A SHORT BREAK FROM QUARANTINE WITH KUNDURA SİNEMA
Douwe Dijkstra’s award-winning Green Screen Gringo (2016), which has picked up prizes at many film festivals, turns its camera on the chaos of the streets of São Paulo in Brazil, where the political atmosphere became turbulent as President Dilma Rousseff’s name was linked to corruption scandals. Seeking to understand the country’s political tensions by focusing on people in the street, the film adopts an experimental style. The visibility of the crew member carrying the green screen, which could be called the film’s hallmark, constantly reminds viewers that documentaries, too, which are believed to reflect reality directly, present a reality filtered by a film crew. Moreover, by placing people into different social contexts through the games it plays with the image, Green Screen Gringo makes us question how decisively the many manufactured objects around us, from clothing to spaces, shape our thoughts about people, as if echoing Guy Debord’s words: “The spectacle is the faithful reflection of the production of things, and the unfaithful objectification of the producers.”
Alper Yıldırım (www.altyazi.net)
To view the original film, click here!
A SHORT BREAK FROM QUARANTINE WITH KUNDURA SİNEMA
Kundura Sinema is bringing its short film selection “A Stroll from Within” to viewers via its website. Aiming to take viewers who have been staying at home for a long time on a journey to different places with this special short film selection, Kundura Sinema invites all its followers to connect with intellectual nature and discover the hidden room within themselves.
The special selection “A Stroll from Within,” consisting of 10 short films that open doors to new worlds, was available free of charge with Turkish subtitles from May 11 to June 11, 2020.
In this film selection, which brings together short films in different styles, we rediscover the surroundings that envelop us. Wandering between going far away from our current state of being and staying put, we let go of chasing our dreams and listen to what lies beyond the walls. On this stroll, as we search for a new starting point the moment we get stuck, we remember that for a long time we have been keeping an empty room inside us… And its door opens onto a forest.
At Kundura Sinema, we continue to present themed selections under the #kundurasinemaizliyor banner. This time, we take a close look at 6 cartoons from the Soviet era, which left its mark on film history, featuring a range of adventurous and lovable characters, with English subtitles. Let’s explore together the inspiration this striking period gave its animation artists and the works that emerged from it.
Written by Eduard Uspensky in 1966, the story of Cheburashka became a phenomenon in the country when it was presented in 1969 in 4 episodes of 20 minutes each. It begins with Cheburashka’s arrival in the Soviet Union in a crate of oranges. Turned away from the zoo by scientists, Cheburashka meets a cultured crocodile named Gena, and this wonderful story of friendship sets sail for adventures full of songs that will never grow old.
This 1974 cartoon tells of a hare’s efforts to bring a bag full of apples to his 4 children waiting at home, while getting past many dangerous creatures in the forest, such as a bear, a wolf and a crow. It shows how the hare’s kindness and generosity fill the hearts of both the dangerous forest dwellers and the viewers with love.
A hedgehog whose favorite pastime is watching the stars and drinking tea with his friend the bear finds himself drawn into a whirlwind of life, death and friendship when, one day, fog descends and erases that familiar landscape. In this 1975 animation, our hero begins his adventure by first seeing an owl; then, frightened by a white horse in the fog and a shadow resembling an elephant, he feels he must keep going to reach his closest friend.
A boy nicknamed “Uncle Fyodor” wants to take home a cat named Matroskin one day, but his parents object. The two run away from home and meet a stray dog named Sharik along the way. While his parents search for Fyodor, they settle in a village called Prostokvashino and find themselves in the middle of comic adventures. Full of life, this production, based on Eduard Uspensky’s novel, was released in 1978.
Begun in 1969 as the Soviet Union’s Tom and Jerry, this production was voted the best cartoon of all time and continued until 2006. In this cartoon, which even inspired many computer games, a hare has mischievous adventures while escaping from a pipe-smoking wolf.
