rehearsing is for cowards,” they wanted to be “professional art amateurs.”
The trap of representation (which is essentially present throughout the entire German theater scene) had to be avoided at all costs, and in Giessen, more than anywhere else, it was regarded as the primary cause of theatrical evil. Anything pleasing, anything that could be accused of trying to “give the audience what it wants,” anything “connected with purely visual effects and surfaces associated with conventional dramaturgy was generally subject to the charge of not thinking.” (Wetzel).
Ungunstraum’s works mostly found their dramatic structure through the use of technical applications and their instructions. In their 1996 piece Piraten: “Piraten” (Pirates: “Pirates”), Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel nailed a box shut around Marcus Droß while an interpreter translated everything that was not said into Czech. In this case, where yet another performer disappeared from view, the main idea was the realization that Droß was a human sound card being installed in a computer according to genuine installation instructions. “If your box is equipped with audiovisual functions, you can install a human equipped with audiovisual plug-in units in your box. […] Most of these humans should be installed by an authorized person in case of damage. If you install the human yourself, you will not be insured against any damage to your box.”
During the same period, Stefan Kaegi, as an art student in Zurich, worked on his own disappearance. Once he wrapped pork sausages around his head; another time he sat in a cupboard for 5 hours and, blowing through a tube, fired small paper balls with text on them at the audience. He also turned himself into a table for 3 hours, or hung suspended in the air above the audience with a typewriter. Unlike Ungunstraum, what mattered to Kaegi was the production of text; he saw himself above all as a writer. Only gradually did he move from the performativity of his texts to the performance of the reading, and from there he became increasingly interested in performance itself. Another reason for this was that his readings were more successful than his literature.
The radio play became an important medium for him, because it allowed him to keep working on performances in which he transformed text live, for example through a simple guitar delay pedal, and then multiplied it. Kugler Der Fall (The Kugler Case) was first published in print in 1998 and later broadcast on radio. The live performances following the radio plays Dagobert (2001) and Glühkäferkomplott (2002) also belong to this series.
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
Ungunstraum’s disappearing performers required stand-ins who could be given specific instructions to carry out on stage. That is why the first experts appeared on stage as early as the 1995 piece 2nd Stage: once again, to the right and left of an installation made up of a great deal of equipment and frosted-glass windows sat two firefighters, whose presence was in fact required on health and safety grounds (and who therefore, in a sense, belonged to the infrastructure), since toward the end of the piece candles would be blown out by bass tones and lit again. Haug, Droß and Wetzel convinced them that they were the fire experts who would carry out this task.
The literal following of instructions on stage (switching off machines, changing projected images, writing on condensation, moving from one piece of equipment to another, stopping a record, rewinding it and letting it go) was also very clearly influenced by performance art and conceptual art. This should not, however, be taken to mean that these acts under any circumstances fell into performance art’s and conceptual art’s trap of creating an aura. Ungunstraum was about indirect and functional actions rather than overt ones, and certainly not about loading reality with symbolism. Using experienced professionals even for small jobs proved a good solution because they were “simply happy to do what they could do rather than wearing that eager Giessen expression on their faces” (Wetzel).
In 1996, Stage: Alibis brought an entire choir to the small Rauischholzhausen castle. The 1998 piece Bei voieviel Luxschalten Wurst und Kraus das Licht ein? (At what brightness do Wurst and Kraus switch on the light?) showed the work that an engineer named Wurst (who appeared on stage under the name Wetzel) had (perhaps) done the previous evening at Frankfurt’s electricity distribution center, and the audience watched him (perhaps) switch on the city’s lights for the last time. He pressed a button and Frankfurt began to glow in the night.
Many of the radical interventions in the theater system, attempted sometimes playfully and sometimes seriously, were the result not only of performance theory and philosophical or artistic speculation but also of pragmatism, in the sense of working with what was at hand. When the first monitors and later the first video projector were purchased, the monitors and then the projector (and after that, sound recordings from the new sound department) began to be used as key elements. If your entire audience consists of fellow students who not only know everything but also watch every production analytically, why not turn the production into an analysis that examines its own materials? If you have no actors other than yourselves, you try to use forms of expression that are not in ordinary actors’ repertoire (as with the rapid-fire speech and screaming René Pollesch used, inspired by John Jesurun, who came to the Institute regularly as a guest teacher), or to place your own technical shortcomings deliberately at the center of your performance (as with She She Pop and Showcase Beat Le Mot), to remove yourself from the performance, as Ungunstraum did, or even to see what happens when you put your neighbors on stage as real people. While Ungunstraum had not yet placed these things at the center of their work and justified their complex experimental designs through practice, Bernd Ernst and Stefan Kaegi concerned themselves with the matter itself and left out of the work anything that might obstruct the point of view. In Kongress der Schwarzfahrer (Congress of Fare Dodgers), staged in Hamburg in 2000, sixty experts drawn from a wide spectrum, ranging from a beggar to an NLP manager and on to an endosymbiosis theorist, presented their knowledge of parasitic systems. Alongside human experts, Hygiene Heute repeatedly brought animals onto the stage, because they were ideal in their complete lack of narrative, psychology and stagecraft. In 2001, at the Tanzquartier Wien dance center, the Congress of Vienna was reenacted with seventy guinea pigs in Europa tanzt (Europe Dances), and the following year a thousand ants were used to create the installation Staat, Ein Terrarium (State, a Terrarium) in Mannheim. “We realized that the only actor we could really rely on was one who needed no rehearsal” (Kaegi). Although the animals did not act out stories, stories could be projected onto them. In addition, the discussions about the animals reflected the metaphors and language used in a discussion about people.
