Curator and artist Stefan Kaegi, one of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, the legendary art collective of documentary theater, is coming to Istanbul on March 31 to present one of his latest projects, “Conference of the Absent”. The following day, Kaegi will also lead a workshop for theater professionals at Kundura Sahne. With his award-winning and controversial projects, he is one of the star creators of the European stage.
Born in 1972 in Solothurn, Switzerland, Stefan Kaegi studied art at the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich.
Together with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, whom he met during their school years in the ’90s, he founded Rimini Protokoll in 2000. Theatre der Zeit, one of Germany’s most established theater publications, greeted the collective, which went on to make a powerful impact on the theater world, as “the heroes and founders of a new realism on stage.”
In “Deutschland 2”, a performance created especially for the 2002 Theater der Welt Festival, he and 200 citizens of Bonn re-enacted an entire session of the German Parliament. The performance, which the then President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, tried to block on the grounds of ‘the privacy of the house,’ sparked a heated debate in Germany about artistic freedom and the relationship between politics and art.
His projects “Mnemopark” (2005), which won the Jury’s Special Prize at the Politik im Freien Theater Festival; “Cargo Sofia” (2006), which takes the audience on a journey inside a truck accompanied by two Bulgarian truck drivers; and “Karl Marx – Das Kapital, Band 1” (2007), adapted from the foundational work of Marxism, have been staged at major festivals around the world.
He received the Faust Theater Prize in 2007, the Europe Theatre Prize in 2008 and the European Award for Cultural Diversity in 2010.
Inspired by the way the call to prayer in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak was recited from a single center and broadcast live over the radio, he created “Radio Muezzin”, a project with which he toured many countries and which won the Jury’s Special Prize at the Sarajevo Theater Festival in 2011. That same year, he was honored with the Silver Lion at the Venice Theater Festival.
The transatlantic telephone performance staged live between an employee of a call center in India and audience members in different countries around the world, “Call Cutta in a Box” (2012), and the simulation of the United Nations Climate Change Conference “Welt-Klimakonferenz” (2014) earned him an Honorary Mention from Ars Electronica, the Austrian institute for culture, education and science.
Launched in 2013 and designed especially for evolving cities, his project “Remote X” has been adapted to 55 different cities, including Shanghai, Moscow and New York. In 2015 the project earned him a nomination for the Golden Mask Award of the Russian Theater Festival, and that same year he received the Swiss Grand Award for Theatre, which honors the year’s most influential figures in the theater world.
In 2014, “Situation Rooms”, a multiplayer video installation about the arms industry, received the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival.
In 2018, he marked a new turning point in the use of artificial intelligence in theater with “Uncanny Valley”, for which he built and put on stage an android (a humanoid robot) that is virtually a clone of the German writer Thomas Melle.
His recent acclaimed works include the interactive installation “Nachlass” (2018), about people who do not have long left to live, and “Temple du présent” (2021), in which we watch a live octopus give a solo performance on stage.
Kaegi, who also creates works specifically for museums, most recently presented his eco-installation “win < > win” and his ‘walkable film’ “Urban Nature” at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).
Kundura Sahne’s co-production with Kaegi, the Istanbul adaptation of his “Remote X” project, “Remote İstanbul”, continues to meet art lovers in Türkiye.
Tim Burton’s cult film, created out of his love for B-movie horror and Gothic literature, “Edward Scissorhands” (1990) meets Istanbul audiences in February as part of the Kundura Sinema program Sunday Cinema Club. Here are 10 facts that will change the way you see this ’90s classic, which tells the story of the child-hearted Edward, left unfinished with scissor blades in place of hands after the sudden death of the inventor who created him.
Untitled – Tim Burton, 1990.
Bearing deep traces of Tim Burton’s own life, “Edward Scissorhands” is the visionary filmmaker’s most personal work. The film’s first idea came from an illustration that Burton, who is also known for his drawings, made in his youth, depicting a thin, serious man with long, sharp blades instead of fingers. The town of Suburbia is likewise a stand-in for Burbank, California, where Burton was born and raised. For Burton, who likened growing up in the suburbs to ‘being in a Frankenstein movie,’ Edward is practically an avatar of his lonely youth as an outsider.