The honey-loving bear created by A.A. Milne, known and loved by everyone, appears this time in his Soviet version as Vinni-Pukh. Of this 3-episode series made in 1969, Wolfgang Reitherman, who created the Disney version and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, said, “The Soviet version is much better than mine.”
“Both the questions and the answers, from and with images, but also from and with the word and the body, both of whose presence is strongly felt in Mroué’s work and whose reconsideration has become extremely necessary in today’s context, seem to be of vital importance for forming a thought about the contemporary image.”
PABLO MARTINEZ*
In the beginning, images mean everything. They are durable. Spacious.
But dreams congeal, turn into form and disappointment.
No image can carry the sky anymore. Clouds seen from a plane:
Only vapor cutting across the view. The crane is only a bird.
Even communism, that is, the ultimate image, is always renewed.
For it is washed again and again in blood – everyday life
Hands it out like small change; blackened, sweat running down and blinding the eyes.
Great poems are wrecks, like bodies long loved, but No longer needed,
borders finite, the route of our insatiable species
Laments between their lines, their raptures
built on the bones of workers
For the beautiful means the possible end of horror.
—Heiner Müller, Images [original title: Bilder], 1955
A poem about images in which images offer no comfort strikes me as a good way to begin this text. Images written for a work that begins with images positioned beyond representation. Words about images that confirm absence, images that no longer want to carry the sky, images that emerge from the other side of horror. Just like the ones that make up the work of Rabih Mroué, which explains the nature of images to us by showing it. The heartbeat of images, the flow of their blood, the way they shoot. Because images shoot, too. They leave their marks on the retina; they hurt, they caress. They open new wounds in old scars. This is nothing new: the agony of the image.
However, not all images behave in the same way; not all of them are alike. Not all of them play the same role in history. At the 2011 conference Historias que nose han escrito [Stories That Have Never Been Written], Rabih Mroué presented his “non-academic lecture” The Inhabitants of Images at CA2M. The title alone is enough to tell us about the relationship Mroué establishes with images.
Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı’s curated program of Istanbul films, which has begun screening at Demirane, consists of short found-footage clips shot by European camera operators at the turn of the century, in the style of a travelogue. Accompanying the screenings, this article by film writer and academic Aslı Özgen, published in Toplumsal Tarih magazine, recounts the fascinating history of how Istanbul and the Bosphorus were captured on film.
Aslı Özgen
This article reflects on the translation of urban space into a cinematic element, underlining the strong role of the “fluid frame” in shaping the cinematic image of Istanbul in particular. At the same time, it sets out to trace the aesthetic precursors of fluid frames before the advent of cinema. Let us also note here that, although it falls outside the scope of this article, one of the essential steps in researching the aesthetic precursors of fluid frames is to reach into the little-known and hard-to-discover corners of film history.
Istanbul is known to have been filmed for the first time in 1896 by Alexandre Promio, the camera operator sent to the Middle East by the Lumière brothers, the inventors of the cinematograph. [1] Perfected in 1895 by Auguste and Louis Lumière, two brothers who worked as photographers and manufactured photographic supplies in France, the cinematograph could record onto a 17-meter strip of film, develop the exposed film, and, with the help of a light source, project the developed film onto a wall to show it to a large audience. Light and multifunctional, and therefore easy to carry, the cinematograph was operated by a hand-cranked lever, which made it possible to film in the streets, in crowded places, at public events and in distant lands. The Lumière brothers asked each of the photographic supply agencies they already had in various cities around the world to assign an operator, and urged them to film everyday life in every corner of the globe. Promio, too, had come to Istanbul in the footsteps of the travelers who preceded him. The bond between cinema and travel was a strong one from its very earliest days.
To put it more precisely, it is impossible to think of cinema independently of the technological inventions that transformed the perception of space and time in the 19th century: trains, steamships, bicycles, elevators, moving walkways, accelerating trams and, later, automobiles and even airplanes also gave birth to new ways of seeing.