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
In this way, although Hygiene Heute and Ungunstraum moved closer to each other, they did not actually overlap, nor did any great interest in collaboration emerge between them. Helgard Haug had finished her studies many years earlier and since 1997 had been working in Berlin on her own artistic, primarily visual, projects, earning her living as an editor at a theater publisher. Marcus Droß left Giessen in 1998 after his diploma exams. In 1999, when Daniel Wetzel and Stefan Kaegi, over a long night in the Institute’s sound studio, introduced each other to work they had previously known almost nothing about, the Ungunstraum chapter had long since closed. More important than the lists of their previous work were their existing connections, shared ideas and, above all, a real project that both had been developing along parallel lines. Like Haug and Wetzel, Kaegi had planned a project using the senior residence next to the Frankfurter Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Shortly after they applied to the Plateaux festival, a newly founded platform for emerging artists, they were accepted, and work began on their first production in this lineup, Kreuztworträtsel Boxenstopp (Crossword Pit Stop). The piece premiered in November 2000, while Hygiene Heute continued working on its own projects and Haug and Wetzel were working together on the radio play O-Ton Ü-Tek.
Herforder Quittung (Herford Receipt)
At first they worked in informal configurations, each with a slightly different aesthetic sensibility and set of interests (more precisely: Kaegi on his own, Haug on her own, Haug/Wetzel or Ernst/Kaegi, Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel or Ernst/Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel). But as professional and press interest in them grew, it became difficult to continue with this informal arrangement. By 2002 it was clear that the child needed a name. Matthias Lilienthal, then head of the Theater der Welt festival, asked the group, which was staging Deutschland 2 in Bonn, to come up with a name, and to do so immediately.
So Haug and Kaegi hired a bar poet they happened to run into. Although the poem itself, made up of the initials of the four directors’ names, was not much help, it was written on a bar receipt headed “Herforder Quittung.”
Although this name was ultimately rejected too, because the word Quittung (receipt) somehow sounded terrible and nobody knew where Herford was, it pointed the way forward. The word Quittung belongs to a particular group of words, and combining such a word with a place name somehow sounded plausible, especially now that they had run out of time. The word that seemed most fitting was Protokoll (protocol, bulletin or minutes). Then, after long discussions lasting whole nights that had more or less to do with German tourists in Italy and the riots in Genoa, Rimini replaced Herford, and Rimini Protokoll was born.
Photo: ©RiminiProtokoll
The matter-of-fact pragmatism they showed in finding their name also reflects the way the group has understood itself to this day. Alongside friendship and the joy that collaboration brings, there is a non-ideological, almost practical relationship between them. The name is not a formal declaration of intent but a label that facilitates communication, reflecting an effective working network, an umbrella organization, that still keeps separate accounts even today.
Rimini operates as a team with equal authority, without specifically assigned roles, and in this sense differs from well-known avant-garde groups such as the Living Theatre, the Wooster Group or Forced Entertainment, all of which rely on a central figure (not to mention traditional director-led theater). They have always had, and still have, different interests and skills. Daniel Wetzel works in sound studios and as a DJ, Helgard Haug is interested in spaces, Stefan Kaegi was for a long time interested above all in producing text, and Bernd Ernst was always in search of a story, a subject. Yet clinging to areas of interest separated by such clear boundaries was never a feature of the work they made together. In the beginning it was difficult to explain this to artistic directors, who wanted precise job descriptions such as director, dramaturg or designer to write into contracts, and to fit these titles into programs and, above all, into budgets.
Working this way as a collective had to be learned, and pursued with determination. Rimini Protokoll’s strength has come not so much from the similarities that developed over the years as from the points at which each of them differs: “We still listen to each other with a sense of separateness. That is what makes it interesting: working on other projects in other configurations and being changed by them. Each time we have to rediscover each other” (Haug).
Disagreeing over long periods of time can only be sustained in this way. It is all about discovering entirely new things, surprising yourself, developing fantasies together, going beyond yourself. The script moves back and forth between these and objections, and new work is discussed before and after rehearsals. The process of sharing information, of updating both the production and the text, takes longer than the rehearsals themselves. Lingering differences of opinion and reservations must stay within the team. Once work with the experts begins, they must speak with one voice, which is why, under normal circumstances, only one of them is present at rehearsal.