Johnny Depp – Edward Scissorhands, 1990. Photo: Park Circus/Paramount
Although Burton initially planned for the film to be a musical, he soon abandoned the idea. His co-writer on the screenplay, Caroline Thompson, was a young writer who had drawn attention with her first novel, “First Born,” and Burton, an admirer of the novel ‘about a monstrous fetus,’ approached her with an offer. This collaboration, which began as a deep partnership, continued with “The Addams Family” (1991), “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) and “Corpse Bride” (2005).
During the writing process, they often looked to the B-movie horror and Gothic literature Burton loves so much. As a result, with references ranging from ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ to ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ and from ‘Frankenstein’ to ‘King Kong’ and even fairy tales, the film became a truly unique production.
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp on the set of ‘Edward Scissorhands,’ 1990. Photo: Twitter
For the role of Edward, names such as Tom Cruise, Gary Oldman, Jim Carrey and Robert Downey, Jr. were considered, and screen tests were shot. Rumor has it that even Michael Jackson’s name was on the list. While Cruise turned down the role “because he wanted a happier ending,” Oldman said in an interview years later that turning down the role of Edward was one of his biggest regrets.
“Edward Scissorhands” is the first film Tim Burton and Johnny Depp made together; they would go on to become the star duo of popular films of the ’90s and 2000s. Unlike the producers, Burton had the actor as his first choice. Depp, who was looking for ways to shed the teen idol image he had acquired with the popular series of the time “21 Jump Street” (1987-1991), immediately accepted Burton’s offer. Having become close friends on “Edward Scissorhands,” the pair kept their bond going by working together on “Ed Wood” (1994), “Sleepy Hollow” (1999), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005), “Corpse Bride” (2005), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (2007), “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), “Dark Shadows” (2012).
Johnny Depp – Edward Scissorhands, 1990. Photo: Park Circus/Paramount
Johnny Depp says that when he first read the script, he “cried like a baby.” To prepare for Edward, who speaks only 169 words in the film, he watched the silent films of Charlie Chaplin. Depp, whose costume and prosthetic makeup took nearly two hours to apply, insisted on wearing the leather costume without any cooling in order to better understand Edward, and fainted on set from the extreme heat during the scene where Edward runs away to his house.
Tim Burton and Vincent Price on the set of Edward Scissorhands, 1990. Photo: Park Circus/Paramount
The actor we see as the inventor who created Edward, Vincent Price, is known especially for his roles in B-movie horror films, and Tim Burton had admired him since childhood. We also know of Burton’s love for the actor he called ‘my superhero’ from “Vincent,” the wonderful short film he made in 1982 about a boy who imagines he is ‘Vincent Price.’ The role of the inventor, which Burton wrote especially for Price in “Edward Scissorhands,” was initially conceived on a larger scale, but his scenes were cut to a minimum because the actor had developed Parkinson’s. “Edward Scissorhands” became the last film of the actor, who died in 1993, and the last moment he appears on screen is his death scene.
Johnny Depp & Winona Ryder, 1997. Photo: Barry King
Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, one of the most celebrated couples of the ’90s, fell for each other while shooting this film and got engaged the same year. In an interview with People, Depp said, “Nothing in my 27 years of life compares to the feeling I have with Winona,” and declared his love to the whole world by getting a “Winona Forever” tattoo on his right bicep. (After their breakup, Depp reinterpreted the tattoo, changing it to “Wino Forever.”)
Robert Smith
The inspiration for Edward’s hair goes back to The Cure’s Robert Smith. In fact, Burton first wanted him to do the music, but the musician, who was busy recording the album “Disintegration” at the time, turned the offer down.
Tim Burton & Danny Elfman, 2022. Photo: amp-worldwide.com
The film’s unforgettable score, nominated for Saturn and Grammy awards, bears the signature of Danny Elfman. The duo, who had also worked together on “Beetlejuice” (1988), continued their partnership with “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “Mars Attacks!” (1996), “Sleepy Hollow” (1999), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005) and “Frankenweenie” (2012).
