Opened after many years, a family archive offers intimate records of a love that began between two women in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.
For most of her life, looking at the records of her grandmother’s imprisonment in the Ravensbrück concentration camp seemed too painful for Sylvie Bianchi. For years, Sylvie kept her grandmother’s letters, diaries, photographs and home movies in the attic of her family’s French farmhouse. The documentary “Nelly & Nadine” tells of how Sylvie finally opened the dusty boxes and drew from them a surprising story of love and resistance.
Sylvie learns that her grandmother, Nelly Mousset-Vos, was an opera singer who spied for the French Resistance. Nelly was imprisoned at Ravensbrück in 1944, and there she met Nadine Hwang, who worked in literary circles in Paris and was probably involved in resistance efforts. They fell in love. Then they were separated, but after the war they moved to Venezuela together. They lived as a couple until Nadine’s death in 1972, and Nadine documented the life they shared in the home movies we also see in the film. Answering director Magnus Gertten’s questions with great candor, Sylvie says she remembers Nadine, but that Nadine was only ever referred to as her grandmother’s friend and housemate.
Given the amount of documentation shown in the documentary, this is quite an astonishing love story. Gertten first identifies Nadine in newsreel footage of refugees who found shelter in Sweden after being liberated from the camp. That footage alone—capturing hundreds of joyful faces, and Nadine as a lone, somber figure in the crowd—is remarkable.
But it is equally miraculous that Nelly and Nadine’s records were preserved by Nelly’s family—historically, an archival courtesy rarely extended to women who loved women. The film is a moving work because it portrays an archive as unexpected as the film itself.
But it is just as miraculous that Nelly and Nadine’s records were preserved by Nelly’s family—historically speaking, an archival courtesy we rarely encounter when it comes to women who loved women. The film moves forward with the intimacy it portrays, opening up an archive as extraordinary as the love story it pursues.
*This article was published in December 2022 in The New York Times.
Lynne Sachs’s prismatic, psychodramatic family portrait “Film About a Father Who” (IMDb) is a gripping, poetic essay suggesting that looking at a family tree is not enough to understand a family.
American filmmaker, artist and poet Lynne Sachs—whose work, spanning documentaries, experimental shorts and hybrid live performances, is too diverse to be confined to a single genre—made the 2020 film “Film About a Father Who”, which is not only a fragmented family album but also a record of how Sachs’s filmmaking has evolved over the years.
In her film, which takes its title from Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 avant-garde masterpiece “About a Woman Who…,” Sachs unlocks the secrets of her rebellious, free-spirited father Ira, now in his eighties. Looking deeply into a far-from-stable family life, she also tries to understand the bond that ties a child to their parent and siblings.
Ira Sachs Sr. is no ordinary father. He resembles an older version of The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” He is a hippie whose grand gestures and exuberance draw attention wherever he goes, and a businessman with ambitious commercial ventures. And at the same time, he is the father of nine children, all now over 30, from relationships with six different women—some of whom grew up unaware of one another for years.
Lynne Sachs, the eldest of the siblings, has been recording her father since 1984. She gathers 8 and 16 mm film footage, videotapes and, more recently, digital material, and from this visual memory spanning decades she crafts a documentary that is as experimental as it is deeply personal.
Starting from cubist representations of a face, Sachs’s cinematic inquiry presents multifaceted, sometimes contradictory images of her father, portraying a man who, though he shows himself openly in front of the camera, remains mysterious and invisible in his private life.
Sachs approaches the father figure—seemingly modest, and one the audience feels very close to—with a candor that, while not entirely merciless, is not easy on him either. She structures her film as an investigation into his character—and, of course, around the shock that two children he had hidden from his other children, revealed toward the end of the film, sent through the family.
Sachs’s emotional interrogation of her glib yet secretive father takes her back, again and again, to blurry videotapes shot in her childhood or young adulthood, where she searches for signs that might explain his behavior.
Unfolding as a meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, the film gives both Sachs herself and the viewer the chance to look beneath the skin, beyond the reality being projected. As surprising truths come to light, she learns things about her father she never expected.
“How can you search for something you didn’t even know was lost?” asks Sachs, referring to the two half-sisters she was unaware of for years and who grew up around the same time as she did, as she ponders early-’90s footage of her young half-brothers playing in the woods.
Despite the shocking revelations she uncovers, Sachs does not turn her film into a punch, and takes care to convey her love for her father. A feature-length polyphonic portrait of her father filmed over many years, the film ultimately shows that this man is essentially unknowable, his mysteries too vast to be captured by a camera.
Jonathan Romney of Screen Daily describes the film as “Terrific in its courage, honesty and purpose! Like a chapter in the ongoing body of work of a director who makes experimental, deeply personal work.” Benjamin Hollis of Documentary Weekly says, “Sachs’s greatest achievement to date. A unique, brilliant film that stayed with me in the end.”
The film had its world premiere as the opening film of the Slamdance Film Festival in 2020, was screened in The Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight program, and had its international premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest alongside a retrospective specially devoted to Sachs.
The film also holds a surprise: one of Lynne’s siblings is the American director who shares his father’s name, Ira Sachs. Known to audiences in Türkiye especially through “Keep the Lights On” (2012), and continuing his success with films such as “Love Is Strange” (2014), “Little Men” (2016) and his latest film “Passages” (2023), which competed at the Berlinale, Ira Sachs briefly joins his sister Lynne in her search.
Kundura Sinema’s “Love, Rebellion, Freedom” selection will screen “Film About a Father Who” on June 4. For ticket information, please follow this link.
Lynne Sachs: An experimental filmmaker and poet born in Memphis and based in Brooklyn. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries to essay films, experimental shorts and hybrid live performances. She has directed more than 30 films, including “Tip of My Tongue,” “Your Day is My Night,” “Investigation of a Flame” and “Which Way is East.”