At the beginning of a new project, they have often each rehearsed separately with a different performer. “Still, it is essential to rediscover yourself every time and to pin down what you really want.” (Kaegi) However dangerous disagreement can be, consensus that leads to routine, the one thing their collaboration must resist, is just as dangerous. “Of course routine things happen, because thanks to all that shared experience you use phrases that come easily to everyone in order to agree on things quickly, and you carry the language you have developed while making theater together onto the stage. But the things that become routine are precisely the things we always want to expand and transform.” (Wetzel)
Even within these relatively open arrangements, though, working as a group of four was not easy. When they worked in pairs or even trios they developed common languages, and things went surprisingly well, but Bernd Ernst, above all, long remained skeptical about the possibility of working together over time. He and Kaegi had in fact discovered a wild, intoxicated way of thinking all their own, filled with strange and fantastic ideas that did not translate well to the stage. “What really united us was that we were constantly working on what else we could do, without stopping and without thinking about the cost.” (Kaegi) In thinking about feasibility only afterward, they were reminiscent of Hygiene Heute; projects that would be abandoned halfway because of the realities of life were started again and again. Once they tried to persuade all the residents of an apartment building to take in guests overnight; another time they tried to present a demolition expert together with his profession; and on yet another occasion they wanted to lead people underground through the center of the town of Friedberg near Frankfurt… Because his imagination headed in different directions and the size of the group did not suit it, Bernd Ernst never fit in all that well with Rimini Protokoll. While still continuing to work with Stefan Kaegi to produce the guinea pig congress in Vienna, the ant state in Mannheim and the final part of the “Kirchner” audio tour in Munich, he left the group after Deutschland 2, before withdrawing from the production of Physik at the dance center in Vienna while it was being made.
In just seven short films, including the recently much-lauded Fox (2016), Hiwa (2017) and Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (2018), Jacqueline Lentzou has made her aesthetic concerns and her remarkable talent abundantly clear. With a curious and empathetic camera, she captures moments of change and transition that are often unwanted, moments that perhaps we wish mattered more, moments that reveal a great deal about us. The banality of adolescent totems, the sadness that holds maturity at bay, the loss of something we never knew to value: these are the moments that define the Greek filmmaker’s striking body of work. During a week of screenings that formed part of Lincoln Center’s and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films festival, I spoke with the filmmaker about how she crafts her own language of discovery and tenderness.
Many of your films feel as though we are eavesdropping on private moments no one thought to share. Could you talk about developing the language of intimacy in your films?
When I’m asked how I think about something, I can’t come up with a good answer, because, at least in the short format, it’s very instinctive. I write visually, because I think intimacy and the whole feeling of a film are written before it happens on set. My cinematographer, Konstantinos Koukoulios, is my best friend, and that is very important, because I’d say my tendency to work with people I’m close to is connected to the situations I try to portray in my films. It comes about very, very naturally. I made an early decision that I don’t like static cameras, and that comes from that same natural place. While I was still in school, I switched to handheld cinematography. All our film exercises required fixed positions and tripods, and I never felt free. Around 2010, I realized that I like roaming freely. Camera movement reminds me of how our eyes move. When I look at you, I’m not just looking at you; I’m also looking behind you and around you. I’m glad we’re talking about intimacy; being able to convey it, having an organic side to the films, is one of my goals. I want people to feel that they are there, sharing that moment and everything that is happening.
The balance between your use of the tripod and your handheld movement is quite interesting. You explore spaces not in the traditional way but after a chaotic moment. I’m thinking in particular of the church scene in “Hector Malot.”
I was thinking of the church too! I like to set up a relationship that does the exact opposite of what an establishing shot does. Rather than telling viewers that we are now here, I’m more interested in telling them that we are now in this state of mind. What really interests me is mood and atmosphere. I also need wide shots so I can breathe. In “Hector Malot,” I found it more interesting that the character isn’t fully aware of exactly where she is. Also, when I have my wide shot, I usually move back and forth a lot, and I feel I owe my audience something calmer to prepare them for what comes next. In “Hiwa,” the camera is always moving. Even when I watch it now, I love some aspects of it. It’s very shaky; maybe if I had added a few calmer shots, it would have been a more soothing experience for the viewer.
“Hiwa” was the first film of yours I saw, and I felt as if I were preparing to watch an avant-garde film. Of course, there is a lot of experimentation in your other work too, but you tell more linear and emotional stories to catch people just before adulthood. How do you finance films like these? I imagine it would be hard to try to explain them in a synopsis.
I hate writing synopses. It’s not something I do well; it feels like a chore. I should do the dishes, I should write a synopsis. Fortunately, in short filmmaking they largely don’t need a synopsis, but right now I’m working on two feature films, and the first thing they ask for is a synopsis, because they don’t have time to read the whole script. Synopses don’t convey what’s in a creator’s head; it’s just another document. For “Fox,” my only film to receive official funding from the Greek Film Centre, I had to write an application. They asked for the script and gave me 9,000 euros. That’s nothing. Thank God I always had a producer who could create good things out of the limited means at hand. For “Hiwa,” which is a crazy film, I was commissioned by the Athens Film Festival, together with six other directors, to show Athens in a different way, and they gave us 7,000 euros for it. “Hector Malot” was a labor of love; I also foresaw that there would be a delay with my feature, and in the meantime I felt the need to shoot something else. Finding funding is hard work. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s true that you can be more creative and daring when you have no money.
How much of the work is indirectly autobiographical? How much is inspired by other people’s experiences?