Johnny Depp & Dianne Wiest – Edward Scissorhands, 1990. Photo: Park Circus/Paramount
The song that plays in the scene where Edward cuts the hair of the neighborhood women references the famous 1979 Broadway musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”. Johnny Depp would later play Sweeney Todd in Tim Burton’s 2007 adaptation of the same name.
Edward Scissorhands, 1990. Photo: Park Circus/Paramount
“Edward Scissorhands” is the only Burton film included in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik’s book “100 Cult Films”, regarded as one of the key sources of the literature on cult cinema. Also featured in Steven Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”, the film was included in the American Film Institute’s 100 Years of Film Scores list, published in 2005.
Tim Burton Photo: The Guardian
Tim Burton says that “Edward Scissorhands” is his ‘favorite, if not his best’ film, and he has never considered making a sequel because he believes it would “spoil its purity.”
Kundura Sinema will screen a restored print of the 1971 Bond classic “Diamonds Are Forever”. Here are 10 things to know about it.
Ian Fleming‘s 1956 novel of the same name was adapted into “Diamonds Are Forever”, for which the producers drew inspiration from the 1964 Bond film “Goldfinger”; as in that film, Guy Hamilton directed, and the opening featured a Shirley Bassey song.
George Lazenby did not want to play Bond a second time after “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), so the search for a new actor began. Burt Reynolds, John Gavin and Michael Gambon were among the names on the list, but when it failed to generate enough excitement, the producers came knocking on Sean Connery’s door, and the actor agreed to return as James Bond for the sixth time for a salary of $1.25 million, a figure unheard of at the time.
Actresses considered for the ‘Bond Girl’ Tiffany Case included Raquel Welch, Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway. Considered for the role of Plenty O’Toole, Jill St. John, during screen tests, impressed director Guy Hamilton so much that the part went to her, and so, for the first time, a ‘Bond Girl’ was played by an American actress.
The ‘Moon landing’ scene on Bond’s film set is a nod to the ‘we never really went to the Moon’ conspiracy theories popular at the time. The scene was shot in Nevada, at a gypsum plant just outside Las Vegas. The famous Moon buggy was found rotting in a farmer’s field in the early 1990s and was restored by the James Bond International Fan Club in 1993. In 2004 it was put up for auction at Christie’s and bought by Planet Hollywood Las Vegas for $44,000.
Since the Las Vegas car chase would involve many crashes, the producers struck a deal with Ford Motor Company, one of the leaders of the automotive industry, to use its vehicles. Ford’s only request was that Sean Connery drive the 1971 Mustang Mach 1 belonging to the ‘Bond Girl.’
It was the first Bond film not to use the villain from the novel. While the film presents Blofeld as the villain, in the novel it was actually the Spang Brothers. We had already seen Charles Gray, who created one of the most iconic Blofelds of the series, in the 1967 Bond film “You Only Live Twice”, in the role of Henderson.
Blofeld’s famous line, “Humility is the worst form of conceit,” is a quotation from the 17th-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld.
The original score was composed, for the sixth time, by John Barry. Shirley Bassey, who lent her voice to one of the most beloved Bond songs, “Diamonds Are Forever”, also sang “Goldfinger” (1964) and “Moonraker” (1979), and remains the only singer to have performed more than one Bond song.
Made on a budget of $7.2 million, “Diamonds Are Forever” was released in December 1971 and grossed a total of $24,568,915 worldwide. It was number one in the United States for seven weeks in a row, and in the United Kingdom it became the second highest-grossing film of 1971 after “On the Buses.”
Named Best Film at the Golden Secreen Awards in 1973, “Diamonds are Forever” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound.