As an art with the power to change the perception of space and time, cinema became a medium in which these new ways of seeing were put into practice, tested, and pushed to their limits to produce aesthetic experimentation. While its closeness to reality was praised because it showed what the human eye cannot see, its power to shape perception was also being discovered (it emerged, for example, that a train that was actually slowing down as it entered a station would, because of the lens effect, suddenly grow disproportionately larger as it approached the camera, thereby creating the sense that it was speeding up, and that this had the power to throw audiences into a panic). Alongside motives such as letting people experience a place or archiving an event, the Lumière brothers also used the new perspectives, that is, the new points of view, brought by modernity as sources of inspiration in shaping the aesthetics of cinema: in the films of the Lumière catalog, one notices at first an aesthetic aim of fitting maximum movement within a fixed frame; later on, one sees them setting out to explore the possibilities of the moving perspective by placing the camera on trains, on ships and on elevators.
[1] Burçak Evren, “Les Premiers Pas: 1895-1923”, Le Cinema Turc, Mehmet Basutçu, ed. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou Editions, 1996), p. 61.
The earliest known images of Istanbul in the history of cinema also fit into this context. In other words, the first filming of Istanbul is a moment in which, with the aim of letting viewers experience a place, the aesthetic boundaries of cinema, a new art, were pushed, and in which urban space itself gave rise to the production of a cinematic element. But that is not all: the first filming of Istanbul also makes possible a journey back to the roots of the modern culture of spectacle (temaşa) that permeates the art of the Lumières.
Promio, an operator who reflected on and experimented with the possibilities of this new invention, filmed Istanbul from the water, from the Golden Horn. With the images he recorded of the city from the water while riding in a boat moving along the Golden Horn, Promio made one of the first “tracking shots” in history. [1] According to some sources, shortly before this he had also made a similar tracking shot from a gondola moving along the Grand Canal in Venice. The fluidity of this deep, wide waterway running through the middle of both cities [2] seems to have inspired Promio to move his camera like these waters, too.
In the case of Istanbul, filming the city with a moving perspective flowing over the water would later echo in many films. For example, in the films of the French documentarian Maurice Pialat, who visited Istanbul in the 1960s, of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who shot his first feature in Istanbul with Lütfi Akad as his assistant, of Atıf Yılmaz and of many others, the shores of the city are contemplated from a boat gliding along the Bosphorus or the Golden Horn. All these long tracking shots share a common feature: they have a “fluidity” that comes from being filmed on the water. In these shots, the gentle or at times turbulent movement of the water also determines the aesthetics of the images that move in and out of the frame. Another element is that the image in the frame flows past just like the waters flowing beneath the camera. The new regime of time and the new perception of space that come with the moving perspective gain a strong foothold in cinema. What is distinctive here, however, is that water is the most decisive element. In light of all this, it seems possible to define this aesthetic element, born of translating the movement of the waters that divide the city in two into cinematic movement, as the “fluid frame.” This article reflects on the translation of urban space into a cinematic element, underlining the strong role of the fluid frame in shaping the cinematic image of Istanbul in particular. At the same time, it sets out to trace the aesthetic precursors of fluid frames before the advent of cinema.
[1] A tracking shot is a shot in which the camera moves while filming. A pan, by contrast, is the movement the camera makes by rotating from one side to the other around a vertical axis. Source: Ralph S. Singleton, Amerikan Film Terimleri Sözlüğü (İstanbul: Es Yayınları, 2004).
[2] The concept of the “Fluid Frame” was first written up as a short entry for Altyazı’s Unofficial and Illustrated Dictionary of Turkish Cinema. See Altyazı’nın Gayrı Resmi ve Resimli Türkiye Sinema Sözlüğü: Special Issue 150 (June-September 2015): 21-22.
An important feature characterizing the new ways of seeing brought by modernity was their relationship with the notion of “movement”: new recording devices had made it possible to represent movement flawlessly, while the central, all-commanding, fixed perspective of the Renaissance had given way to the relative perspectives of a subject in motion. In Techniques of the Observer, his book on vision and modernity, Jonathan Crary notes that the rupture in classical modes of vision in the early 19th century involved far more than a visual change in images and works of art or a break in conventions of representation. According to Crary, this rupture in ways of seeing is inseparable both from social practices that altered the productive, cognitive and desiring capacities of the subject in all kinds of ways and from a sweeping reorganization of knowledge. [1]
[1] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 3.