Kundura Sinema’s Love, Rebellion, Freedom documentary film selection features “Nelly & Nadine”, which follows the moving journey of two women in pursuit of a ‘forbidden love’ that began in a concentration camp in the 1940s. The film’s director Magnus Gertten spoke about how the film came to be and its challenging production process.
How did the story of Nelly & Nadine begin?
It actually goes back to 2007. That was the year I began researching a historical event in Malmö, which is also the city where I was born. At the end of World War II, around 15,000 people rescued from the Nazi concentration camps in Germany found refuge in Sweden for several months. The survivors took their first steps of freedom in the harbor of Malmö. April 28, 1945, in particular, was one of the days carefully documented by the Swedish media. The best film photographers were there to capture striking close-ups of people who had just escaped the horrors of the camps. The archival footage shot in Malmö was about 40 minutes long and was unique material of its kind. The faces in the films—these newly liberated people standing in the harbor of the city where I was born—fascinated me. I asked myself: would it be possible to identify these people, almost 70 years later?
And so began a long cinematic journey, one that produced two different documentaries: “Harbour of Hope” (2011) tells the big story of how the Swedish city looked upon the survivors in 1945, while “Every Face Has a Name” (2015) took on the conceptual mission of finding the names behind the anonymous faces. I can proudly say that both films traveled the world and won awards.
Whom did you identify in the footage from April 28, 1945?
The people in the archival footage came from different backgrounds; among them were Jews, members of the Belgian resistance, British agents, Norwegian resistance fighters and Polish women with newborn babies. We managed to trace the stories of many of the survivors.
One of the most mysterious people in the harbor footage was a Chinese woman in a striped camp uniform, standing in front of a wooden fence. While the others were clearly happy, she had a very serious expression on her face. While editing our two documentaries, we kept returning to the footage of this striking woman. What was she thinking at that moment? What became of her story after the war?
How did you learn the story of Nelly and Nadine?
First, we learned the name of that mysterious woman—Nadine Hwang—and a year after completing “Every Face Has a Name,” we returned to her story to discover what had happened to her after the war. A Venezuelan woman living in Paris saw the call for help we had posted on social media and wrote to us. She told us that Nadine Hwang had been her nanny in Caracas, Venezuela, when she was a baby in the late ’60s.
The last missing pieces about Nadine came to light in late 2016, when I attended a screening of “Every Face Has a Name” in Paris. There I met a couple named Sylvie and Christian. They told me the whole story of the relationship between Nadine Hwang and the Belgian singer Nelly Mousset-Vos, Sylvie’s grandmother, and spoke of the archival treasures in their attic, among them a diary from the camp years. Suddenly, I had another big story in my hands connected to the 1945 archival footage. I had never dreamed of making another film from this archive, but it was clear that I had to take care of this gift.
Is there anything you would like to add?
“Nelly & Nadine” gave me the chance to combine my curiosity about history and music with my passion for telling the stories of people who fight for freedom, love and the right to be themselves. And once again I realized that I have the most privileged job in the world.
For ticket information for “Nelly & Nadine,” screening on June 4 as part of “Love, Rebellion, Freedom,” please follow this link.
Magnus Gertten: An award-winning director and producer based in Malmö, Sweden. During his years as a TV and radio journalist, he made films for Swedish National Radio and Swedish Television (SVT). He continues to develop projects under Auto Images, the production company he founded with actor Lennart Ström. His notable films include “Get Busy” (2004); “Rolling Like a Stone” (2005), which won the Best Music Documentary Award at the Silverdocs/AFI Festival; “Long Distance Love,” which won the Best Documentary Award at the Hamptons Film Festival in 2009; “Harbour of Hope” (2012), which received the Special Jury Award at the Krakow Film Festival; “Every Face Has a Name” (2014), screened in the Best of Fests section at IDFA 2015; and “Becoming Zlatan” (2015), which he co-directed with his brother Fredrik Gertten. Since 2017, he has held an honorary doctorate from Malmö University.
Sümerbank Beykoz Deri ve Kundura Fabrikası (Beykoz Leather and Shoe Factory), which has become a multilayered cultural heritage of the history of labor and workers in Türkiye, embodied a factory model that never set labor apart from production and was home to a solidarity in which workers came first.
Nurtaç Buluç*
The foundations of Beykoz Kundura—regarded as one of Türkiye’s most important industrial heritage sites and, since 2018, one of Istanbul’s leading centers for arts and culture—were laid in the early 1800s as the Beykoz Broadcloth and Paper Factory.
Converted by Abdülhamit II in 1886 into the Hamidiye Paper Factory, a paper and leather manufacturing works, the Factory became, with the founding of the Republic and as Sümerbank Beykoz Deri ve Kundura Fabrikası, a multilayered cultural heritage for the history of labor and workers in Türkiye as well.
Beyond being a factory complex, Beykoz Kundura was a living space with a population of up to three thousand, encompassing a nursery, a cinema, a social club, a health clinic, a library and staff housing. Strikes, resistance and union struggles were inseparable parts of life at the Factory. The proletarian spaces formed by industrial workers, together with social and economic life, merged with the place itself to shape the reality of the Factory and of Beykoz. Through all of these formations, the Factory was also shaped by its spaces, by the labor of its workers and by the bonds that this labor forged.
Beykoz Deri ve Kundura Fabrikası had become a vast living space, where workers were paid according to their output under a planning system, where social life was active, and around which a working-class neighborhood culture took shape.
According to an archival document from 1935, the Beykoz Deri Kundura Fabrikası Consumer Cooperative was established to carry out relief work for the workers employed at the Factory, thereby providing them with financial support.(1) Another archival document, from 1950, records that the Beykoz Deri ve Kundura Fabrikası Workers’ Building Cooperative was founded to meet the workers’ housing needs.(2) The Factory embodied a factory model that never set labor apart from production and was home to a solidarity in which workers came first.