Bringing her new work “How to Turn to Stone” to Istanbul audiences at Beykoz Kundura’s Kundura Sahne on November 4, 5 and 6, Manuela Infante is a figure who in recent years has frequently been in the spotlight of the international performing arts scene with works that bring complex theoretical subjects to the stage. Thanks to the time she spent and the experience she gained in Canada and the Netherlands, the Chilean theater artist is able to look through the windows of both the North and the South, and her work is often considered within the school of thought that some call the “nonhuman turn.” Approaching theater as more than a place for storytelling, as a kind of laboratory of embodied philosophy, Infante, in her latest work “How to Turn to Stone”, focuses on the similarity between laboring bodies and geological formations, and on the history, in fact true of both, of how natural resources are extracted from the earth and consumed, underlining that we too are made of stone and can be extracted like a mineral.
Interview: Ayşe Draz*
Could you tell us a little about your journey from Chile to the Netherlands? As someone who studied Cultural Studies, how do you think being exposed to different cultures has shaped your artistic journey?
I grew up in Canada, and that was actually my first encounter with these different cultures. Canada is a very culturally rich place. Then I lived in Chile. After that, in the Netherlands. These experiences have certainly had an impact on my work. The contrast between living in the wealthy countries I mentioned, Canada and the Netherlands, and living in Chile showed me very clearly, from a very young age, that the North and the South are not the same world. What makes the wealth and comfort of the North sustainable is the exploitation and depletion of the South. As a child and as a young person, this always affected me deeply, and I have never stopped taking it up as an issue in my plays.
As a playwright, director, screenwriter and musician, you make work with more than one identity; what kind of interaction do these various identities have with one another?
For me, it is a single identity. The interdisciplinary divisions between the arts, or even between science and philosophy or mystical thought, mean nothing to me. I think that today, standing in the midst of such complex global problems, these disciplinary divisions don’t help us at all. They don’t help us think about new forms of relationship, new models for the world, and so on. I chose to work in theater because it felt like a place where I could do a kind of musical philosophy; when I entered theater school I was a musician, and I wanted to study philosophy. I wasn’t very interested in the theatrical tradition, but instead I found a field, a very rare one, where different disciplines are intertwined. That is why I am a theater maker.
“Creations that bring complex theoretical subjects to the stage” are what you are known for. How did this interest come about? Why is it necessary to bring such subjects to the stage?
My stage works grow out of subjects that matter to me. I see myself as a kind of mystical scientist. I use theater as an experiment room for dancing around the things that make me curious, that amaze me, that I feel are ungraspable and unthinkable.
In your work, you consciously try to leave certain ambiguities as “an area that cannot be resolved within human knowledge.” Could you elaborate on this a little? What kind of relationship are you trying to build between the stage and the audience?
In recent years, captivated by the magic of what is more than human (more-than-human) that was present in my earlier work, I began to define the more-than-human simply as this zone: the place that human knowledge can never reach. That zone, that horizon, is not only out there at the end of our sight, but also right here, extending into our bodies, our psyches, our biographies and our histories. I am fascinated by the idea that in everything and everyone, always, there is an excess that we cannot understand, cannot control, cannot appropriate. I try to find ways not to lose the presence of this excess. A respectful presence. I try to find an ethical approach to what is unknown to me, to what is radically different, such as a plant, a stone, oil and so on. And to take the audience with me on this journey. Being in the theater is not about understanding everything, making sense of everything, which is itself also a form of exploitation; it is rather about discovering new ways of being in the presence of bodies, ideas and images, in the presence of this unknown excess.
In your previous work Vegetative State (Estado Vegetal), you explore concepts such as plant intelligence and the possibilities of communication by addressing the impossibility of dialogue between humans and plants. Your more recent work How to Turn to Stone, which you will bring to Istanbul, places stones/rocks at its center as “inanimate” things, and proposes a different form of resistance to the current rhetoric of life, in which “concepts such as growth, progress and development are of central importance to the dominant political and economic frameworks.” As can be seen in both of these examples, your work is often regarded as posthuman or post-anthropocentric theater; could you tell us a little about your interest in and approach to this field? How would you define posthuman or post-anthropocentric theater?