The bond between cinema and travel culture is likewise inseparable from this newborn way of seeing/watching/looking, from the subjectivity prone to change that it triggered, and from the celebration of movement underlying them. The Paris arcades that inspired Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project are among the places where this bond found its clearest expression. In Window Shopping, her book examining the seeds of cinema and postmodernity, Anne Freidberg emphasizes that the arcades, spaces built for the “mobile subject,” always housed a “panorama” or a “diorama.” [1] These places of entertainment, in a sense precursors of cinema, usually featured large-scale paintings that made visitors feel as though they were standing in a famous square of a city, in front of one of its famous monuments, or in the midst of an admirable pastoral landscape. Visitors could thus travel in a single step to Paris, London, New York, a spot in the Alps or the Lake District. Benjamin notes that the spread of arcades in Paris coincided with the spread of panoramas. According to Benjamin, panoramas, which played with the perception of space and time and transported visitors in an instant to another time and another place, paved the way for both the art of photography and silent and sound cinema. By the time of the Lumières, the presence in cinematograph footage of cities’ busiest streets and squares, their monumental buildings, and their historical and natural beauties was an extension of this culture.
Walter Benjamin argues that panoramas were also the expression of a newly emerging attitude toward life. In panoramas, the city or nature is transformed into a view, a “sight to behold,” a “temaşa.” [2]
In an interview with the monthly film magazine Altyazı, the historian Cemal Kafadar, while looking at Istanbul across the Golden Horn, made the following observation about the city’s culture of spectacle: “One feature of the centers that, in the long run, shaped and defined the modernity that took form in the 16th century is that they created a new culture of spectacle or brought new interpretations to the existing arts of spectacle: there is Karagöz, there is the meddah, and elsewhere there are other arts. But since we are talking about architecture, we should also talk about the elements of spectacle in architecture. For Sinan, the Süleymaniye is a place of spectacle, but from the Süleymaniye the city, too, is a place of spectacle. As one walks here, one takes pleasure in the spectacle from a host of surprising, playful perspectives. It was conceived with the idea of creating a pleasure of spectacle not only for a foreigner looking from Pera or a visitor entering the city from the sea, but for every person walking in the city.” [3]
The close link that Kafadar draws here between “viewing” and “strolling,” as he speaks of the pleasure of viewing that city dwellers derive from their everyday walks, is present in the word temaşa itself. Having come into Turkish from Arabic, the word “temaşa,” besides meanings such as watching, looking and observing, is also related to the word “walk” and carries the meaning of “stroll”; it can therefore be said that movement and viewing are inherent in temaşa. In other words, temaşa involves moving (strolling), watching while in motion, or watching what is in motion. Kafadar’s observation reminds us that the roots of modernity’s culture of spectacle, that is, of the ways of seeing of the subject in motion and of the new regimes of knowledge born of relative perspective, go back much further, to the 16th century: “There is a modern pleasure that we call seeing and being seen, which, although it was named in the 19th century, existed before then without a name,” says Kafadar. Interestingly, the seeds of the “fluid frame,” the hallmark of Istanbul’s image in cinema, or of the panoramic shots flowing over the water along the Golden Horn or the Bosphorus, also go back several centuries, and the pre-cinematic fluid frames in which the city becomes a “sight to behold” are remarkably numerous. A kind of pre-cinematic cinematographic style stands out in historical accounts, in travelers’ prose and in paintings alike.
[1] Anne Freidberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 4.[2] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2002), p. 6.[3] Kamera Öncesi bir Kamera Gezisi” (interview with Cemal Kafadar), Altyazı, no. 109, September 2011, pp. 52-55.
