"No truly significant relationship can ever be based on a contract…
first there is loyalty."
- Mark Rowlands, from The Philosopher and the Wolf
This article grew out of a meeting and a festival, the first with
Dieter Wieczorek, and the second being the Istanbul International Film
festival 2013. The reason the origin of the piece is mentioned is not
purely for purposes of placement and intention; rather, I am keen to
underpin the argument of the article in its making, that is, in
creative encounters with individuals and supportive structures.
I attended the festival as a maker and a viewer. The former saw me
present the world premiere of Taskafa, stories from the street, a
documentary essay about memory and the most necessary forms of
belonging, through a search for the role played in the city by
Istanbul’s street dogs and their relationship to its human
populations. In the second, and with all too short a visit, I focused
exclusively in my viewing on new feature and documentary works by
Turkish and Kurdish filmmakers.
It goes without saying (it is almost a cliché of course) that Turkish
culture and society are in transition, poised between East and West,
tradition and modernity, a secular state and Islam. However, what is
most relevant for our purposes here is the second threshold it
occupies above. It is perfectly possible (in a way that is absolutely
not the case in my native Germany or the UK, my adopted home since
1991) for a filmmaker now emerging in Turkey to have grown up in an
agricultural Anatolian village in significant ways unaffected by the
dynamic modernising forces of recent globalisation and international
commodity / finance capitalism. That is not to say, of course, that
this imagined village would not partake in commercial and consumer
exchanges, international telecommunications by whatever platform, and
all the social / communal shifts felt elsewhere and, most
specifically, in large metropolitan centres.
However, the village’s continuity with the past remains far more
visible, felt and experienced than in the vast majority of Europe, the
West, and the industrialised world generally. The sense of tradition
(positive and negative), the enduring relationship with the land and
forms of labour associated with it, and the strong sense of folk
practices, beliefs, tales and music all persist in a way that provides
a significant brake on aspects of these constantly accelerating
shifts.
"Devir", Dervis Zaim |
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So, crudely put, such environments are perhaps better placed to resist
the less appealing monocultural and imposed forms of ‘progress’ all
too visible elsewhere. It is this particular aspect of contemporary
cultural transformation that interests me here, because it relates to
my own film Ta?kafa, and because explorations of this theme were
evident in a number of the films I viewed and, most notably, in Dervis
Zaim’s Cycle (Devir, 2012, 75’). Each late summer, the villagers of
Hasanpasa hold a traditional shepherding contest. The shepherds dye
their lead sheep red, and in the contest, the shepherds entice their
sheep through a stream. Scripted around the actual event, the film is
set on location and performed by non actors – shepherds play
shepherds. Cycle is also notable for its strong sense, in a key scene
that bookends the narrative, of mythic storytelling, strikingly caught
in the opening image of a damaged stag ‘wearing’ wooden antlers in
place of its own (sawn off), the meaning and implication of which the
film explores.
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Here is not the place for detailed plot summaries of either film (I
have added links at the end of this piece). What is important,
however, is briefly to identify what these two works, despite their
obvious differences – form, location, narrative structure, budget, and
scale – share, and what effect or effects they intend to have.
Most notably, each seeks to investigate an unthinking, collective
belief in progress, especially in social, economic, and structural
development and to raise, with some urgency, the growing distance
between the human and non-human realms, whether in urban or rural
environments. That both focus their thematic and narrative drives
around the relationship with animals (dogs in Taskafa, and sheep in
Cycle) is important. I can only speak here of my reasons for such an
approach in Taskafa, but I imagine and feel, having been genuinely
touched by Cycle, that Zaim’s intentions in his film are not
dissimilar.
With Taskafa, I seek to explore how public space becomes contested,
especially in the relationship between corporate city-making - through
the demolition and the redevelopment of vast swathes of the city,
increasingly a process of erasure - and the everyday lives of the
neighbourhoods affected. Taskafa is not finally about dogs. Rather, it
concerns the way people still, and especially now, seek to be part of
a larger context, one that respects other creatures and wishes them to
play a significant role in their lives. The key issue is not whether
we live securely’, especially in its official sense, but that we
don't lose touch with the shared reality that surrounds us. In this way both films, I feel, while committed thematically to their
evident subject matter, and artistically to their own forms of making,
within the frame and behind the camera, share, finally (but not
exclusively of course), a sense of values and a belief in the role of
filmmaking now, at an urgent and uncertain time for human communities
and larger ecological and natural systems.