In recent years, I have been working in tune with the ideas of a current of thought that some call the nonhuman turn, the post-humanities and so on. I usually draw inspiration from critical philosophy and theory; I am fascinated by the idea of using the stage as a place to bring to life a way of thinking about the world thoroughly and in an untamed manner, by the idea of theater as a thinking thing, or as a thing for thinking with the body. I start with theory and then… I turn everything upside down in a very irresponsible way. To put it directly, by emphasizing the agentive contribution of nonhuman forces (operating in nature, in the human body, in history, in politics, in the economy, etc.), thinkers of the nonhuman turn develop work that aims to debunk human-centered (anthropocentric) thinking. All posthumanists are trying, in one way or another, to rewrite the grammar of agency. That means rewriting the grammar of action.
Who and what is or is not allowed to have agency, who and what can or cannot act. Posthuman or nonhuman thought is also a practice that levels a harsh critique at the concept of the Human written with a capital H, disrupting its normalization by looking at how this universal Human was constructed, who this Human actually is, what practices it has used to build its own domain, and whom it has left out in order to build that domain and establish itself as a universal reference. Seen from the perspective of the South, this is a very important aspect of nonhuman thought. The concept of the “Human” has served to sustain and justify major forms of exploitation and exclusion. Not only of nonhumans, but also of humans considered less than human.
How do you put together your artistic team (performers, musicians and so on) when working on your projects?
I work with artists who fascinate me. I usually set out with very broad questions. The contributions of the actors, dramaturgs and musicians are what form the backbone of my work.
Is there anything you would like to say to the Istanbul audience before they encounter your work ?
To be patient with the work. As if they were looking at a landscape painting.
*This interview was published in the September-October 2022 issue of Art Unlimited magazine.
Manuela Infante, Kundura Sahne’s upcoming guest with “How to Turn to Stone?”, continues to experiment with non-humanist theater in this work and pushes back against the idea of the human as the measure of all things.
Gülin Dede Tekin – Argonotlar.com
Playwright, screenwriter, director and musician Manuela Infante is one of the leading names in contemporary theater: an artist who takes issue with anthropocentric theatrical practices, who has spent many years exploring how the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are produced, and who is in pursuit of a new kind of theater. She is a researcher who sees, and seeks to understand, theater not only as a place for telling stories but also as a laboratory for a kind of embodied philosophy-making.
Manuela Infante is also the first Chilean theater artist to be invited to the Venice Biennale, in 2019, with her plays Estado Vegetal and Realismo.
In Estado Vegetal, Infante pointed to our failed relationship with nature through concepts such as plant intelligence, the vegetal soul and plant communication; in Realismo, she shook up our stereotyped ideas about objects; and in
Metamorphoses, she led her audience to question whether voice belongs to humans alone.
In How to Turn to Stone?, which we will have the chance to see at Kundura Sahne, she continues to experiment with non-humanist theater and challenges the idea of the human as the measure of all things. The realities the project confronted during its research process show once again how we exploit the planet and human beings in the Anthropocene. She says, for example, that workers handling heavy metals in copper refineries in Chile’s mining regions practically turn to stone, and that after they die their insides turn out a coppery green. She takes a close look at how laboring bodies resonate with geological formations, and at their histories of production and depletion.
As the three performers onstage tell stories of stones through texts and sounds, they strive to show that humans are not the most important thing in the world, bringing together fragments of worn-down stories and creating various geological landscapes with the pieces they stack. Many other things may be more important than humans, like nature, or like stones. Stones that are never born and never die, that simply ‘remain’ through their sheer mass. With the questions “What does the world look like from the perspective of resilient, nearly indestructible stones? What if we tried to imitate that which is never born, will never grow and will never die?”, the play carries out its own resistance on the theater stage.
Infante believes that theater suffers from a human invasiveness that must now come to an end, and her How to Turn to Stone?, which we will have the chance to see at Beykoz Kundura on November 4-5-6, is an eye-opening work on the explorations of contemporary theater. It is also an unmissable opportunity for anyone looking for something different in theater in Türkiye, where in recent years we have mostly seen text-driven productions.
*This article was originally published by Argonotlar.
