Documentary in artistic practice: accented essays from Turkey

Online talk via Teams, 1 December Wednesday, 14:00-15:00 (link)

Documentary and art are seemingly two words in conflict with one another: the former implies a kind of documentation that encloses an objective record of the real world while the latter is defined and evaluated by subjectivity and creativity. Nonetheless – as Grierson’s famous definition of documentary also suggests – subjectivity and creativity are two concepts that inevitably become significant during the documentary filmmaking process as they can produce and/or prevent conventions, possibilities and limitations in a film’s narrative. Moreover, the historical collaboration between documentary filmmakers and visual artists is an indication of the range of forms documentary can take.

As part of the Centre's research seminar series, Elif Akçalı's paper will look at the use of documentary filmmaking in artistic practices in Turkey, especially focusing on those contemporary works that adopt a first-person, subjective viewpoint, made by artists in transition. Akçalı's case studies are Didem Pekün’s Of Dice and Men (2016), Şener Özmen’s How to tell of peace to a living dove? (2015) and Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-white Tulips (2013), which she categorizes as accented essays. Akçalı will analyze the aesthetics of these three works especially in terms of how the subjective viewpoint in their narratives shape our understanding of the social and cultural context, which was largely shaped by the political events during the period in which they were made. The accented first-person address in these works, along with other stylistic choices prone to essayistic documentary filmmaking that they pursue, allow them to enjoy a multiplicity of meanings, raising personal questions that become relevant for collective issues of identity, belonging, culture, history and memory.

Dr. Elif Akçalı completed her PhD in Media Arts in 2014 at Royal Holloway, University of London, and she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Radio, TV and Cinema Department, Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey) since 2015. She teaches the practice of film editing as well as a variety of theoretical courses in screen studies within the undergraduate and graduate programmes at Khas. Her works have appeared in a variety of journals including Critical Arts, Journal of Film and Video and [in]Transition. Her research interests include film style and aesthetics, documentary and essay film, gender and audiovisual production, and videographic film studies. Currently she is leading a two-year research project funded by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) titled “Women on Screen and Behind the Camera: A Contemporary Outlook of Representation and Labor of Women in Film and TV Industries in Turkey (2017-2021).”

Horror in the Archives

 

Transnational Folklore, Politics, and Horror Film

The academic study of horror cinema has become increasingly established in recent years (with the Horror Studies journal launched in 2010, the Horror Studies book series from University of Wales Press launched in 2015, and the SCMS Horror Studies SIG launched in 2016), yet the study of the transnationalism of horror cinema has still been relatively limited. While the approach was discussed in the two anthologies on international horror co-edited by Stephen Jay Schneider in the early 2000s (Fear Without Frontiers, 2002; Horror International, 2005), and a handful of later collections devoted to particular national horror traditions (Korean Horror Cinema, 2013; Italian Horror Cinema, 2016; Hong Kong Horror Cinema, 2019), there is still much to be said about the specifically transnational dynamics of horror film production and reception. By investigating case studies of contemporary horror films produced in Sweden, Turkey, India and Southeast Asia, and tracing how they draw upon local folkloric and mythological traditions, this panel (proposed by Professor Chris Holmlund, Professor Rosalind Galt, Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar and Dr Iain Smith for SCMS2021 Virtual Conference) grappled with the cultural politics underpinning these complex interactions of the local and the global.

Chris Holmlund discussed the representation of the troll in Gräns (Border, 2018) and how Iranian/Swedish director Ali Abbasi presents an outsider’s perspective on Nordic folklore and Scandinavian values. Rosalind Galt followed with an analysis of the Malay folkloric spirit penanggalan and how the films Tamnan Krasue (Thailand, 2002) and Penanggal (Malaysia, 2013) deploy the figure in strikingly different political contexts. Cüneyt Çakırlar presented an analysis of the post-millennial emergence of horror films in Turkish cinema and how the djinn figure of Islamic mythology relates to the politicization of Islam in contemporary Turkey. Finally, Iain Smith investigated the invented mythology of the Goddess of Prosperity in the Indian folk-horror film Tumbbad (2018) and demonstrated how its specific combination of global/local characteristics has helped it overcome the traditional exclusion of Indian films from the international horror canon. Building on recent interventions in the field of transnational horror studies (Choi and Wada- Marciano, 2009; Och & Strayer, 2014; Siddique & Raphael, 2016), this panel therefore meet the pressing need for scholars to address exactly what the transnational turn in film studies scholarship means for the study of contemporary horror cinema.