Kömürciyan’s pre-camera camera
In reaching back to the pre-cinematic precursors of the fluid frame, we should first look, again drawing on Cemal Kafadar’s observation above, at a work he discusses: Eremya Çelebi Kömürciyan’s History of Istanbul. In an entry he wrote for the Official and Illustrated Dictionary of Turkish Cinema prepared by Altyazı, Kafadar writes that the traveler Eremya Çelebi Kömürciyan, a contemporary of Evliya Çelebi, takes his readers on a boat trip on the Bosphorus, and that this trip is constructed in a cinematographic style. In the entry titled “Eremya Çelebi Kömürciyan’s Pre-Camera Camera,” Kafadar states:
“In his work titled History of Istanbul, he starts from Yedikule and puts his reader in a boat. ‘Come, let us board a boat,’ he says. He rows out a little and says, ‘now let us look at the city from here.’ After that, he writes the entire history of Istanbul by talking with that reader he takes around in the boat and by shaping their perspectives. He says: ‘To the west, Yedikule, the farthest end of the city, can be seen. Let us not get out of the boat. Following the shore and advancing slowly toward the east, let us carefully contemplate our surroundings.’” [1]
Kafadar sees here a mode of narration reminiscent of cinematic editing. He notes that Kömürciyan wrote “the entire history of Istanbul by talking with that reader he takes around in the boat and by shaping their perspectives”; in other words, he suggests that Kömürciyan made “a camera tour before the camera”: “He pans, he stops, he zooms. He pulls out, pans again, or switches between close-ups and long shots.” According to Kafadar, this is “an indication of how the pleasure of spectacle was internalized in the culture of that period.” [2]
[1] Cemal Kafadar, “Eremya Çelebi Kömürciyan’ın Kamera Öncesi Kamerası”, Altyazı’nın Gayrı Resmi ve Resimli Türkiye Sinema Sözlüğü: Special Issue 150 (June-September 2015): 78-79.[2] “Kamera Öncesi bir Kamera Gezisi” (interview with Cemal Kafadar), Altyazı 109 (September 2011): pp. 52-55.
Kundura Sahne‘s interdisciplinary and international concept and practice development program in the field of performance, held for the first time this year, PerformLab, is bringing together artists from Türkiye and the Netherlands at Beykoz Kundura from May 29 to June 6. Ten-Question Conversations will host these artists, and the first is performance artist, theater maker, actor and writer Khadija El Kharraz Alami
Interview: Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel
Art Unlimited – 10-Question Conversations
***To read the full interview in Art Unlimited Magazine, CLICK HERE
Realized by Kundura Sahne in partnership with Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam and with the support of Dutch Performing Arts, the PerformLab program will give artists from Türkiye at different stages of their careers, selected through an open call – Barış Arman, Dilan Onay, Doğan Can Serinkaya, Filiz İzem Yaşın, Halil İbrahim Aygün, Nadir Sönmez, Nursev Irmak, Onur Karaoğlu and Selen Gürmen – the opportunity to share and develop their work over the course of a week, together with the artists from the Netherlands. PerformLab will also be accompanied by artist İlyas Odman as its Art Fermenter, bringing a new perspective to artistic processes through the concept of fermentation. This approach, which proposes using fermentation as a tool for looking at artistic processes from a new perspective, will form the backbone of PerformLab.
The artists joining from the Netherlands are dancer and choreographer Benjamin Kahn, Amsterdam Fringe Award–winning dancer and performer Cherish Menzo, actor and performer Khadija El Kharraz Alami, and Green Room Award–winning educator, artist, theater maker and director Samara Hersch. The first of the artists we will host in Ten-Question Conversations is performance artist, theater maker, actor and writer Khadija El Kharraz Alami. El Kharraz Alami is a ‘storyteller’ who draws inspiration from everyday events, relationships and people in her own personal life, and who is interested in human beings in search of identity and in the futility of that search. Her performances emerge at the end of long research processes, and she allows them to keep transforming even afterward. In performances shaped by a feminist perspective, she invites her audience on a journey, one they undertake together and that the process continually transforms, into the realm of womanhood and toward how one might move beyond it.