Kundura Sinema’s “At 60: Bond, James Bond” program continues in December with Bond films from the ’70s. With “Live And Let Die” (1973), “The Man With The Golden Gun” (1974), “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), and “Moonraker” (1979) set to heighten the excitement of the program, Roger Moore remains ‘the best James Bond’ for many Bond fans.
He was born Roger George Moore on October 14, 1927, in the Stockwell district of London.
He began his acting career as an extra in the late 1940s and had his first breakthrough with the famous series of the period, “Ivanhoe” (1958-1959), and continued his screen success with “The Alaskans” (1959-1960), “Maverick” (1959-1961).
He gained international recognition with the series “The Saint” (1962). During this period, producers came knocking twice for the role of Bond, but he had to turn down the offers because he could not break the demanding contract he had signed for “The Saint.”
His role as the adventurous playboy Lord Brett Sinclair in “The Persuaders!”, the popular series he starred in after “The Saint,” put him back on the Bond list, and in 1973 he took over the James Bond role left vacant when Sean Connery announced his retirement.
He was the series’ third, and oldest, James Bond. He was 45 in his first film, “Live and Let Die,” and 58 when he bowed out with “A View to a Kill”…
He created a Bond very different from Ian Fleming’s, and he was much loved. Designed to cater to the modern tastes of the 1970s, the new Bond was now an experienced, more courteous playboy with a gift for humor, who always had a trick or a gadget at hand whenever he needed one.
In his autobiography, he would later put it this way: “Sean played Bond as a killer, and I played Bond as a lover.”
He starred in seven Bond films over 12 years. After Daniel Craig, he still holds the title of the Bond actor who kept the role the longest.
After the Bond films, Moore devoted more of his time to UNICEF work than to cinema; in 1991 he was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCm869P4TUA
In 1987, he hosted the celebration of Bond’s 25th anniversary, ‘Happy Anniversary 007: 25 Years of James Bond.’ In 2010, he voiced a cat named Lazenby in “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” a film full of nods to the Bond films.
He passed away in 2017, at the age of 89, in Switzerland, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer.
The Turkish Librarians’ Association held a webinar titled “Cultural Heritage and Institutional Memories: Exemplary Practices,” where we talked about Kundura Hafıza Archive & Research.
In the webinar, moderated by Emre Hasan Akbayrak and also featuring as a speaker the Director of the Gaziantep City Archive, Ecem Tan, the Kundura Hafıza Archive & Research Lead talked about Kundura Hafıza’s journey from 2015 to the present day and about the Digital Archive project, which will be launched very soon.
İlayda Güler – Bantmag*
As you know, James Bond films have a formulaic opening. Each film begins with credits rolling to an original theme song. Bond songs are in fact the series’ secret sauce, both because they set the tone for the action the audience is about to encounter and because they speak to the spirit of the time in which the current film is set. Since they are eagerly awaited with each new film and have become a pop culture tradition, they also mark an important milestone in the careers of the musicians who take on this responsibility. We took a closer look at the films in the “At 60: Bond, James Bond” program, together with their music.
The first act of the Bond adventure
Screening on October 8 and directed by Terence Young, the first film starring Sean Connery is Dr. No. In it, James Bond sets off for Jamaica on the trail of a missing British agent. The signature theme performed by John Barry & Orchestra quickly draws you into the film with its highly repetitive composition, shifting tension and the cosmic effect it leaves on you. Some describe this music as a meeting of Debussy and guitarist Duane Eddy, who rose to stardom with his take on Henry Mancini’s theme for Peter Gunn.
When the calendar reads October 9, you will be able to watch the first Bond film shot in Türkiye on the Beykoz Kundura screen: 1963’s From Russia with Love. The legendary music of this production, which takes you on a tour of 1960s Istanbul with stops such as the Grand Bazaar, the Basilica Cistern and Hagia Sophia, is “From Russia with Love,” the song that shares the film’s title, echoing in Matt Monro’s velvety voice. Besides being the first pop song produced for a Bond film, it takes the agent a little away from his action-packed world and sets him sailing into romantic waters.