Leather workers, who had been among the key actors of the labor movement through the union associations they formed in the Ottoman era, came together under a single union for the first time in 1947, the year the right to union organization gained a legal framework (under Law No. 5018 on Workers’ and Employers’ Unions and Union Confederations).
The Beykoz Leather Goods Industry Union was founded in 1947, followed by the Deri-İş Union in 1948. The legal recognition of workers’ rights such as collective bargaining and the right to strike at that time gave rise to a deep-rooted class movement that has shaped today’s working conditions.
As part of the oral history work that Kundura Hafıza launched in 2015 in collaboration with the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfı), and which continues today, we interviewed nearly 200 people who lived and worked at the Factory. Through these interviews, we also recorded a wealth of information about the working class, unionization and class struggle at Beykoz Deri ve Kundura Fabrikası. Here are a few of them…
“Kundura was the first factory here; it was the largest-scale organization in Beykoz. In fact, it wasn’t only a factory—this place was a social center, a living space. And the factory had a character of its own here, a way of life it had created for itself. People who came from different places in Anatolia, from different cultures, had formed an Anatolian culture here, specific to the factory, centered on the factory, under the banner of the factory. A Beykoz culture under the banner of leather and shoes, you know… a Beykoz culture with Anatolian culture within it, really—that’s what they had built.”
Yusuf Kırtorun (He worked as a laborer at the Factory.)
“I was a representative during the strike. They even set up tents here; there were people on watch all the way to where this Mobil station is. In the evenings we’d bring them, all of them, stuff, you know—food was being brought to the shore and so on; there were 7 or so, 8 friends, and together with them we’d bring their meals by car. As a union, we asked for a raise. We went on strike on a Wednesday. The strike was well prepared; Emin Bey called in those on strike duty and gave each of them a task: tents will be set up over there—they were set up at the gate there, up above as you head toward that Mobil station. And also, here where you are, four tents were set up over there, and in the tents, you know, tea stations and whatnot were prepared. That was in ’75, and it lasted a full 54 days. After 54 days they called them to Ankara, so Emin Bey and the others went. Four people went then, and anyway they agreed on some modest amount or so; for those times, well, it was said, ‘God bless it anyway.’ That’s how the strike went—we went on strike for a full 54 days.”
Orhan Dinkay (He worked in the Factory’s Planning Office.)
“Our lives, I mean, how should I put it, our youth—I really did come in at 22 and leave at 47. The best period, what can I say, let’s call it the spring, the spring of a person’s life was spent here. And it was a very good one; I’m so glad I came. It’s a matter of fate, but, for example, I stayed single here for 7 years, in the boarding house. With the friends in the married staff housing, we were like a family. We were like brothers. Dropping by their homes at all hours, them inviting us over for dinner—it truly was a family. Let me put it this way: there’s a saying within Sümerbank, Beykoz can’t be told, it has to be lived. And it really is so. Beykoz can’t be told, it has to be lived. We ate and drank here like a family, sat together, got up together. We were like a family here. The smell? After a while… of course, when we first started and they were showing us around the factory, touring the leather plant, there really was a very heavy smell. When you first arrive, that smell hits you very differently, but over time, as you work at your job, it builds a sort of immunity, you get used to that smell; honestly, I didn’t really mind that smell much.”
Abdullah Kaya (He worked in the Factory’s Machinery Directorate.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEOEoBOm3Xc&list=PL4MOdOLTxZ93j4aBIFrI_EjUWTpCQBB83
*Nurtaç Buluç – Kundura Hafıza Archive and Research
References
1- Presidency of State Archives, Republican Archives, Prime Ministry Directorate of Decrees, Archive No: 30-18-1-2.
2- Presidency of State Archives, Republican Archives, General Directorate of Transactions, Archive No: 30-18-1-2.
3- In 1968, Sümerbank launched a lyrics and composition competition for the Sümerbank Anthem. The Sümerbank Poetry Anthology is a compilation of some of the poems submitted to the competition.
The documentary by one of the auteurs of feminist cinema, Chantal Akerman, about Pina Bausch – One Day Pina Asked… – is screening at Kundura Sinema this weekend. Made in 1983, the film will be shown in a restored print as part of a program prepared especially for International Dance Day on April 29 in tribute to the legendary dancer and choreographer we lost in 2009, Pina Bausch: “For the Love of Dance: Pina Bausch”.
Unlike any other film made about dance or choreography, this documentary brings together two of the most remarkable women artists of the 20th century and portrays Pina Bausch and the work of her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, through the eyes of Chantal Akerman.
“The first time I saw one of Pina’s performances, I was overcome by a feeling I couldn’t quite define,” says Akerman, and she builds the film’s point of departure on precisely this indefinability. One Day Pina Asked… becomes an attempt to describe this feeling by journeying into the depths of Bausch’s world.
Recording the company’s rehearsals and performances during a five-week European tour, Akerman takes us on a fascinating journey into Pina’s creative world and her unwavering search for love.
Observing the dancers backstage and in their dressing rooms as they get dressed, put on makeup and sing, Akerman talks about Bausch with the dancers, whom Bausch chose not only for their talents but also for certain intangible personal qualities. The camera, which never leaves their side throughout the tour, captures the dancers’ development and how they discover in their own stories the autobiographical details that Bausch so often built into her performances.
Seeking to get to know, through the eyes of her dancers, an artist who set out to explore personal memory and human relationships with her striking dances and elaborate stagings, Akerman uses long takes and meticulous compositions, and sees from the heart the autobiographical details that Bausch so often built into her performances.
The film also features cult Bausch performances such as “Komm Tanz Mit Mir” (Come Dance with Me, 1977), “Nelken” (Carnations, 1982), “Walzer” (1982) and “1980” (1980).