Çakırlar's paper, titled "Djinns of Post-millennial Turkish Horror Film: Gender Politics and Toxic Kinship in D@bbe (2006-15) and Siccin (2014-19)", argues that the popularisation of the traditional and religious imagery in Turkish visual culture is symptomatic of the post-millennial politicization of Islam in Turkey following the electoral victory of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in 2002. The shift from militarist secularism to neoliberal Islam in Turkish politics unsettled the Kemalist foundations of Turkishness, and provoked anxiety and polarisation. Reflecting on this anxiety, this paper focuses on the post-millennial emergence of horror films in popular Turkish cinema to locate them within Turkish political culture and its restoration of Muslimness. These films authenticate their horror by exploiting an image of Turkey as a new autocracy that has antagonized the state’s secularist republican legacy. Investing in the figure of the djinn of Anatolian folklore, Turkic shamanism and Islamic mythology, the films tell paranormal stories of witchcraft, black magic, demonic possession and exorcism. Hasan Karacadag’s D@bbe and Alper Mestçi’s Siccin have been the most popular horror series. Inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo (2001), Karacadag’s D@bbe films refer to the Quranic verses on the summoning of all djinns (to lead the judgment day) by the creature Dabbe’t-ül Arz, which these films seem to depict as an evil force haunting people through digital media. While Karacadag’s transnational style appropriates a Japanese and American supernatural horror aesthetic, his use of the djinns of Turkish folklore and Islamic mythology narrates stories that represent toxic relations of family, kinship, class, and property in contemporary Turkey. In these films, demonic femininity, especially via vengeful mothers, mobilises djinns and demons across generations. Thematically resonating with the D@bbe series, Mestçi’s Siccin movies move from the found-footage “techno-horror” to hybrid “horror dramas” of familial grief, revenge, jealousy and class conflict, i.e. amorous and familial relations cursed by djinns and demons. Çakırlar's study discusses the ways in which the two most popular auteurs of this new genre cite folklore and religion to entertain, if not confront, their audiences with the contemporary horrors of gender politics and kinship relations in post-millennial, post-secular Turkey and its Islamic liberal-conservative project of rebuilding the nation.          

 

Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in Documentary

 Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016) 

published in The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, Issue 01 ‘Transitory Parerga: Access and Inclusion in Contemporary Art,’ edited by Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds): pp. 245-263. [open access link]

Cüneyt Çakırlar's study critically analyzes the themes of queer migrancy and homecoming in two recent documentaries. Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner in Mecca (2015) documents the filmmaker’s journey from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia for his hajj pilgrimage. Using an essayistic, first-person documentary register, Sharma constructs a tension around his attachments to nation, religion, and sexuality. While the film offers a critique of religion as a punitive state apparatus, Sharma’s pronounced proprietorial relation to a migrant gay Muslim identity functions in progressive counter-valence. Tomer and Barak Heymann’s portrait documentary, Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016), tells the story of Saar, an Israeli gay man who was expelled from his Jewish community in Israel and has emigrated to London. Treating Saar’s HIV diagnosis as the marker of an affective crisis, the film oscillates between two distinct spaces of domesticity: Saar’s family in Israel, and his circle of friends in the U.K. In both films, the conflict between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrancy. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the constitutive attachment of the queer migrant.

 

Keywords: affect, essay film, first-person, intersectionality, LGBTQ documentary, migration, religion, sexuality, transnationalism

To access the open-access journal, visit https://thegaragejournal.org/en/

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture is an independent interdisciplinary academic platform that advances critical discussions about contemporary art, culture, and museum practice in the Russian and global contexts. It publishes original empirical, theoretical, and speculative research in a variety of genres, celebrating innovative ways of presentation. Fully peer-reviewed, The Garage Journal provides an open-access source book of ideas for an international audience.