In the October 15 program’s Goldfinger, the lead role once again goes to Sean Connery. In this 1964 production, with Guy Hamilton in the director’s chair, Bond takes on a jewel smuggler, a man with the Midas touch, to prevent a nuclear disaster. Heard over the film’s golden opening credits, the Grammy-nominated song “Goldfinger” shines brilliantly with a refined orchestration that accompanies the powerful voice and punchy vocal delivery of Shirley Bassey.
In the following year’s release, Thunderball, Bond fights the threat posed by the bombs SPECTRE has seized from a hijacked bomber plane, which could destroy two cities in the US and the UK. The film’s mesmerizing opening, which plunges you into blue, purple, red and green waters, is accompanied by a song that adds new touches to John Barry’s theme and swells with the superb vocals of Tom Jones: “Thunderball”. A dizzying experience.
The screenplay of the series’ fifth film, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, was written by Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the film, which screens on October 23, Bond’s path leads him to Tokyo to work with the Japanese Secret Service. In the opening credits, which scorch the screen with erupting volcanoes and flowing lava, we hear the John Barry and Leslie Bricusse composition that became a classic with its intro melody. As for the song that calls you into the realm of dreams, “You Only Live Twice”, Nancy Sinatra’s serene vocals on it loosen every muscle.
Scheduled for October 29 on the Bond program calendar, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service marks a turning point in the history of the series, because instead of Sean Connery, the lead in this 1969 film is an Australian model with no previous acting experience: George Lazenby. This time, James Bond battles the viruses of his archenemy Blofeld, brought to life by Telly Salavas, which could wipe out humanity. With its lyrics, “nothing more, nothing less, only love,” and Louis Armstrong’s crackly vocals leaving you with a bittersweet feeling, the song “We Have All the Time in the World” is both a celebration of true love and the footsteps of an approaching end.
In Diamonds Are Forever, in which Sean Connery returns as 007 James Bond for the last time, the mystery behind a diamond heist, just as the title suggests, is unraveled. Once again after Goldfinger, Shirley Bassey’s powerful vocals accompany Bond, who owes a debt of revenge to Blofeld, the man who turns out to be behind this scheme as well. The 1971 “Diamonds Are Forever” is known as the sexiest song in the Bond canon. Legend also has it that composer John Barry designed an eight-note melodic loop representing the eight facets of a diamond. It can be seen at Beykoz Kundura on December 3.
A Whole New Bond
Time to meet a new Bond: Roger Moore. Starting with 1973’s Live and Let Die, the actor we would go on to watch as James Bond for a long time finds himself, in his first adventure, at the center of a major drug operation while trying to solve a murder, on a journey that stretches from New York’s Harlem to the Caribbean. Over the flame-filled opening credits of the film, which you can see on December 4 in a print restored by MGM Studios, we hear a song by the band Paul McCartney formed with his wife Linda after the breakup of The Beatles, Wings: the Oscar- and Grammy-nominated “Live and Let Die”.
Producer Harry Saltzman, who, as the series’ earlier music suggests, was not much of a rock fan, agreed to this collaboration on the strength of the commercial potential the McCartney name brought, but loved the song once he heard it. Let us also recall that nearly 20 years after its original release, the song enjoyed a second life thanks to the cover by Guns N’ Roses.
The December 10 program features 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun. The story begins with a message sent to the British Secret Service by the assassin Scaramanga, one of the most impressive villains in Bond history, brought to life by our very own Saruman, Christopher Lee: a golden bullet engraved with 007. It continues with James Bond’s journey along the Hong Kong – Thailand route. Although it is said that the silly lyrics of the accompanying song, “The Man with The Golden Gun,” give away that John Barry and Don Black wrote it in a rush to meet a deadline, Lulu’s fun rendition, with its shifting energy, will get you dancing.