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody compares the film with Wim Wenders’s 2011 film “Pina” and praises it in these words: “Akerman’s film is a work of modestly audacious curiosity, discovery and inspiration. With its daring compositions, its decisive editing and its sense of time that quivers like a taut string – and with its austere simplicity – it conveys what ‘3-D Pina’ could not: the instantaneous ecstasy of the moment of creation.”
Meanwhile, the Chicago Reader’s Ben Sachs says: “Astonishing! With ‘One Day Pina Asked…’ Akerman reaches new levels of sensuality and emotional directness. Using long takes and meticulous compositions, she encourages us to consider how the dancers’ bodies look. She turns Bausch’s ideas into flesh and blood.”
You can watch “One Day Pina Asked…” at Kundura Sinema on April 29 and 30. For more information and tickets, click here.
The choreographer who revolutionized modern dance, Pina Bausch, is the focus of Beykoz Kundura’s International Dance Day celebrations this year. Screening on April 29 and 30 at Kundura Sinema as part of the program “For the Love of Dance: Pina Bausch”, the documentary “Dancing Pina” celebrates the art of the legendary dancer and the people who interpret her work today.
Directed by Florian Heinzen-Ziob, the 2022 film pursues the question of what remains of Bausch’s legacy, offering a visually intense and emotional look at the world of modern dance and beyond.
Telling the story of how young dancers from around the world rediscover Pina’s unique choreographic style, the film follows two dance projects in Europe and Africa: one at the venerable Semperoper in Dresden, Germany, and one at the École des Sables in a fishing village near Dakar, Senegal. The young dancers are guided by former members of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater company. But Pina is not someone who can simply be copied.
The dancers have to relive Pina’s choreographies through their own bodies and their own stories. Like Sanguen Lee from South Korea, who was considered too tall to be a dancer. Or Gloria Ugwarelojo Biachi from Nigeria, who uses dance to represent her struggle for equality… Or Julian Amir Lacey from the US, who has had to overcome homophobic prejudice…
The film creates a captivating metamorphosis: as performers of street dance, classical ballet, and traditional and contemporary African dance forms transform Pina’s works, Pina’s choreographies transform the dancers in turn.
Interviews with dancers and choreographers, clips from the original productions and a modern perspective bring Pina Bausch and her genius back to life. And throughout the film her spirit hovers over the dancers, asking: How would you dance if you knew you were going to die?
Enhanced by stunning footage on stage and especially in the town of Toubab Dialaw on the coast of Senegal, the film takes us on a journey full of fascinating insights into the dancers’ lives and the expressive power of movement.
You can watch Dancing Pina as part of the “For the Love of Dance: Pina Bausch” program at Kundura Sinema on April 29 and 30, 2023.
Rimini Protokoll, the Berlin-based collective that has been developing different forms of storytelling around current issues and new realities ever since it was founded, comes to Beykoz Kundura with “Conference of the Absent.”
Ferdi Çetin*
“Theater” and “presence”: two fundamental concepts that have been mentioned in the same breath throughout the history of the dramatic tradition… The experience built around the idea of the “now” and the “here,” meanwhile, has always been shaped by an emphasis on the presence of the actor, owing to the central position of the play text. For the aim is for the actors to bring the characters – who emerge from the fictional world set out by the playwright and, in turn, by the play text – face to face with the audience in the present moment of the stage. Bringing the concepts of “theater” and “absence” together therefore appears to us as a relatively new approach. The idea of “absence,” which the theater theorist Gerald Siegmund theorized through dance, has been masterfully put into practice by the German director and composer Heiner Goebbels in works that blur the boundaries between theater, dance, opera, installation and concert. Alongside his artistic practice, Goebbels discusses the idea of absence in detail in his essay Aesthetics of Absence – How It All Began. Among all the dimensions of absence the director points to, the idea of “removing the performer from the stage” is the most striking. First moving the performer away from the center, and then gradually removing them from the stage altogether, are the most fundamental strategies we encounter in the director’s pieces. In this sense, Heiner Goebbels has taken his place among those who have made the best use, in stage practice, of the avant-garde experiments that emerged in various periods of the 20th century. It would now be fitting to follow this thread further, keeping in mind above all the “dehumanization of the stage.”
When we add to the point I made at the outset the idea of the “posthuman,” which is being hotly debated in every field of art and in philosophy, we will see an extremely practical ground opening up before us for making sense of many of the works we see these days. To draw a brief connection and move on: when the avant-garde explorations of the 20th century are read through the philosophical perspectives of the “posthuman,” we realize that works in the performing arts in which the human is not at the center are not so far away from us after all. Especially at a time when, with the outbreak of the pandemic, the destruction humans have wreaked on the planet and our relationship with nature have begun to be questioned faster than ever before, the performing arts, too, continue to contribute to this debate with current practices.
At this point, even a brief look at the works Beykoz Kundura has brought to audiences in Istanbul is enough to follow the debate in question. For example, Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley, which Beykoz Kundura presented to audiences online via a digital platform during the pandemic, put a robot controlled by artificial intelligence in front of the audience. Chilean writer and director Manuela İnfante’s play How to Become Stone, on the other hand, was concerned with how an aesthetic could be created by “imitating” an issue rather than “representing” it. Now we are about to see another play by Rimini Protokoll: Conference of the Absent. In this play, too, we encounter all the debates and practices touched on so far. The concept, text and direction of the play are by the collective’s founders, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel. Setting out from a position that inverts the ideas of representation and presence, Conference of the Absent puts not actors but audience members on stage in front of the audience. The speakers who “could not attend” the conference have been chosen from real life, and in this sense the talks also have a “documentary” quality. Among the speakers, alongside people from various professions such as a doctor, a lawyer and an engineer, historical figures who survived genocide are also “absent.” Let’s take a closer look at the play.