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"Taskafa, Bir sokak hikâyesi", Andrea Luka Zimmerman
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This uncertainty stems
primarily from a crisis of belonging; that is to say, from profound
splits within the human realm about the fundamental nature of our
place within these larger structures. We are paying a very heavy price
– environmentally, economically, socially and psychologically – for
this crisis, one driven by the increasing demands and damages of a
techno-rationalist model of organising society.
This model believes that life is a problem to be solved, that one can
arrive at a kind of neutral state (neutral only in that it has fully
accepted the imposed imperatives of contemporary capitalism) whereby
all that remains is endlessly to carry out the dictates of this order,
as all decisions as to its efficacy have already been made. That this
is impossible and undesirable is, I hope, entirely obvious and yet
this motivation is the driving impulse of our world today; or rather,
of those directing our world, economically and politically.
"Taskafa, Bir sokak hikâyesi", Andrea Luka Zimmerman |
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In Taskafa, this mindsets manifests as a desire to cleanse Istanbul of
its non-domestic and formally untamed animal life (dogs, cats, and
urban wild creatures) because they do not conform actually, or
aesthetically, to the processes of gentrification. Taskafa, meanwhile,
endorses the coexistence that has worked with great success, and
widespread popular support for centuries. The earth is clearly a
common dwelling place for all species, however much certain human
beings dislike the idea. Therefore, it goes without saying, that a
place on the earth, in this case the city, should also remain commonly
held. In rural environments, it can sometimes feel, despite the
obvious human effects on the landscape through farming, road building
and other forms of infrastructure, that the non-human defines and
predominates.
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And yet, as numerous environmentalists have written, and
when human pollution reaches as far as the body tissue of penguins and
polar bears, it is now viable, sadly, to argue that nowhere on the
planet can be said formally to be ‘wild’, to be beyond the effect of
our actions. So, the world of Cycle feels equally, if sometimes less
apparently, the same pressures.
If these views are accepted, then, in filmic terms, it might be
possible and productive, as I close, tentatively to propose a modest
manifesto prompted by thinking about this relationship between
filmmaking, meaning and values. Such a manifesto, as is the case with
this form, could swiftly be challenged, denied as naïve, reductive,
ignorant of complex realities etc. However, that does not mean that
manifestoes, and this article do not serve a particular purpose at a
particular moment in gathering thoughts for further discussion. And
so, here below I offer my manifesto for coexistence in film and life
(grand titles are a prerequisite of the medium!) and of course I
welcome any and all responses.
Manifesto for coexistence in film and life
1. Life is a work in process, unfinished, provisional and uncertain.
Film must reflect this or it has no purchase on reality.
2. A work seeking internationalist reception – through content, form,
aesthetic or technology – without a specific grounding in the lived
experience of people and place, is not internationalist.
3. All filmmaking that is worth the name, regardless of its apparent
construction, is a process of making through community; on screen,
behind the camera, and in the intention of all its makers. There is
such a thing as society.
4. The budget and production structure of a film should always be in
proportion and humane relationship to its protagonists, its theme, and
its intention. It should be modest.
5. The most productive form of filmmaking today, regardless of its
outward expression (fiction, documentary, etc) is the sketch, the
essay, from the French, to try; and then, from Beckett, “fail again,
fail better”.
6. Braudel identified three strata in time – the personal, the social
and the natural. The fourth dimension is empathy. Film is this fourth
dimension, caught.
7. All films must feature animals. Without them, it is like a camera
without tape, without a reel. It ignores the majority world and is
invalid.
8. In the same way, a world - and a film - without hope, is invalid.
Hope is the thing….
To finish, many films, I believe, already embody these principles,
declared or not, but I wish now to draw your attention to one
outstanding recent work, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, by Marseille’s
‘filmmaker in residence’ Robert Guédiguian (French born, of German and
Armenian parentage). Please track it down and view it with enjoyable
urgency, as it speaks to the challenges and pressures of our times in
a way that few films have managed. That it does this with emotion,
insight, political acuity and immense empathy towards its ensemble of
characters is remarkable. Made by a filmmaker of hybrid origins, in a
city far from the political centre and itself on the shore of a sea of
great and rich diversities, with a family of actors and collaborators
who have shared his journey over many works and years, only serves to
underscore the importance of committing to a place and to ways of
working, as well as to a refusal to settle for the status quo as
defined by the current political and economic elite. Follow this way
of working, the film and its means of making suggest, and you cannot
do otherwise than produce such work, work that matters, and helps.
This is how things come together 
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