Next up is the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me, which will be on the Beykoz Kundura screen on December 11. This time, Bond’s goal is to prevent a nuclear war. In the film, where we meet Jaws, one of the series’ iconic villains, James Bond works with KGB agent Anya Amasova to find a stolen Russian submarine. As in many of the films, the opening credits once again create a dreamlike atmosphere, and the dance on gun barrels is accompanied by Carly Simon’s inviting rendition of “Nobody Does It Better”.
The last film in the “At 60: Bond, James Bond” program and the 11th film in the series, Moonraker, screens on December 17. In Moonraker, Bond’s mission is to stop a billionaire of, predictably enough, Nazi origins, who plans to bring about the end of the world and build a new life for a superior race in space. The film’s signature song, following “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” is the series’ third and final Shirley Bassey touch: “Moonraker”. This time, we hear this song about the dream of a love that seems less likely as the days go by, accompanied by silhouettes floating through different layers of space in the opening credits.
After the 11-film tour is complete, the first film of the series, Dr. No, returns to Beykoz Kundura on December 24, followed on December 25 by From Russia with Love, the first Bond production to make Istanbul its home.
*This article was originally published by Bantmag.
Chilean playwright, director, screenwriter and musician Manuela Infante was born in Santiago in 1980.
She graduated from the Theater School of the University of Chile in 2004. The artist, who earned her master’s degree in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, is known for giving complex theoretical subjects a natural form of expression.
Between 2002 and 2016, together with the company Teatro de Chile, she wrote and directed works with the continuous support of the National Fund for Cultural Development and the Arts (FONDARTS).
Four of her plays have been published and translated into English and Italian. Her work has toured the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore, Korea and Japan.
In 2015 she became the first female director of Chile’s National Dramaturgy Festival.
In 2019 she became the first Chilean artist to perform at the Venice Theater Biennale, to which she was invited with two of her plays.
She sees theater not only as “a place where stories are told” but also as a laboratory for embodied philosophy-making.
In her recent work, the artist imagines how a non-anthropocentric theater might be made, developing various stage strategies that question the notion of the human from postcolonial and gender perspectives.
Her play “Estado Vegetal” (Vegetative State), which she wrote and directed in 2019 inspired by the revolutionary ideas of philosopher Michael Marder and neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, was created by an all-female team. Imagining a scenario in which plants decide to take back their own lives, the play explored the notions of plant intelligence and communication while examining the impossibility of dialogue between humans and plants, proposing a non-anthropocentric theater.
Her latest play, which has toured festivals around the world and will be staged in Türkiye in November as a guest of Kundura Sahne, “How to Turn to Stone?”, takes as its starting point the question of what it would be like if a stone had a play of its own. Bringing to the stage, through a surprising performance and sound and lighting design, how the world might look through the eyes of a stone, and what happens when we try to imitate the stone, which is also “never born, will never grow and will never die,” the play offers audiences a viewing experience that will awaken their minds and hearts.
You can watch the lecture on non-humanist theater that Infante gave in 2019 as part of the Teatro a Mil Festival, with Turkish subtitles.
A lesson on non-anthropocentric, non-humanist theater from playwright and director Manuela Infante, one of the most original voices in Latin American theater.
Coming to Istanbul with her play “How to Turn to Stone?” as a guest of Kundura Sahne, the artist gave this masterclass in 2019 as part of the Teatro a Mil Festival. It offers a conversation that opens doors not only for theater lovers but also for those curious about philosophy and psychology.
HOW TO TURN TO STONE?
Friday, November 4, 2022 / 21:00
Saturday, November 5, 2022 / 19:00
Sunday, November 6, 2022 / 17:00
MANUELA INFANTE is a Chilean theater director, playwright, screenwriter and musician. She completed her master’s degree in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2002 and 2016 she created projects with the company Teatro de Chile, writing and directing works with the continuous support of Chile’s arts funds. In 2019 she became the first Chilean theater artist to be invited to the Venice Biennale, with her plays “Estado Vegetal” and “Realismo.”
MASTERCLASS: Manuela Infante
2019, in Spanish with Turkish subtitles, 62’
Production: La Copia Feliz Productions | Team: LAB Escénico, Teatro a Mil Foundation