I don’t deliberately use other people’s experiences much. I don’t really know what happens unconsciously. I’m truly interested in my friends and family, in people. But everything still comes down to the creation of my individual worldview. Everything I write and try to convey develops through me. Of course it isn’t biographical, but the source material is always personal. When I watch a film, no matter how beautifully it’s made, what makes me fall in love with it is honesty. That’s a subject in itself: what is honesty? It must be entirely about people writing what they know. For now, what I know best is how I perceive experiences, how I feel and the moods I go through. I try to make personal films, not self-referential ones, and there is an important difference between the two.
Knowing that you’re a Harmony Korine fan makes sense, especially when we think of parts of “Fox,” which is set in a sort of messy, slightly grotesque suburban environment. You both capture a messy, melancholic, hermetic sense of adolescence. The eccentric family and the deliberately dirty-looking house reminded me of my own childhood as much as of Korine. Where did the image of the house come from?
The fact that I love Harmony Korine has to do with growing up much like his characters. When I discovered him, I was spellbound, because I identified with what he was making films about. If you could see my house: when my mother was young it was very grand, but when we moved back there when I was a child, it was a completely decaying house. Being in a house that has always been old, unchanged and beautiful is different, but when you grow up somewhere, feeling its decline gets into your bones. It changes over time, the walls peel, it smells of damp. I know that very well. In Gummo (1997), in the scene where the boy lifts a portrait and we see a swarm of flies come out from behind it, I felt as if I were there. I didn’t grow up in a house quite like that, but…The reference point for the house in “Fox” was my home in Thessaloniki. Finding a house that once held happiness but that happiness had since abandoned was a very conscious move. I really love directors like Harmony Korine, Chantal Akerman, Jonas Mekas and Claire Denis, and I feel we have a bond, as if we were from the same family. Even though I’m not as talented as they are, I think we have something in common. They get into my system and shape me like a song, but I never say, “Let’s shoot it like this.” I’ve seen a lot of shorts that resemble each other stylistically, and it feels like a fashion. People see something, admire it and want to make a copy of it. When that’s done consciously it doesn’t work, but when it happens subconsciously, it has more depth.
Decay is a very old literary conceit, rather than a specifically cinematic one. In Dickens, for example…
And in Baudelaire…
Yes! In your films you use it as a kind of dramatic and ironic counterpoint. Just as we see young people moving into new phases of their lives, around them are the bones of what has happened and the ghost of progress that never came to pass.
You know what? I believe that’s how life is. I don’t understand films and books that say everything will be fine once you grow up, or that everything is bad when someone dies. This view of good and bad, light and dark, was an easier way to understand the world even as a child. The world is more complicated than that. Of course things will work out. I’m not an optimistic person, but I believe in change, and decay is itself a change. In a way, it’s the same idea.
I would have thought that growing up surrounded by evidence of one of our oldest cultures would reinforce that understanding. In America we don’t have that. We are a young culture, and we tell children they can be anything they want to be. We’re supposed to hide our dissatisfaction, whereas Europeans, especially the French, know that part of life is understanding decay.
Some of my favorite writers are the French writers of the ’60s – Camus, Sartre and the rest of the existentialists. One reason they affected me is that through them I could read things I had felt for a long time but couldn’t put into words when I was 15 or 16. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to the French.
That’s the perfect age, when we are still forming our worldview. What were your teenage years like?
I digested what happened in my childhood very early. What others do at 30, I did on my own at a younger age. Growing up was harder because of my family relationships. In primary school I wasn’t aware of how bad everything was. In my teenage years I faced a lot of things. I had been writing since childhood and thought I would become a writer. When my writing grew darker, I made new friends. We started watching films by directors other than Scorsese and Coppola – who, of course, were magnificent too. But at that time other doors opened. Names like Wim Wenders and Gus Van Sant steered me toward cinema. While watching Elephant (2003), I decided that I could make films too. It was the first arthouse film I saw, at 14, and I thought, “I can do this too!” These things shaped me. I identify with who I was back then and with the decisions I made. Of course I’ve grown up, I’m 29, but I don’t see my teenage self as different from my child self or my adult self, which of course makes things a bit chaotic for me and my friends, and even my relationships. I think it’s the fact that there is no pure division of time, and that I see people as whole units. It seems strange to me when people look back and say, “I can’t believe I did that when I was 15.” They are so far from who they were then. How can you not believe it? Who were you? I have that memory. I can’t say that this event fed this or that, but arthouse cinema certainly led me to a great deal of introspection that helped me understand these things.
Scout Tafoya
Translation (into Turkish): Nil Ege Özden
In just seven short films — including the recently lauded “Fox” (2016), “Hiwa” (2017), and “Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year (2018)” — Jacqueline Lentzou has already made her aesthetic concerns and immutable talent quite clear. She finds, with a curious and empathetic camera, moments of oft unwelcome change and transition, the moments that reveal a lot about us that we perhaps wish had more import. The banality of adolescent totems, the sadness that preempts maturity, the loss of what we’ve taken for granted; these are the moments that define the Greek filmmaker’s impressive work. During a week of screenings that were a part of the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, I spoke with the filmmaker about how she coined her own language of discovery and tenderness.
Many of your movies make us feel like we’re eavesdropping on private moments no one else would think to share. Can you talk about developing the films’ language of intimacy?
