Blinding Goats
Blinding Goats is a short split screen film showing my family having traditional Turkish food in an observational documentary format. The film is displayed with kebabs so the viewers could sit on the table and enjoy the food with the rest of my family. It entails organic conversations between the family members with some commentary explaining their personal lives and achievements.
The bizarre nature of the conversations such as Dede (grandfather) being accused of killing and blinding goats, as well as Baba (father) reminiscing on getting beaten when he was younger are used to invoke an unprecedented feeling of disclosure coming from the de facto state of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The separation of the film in three screens is inspired by religious triptych paintings as a reminder of Islamic background. The conversations are edited together to illuminate lack of financial opportunities, violence, the estrangement between different generations, tradition, family and death. It is a mundane moment in time as a reflection of life in an occupied land that longs to be recognised so that the collective trauma of war and separation can be forgotten. As an artist and young individual who has emigrated to the UK for better opportunities, my own distancing from my family is represented with guilt and confusion by close-ups of food and surroundings. Therefore, only explanatory commentary is used instead of a rather poetic or figurative language because the film is intended to reflect my inner feelings of suppressed love for my background and culture to become more European and successful in the real world.
Turkey Oaks
For this project, I initially started collecting footage of the human ramifications of a garden by looking at the direct examples of man-made objects, such as benches, designed labyrinths, irrigation systems, name tags etc, in Harris Gardens at the University of Reading. Through this, I started questioning the origin of the garden and how the trees themselves are not naturally resided here as the name tags suggested there were plants from all over the world from Japan to Russia.
Turkey oaks are ornamental trees native to the Balkans and Turkey, brought over to Britain in the 18th century. They were planted at the Harris Gardens in Reading by George Spencer-Churchill, 5th Duke of Marlborough, when the garden used to be a part of a now demolished Victorian house. It was later discovered that the turkey oaks are host to a gall wasp which damages the native British oaks, hence the Ministry of Defence ordered all Turkey oaks on their land to be removed in 1998. Now, only five remain at the Harris Gardens.
In the video, this information is used to signify Turkey’s relationship with Europe over the years, as it has been incredible volatile due to propaganda as well as terrorism. For example, David Cameron, former prime minister of the UK, was a huge supporter of Turkey joining the EU however this was later used as a Brexit campaign encouraging people to vote leave, perhaps because Turkey presents a threat due to its religious background. However, this is what Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey, keeps suggesting for religious propaganda in Turkey and part of the reason why Turkey is pushed back from being a candidate is the fact that there are uncontrollable political repercussions, such as the Gezi Park in 2013 demonstrations and the failed coup d’etat in 2015. Although Europe does not recognize most of the terrorist groups in Turkey, the terrorism is not dealt with either in Turkey or Europe to signify a step towards unity, Turkey will always be a threat for obvious realities as well as rather chauvinistic reasons.
Embargo
Based on the political, ethnographic and historical existence or non-existence of my home country, I decided to adopt the documentary style fully by making a longer, single channel film, and by explaining the context through a voiceover, talking heads and found footage. Interviewing friends from the two separated sides of Cyprus allowed me to think about what I can represent through genuine experiences of living in the UK, and the two contradictory collections of information led me to think about implications of Westernisation solely looking at the complicated Cypriot identity. Cyprus is a small country and even though England is its guarantor, the foreignness that surrounds it is acceptable, however its history and the non-existent identity can be used to dig deeper into issues that include everyone belonging to the two sides of the world (East and West) that has been separated for centuries due to religion, location and violence.
The Turkish Cypriot friends against the Greek Cypriot friend created unexpected dualisms in my own head, because I expected both sides to be either longing for Cyprus or completely ignoring it. By asking them to explain their experience with locals in Reading and comparing it to back home, it was easy to collect ideas that I felt myself, but the different attitudes towards the UK and the levels of assimilation led me to think about whether the European Republic of Cyprus differentiated from the collective Cypriot identity. The recent historical implications on both sides – such as the social, economic and travel embargoes inflicted by the Republic of Cyprus on the de facto state of Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, as well as the process of the Republic of Cyprus joining the EU and later surviving a terrible economic crisis due to the EU and Greece – affected the ethnography of the collective identity immensely because of the dualisms devised without affecting/verifying the other, and the Eastern ideologies and traditions stuck with the TRNC whereas the Republic of Cyprus evolved and grew successful enough to lend money to their motherland Greece. TRNC still depends on Turkey economically as well as for basic governmental structures such as police force and military, because of the feeling of having lost the war against the modernising world; there is always a feeling of victimhood that surrounds the Turkish Cypriots because of the constant reminders of war and having been stuck in a de facto state with Turkey overruling the systems of religion and media. This idea linked very well with the conversations I had with my friends from both sides, even though both parties are for a united Cyprus, we do not know who to be and where to belong.
Inspired by Adam Curtis and John Akomfrah, as well as Abu Ali Mustafa’s They Don’t Exist (1974), I experimented with managing the link between a video essay and the supposed objectivity of documentary filmmaking. The informative aspect of the film ended up allowing me to discuss some of the realities that I did not think mattered so much anymore. Although the film is supposed to be open for interpretation, because of the depth of unknown history that it provides, I will be freer to experiment with the visualisation of this information without relying too much on language because this is when the film starts to take a stance, which is something I want to avoid.