Parallel to the idea of the posthuman, which is debated on a conceptual level, another widely discussed issue is the carbon footprint. Performing artists traveling thousands of kilometers, and the international circulation of productions with enormous sets in order to give just a few performances in a city, have become a current problem that, with the pandemic, is now open to debate in the performing arts. Among the practices that people want to adopt, or have begun to adopt, are the idea of artists creating work with local artists instead of traveling with a large team, and the idea of a production being made by local creators with local materials rather than a ready-made show being sent on tour. Conference of the Absent is almost the embodiment of these debates. The play sets out from a crisis and rejects the idea of transporting both the speakers who are to take part in the conference and the play’s set. This means that the speakers featured in the conference have to be represented on stage, and it falls to the audience to meet this expectation. The set, meanwhile, is put together from whatever scenery already exists at the venue where the play is staged.
Beyond its response to these debates, Conference of the Absent has another striking feature: the idea of absence is met formally by the fact that the speakers of the “fictional” conference in the play are not present “there” and “now.” This idea of absence, explored at the level of form, is also present in the content of the conference speakers’ talks. To give an example, one speaker’s inability to move is cited as the concrete reason why they cannot travel. In other words, the speaker has a body they cannot move and needs a moving body to represent them on stage. Another speaker, for instance, turns out to be a lawyer, who comes to the fore in cases concerning the ‘absence’ of justice. Once again, in this situation ‘bereft’ of justice, they need a performer to represent them. And the list goes on… In short, Conference of the Absent addresses the idea of absence on the levels of both form and content.
In Conference of the Absent, which manages to bring together all of the debates mentioned above in the performing arts in an age of global crises and to embody them exceptionally well, the audience has to go on stage and “play” in order to be able to watch the play. In this way, the problem of the conference speakers’ absence is resolved “through a displacement,” and the absent bodies on stage are replaced by the bodies present in the auditorium. It is a formula that also calls into question the sharp boundaries between performer and audience. From the moment audience members go on stage to give a talk at the conference, their speech texts are handed to them in envelopes, and the technical equipment they will need during the talk is provided with the help of a technical desk that is also set up on stage; all that is left is to listen to the instructions and deliver their talks. In this sense, Conference of the Absent is a play that is renewed with every performance. It is an opportunity not to be missed to experience the play from the stage.
*This article was originally published on Argonotlar.com.
Tim Burton’s early classics ‘Beetlejuice’ and ‘Edward Scissorhands,’ which stand out for their gothic worlds and melancholic characters, come to audiences as part of Kundura Sinema’s Sunday Cinema Club.
Kaan Denk*
Tim Burton is a special director who, through the singular universe he has created since the very beginning of his career, has managed to bring the stories of his heroes who stand outside the circle to a general audience. Naturally, for every cinephile some of his films will stand out above others, and some will remain more special because of personal experiences. But for most viewers it is hardly possible to remain indifferent to the works of his early career in particular.
The famous Tim Burton world we all know today began to take shape with the short animated films the director had been making since the age of 13. And it is still possible to see the trademark traces of the world of Burton, who most recently, this year, sat in the producer’s and director’s chair for the popular series about Wednesday, the beloved member of the Addams Family. Using the dark elements of gothic culture in all his work, the director promises perhaps a little shiver in his films but, for the most part, a high dose of fun. In fact, it may be worth talking about two modern classics that stand out precisely for these qualities, that come to mind whenever Tim Burton is mentioned, and that sum up the director’s cinema: Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990).
Impressed by the talent the director had shown in his early short films, Warner Bros. had entrusted him with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, released in 1985. After this first feature, a success both at the box office and with the critics, they set to work on one of the greatest Burton classics. Beetlejuice had all the hallmarks that would come to be identified with the director, and despite a story that might come across as “weird” to a general audience, it was a thoroughly mainstream film. It was in this film that we first encountered not only the eerie and fun side of Tim Burton’s films but also his famous gothic melancholy, which overshadows those qualities. Beneath a bustling romp that feels almost as if it belonged in a children’s film, Beetlejuice also had a rather sad story to tell.
Setting aside the “poster character” played by Michael Keaton, who gives the film its title, what we are actually watching is the sorrowful story of the young Maitland couple, the protagonists of the tale. The film opens with the young couple, deeply in love, having an unfortunate accident while building a new life in their house, which is big for them but which they adore. Getting past this heartbreaking opening with a very delicate touch, Burton then invited his audience into the “afterlife” universe that Beetlejuice also inhabits. The Maitlands’ limbo and their reluctance to leave the house that no longer belongs to them were balanced by the fun arising from Burton’s particular brand of earthly depiction of the afterlife. Yet the real gothic melancholy of Beetlejuice, a film that translated the story’s flow to the screen with astonishing skill, lay hidden elsewhere.
Lydia Deetze, one of the film’s most beloved characters and the role that made Winona Ryder a star, was one of those gothic heroines we would go on to see in every Tim Burton film. The melancholy of Lydia, who cannot connect with anyone she knows, her parents above all, and does not feel she belongs to the world around her, turns in Beetlejuice first into the role of an intermediary and then into that of a savior. Playing one of the key roles in the film through all these functions, the character was also a fine reflection of the director’s career. It would not be wrong to say that creating a world in which a hero who feels like an outcast can feel at home is the signature of both Tim Burton’s personal character and his artistic output.
Not long after – just two years later (with a relatively big-budget Batman film squeezed in between) – we saw Tim Burton at the helm of a classic he had written himself. Edward Scissorhands set out from a premise strongly reminiscent of the story of ‘Frankenstein’ (and a little of ‘Pinocchio’), one of the director’s favorite literary works. The story, which we witness in the form of a fairy tale, brought the sensibility of gothic culture to the screen in all its aspects. It focused on the utterly lonely life of Edward Scissorhands, who comes into the world with ten razor-sharp fingers resembling scissor blades after the master who created him dies before he can finish his hands. Rooted once again in a story of painful loss, this melancholic outsiderhood now had a physical cause as well.