Whenever I’m asked how I thought of something, I don’t have a good answer because it’s very instinctive in the short format, at least in the moment. I write visually; I think intimacy and the whole feel [of a film] are written out before they happen on set. My cinematographer is my best friend [Konstantinos Koukoulios], which is important; it correlates to the situations I try to depict in my films, the fact that I tend to work with people I know, with whom I’m intimate with myself. This comes out very, very naturally. It also comes from a decision I made early on, that I don’t like fixed cameras; I moved to handheld cinematography while still in school. All of our film exercises required fixed positions and tripods and I wasn’t feeling free at all. I learned then, around 2010, that I liked to have free movement. Camera movement reminds me of the way our eyes move. When I look at you, I don’t just look at you, I look behind you, and over there. I’m happy that you mentioned intimacy, it’s one of my aims to depict it, to have that be an organic aspect of the films. I want people to feel that they are there and that they share the moment, everything that happens.
It’s interesting to note the balance between your use of tripods and handheld movement. You don’t establish locations in the traditional way, you discover them in space after a chaotic moment. I’m thinking specifically of the scene in the church in “Hector Malot.”
I was thinking of the church as well! I like to create a relation that does the opposite of what establishing shots do. I’m not interested in telling the audience that now we are here. I’m interested in telling the audience that he or she is now like that in this mood; I’m more interested in the mood. I need wide shots as a breather. In [“Hector Malot”], I found it more interesting not to be aware of where she is exactly. In terms of blocking, when I have my wide shot, usually I move around a lot, back and forth, soft focus, hard focus — I feel I owe my audience something calmer, to somehow prepare them for what comes after. In “Hiwa,” the camera’s moving all the time. Even when I watch it now, I like aspects of it. It’s super shaky, and maybe if I added some more calm shots, it would be a more pacifying experience for the viewer, not so crazy.
“Hiwa” was the first film that I watched of yours, and I felt I was being primed for an avant-garde body of work. Certainly there’s a lot of experimentation in your other work, but it’s more that you use experimental ideas to tell linear, emotional stories, catching people right before adulthood sets in. How do you get films like this funded? I imagine trying to explain these in a treatment would be hard work.
I hate treatments. It’s not something I do well, it feels like housework; I have to do the dishes, I have to write a treatment. Thankfully for the most part in making short films, they don’t need a treatment, but I’m developing two features and it’s the first thing they ask for because they don’t have time to read the proper script. Treatments don’t convey what a filmmaker has in their mind; it’s just another document. For “Fox,” my only film to get funding from the Greek Film Centre officially, I wrote an application. They asked for the script, and they gave me 9000 euros. That’s nothing. Thank God I had a good producer who, out of nothing can do something. For “Hiwa,” which is a crazy film, I was commissioned by Athens Film Festival, along with six other directors, to show Athens in a different way. It was an open commission; they gave us 7000 euros for that. For “Hector Malot,” which happened out of our hearts, I had an urgent need to shoot last year because I could see there was going to be a delay with the feature film and I had to be on set doing something. Funding is hard. It’s cliché, but it’s a fact that you can be more creative and courageous with no money.
Continue reading the article on Kinescope website.
Nine long years have elapsed since the release of The Headless Woman (2008), Lucrecia Martel’s last feature film. Since then, she prepared and failed to get a science-fiction project launched, endured a drawn out two-month production, and oversaw an extensive edit on Zama, an adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s rigorously precise novel of the same name. The shoot may have been protracted, but none of that manifests on screen. Though at times insular, Zama is a haunting work for an artist who continually redefines her cinematic language with each film.
Zama follows the eponymous character during three episodes in his life: wooing an official’s wife; defending an assistant’s budding writing ventures while on duty; and volunteering to apprehend a notorious bandit in the Paraguayan wild with a small crew. Don Diego de Zama is a corregidor, an official of the Spanish crown, stationed in Asunción. All he wants — and never achieves— is a transfer out of this backwater and into a cozy position in Buenos Aires, Santiago, or someplace else in Spain’s vast empire in the 1790s. However, Martel gradually reveals what kind of man he is — a weak one — by his interactions with colleagues, royalty, townspeople, and the natives.
Zama is Martel’s first book adaptation. It’s a curious choice since di Benedetto’s novel uses first person narration exclusively. Since cinema is good at capturing surfaces, this is what Martel does: she transforms the book’s interiority into an exteriority. She creates a psychogeography in which the bumbling, hapless Zama wanders through. In this way, Zama is similar to The Headless Woman, for both offer viewers subtle subjective perspectives from the leading character. In Zama, tight close-ups hold on the worn face and deep-set eyes of Don Diego as a babbling brook of voices swim around him off-screen as if they were the enunciations of his own thoughts.
