ALTYAZI_62 Film Magazine_Alfredo Cramerotti_Performative Cinema_extract

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mayıs

ZODIAC

07

Anaakım Hollywood’un yüz akı David Fincher, başyapıtı Yedi’den sonra bir kez daha bir seri katil hikâyesiyle karşımızda; kısacası Fincher cinayet mahalline geri dönüyor.

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K. Murat Güney

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GUS VAN SANT

Amerikan sinemasının nevi şahsına münhasır yönetmeni Gus Van Sant’la 26. İstanbul Film Festivali’nde verdiği master class’ın ardından sineması üzerine sohbet etme şansı bulduk.

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BEETHOVEN’I ANLAMAK

Agnieszka Holland son filmi Beethoven’ı Anlamak’ta hikâyenin merkezine yerleştirdiği bir ilham perisi aracılığıyla müzisyenin yaratım sürecini yeniden yorumluyor.

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KAYNAK

Farklı kültürlerin yaradılış mitlerini kendine esin kaynağı alan Darren Aronofsky, son filmi Kaynak’ta ölümsüzlüğün formülünü arıyor.

Ayça Çiftçi

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ZAMANLARÜSTÜ İMGELER Murathan Mungan, Matrix ve Beşinci Element gibi bilimkurgu filmlerindeki gelecek tasavvurları üzerine yazdı.

32 34 12 Eylül darbesini, dönemin karmaşık siyasi ilişkilerini merceğe alarak tartışan Zincirbozan’ın yönetmeni Atıl İnaç ve senaristi Avni Özgürel’le söyleştik.

Ege Edener

PORTRE

DANNY BOYLE

Son filmi Gün Işığı vizyona girmeden hemen önce İngiliz yönetmen Danny Boyle’un Mezarını Derin Kaz’dan Milyonlar’a uzanan filmografisine toplu bir bakış atıyoruz.

Erman Ata Uncu

altyazı’dan haberler

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özel haber 9. Eskişehir Film Festivali ve 2. Konya Aşkın Filmleri

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ayın filmleri 4 Mayıs Örümcek Adam 3, Sözün Bittiği Yer, Temel Parçacıklar 11 Mayıs Benim Adım Elisabeth, Cevapsız Arama 3, Gün Işığı, İhanet, Kaynak, Tetikçi 18 Mayıs Cinayet Gecesi, Mr. Bean Tatilde, Sevimli Dinozor, Tepenin Gözleri 2, Zodiac 25 Mayıs Karayip Korsanları: Dünyanın Sonu, Tarih Öğrencileri, Zamana Güzellik Kat

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söyleşi Seçkin Yasar Yasar’la geçen ay vizyona giren filmi Sevgilim İstanbul’u konuştuk.

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göze çarpanlar Temel Parçacıklar Oskar Roehler’ın Michel Houellebecq’in aynı adlı romanından uyarladığı Temel Parçacıklar’ı Berke Göl yazdı.

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festivalin ardından Sinema yazarlarına festivalin ardından akıllarında kalanları sorduk.

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festival söyleşileri Paul Schrader Son filmi Entrika ile festivale konuk olan ünlü senarist/yönetmenle sineması üzerine konuştuk.

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festival söyleşileri Park Chan-wook Güney Koreli yönetmenle son filmi Ben Bir Robotum Ama Sorun Değil’i ve bu filmin filmografisinde durduğu yeri konuştuk.

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festival söyleşileri Tom DiCillo Delicesine’nin yönetmeni, Amerikan Bağımsız sinemasının günümüzdeki durumunu anlatıyor.

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festival söyleşileri Bruno Dumont Son filmi Flanders İstanbul Film Festivali’nde de gösterilen Bruno Dumont ile New York’ta söyleştik.

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festivallerden 10. Uçan Süpürge Kadın Filmleri Festivali Bu yıl onuncusu düzenlenen Uçan Süpürge’de yer alan Lina Wertmüller toplu gösterimi üzerine Şükran Yücel yazdı.

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benim sinemalarım Nisan Akman’ın kült filmi Bir Kırık Bebek’i Övül Durmuşoğlu yazdı.

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dizi film kuşağı Joss Whedon’un Firefly dizisini A. Özge Öndeş inceliyor.

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görüntü Alfredo Cramerotti, Hindistan’da bir sinema salonunda Bollywood filmi izleme deneyiminden yol çıkarak sinemanın performatif boyutu üzerine yazdı.

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cin aynası Kaya Genç, Türk sinemasıyla yıldızının neden bir türlü barışmadığının sebeplerine bakıyor.