World Cinema and the Essay Film

Cüneyt Çakırlar presented a paper (with Elif Akçalı, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey) on Werner Herzog's film-making at the international conference World Cinema and the Essay Film, at University of Reading (30 April - 2 May). The paper, titled ""A Form of Proto-Cinema": Aesthetics of Werner Herzog's Documentary Essayism", explored potentials and paradoxes of interpretation in Herzog’s recent documentary practice. Capitalizing upon the various aspects of “the aesthetic” embedded in his filmmaking (from the on-screen presentation of the subjects’ urge to create and re-invent to the fimmaker’s performative address at his “documentary” aesthetic), the project aims to discuss the ways in which Herzog turns his documentary material into a series of artful acts and “proto-cinema” gestures. What makes this transformation possible especially in the  documentaries Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) is the filmmaker’s persistent interventions both as director and participant observer in the pro-filmic events as well as his highly stylised additions to the narratives during post-production including his editing decisions, use of sound and voice-over narration.  The subject matters that these documentaries originally deal with multiply and turn into remote questions both voiced by the filmmaker’s on- and off-screen comments, and implied through his filmmaking aesthetics.  Rather than reinforcing a documentary truth claim, Herzog’s subjective interventions in each film create an alternate narrative prone to essay-films, which run next to these otherwise participatory documentaries. The continuous juxtaposition between Herzog’s subjectivity and the films’ photographed, quasi-objective realities including the people and the landscapes creates an ambiguity in defining certain moments from these films as they fluctuate between fiction and non-fiction, real and represented, and natural and artificial. Focusing on his engagement with film form, style, and the recurring themes of ecstasy, spirituality, scientific reason, and the indifference of nature, we would like to address wider methodological implications in Herzog’s practice. 

The aesthetics of film and video: the legacy of some early industrial factors

TV is the New Cinema: Exploring the Erosion of Boundaries between two Media

Thursday 22 May 2014 12.30-7.30 pm David Woods will be presenting a paper on the one-day symposium “TV is the New Cinema” organised by the Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool and the Department of Film Studies, Liverpool John Moores University. The increasing erosion of boundaries between film and television is a phenomenon increasingly discussed among scholars, critics and other stakeholders. Publications such as the New Yorker (January 2012) and Sight and Sound (September 2013) have explored the matter in special dossiers. Filmmakers have increasingly been working across the two media (eg. David Fincher and Netflix’s House of Cards; Greg Motolla and HBO’s The Newsroom), while others seem to have found a more or less permanent home on television than cinema (Frank Darabont and AMC’s The Walking Dead) or even to pronounce an early retirement from cinema in order to work exclusively for television (Steven Soderbergh). Furthermore, year’s end Top Ten lists have started including television series, with episodes of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire making some of the 2013 lists next to Academy Award nominated films such as Nebraska and The Wolf of Wall Street. Even major film festivals premiere episodes from television series (two episodes from House of Cards were offered a special screening at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival).  Successful television shows are now habitually adapted for the cinema and become entry points to huge franchises (Sex and the City), while television producers are invited to direct and produce major film properties such as Star Trek (J.J Abrams) and Avengers Assemble (Josh Whedon). What do all these developments mean for the current state of the two media? Is the future of film and television intertwined? Is medium specificity not important anymore as a defining characteristic of each medium? To what extent can we still talk about film and television as different media industries? What is the impact of recent developments on the aesthetics associated with each medium? In what ways has the history of each medium influenced their current state? What is the role of the global entertainment conglomerates that control both film and television in this convergence between the two media? TV is the New Cinema will explore these and a host of other questions, with a view to bring together film and television scholars to discuss the ways in which research and knowledge from both fields can help us understand the present and the future of these media.

Woods’ paper examines an aspect of the historical and industrial grounding of the technologies of cinema and television. It argues that a key aspect of their strikingly different looks can be attributed to the different temporal resolution of the two formats, and that the reasons for this difference can be accounted for in terms of the technological strategies the two industries developed historically to minimise the use of expensive resources specific to their medium. The cultural complexities of the aesthetics associated with cinema and film were well demonstrated by the release of The Hobbit in high framerate in 2012, and the paper briefly outlines some implications of the often highly charged popular responses which this provoked.

For the event details: http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/LSS/127881.htm