On Twitter, critic Steve Macfarlane aptly compared Zama to the cantankerous Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And, as Alex Engquist noted in a reply to the tweet, like the HBO show, parts of the up-tempo, up beat non-diegetic music acts like ironic counterpoint to Zama’s escapades and eventual comeuppances. Yet such a comparison is more fitting for di Benedetto’s book. In the novel, the reader is always in Zama’s headspace. He comes off as a raging egocentric, haughty, vain, cowardly, and hypocritical. The last of these traits di Benedetto underlines by using short sentences that contradict Zama’s (usually long-winded) thoughts that preceded it. In Martel’s adaptation, Zama’s self-image is not so explicit. Daniel Giménez Cacho’s multi-faceted, evolving performance presents Zama as a principled man at first. In the first image of the film, he’s on a shore, looking out at a body of water. He rests on one of his legs. Laden with a sword, a white hat, and a red coat that gives him a regal air, he yearns to move, move, move. Zama finally does so in the film’s final episode by becoming a volunteer in a brigade to find Vicuña Porto, the man he once apprehended during his days as a corregidor. And it is at this time, after nine years, he looks like a broken man. His wardrobe is shabby and a shaggy white beard adorns his chin. His eyes, a shifting signifier of frustration and exhaustion, here convey sadness. He’ll never get to see his wives and children again.
Martel’s film focuses narrowly on Zama, and in this sense fails to add a new perspective on colonial history. However, di Benedetto and Martel’s critique is felt obliquely in their character study of Zama’s absurd existence. He’s a puppet, a fool, and an inept Kafkaesque bureaucrat caught and complicit in colonialism.
Zama is part of a recent trend of slow, hallucinogenic art house films that are set in the past. Albert Serra’s Story of My Death (2013) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014) ignore generic conventions associated with the historical film, creating mesmeric works that intertwine the fantastic and the banal. Zama falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between Story of My Death and Jauja. It doesn’t have an iota of the braggadocian filmmaking in the former or the plunge into the oneiric in the latter. Rather, Zama, like Martel’s prior works, has a tactility to it that’s accentuated by the clipped editing. And the dreamy, discombobulating elements come in flashes — the monotonous hum on the soundtrack, a glimpse of a child, a peripatetic llama.
Keeping with Martel’s modus operandi, in terms of plotting, Zama doesn’t hold your hand. Moreover, she elides explicit indicators of the passage of time, which is a crucial structural component of the novel. The three parts in di Benedetto’s book take place in 1790, 1794, and 1799. What Martel does is to blur the film’s duration, giving the impression that Zama is stuck not only in the same place, but in time as well. Perhaps Zama’s aesthetic is straightforward — that is, more straightforward than Martel’s prior work. It is, however, a refreshing work in a year with relatively tepid films at the New York Film Festival. Zama offers us the freedom that its titular character so desperately seeks in people, places, and things.
Click here to read on the original page on Kinescope.
Nine long years have passed since Lucrecia Martel’s last feature, The Headless Woman (2008). In the meantime, the director developed a science-fiction project that never came to fruition, endured a production process that wasted two months, and oversaw an extensive editing process on Zama, adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s novel of the same name, which the film closely resembles. Although the shoot was a drawn-out affair, this certainly does not show on screen. Because it is at times inward-looking, Zama is a daunting work from an artist who continually redefines her cinematic language with every film.
Zama follows its title character through three periods of his life, which can be summed up as courting an official’s wife, defending an assistant’s budding attempts at writing while on duty, and volunteering with a small military unit to capture a notorious bandit in the Paraguayan wilderness. Don Diego de Zama is a Corregidor, that is, a magistrate, serving the Spanish Crown in Asunción. The one thing he always wants, yet never manages to achieve, is to be taken out of this backwater and transferred to a comfortable post in Buenos Aires, Santiago, or anywhere else within the vast imperial borders of 1790s Spain. Over time, however, through his interactions with colleagues, nobles, townspeople and the Indigenous population, Martel reveals what kind of man he is and how inadequate he is.
Zama is Martel’s first literary adaptation. This is an interesting choice, since di Benedetto’s novel relies solely on first-person narration. Because cinema is good at capturing surfaces, this is exactly what Martel does: she turns the book’s inward-looking narration outward. She creates a psychogeography for the clumsy and hapless Zama to wander through. In this way Zama resembles The Headless Woman, in that both offer the viewer subtle, objective perspectives on their protagonists. In Zama, tight close-ups focus on Don Diego’s weary face and sunken eyes, while a stream of off-screen sound, babbling as if his own thoughts had been given voice, swirls around the character.
On Twitter, critic Steve Macfarlane aptly compared Zama to the cantankerous character Larry David plays in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In addition, as Alex Engquist noted in a reply to that post, much like in the HBO series, parts of the film’s upbeat, lively score serve as an ironic counterpoint to Zama’s escapades and the misfortunes that befall him as a result. That said, such a comparison is better suited to di Benedetto’s book. In the novel the reader is always inside Zama’s head. The character reveals himself to be extremely self-centered, conceited, pretentious, cowardly and hypocritical. Di Benedetto underscores the last of these traits through Zama’s terse utterances, which contradict the (usually interminable) thoughts that precede them. In Martel’s adaptation, Zama’s self-image is not so plainly evident. Daniel Giménez Cacho’s multifaceted, gradually building performance initially presents Zama as a man of principle.