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kısa metraj Ankara Film Festivali’ne konuk olan, 2007 Kısa Film Oscarı’nın sahibi Ari Sandel ve ünlü Fransız kısa filmci Jean Gabriel Periot ile söyleştik.

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kitap Bir Halk Sinemacısı: Osman Fahir Seden, Yeşilçam Hatırası, Jim Jarmusch, Türk Sinemasında Cinselliğin Tarihi, Film Yönetmek Üzerine, Sinema Manifestoları

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DVD Ivan’ın Çocukluğu, Solaris, Stalker, Türk Sineması Görsel Hafıza Projesi

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GECEYARISI DVD’LERİ Kaya Özkaracalar tarafından hazırlanan bu yeni bölümde “karanlıkta kalmış” DVD’ler tanıtılacak. Bu ayın filmi Sessiz Tepe.

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film müziği Kaynak, Bir Ömür Yetmez

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eleştiriler Pan’ın Labirenti, Küçük Gün Işığım, Yarım Ay, Durgun Yaşam, Suyun Rengi, Senin Yerine Roma

Fırat Yücel

Gözde Onaran

ZİNCİRBOZAN

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93 94 96

box office festival yıldız tablosu yıldız tablosu


PERFORMATIVE CINEMA by Alfredo Cramerotti

Back home. Thoughts. To go and watch a movie is not exactly horse riding. It’s quite unlikely to perceive the cinematic setting as a performative act. Yet it is. The experience of cinema has been received – throughout its history – as curiosity, entertainment, documentation, and leisure; in short, the representation of a fictional story and/or a given reality. (We can open here a neverending debate about whether and how it is possible to tell one from the other. We leave the burden to some postmodernist geeks.) What matters to us, is that rarely – if ever – these experiences has been perceived as performance, because of the dual nature of cinema setting.

In yesterday and today’s film industry we have two distinct patterns. On one side, the making of a movie, that is, the process that leads to the film-product. Roughly: idea, subject, money (out), script, producers, director, cast, troupe, filming, editing, mastering, marketing, promoting, distribution, release. On the other side, the consuming of a movie: preview, critics, premiere, reviews, public, gadgets, home video, money (in), archive, and cinema dictionary.

How does the performative aspect come into the picture? Somewhere in-between the two areas, to break up the dialectical world of the film-product. Precisely, in the location of its screening. Watching a movie in the city centre of Berlin or Edmonton is not quite the same as watching it in the outskirts of Cairo or Mumbai. Granted. I am not arguing different criteria according to wealth distribution, life expectation, or commodity-density. It’s not a matter of West/East, North/South, Bottom/Up contrapositions; it’s simply everyone’s experience that is different. To be in a certain location, daytime, and company. This is the terrain where the performative aspect of the cinema setting has to be sought, and possibly explored and revealed.

Over there: Displacement.


This article results from a trip to India a few weeks ago. It is the fruit of a disarticulation of my own standards (western, white, male – sorry) for “watching a movie”. Location: Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh, an unbelievably hectic, busy, and polluted city that can be a paradigm for today’s India: Fierce capitalism and off-the-wall enthusiasm; Environmental concerns and economical growth; Political mistrust and national pride. After a day in the traffic, I just wanted to jump on the first train leaving the city. But then I stayed. Time: afternoon. I went to a screening of Salaam-e-Ishq, a musical with lots of love, adventure, criss-crossed couples and a drop of eroticism. Marvellous piece of art. I love it. I am not impartial, who cares. That’s why I got to think of the performative aspect of cinema. I never expected to sit in an almost empty huge cinema from 6pm till 9.30pm, not understanding the language (the film was in Hindi with no subtitles), and still wonder at the end how the time went so quickly. I was a bit sorry when the movie ended. I wanted more. Company: the youngsters in the hall, waiting with me the door opening, were sarcastically (I think) chitchatting at the thought of me watching a Hindi movie – a movie in Hindi. I was more doubtful than them. Once inside, I walked to the middle of the huge space and sat on an empty row. There were about 30 people in front of me – in two rows quite close to the screen, and the same number behind me, a couple of rows close to the entrance. The cinema could have contained maybe 1.000 people, maybe more. So I wondered if my ticket was numbered, since I could not understand the position of the other spectators.

The movie started. Great soundtrack, it made me feel like to jump up and belly dance. If only I could. A story developed; The characters were introduced in couples, the action set changed from Bombay to Delhi to London to Agra to Rishikesh. Salaam-e-Ishq is the story of six groups of people (a couple, their friends and/or colleagues) from different walks of life and unaware of each other’s existence, which – by unexpected circumstances – were brought together by destiny, fate, love. The common, and bottom line of the movie could be “but things are going to change…” There was only an occasional word or two of English, mostly idioms such as “No way!”, “Then what?” and so on, but instead of feeling out of place, I found myself enjoying the faces and the music. Then something happened.