What do you think is the essence of performance? How would you define performance today?
Setting out to move beyond established, old ideas, recalling them and expressing them; trying to explore the unknown. An ongoing inquiry into how the clash of different times can be fruitful.
What new perspectives do you think interdisciplinary production in the arts offers artists?
It keeps artists’ curiosity alive and allows them to gain broader perspectives on the meaning of craftsmanship.
What specifically (which performance, process, etc.) will you share with the PerformLab participants?
The attempt to mentally and physically “take back space” (reclaim space), and how our first encounter, in the midst of the unknown, can allow us to share, exchange, confront and move beyond this attempt.
***To read the full interview in Art Unlimited Magazine, CLICK HERE
*You can watch Daniel & Clara’s film Notes from a Journey online and free of charge until July 19, 2021, on Kundurama, as part of “The Other Side of the Dream” selection.
British filmmakers Daniel and Clara say they have freed themselves from their nationalities, surnames and genders in order to work as “a single artist split into two human forms.” Judging by their working bases in the countryside of Portugal and England, Daniel and Clara’s focus clearly points toward a rural aesthetic. Even at their most direct, Daniel and Clara’s films avoid simple documentation. Even when it is an experience as ordinary as taking a walk by the sea, they convey its complexity.
Their latest feature, Notes from a Journey (2019), signals that it is an avant-garde horror film, if horror shot through with a light-hearted joy is possible. The directors use music, sound design, editing and color to show the limits of our perception and the potential for a perfect connection with nature. Shot during a two-week journey that ended at the stone circle of Avebury in the United Kingdom, the film never allows the viewer to settle. While the image of a forest is hidden behind bright red tones, the screen periodically becomes so white or so dark that we can see nothing at all. The film contains a few scenes in which we clearly see Daniel and Clara on their journey and recording sounds, but even these scenes seem uncanny in context. Although it is not linear, it is sound, more than image, that carries the film. It is an exciting continuation of Exteriors (2017), a series of short films that turned their tendency toward abstraction into something new and hard to pin down. Notes from a Journey is thrillingly beautiful, yet it also carries an uncanny sense of foreboding.
**This interview was conducted by email for Kinoscope, with Daniel and Clara giving written answers to questions from film critic Steve Erickson.
Revisiting (2019) seems to create an imaginary, immersive experience of nature. Yet at the same time, it keeps reminding the viewer that this experience reaches them through a medium. Along with people taking photographs of the stone circle, we also see printed pictures of it next to a computer. Why did you include these references?
Revisiting came about during our second visit to the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire. Our first visit took place in 2017, during a two-week tour around England, and it resulted in our feature film Notes from a Journey. Avebury had a significant impact on our lives and our work; you could say it was one of the reasons we returned to England after living in Portugal for a few years. The experience was almost life-changing, and it has guided the focus of our creative practice ever since. So “Revisiting” is a film about returning to this place of personal significance, about looking at the site, and about trying to express the feeling of experiencing it.
We are very much interested in the nature of experience, and through our work we explore how we can express the experience of experiencing in all its complexity and layers, especially in relation to place. When we encounter a place, our experience of it is never one-dimensional. It is not a matter of observing objectively, as if we were some unfeeling mechanical device. What we describe as our experience is made up of complex and stimulating layers that exist both inside and outside.
There are the physical feelings and sensations caused by the temperature and the weather, and there are also the physical sensations within yourself: whether you are hungry or have just eaten, whether you are ill, in pain or suffering, or have any other bodily sensation. Your emotional state also colors how you respond to the place. All of this is blended together with the thoughts flowing through your mind and with the personal and cultural associations of the place. All of it becomes a dance in which inner and outer reality merge seamlessly. In our work, we explore ways of becoming more aware of all these dimensions of experience, and of how they contribute to our perception of what reality is.
This brings us to how image-making tools come into play. Since our experience of making a film about returning to Avebury centered on looking through cameras and on the act of image-making, we felt it was fitting to include this on screen as well.