In the film’s first image, he is on a shore, gazing out at a body of water. His weight rests on one leg. He is outfitted with a sword, a white hat and a red coat that lend him a regal air, and he endlessly longs to move, to get away, to leave. In the final part of the film, Zama fulfills this ambition by volunteering for a military unit seeking Vicuña Porto, whom he had once arrested while serving as corregidor. Nine years later, at this point the character looks like a ruined man. His clothes are in tatters and a bushy white beard hangs down from his chin. His eyes, which have alternately signaled disappointment and exhaustion, now reflect misery. He will never see his wife and children again.
Martel’s film focuses narrowly on Zama and, in this sense, fails to offer a new perspective on the history of colonialism. Nevertheless, the critique that di Benedetto and Martel make is felt indirectly in their portrayal of Zama’s absurd existence. Zama is a puppet stuck in colonialism and serving it, a fool and a Kafkaesque, incompetent bureaucrat.
Zama is part of a current trend toward slow, hallucinogenic art films set in the past. Albert Serra’s Story of My Death (2013) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014) disregard the stock conventions associated with period films, creating hypnotic works that bring together the fantastic and the banal. Zama sits in the middle of the spectrum between Story of My Death and Jauja. It carries not a trace of the swaggering filmmaking peculiar to the former, nor does it plunge into the dreamlike realm of the latter. Instead, as in Martel’s earlier work, Zama is governed by a concreteness accentuated by its elliptical editing. Dreamlike, startling elements, such as the monotonous drone in the soundtrack, the fleeting image of a child and a wandering llama, appear in flashes.
In keeping with Martel’s way of working, Zama does not take you by the hand and help you along in terms of plot either. What is more, it avoids explicit indications of the passage of time, a crucial structural component of the novel. The three sections of di Benedetto’s book take place in 1790, 1794 and 1799.
What Martel does here instead is blur the time that passes in the film, creating the impression that Zama is stuck not only in the same place but also in the same time. Perhaps Zama’s aesthetic structure is plain, in the sense that it is more straightforward than Martel’s earlier work. Still, in a year filled with relatively lifeless films at the New York Film Festival, it is a refreshing work. In this sense, Zama offers us the freedom that its character, who is nothing more than his title, desperately seeks in people, places and objects.
Tanner Tafelski
Translation (into Turkish): Nahit Evre Uçarcı
Kundura Sinema, which opened its doors at Beykoz Kundura, one of Türkiye’s industrial cultural heritage sites, is celebrating the October 27 UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage with a special screening of “The Brilliant Biograph,” presented on its online platform. The program sheds light on everyday life in Europe between 1897 and 1902, with music composed by the Dutch composer and pianist Daan van den Hurk.
In line with this year’s theme for the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, “Your Window to the World,” Kundura Sinema invites audiences to rediscover the Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London of the 1900s with a special screening of “The Brilliant Biograph,” which features some of Europe’s very first recorded films. Restored from the Mutoscope and Biograph collections by Eye Film, the National Film Archive of the Netherlands, and the British Film Institute (BFI) using 8K digital scanning technology, with the support of the European Commission, this special screening brings recordings from the earliest days of cinema, images with some of the richest detail in film history, to Kundura Sinema’s followers from today until the end of the year.
October 27, UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage
Celebrated with conferences and film screenings by the world’s leading national film and media archives, the October 27 UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage aims each year to open a dialogue on cultural heritage among institutions around a particular theme. Audiovisual documents, from film, radio and television programs to many other kinds of records, contribute to cultural heritage by bringing different nations together on common ground. Aiming to raise public awareness of the need to preserve and rediscover these archives at risk of disappearing, this special day also underlines their importance in safeguarding cultural heritage. Beykoz Kundura, one of Türkiye’s most important industrial cultural heritage sites, invites its followers to celebrate this special day with the special screening of “The Brilliant Biograph,” available to stream free of charge from October 27 on its online platform www.kultur.beykozkundura.com, and with a blog post on the subject written by Buse Yıldırım, Director of Arts and Culture at Beykoz Kundura.
Elif Rongen Kaynakçı, silent film specialist at the Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands, commented on the preparation of the “The Brilliant Biograph” screening: “The musical accompaniment for these very short and unrelated films of varying content and rhythm would present a big challenge to any improvising musician. Hence, a special piano score was commissioned, composed and recorded by Daan van den Hurk. His score holds the compilation together, flowing along its structure while also recognizing the intrinsic value of each individual film.”
Beykoz Kundura’s new digital platform and blog, www.beykozkundura.com, which makes its content accessible from anywhere, will host online film screenings as well as pieces written about Kundura Sinema and Kundura Sahne, articles on the culture industry, and interviews with leading figures in the sector.
Running parallel to the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage’s “Your Window to the World” theme, “The Brilliant Biograph” transports viewers back to around 1900 and let them feel the enthusiasm of early cinema when cities such as Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and London were undergoing rapid growth and modernity was emerging. With support from the European Commission’s ‘European Tribute to Film Heritage’ programme, 50 films from the Mutoscope and Biograph collections of Eye and the BFI have been digitally restored (8K). The films were all photographed with the unique large-format 68mm Autograph camera, which provided extraordinarily high-resolution images. These one-minute time capsules from 120 years ago still convey some of the richest and sharpest images that film can achieve preserved.