With a depressive monster tale, Burton responded to the feelings of every character who is seen as a “freak” in society and kept outside the circle, starting with the gothic image in popular culture. With his introversion, gentleness and innocence, this monster had all-too-human qualities; perhaps the only thing he lacked was a pair of hands with which to touch the people he loved. Seen from this angle, the story of Edward Scissorhands shone among the stereotype-reliant Hollywood narratives we came across so often, especially in the late 1980s. At a time when typecasting characters with the label of “freak” in teen movies, action films and all the other dramas with wide distribution had become the norm, he had created a giant freak. Played by Johnny Depp and embodying everything to do with gothic culture, Edward Scissorhands won enormous sympathy from mainstream moviegoers and, just as anonymous fairy tales that end with an important lesson do, brought the story of outcasts inside the circle.
Although we still come across the same themes – and especially the visual elements identified with him – in the recent work of his ongoing career, Tim Burton’s early films have an obvious difference. Among these differences, which could be the subject of an entirely separate essay, what probably catches the eye first, and what is missing from his recent work, must be the spirit reflected in films such as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. Written and depicted with great sensitivity, these naive stories became far more special works than they might otherwise have been, thanks partly to the era in which they were made and partly to the influence of a young Tim Burton with a fresh cinematic eye. Perhaps that is why it feels only natural to remember these two special films as timeless classics to be watched again and again.
Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands will be screened on April 8 and 16 as part of Kundura Sinema’s Sunday Cinema Club.
*This article was originally published in Altyazı.
Kundura Sinema’s program that brings restored prints of classics from the ’80s and ’90s to audiences, the Sunday Cinema Club, welcomes science fiction and fantasy fans to Beykoz Kundura in April.
Inspired by ‘Parliament Sinema Kulübü – Pazar Gecesi Sineması’ (Parliament Cinema Club – Sunday Night Cinema), the film slot that was the biggest screen entertainment on Sunday evenings in Türkiye in the ’90s and gave popular films their first screenings after their theatrical release, the program presents one of the most beloved romance films of all time, “Ghost” (1990); the first two films of “Back to the Future”; and Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” (1988) and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990) – all screened in restored 4K prints.
Sunday Cinema Club opens with the first two films of “Back to the Future”, the series regarded as the forerunner of all time-travel movies. Thanks to the brilliant screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and the visionary producing of Steven Spielberg, they became one of the most successful trilogies in film history: “Back to the Future” (1985) and its sequel “Back to the Future Part II” (1989) will be screened back to back on Sunday, April 9. In these films, eccentric scientist Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown and high school student Marty McFly travel to the 1950s in the first and, in the second, to the year 2015, where cars and skateboards fly. With the iconic performances of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd and their innovative special effects, they remain timeless and unrivaled classics of the science fiction genre.
Meanwhile, two films by one of the most original and idiosyncratic directors of the era, Tim Burton – “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands” – will also be screened back to back, on Saturday, April 8 and Sunday, April 16.
One of the most characteristic films of Burton’s cinema, “Beetlejuice” begins as Adam and Barbara, a couple killed in a car accident, find themselves haunting their own house in New England as ghosts. Building to a madcap romp that draws in the house’s new owners and the devilish ghoul Beetlejuice, the film features a star-studded cast including Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. “Beetlejuice”, with its flamboyant style that turns the 1980s into a time capsule, its extraordinary designs and its grotesque humor, is a comedy classic that still inspires 35 years later.
Tim Burton’s cult film “Edward Scissorhands”, born of his love for B-movie horror and Gothic literature, tells the story of the childlike Edward, who has scissor blades for hands and was left unfinished by the sudden death of the inventor who created him. With a cast that brings together Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Vincent Price and Dianne Wiest, this unforgettable film is also unique for its references, which range from ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ to ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘King Kong’ and even fairy tales.
Another treat the program has in store for classic film lovers is one of the most memorable romance films of the ’90s, “Ghost” (1990). Directed by Jerry Zucker, the film tells the story of a young man killed in a street attack, whose spirit remains stuck ‘here’ and who seeks the help of a reluctant psychic to protect his girlfriend from impending danger. Nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and winner of the Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, “Ghost” is an unforgettable ’90s classic, as much for the wonderful chemistry between Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze as for Whoopi Goldberg’s performance, which won her the Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA awards.
Details and tickets here.
Ahead of the Rimini Protokoll performance Conference of the Absent – Kundura Sahne’s guest at the end of March – Art Unlmited’s Ayşe Draz spoke with one of the collective’s founders, Stefan Kaegi.
One of the most important names in documentary theater, Rimini Protokoll, returns to Istanbul, this time with Conference of the Absent (Namevcut Konferans), a conference in which absent participants are represented by the audience members who are present. Having previously welcomed the collective onto the streets of Istanbul with the Remote İstanbul project and shared their performance Uncanny Valley online with Turkish subtitles, Kundura Sahne is hosting them in Istanbul on March 31, April 1 and April 2. On this occasion, we spoke with one of Rimini Protokoll’s founders, Stefan Kaegi.
Interview: Ayşe Draz*
In the face of the climate crisis threatening our home – the world – is a touring format with zero carbon emissions possible, especially in the performing arts? Or might the solution be a format that actually and physically brings us together in the same space, rather than meeting in an online space through constantly dropping Skype and Zoom connections? What are the factors that determine who represents whom, and how they go about it? Taking up such questions within the possibilities of theater, itself an art of representation, Conference of the Absent is a provocative work that, on the one hand, redefines the boundaries between performer and audience and, on the other, brings audiences the stories of people from all over the world who have had to cope with some form of “absence” in their lives. We talked to Stefan Kaegi, one of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, about Conference of the Absent. Although we conducted this interview long before the earthquakes of February 6, when we were back in touch, Kaegi told me how saddened he had been by the news of the earthquake, which also affected the families of many people of Turkish origin living in Germany, and asked me to pass on his wishes for a speedy recovery. The road ahead is long for the wounds we will heal through solidarity and by keeping our collective memory alive, and the struggle we must wage is exhausting… But perhaps coming together at artistic events such as Conference of the Absent will do us all a little good and help us catch the breath we need. At least, that is what I want to believe…
Conference of the Absent – did this work emerge as a result of the pandemic, or is it the outcome of a process you had been thinking about and working on for a long time?