The members of the audience started to respond to the movie at each scene, especially those that were romantic or spicy, with words, comments, laughs, whistles, clapping and dancing in the seats. I found myself in an organic environment were the film was participated in actively. Each movie character had fans and adversaries, in the venue. Men, women, young and old, showing with the full gamut of human expression their approval or disapproval of the characters as they appeared. I ended up joining in, after a while. I let myself go without being aware of it. I enjoyed the lines of my favourite character; disliked some others, and participated in the audience’s bold statement about the story proposed. If I had to define the experience, I would say “being in the here and now”. At some point I noticed two ushers pointing in my direction, and eventually one of them approached me asking for the ticket. I shown him, and got some Hindi words in reply. English, Hindi, English, English. He gave up. The narrative on the screen was at a critical juncture, and we certainly couldn’t ruin it for a little misunderstanding about my position in the theatre. Besides, there was no seat number on my ticket.

I gradually slipped form the very conscious state of questioning “is it a good idea to buy the ticket?” when I was standing at the counter, to the totally caught-in-the-flow state of “come on, you fool, it's right in front of you!” and similar outbursts offered to the screen characters. No kidding. I witnessed the disarticulation of my own behaviour and belief. The performative feature of the cinema setting won over my entire mental structure and physical inhibitions. Being in Lucknow, with a bunch of 'turned on' people on a winter afternoon, simply displaced me.

Temporality. Think about it. To assess cinema as a performative act we had better take a step back: You may recall Michel Foucault's concept of “other spaces”; The idea of having heterotopian spaces within a given reality. Put simply, it means that some spaces in our life ‘offer’ us an alternative reality, at certain times, locations, and situations. They are not utopian spaces (which cannot exist by definition), but a dimension available only under specific conditions. Think about fairs, theatres, madhouses, hospitals, graveyards. Or ships. I would add contemporary art spaces.


And cinemas, of course. Can we say cinemas offer us a suspension from time and space? Maybe, to take another point if Foucault’s thinking, they offer a compensation for what we don’t have? Well, so does TV, for instance. But... but... there are some differences. Heterotopies imply, to my view, a co-temporality of elements. Space, time, and situation. Theatre is the paradigm of co-temporality: for its existence, it implies a place, a time, and a situation (an audience, an actor, a play) all at once. TV does not require them. TV can exist without co-temporality; rather, it exists thanks to its dis-temporality. And cinema?

Cinema provides a co-temporality of place (film set or screen venue), situation (cast or audience) but not of time. Salaam-e-Ishq has been released simultaneously in India, UK, Europe, USA, Canada, Dubai, Africa, South Africa, Mauritius, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka and many other parts of the world. Yet, when they shot the film was a different time from when we watch what they shot and then edited. To me, cinema has another form of temporality. Not the simultaneous dimension, in which things happen at the same time for all the elements involved, but the dimension of performance, in which things happen differently each time in each place for each element. A per-temporality. If you consider cinema in these terms, it is not another space, and not even a simulacrum of reality. Consider: It is a space in which all kind of errors can influence its life, and can influence its performance each time in a different way. Involuntarily effects by the film cast or staff while making it; Unexpected errors by the projectionist or the usher while showing it; Unforeseeable reactions by the viewer or the buyer while consuming it.

On top of this precarious cultural architecture, the situational varying of the setting changes on a continuous basis. The showing time. The location. The audio quality. The weather conditions, if outside. The media debate about it. The political climate. The social inhibitions, or transgressions (the audience participation rituals of the Rocky Horror Picture Show). The audience’s age. The personal mood. The crowd mood: think about a projection for a classroom in which you happen to be part of; the authoritarian or opinion-molder, brainwashing screenings of past and present regimes (Nazi Germany and GDR state apparatus


made extensively use of this form of cinematic propaganda); the boycott of a movie while it is 'in theatres', as the experience of 1970’s anarchy taught us (and conversely, as the Christian movements did with a lot of ‘apocryphal’ films – one for all, the exhilarant ‘Life of Brian’). What a variety of patterns. And I thought cinema was a pre-packaged cultural product. I thought cinema was part of the realm of things to which I can access but cannot change, only subdue. Maybe reflect. What an idiot. Cinema performs me. I perform it.

Alfredo Cramerotti, 2007


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