Collective histories are often captured on film, video, audio or digital formats, and through these, people engage to learn about the past and to share their own histories with future generations. Increasingly recordings serve as memories and tell the stories that constitute the cultural heritage. In recognition of the preservation efforts of the thousands of archivists, librarians and caretakers around the world who care for these valuable collections, this year’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage again celebrates their dedication and expertise. Without the knowledge and devotion that is required to preserve, digitize and provide access, large portions of our cultural heritage would disappear to be lost forever.
With over 200 years of uninterrupted industrial production, Beykoz Kundura represents a unique example of Turkey’s industrial and cultural heritage. To mark this special day of Unesco World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and to express her views on the film, Buse Yıldırım, Beykoz Kundura’s Managing Artistic Director, wrote an article.
Silent film curator of Eye Film Institute, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı commented:
“The musical accompaniment for these very short and unrelated films of varying content and rhythm would present a big challenge to any improvising musician. Hence, a special piano score was commissioned, composed and recorded by Daan van den Hurk. His score holds the compilation together, flowing along its structure while also recognizing the intrinsic value of each individual film.”
Beykoz Kundura, Istanbul’s dynamic arts and culture venue that supports sustainability of arts and culture and creates new opportunities for young talents and art lovers is now online via its digital platform www.beykozkundura.com. Online screenings, articles on the culture industry, interviews with the sector leaders as well as review pieces on Kundura Cinema and Stage will be accessible on Beykoz Kundura’s new blog.
“Kundura Sinema opened its doors in the fall of 2018 as one of the first steps in shaping the arts and culture identity of Beykoz Kundura, a site of industrial cultural heritage. This process, which grew further with the opening of Kundura Sahne, was in fact designed with inspiration from the Kundura Hafıza project. In the summer of 2017, on the terrace of Yeni Kundura, one of the former production buildings, we announced for the first time both the memory project and news of our cinema, then still under construction, as part of the Restored Film Days, and shared our first glimpses of them. In the memory project, we used the oral history method to refresh, and in a sense restore, the memories of both the former factory workers and ourselves. We took our first steps by watching restored films about workers and factories in a restored factory. Restoration was in fact a process of finding new life; in being renewed, it made new encounters possible across different layers of time. We offer new generations different materials and different stories, introduce them to the concept of cultural heritage, and, as they rediscover the past, remind them that the present is history too. At Kundura Sinema, we have always screened restored classics in our special curations with the utmost care. By screening Hollywood classics, by presenting restored silent film works with live music, and by moving away from a Western-centric perspective, we have brought restored prints of important works of African and Far Eastern cinema to film lovers.
Every year, Kundura Sinema opens its arts and culture season with carefully crafted curations of newly restored films shown in the classics sections of that year’s major festivals, bringing Istanbul’s film lovers together with these classics on the big screen for the first time. The cinema itself opened with “The Naked City”, Jules Dassin’s 1948 film noir, which was likewise part of the Venice Film Festival’s classics selection. By creating a new cinema destination at an entirely different end of the city, Kundura used that year’s selection to invite audiences to rethink both themselves and cinema’s direct relationship with cities.
Featuring many other restored classic films in its program throughout the year, Kundura Sinema once again opened the 2019 season with restored films chosen from the Venice Film Festival’s classics selection. While bringing many Hollywood classics into its program, it also made sure to screen a work by one of the most important directors of Hungarian New Wave cinema, Istvan Gaal’s “Sodrasban”, on the big screen. The timing of the season’s start was, of course, no coincidence… With a nod to October 27, UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, Kundura aims to help build awareness of cultural heritage in cinema and visual media.
October 27, UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is marked each year around a particular theme, with conferences and film screenings organized by leading national film and media archives. Film restorers share information and ideas, including many technical matters concerning that year’s discoveries and the condition of the works they have been working on. By screening the films restored that year and starting dialogues on audiovisual heritage within their own institutions and among institutions at the national and international level, they develop institutional relationships. Audiovisual documents, from film, radio and television programs to many other kinds of records, are among the legacies that bring us together on common ground. They take their place in archives as primary records of every detail of life in the 20th and 21st centuries. October 27 is designed not only to raise public awareness of the need to preserve these archives, but also to question their accessibility, to invite people to discover visual archives at risk of disappearing, and to draw the attention of the press to issues concerning cultural heritage.
The theme set by UNESCO for this year is “Your Window to the World”. Audiovisual materials are, in fact, much like a window to the world: we cannot take part in the events we observe, but we can watch them; we hear voices from the past, but they can never speak again. We carefully craft stories to entertain and to inform. As we search for ways to understand the world and seek to connect with people from other cultures, audiovisual content plays an important role in our lives.
During the pandemic, as we redefined our relationship with the outside world while quarantined in our homes, the windows of our homes became a breath of fresh air and a new way of seeing for all of us. This year, under the theme of a window to the world, Kundura Sinema invites you, in collaboration with Eye Film, the National Film Archive of the Netherlands, to rediscover Europe’s first moving images, its very first recorded films, through the “The Brilliant Biograph” selection. Accompanied by the music of Dutch musician Daan van den Hurk, we lose ourselves, from our own window, in documentary footage shot between 1897 and 1902 and in the everyday life of Europe at that time.”
S. Buse YILDIRIM
Director of Arts and Culture, Beykoz Kundura