How did you decide to shoot the Exteriors series on VHS, which gives it a smeared and imperfect quality?
Our interest lies in consciousness, and in particular in how art can help us to exist fully and consciously in the present moment, and we are aware that, by creating, it can allow us to exist within reality.
Especially when working with photographic images, we want to push them to a place where they stop being a document of something and become something in themselves. We hope to make work that involves a first-person encounter with the piece, work that is not only about its subject but is also an experience for the viewer. When watching an image filmed on VHS, one becomes aware of the recording device and all too aware of its limits as an accurate depiction of external reality. But it is also a hypnotically beautiful image. When you look at its shifting colors and flickering images, you are drawn into it. For us, it is a medium that expresses well our interest in an experience of dual reality.
The electronic music you place in the final minutes of EXT. WAVES (2017), and the way you cut the sound in parts of EXT. FIRE AT FAIRLIGHT GLEN (2017), push the films toward abstraction in a way that made me forget the real nature of what I was seeing. Did you ever plan to use live sound all the way through?
You are right that the sound choices in the films make them more abstract. The way we use sound is the same as the way we use images, as something that activates experience, while also being aware that it is an artifice. We are always amazed at how subtly sound can change the experience of an image; sound can overwhelm it and flatten it, and it can also bring it to life. In guiding the viewer through a film and in creating the reality of the experience, sound is even more powerful than image. It affects both our bodily perception and our instinctive sense of what reality is in a more elusive way.
We always shoot our films silent and edit image and sound separately. That way we have more control over how they interact. Sometimes the sound draws close to the image, appearing as if it were in sync with it, but at other times it can drift away from the image, as if there were several realities existing at the same time.
There is no composer credit on your films. Do you write your music yourselves?
Our early work was usually made in collaboration with musicians and sound artists, but since 2016 we have started making the sound and music ourselves. This was partly because we work faster and on more than one project at a time, and we like to jump between projects when inspiration strikes. So working with others was not very practical for us. We are not trained musicians, but we have developed some personal strategies for creating music; we usually work through sound and image rather than through music.
In Notes From a Journey, we can see images of the forest behind the red tinting. But I kept wondering whether the faint images I saw behind the white screen were optical illusions. Is this excess of light there to cover something up?
In Notes from a Journey we call these sequences color fields. They are faint shots of landscapes, barely visible within a digitally created flat field of bright red, blue, white or black. When we first created them, watching a full sequence in the darkness of our studio was a real shock to our eyes. The extreme color fields push our eyes to the limits of perception, where the image is so hard to see that we even doubt it is there. Are we questioning what we see on the screen, or the effect of the colored light on our eyes? Of course, it is the interweaving of both the stimuli and the physical mechanisms, and their subsequent translation by the brain. While watching these extreme color fields in the dark, one can become aware of how our eyes respond, and also of how the mind tries to make sense of what it sees, how even the slightest image gets filled in. Building a picture out of gaps and even the faintest of clues. What fascinates us is being both inside the experience and observing it at the same time.
The interplay between image and sound in Notes from a Journey is quite complex. How long did the editing take, and how much did you work on this aspect of the film?
Notes from a Journey was edited over two years, but most of that time was spent on other projects. We would have short marathons of work on it, but then we would need to step back. It took us a long time to find the right approach to the film. We like working on several projects at once. When we reach a standstill, we immediately move on to another project. We think this helps the flow of creativity more. Usually, when we return to a work in progress, we can more easily solve everything that had been troubling us before.
We edited and locked the film before starting work on the soundtrack. This part of the process usually develops more quickly for us. The sound and music of Notes From a Journey were created over a month-long process that used a kind of mix of field recordings along with sounds recorded at home. Lacking a sound studio, we built a sound booth by hanging blankets around a wardrobe, where we recorded all the effects and body sounds.
There are undertones of pantheism and a touch of hidden ritualism in your films. Do you follow any spiritual or religious belief system? If so, how much is this connected to your interest in rural spaces and in depicting nature?