It was an idea that had come up earlier, but with the pandemic it took on a new relevance. Conference of the Absent is actually connected to the climate crisis, an increasingly urgent problem, and to the fact that we are a group that frequently goes on international tours with our projects. One of the questions we were grappling with was how we could maintain international connections and give our audiences access to international content without touring huge ensembles, huge stage sets and large technical crews – and therefore without leaving an enormous carbon footprint – and how we could develop different formats to do this. For a long time we had already been devising structurally different forms of performance, such as Remote X. For Remote X, only three people travel, and we source the headphones locally; these three people then spend three weeks on site working out all the details, and that is how the whole piece comes together. It’s quite a different approach from flying somewhere, doing two shows, collecting the applause and flying back. The local adaptations of Remote X, and therefore its impact on different cities, differ from place to place. It also takes place in the local language, which is in fact a process we are now addressing with Conference of the Absent, because everything will be translated into Turkish.
The issues I have just mentioned served as the initial triggers for Conference of the Absent. But then, when the pandemic came, the work took on a different meaning as well, because now we were also confronted with the absence of those who could not travel to where we were. On the one hand, we felt this more and more; on the other, we set about thinking, acting more constructively in Zoom meetings than ever before and complaining about our situation too. But physical presence and what it means take on a truly special form in this work. Even though most of the shows we did during the pandemic were initially performed with masks, which was not exactly ideal, it was very useful to have Conference of the Absent at hand.
I think the real question is this: how can the local audience become more and more performative in a work that comes from far away? After all, in Remote İstanbul people are already giving a performance. At least they interact physically with one another and with the content, and now it’s time for the next step. Now they will even start to speak.
I understand that at the heart of the work lies, perhaps, your search for an answer to the question of whether a tour that leaves no carbon footprint is possible. On the other hand, in Conference of the Absent there is also an intense questioning of what absence means. What can you tell us about that?
This is something we have always been interested in and thought about, because theater is entirely about presence – about what we call liveness, about the presence of the performer in order to do something – and yet much of our work is actually concerned with how we can reconstruct the identity of someone who is not here. For example, Nachlass was a piece I made about people who died after we had devised the performance together, or who knew they would die shortly afterward. These people are not present in the room the audience visits, but their voices, their pictures, even the spaces we reconstructed with them are present. So I suppose we are asking a kind of philosophical and poetic question about absence. But in Conference of the Absent, for example, this question takes a very simple and direct form when someone who works on phantom pain explains to you how you can simulate your neurons – how something that is not there can still be there, or how you can go on representing it in the brain.
I suppose the one element whose presence we cannot do without in theater is the audience – what do you think?
Yes, and I think that was a very important thing we learned during the pandemic: how much we missed being together, missed one another… During the pandemic we could still watch performances online and, for example, see the actors, but that isn’t the only reason we go to the theater; we actually also go to the theater to meet one another. So that is what we should celebrate. With the forms of interaction we have invented for theater, I think we should call what we do in theater play theatre: not a play for others, but a play with one another. Conference of the Absent does exactly that: it allows the audience to come together, to take responsibility for this game and this protocol, and for this interaction to take place. If the audience doesn’t do this, the work could actually stop after twenty minutes. So far that has never happened, because people are always quite happy to take part. But we didn’t know that at the start, and we always rehearsed it wondering about exactly that.
I think that in a work like this the audience feels empowered in a sense, because they are part of the “game.” I wouldn’t say in control, but I can speak of a sense of empowerment. I had observed this in Remote İstanbul as well. In Conference of the Absent, you hand over the “word” to the audience from a different angle, and at certain moments the audience can give a much more beautiful, much more poetic performance than an actor.
Beautiful things can happen, because sometimes a child might represent a very old person, or women represent men and men represent women; and while all this is happening, there is this embodiment that you observe. Something I find especially beautiful is the moment when an audience member on stage begins to speak the sentence of someone whose identity they don’t even know yet. They take someone else’s place, they begin a sentence whose ending they don’t know, you observe something passing through their body, a change taking place; you watch them turn into someone else, or at least engage with someone else’s identity.
The audience members who represent others on stage do so either by reading the text in front of them or by repeating the text coming through their headphones. In my view, representing someone else by repeating the text heard through the headphones, rather than by reading the text in front of you, requires a different kind of concentration and, by bringing about a different form of embodiment, allows for a different transformation. This can easily be observed by the other audience members who are not on stage, too. Did you take this into account when choosing who would be represented and how, or did it play a role in the dramaturgy of the work?
I think that, first of all, we wanted to use different forms of performativity, because, for example, there isn’t only text – there are also gestures written into the text. As the performance progresses it becomes more complex; for example, two people come on stage at the same time and begin to interact with each other, or there are moments in darkness when everything becomes more theatrical. On the other hand, we thought it made sense to start simply; everyone understands how reading the text in front of them works, but it also has some disadvantages – for example, people look down in front of them instead of looking at the audience – whereas once they are listening to the text through the headphones they are much more likely to look directly at the audience, because it allows them to, and it also involves a predetermined timing, which gives a little more room to go deeper into representing the person being represented. Also, Conference of the Absent lasts almost two hours, so it’s nice to keep changing the rules of the game just when people think they have learned them.
So how did you choose the people who would be represented, whose stories would be told?