Annanne
For this project, I decided to make another film to continue my exploration of Westernisation in Turkey and Cyprus. This time, I wanted to focus on an individual experience in comparison to the political distress and corruption by using found footage. I picked my grandmother as my main character, because I thought she is a great example of how people are stuck in between and do not belong to neither of the opposing factions of the world. Although my ideas shifted noticeably due to the afflicting process of finding the right footage online, I feel that I was able to use my intuition to bring it together rather than composing a logical, presupposed film.
My grandmother is nominally Muslim, strictly against Greek Cypriots, as she is still traumatised by the events of war that separated the island in two between 1963-1974. Nonetheless, she visits the European Republic of Cyprus because she likes the fashion and food (McDonald’s Greek Mac) and holds a EU passport. She has always dreamed of one day obtaining the good life promised by the West, although she still identifies herself as a Turk, not even Cypriot. This is when the Cypriot identity becomes convoluted, because there are too many influences on how life should be and how the de-facto half of the country (North) that only Turkey recognises should be run, making it impossible to determine whom a ‘Cypriot’ is within political and social grounds. Cypriots basically have no jurisdiction over their own country; Turkey controls the media, the army, the police force, even network providers on the North. The youth dreams of one day being able to study in the UK so that they can experience a civilised lifestyle, when we live under the laws that were introduced when Cyprus was a British colony, and it is practically the same today (Clerides, 2009)[1]. Even those who are the most patriotic aren’t for the Cypriot identity because they identify themselves as Turkish, whilst enjoying the perks of a EU country in walking distance and EU passports, and speaking a dialect that is very similar to Greek.
At first, I wanted to make a three channel film, where one of the monitors would show live Turkish TV. I wanted to focus on media to tackle how Turkey, and Cypriots who mainly watch Turkish TV, inspired by Morgan Quaintance’s podcast with Şölen Şanlı regarding women’s shows on TV in 2009, and her book Women and Cultural Citizenship in Turkey: Mass Media and ‘woman’s Voice’ Television. I was also inspired by Harun Farocki’s split screen films regarding the development of gaming imagery called Parallel I,II,III; as he used them as a starting point and moved onto much larger concepts and observations. However, the film ended up becoming more about the cultural influences and the complex identity issues in Cyprus rather than media, so I decided to only show a split-screen film. I thought that if I was to separate the two screens and add other information I could not control, then the coherency of the films and the links between the two screens would be lost. I will use some of these ideas next year as part of a bigger project, and I feel that this is a great starting point for me to develop my exploration of subjects that matter to me and my background.
[1] Clerides, C. (2009). History and Nature of the Cyprus Legal System / The Hierarchy of the Laws – Lecture 1. Clerides Legal. Nicosia: European University. Retrieved from http://www.clerideslegal.com/article/history-and-nature-of-the-cyprus-legal-system
Suicide Girls inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, 2002
Password: ecemsinay
Reflective Statement:
For my term abroad in Prague, I focused on continuing what I had been doing in Reading to build up to a coherent style. I have been intrigued by the problematic theory of Orientalism and the effects of Westernisation in Middle Eastern countries, especially Turkey, and have been experimenting with visualising my ideas through exploring Turkish literature, using film. I feel that this is close to my heart as I grew up under the control of Turkey, which progressively fails to modernise because of the misunderstanding between the working class, the extremist religious community and the relentlessly ignorant bourgeoisie.
One of my first projects in Prague was inspired by HyperNormalisation (2016) by Adam Curtis and the idea of becoming too used to the normality of life that how ever dissatisfied one is, they cannot see beyond what is normal and what can be changed. This idea made me think of the people I have met on Erasmus from all over the world; people from the most ‘perfect’ countries have prolonged problems with their government. Therefore, I intended to represent an overwhelmingly ‘normal’ and administrative, outsider view of the Western routines and patterns in daily life, such as traffic, signs, shops, windows etc. This led me to think about the ‘normal’ life in Turkey which has been incredibly turbulent with a tiring amount of terror attacks and political unrest, for which the upsetting events are always used as propaganda for the two extremist parties. I decided to represent this by using excerpts from Orhan Pamuk’s book Snow (2002) about the suicide rate of girls in Kars and Batman, which was higher than any other part of Turkey, and in fact in the world as usually the male suicide rates are always higher than females, according to the book. These girls had been committing suicide for a number of personal reasons but this escalated into being used as propaganda for religious groups and the powerful bourgeoisie which completely disassociated itself from Kars as they frowned upon the city. I wanted to show in my film the different interpretations of these suicides by using symbolism and found footage, to reflect the realities of Westernisation that is very rarely noticeable.
I was inspired by Vanitas paintings and wanted to compose my shots using the symbolism and the mannerisms of these paintings, as I did not want to use actors to play the girls so it would not be too literal. I also used found footage as I could not convey the significance of the situation in Kars with only simple objects. With the Kuleshov effect in mind, I found footage that was all shot in Turkey and deliberately placed them one after another to create a sequential but not chronological film that only make sense as a whole. I made it very short so the viewers could watch it multiple times to see the different imagery in all the footage. In my opinion, the outcome has turned out to be successful in terms of what it reveals and manifests to the audience, I think the most important issue would be that it would seem biased and critical but I feel that it is a mere portrayal of the circumstances which is what I intended it to be.
Ecem Sınay 