We follow the creative spirit wherever it takes us. However, we are not followers of any external spiritual structure. In the early years of our collaboration, our focus was more on experience and insight. We spent a lot of time exploring the images in our dreams and the workings of the imagination, and incorporating them into our practice. More recently, this inward gaze has made room for more dialogue with the environments we find ourselves in, and for the need to look outward. So one of our eyes is open and looking outward, while the other is closed and looking inward. But we have always been strongly drawn to rural spaces, to the natural, to places where the human element is present but which somehow feel mysterious or outside of time. Where our dreams and the landscape intertwine, our fantasies can come true. For us, the landscape is not something that exists on its own; as we come face to face with it, we encounter what we project onto it. Responding to this encounter through image-making is to set out on a journey of the self and of perception.
You set up a website called Moving Image Artists in order to better explain and share both your own work and that of your peers, particularly experimental filmmakers working with images of nature. Before that, you published a magazine in which you wrote about cinema. Are you happy with the response Moving Image Artists has received?
MIA grew out of a need felt by ourselves and by our friends working with the moving image, artists making work that exists in the gap between the gallery and the cinema but does not fit into theoretical frameworks. When we returned to England in 2019, we were looking for a space where artists could come together, share their ideas and work openly and collaboratively, without expecting a hierarchical structure. No such space existed, so we had to create it. We launched the Moving Image Salon concept, a monthly gathering for artists working in experimental film, video art, in short, every kind of moving image. Every month we offer an open platform where our guests can share their work.
We are glad we decided to do it. We had no idea how popular it would become, and through it we have met many inspiring artists. Likewise, we are very happy that these artists have found it a useful and inspiring space for themselves. A community has begun to form through the collaborations that have emerged from the discussions and encounters. The online magazine serves as a platform for artists to write about their own work, share their research and processes, and interview other artists. We see it as a way of documenting and sharing what is happening now in contemporary moving image art.
During the current lockdown, the only way people have been able to see your work has been on home monitors, which are usually quite small computer screens. I watched it on my laptop. Given that you often play with the limits of darkness and our perception, how do you think the experience of seeing your work this way works? Have you had the chance to present Notes From a Journey theatrically?
So far, Notes from a Journey has been shown at the Rencontres Internationales in Paris, the Slow Film Festival in the UK, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio. That is not enough for us, but we are very happy that we at least had that opportunity before the coronavirus pandemic hit the world and the lockdown began. Unfortunately, because of this, all of our upcoming screenings have been canceled, and we do not yet know when we will be able to return to a cinema. Notes from a Journey was not designed to be viewed on a screen such as a home monitor. But for now, we are happy that the film is featured on a platform like Kinoscope and that people can access it. We know the film offers a challenging experience for home viewing, but the lovely responses we have received have really surprised us, so even if it is watched under these conditions, that is wonderful for us. Yes, perhaps it will not be the same as the cinema experience, but it can still evolve into another kind of viewing experience. For the full effect, we recommend that viewers watch it in the dark with headphones or at a very high volume!
What is your latest project, and how far along is it?
We are spending the lockdown on Mersea Island, off the coast of Essex. During this time, we are working on a few projects that keep us sane, safe and creative. Some of these projects are partly a response to the situation we find ourselves in.
We have a mail art project. We have a series of letters that we send to friends, followers and a few strangers. We have been doing this for a year, but now that we find ourselves in great isolation, it has become a more important part of our work. With everything being online, finding ways to make a physical connection is very important to us. Material sent directly from our own hands to the audience is one such work. The act of sending letters carries this feeling as well.
We are also developing a new moving image installation, which is still in its early stages. The film is being shot on Mersea Island and is largely inspired by the hedgerows, thorns, thickets and empty paths that run through the fields and woods around the island. But we are only just beginning! You can follow its progress here: https://www.instagram.com/daniel_and_clara
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Moving Image Artists:
https://movingimageartists.co.uk/
Header and inline images: “Notes from a Journey”, Daniel & Clara
Turkish translation: Nil Ege Özden
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