When we stage works that feature different characters, we do a lot of interviews. We spoke to many more people than the ones we present – I think we had around thirty options – and we wanted to cover geographically very different corners of the world. In the end there is someone from Portland, Ohio, someone from Yakutia¹, two people from Africa, someone from Israel, people from Central Europe, where we developed the work, and so on. We included people from very different corners of the world, and in fact there are very different reasons for their absence, too. Some people aren’t there because they can’t physically move, others can’t come because they are in outer space, some can’t attend because they have to keep working at their jobs, some don’t want to travel because they think it is bad for the climate, and others can’t be visible because they have to stay hidden, like a secret service agent. I think this is also partly about mapping out different variations of the game.
And how did you find these people, how did you get in touch with them?
Through very different channels. For example, I visited Mr. Patke, a physicist with locked-in syndrome, in his own home; his house wasn’t all that far from mine, so I visited him there. It was very interesting; he is a very intelligent, brilliant person. As for the others – for example, I had once been to Yakutia and had contacts there. When I came across the huge pit mentioned in Conference of the Absent, I started asking what it was and set out to find people who had worked there, and they pointed me to Tamara; but I never met her in person, and since she speaks Russian we could only communicate with her indirectly. We found some of the others through research on the internet – for example, Les U. Knight, a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT). Daniel (Wetzel)² met the refugee we feature in person, at a refugee camp in Athens. I met the doctor who works on the phenomenon of phantom pain through the Charité hospital in Berlin. I was interested in the phenomenon of phantom pain, so I started researching it, and that is how I reached him.
So can we say that there are subjects you are interested in, such as phantom pain, and that under these headings you reach out to people whose stories relate to them? Or doesn’t it need to be that systematic?
Sometimes we would find someone and reach others through them, but their stories might not be interesting enough for this work. When we did the first trial, for example, I got in touch with people in Egyptian prisons; that could have produced another story worth telling in its own right, but it was very difficult to communicate with them, and therefore to create the text together. As for the secret service case, we thought it might be interesting to include such a person, but we couldn’t find one. Then we decided it might also be good to explore the question of co-authorship through someone’s story. And so we met Gerhard Schindler, who worked in the secret service all his life but would have to censor most of his own life story if he told it as it really is. We asked him whether he would consider writing a fictional character in situations very similar to the ones he had faced; after all, he is someone with plenty of knowledge about how the secret service works and the problems it faces. And so a wide variety of stories emerged.
Conference of the Absent, as you mentioned, contains different performative moments guided by various instructions: audience members who come on stage to represent others sometimes perform the gestures given to them, or audience members sitting in their seats also become part of these moments, for example by standing up or being invited to vote. In fact, I think it is very important for the empathy established with others that the audience doesn’t just “watch” but somehow becomes involved in other people’s stories with their bodies as well. So how did the rehearsal process for a work like this unfold?
It was a complicated process, to be honest. Frankly, each time we tried out a set of (performative) tools, and some of them didn’t work at all or turned out to be very ineffective, while others worked very well – but then, when you repeated them, things could turn out differently. For example, watching someone you enjoy watching, who is enjoying what they’re doing, can easily make for a good performance and make it work, but a “good” performance only emerges if that holds for everyone who comes on stage. Yet by the very nature of the work we can’t control everything, and some things going wrong or feeling a bit strange is part of this game. Otherwise people might think that those who come on stage are actually all actors, which is definitely not the case – and it is very important for the audience to understand this in order to be able to participate actively. So we knowingly take on a certain risk; the performance can go one way or the other. In some of the places where Conference of the Absent has been shown, I have witnessed wonderful performances, but some of the moments I witnessed were awful. You spoke of empathy, but I think it is also about liveness on stage. If none of us goes on stage, the performance doesn’t go on. Or if you notice that the person on stage feels insecure, you may feel that you want to help them. It’s also nice that you are never completely disconnected from what is happening on stage.
It’s as if you distribute responsibility among the audience; that way, each of us becomes individually responsible for the performance as a whole. As I understand it, you don’t hold “rehearsals” in the classical sense. And in your work you already have experience and knowledge of working with “absent” performers. But something else I am curious about is who you do the first trials with. Do you invite your friends, saying come on, let’s all see what happens together?
Yes – I’ve only talked about the difficulties, but we need to do trials in order to find solutions. We invite people to the trials, and at first we do them with our friends. But the problem is that our friends can be too good at these trials. You also need to test the work with different groups, such as older people or people who are hard of hearing, and to do the trials again and again – which was one of the challenges for us. For about a year, we held these trials once a month.
Did you always do the trials in the same city, or did you also do them in different cities?
We did them in different cities, and at one point we even started doing them in different languages, because translation was also an element we needed to test.
Among the works you have created as Stefan Kaegi, the ones that caught my attention include the performance Uncanny Valley (Tekinsiz Vadi, 2018), in which you put a robot on stage; Temple du présent (2021), in which a real octopus appears on stage as the protagonist; and Natures Vivantes (2022), the five-hour theatrical promenade you created with Caroline Barneaud, in which theater leaves not only its buildings but the city as well and you turn a park into a stage with “natural” elements – to name just a few. They remind me of the three concepts discussed by Rosi Braidotti, one of the leading figures of posthuman theory: zoe/geo/techno. Would you like to say something about this?
For me, nature is a very big and important subject when it comes to re-establishing a certain balance between ourselves and other animals. That is why we have also developed a large project called Shared Landscapes, which is in fact also a Creative Europe project. Within this project, we are working on pieces that will take place outside theater venues, in open spaces and in nature, and that will involve different forms of interaction with nature over several hours. Temple du présent also explored how we can communicate with an animal that we may never truly understand, because its intelligence is different from ours, but which we know to be highly intelligent.
¹: Yakutia, or the Sakha Republic, is one of the federal republics that make up Russia, and the Yakuts, who form the majority of its population, are a Turkic people.
²: One of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, together with Stefan Kaegi and Helgard Haug.
*This interview was originally published in the March–April 2023 issue of Art Unlimited magazine.