Meranda / İpeker

A few years ago, as I discovered more and more things about experimental film and video, I wondered if anybody back in Turkey was interested in these “things”. At that point, it was my fifth or sixth consecutive year living in Buffalo; I went back to Turkey usually every summer, but I hadn’t lived there that long in my life to begin with, so I was very disconnected from back home. A little online digging didn’t reveal too much; most of the chatter was either of David Lynch, or people making fun of filmmakers naming things experimental because they were bad. There was a yahoo listserve however, simply named Deneysel Sinema – Experimental Cinema. My first contact was the admin of the list, Mustafa Uzuner, who was (and is) living in Montreal and whom I shared a couple of nice emails with. It wasn’t very active; a couple of posts of videos being screened in a café in Ankara and that was about it. My annual summer trip home was imminent, and I was considering shooting some 16mm there. I shot off a question that felt slightly naïve to me, but as the internet didn’t answer it, I thought perhaps someone could. “Can I find a 16mm projector in Turkey?” I received two replies; one from Mustafa and one by Yoel Meranda, and another series of correspondence began. Yoel ended up sending me a DVD of his videos: a bunch of little cine-poems, cityscapes in digital close-up, with terrific little rhythms and cuts that made you aware of lengths beyond their own. They remain my favorite Istanbul movies.

Above: 4 Eylül (September 4th), miniDV, 2006

I ended up meeting Yoel, and through him, Eytan İpeker as well. I had met another filmmaker, Can Eskinazi, independently, and then suddenly one summer our various friend groups came together in one of those multi-table, logistical nightmare, drinking manias that have since become synonymous in my mind with “I’m going to Istanbul.” Gather thirty people and make them drink and talk and shout while gypsy music rages in the background, and a single lined flood of humanity stammers along by your side. I was ecstatic; not only had I met people who cared deeply about this whole moving image shebang, but they were absolutely terrific and lovely people too. Yoel tells me that such crazy nights don’t happen too often, but I can’t imagine Istanbul any other way. Especially not without them. In short, I consider the trio mentioned above as very dear friends.

Between the first time I saw his DVD and when he opened his Vimeo account, Yoel has either become or is publicly showing himself to be an incredibly prolific video maker; there’s rarely a month that goes by without four or five new videos popping up, not to mention all the pieces he makes that aren’t online (the only ones that aren’t, according to Yoel, are those that depend on the interlacing effect on a miniDV player (such as could be seen when you pause a video on your camera), those that simply don’t work online or those that he doesn’t like anymore.) The length of the pieces is often between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. Since his miniDV camera broke, he has continued shooting with his cellphone, and recently, with HD. In all of these, his videos have tended to become more and more abstract, his colors and rhythms more precise, always mindful of their format, and pushing them as far as he needs them, often reshooting already “low quality” footage of of his computer screen again, as seen below in one of my very favorites, océanéant.

Above: océanéant. Shot with a Nokia 6151, reshot with an E65. January 2009.

As Fred Camper said about the piece: “Yoel Meranda indulges a fascination with color in his extraordinary abstraction océanéant: fields of translucent reds gather upon themselves until they seem to congeal into something with mass, weight, and texture.” Such indulgences have only been carried forward with his recent videos; we are given set-ups that over time are complicated by the introduction of sudden and frantic new rhythms, accelerated enlargements of a recurring flash of digital color, darkening digital blacks, closures of what was until then a full view, sometimes distancing us from the beautiful, trying to earn it. Aber die Horen (embedded below), along with his other recent output like the hallucinatory Television, the beautiful electric lights near buyukada or the exquisite rauscht are some of these most recent pieces. I can’t wait till next month.

Above: Aber die Horen. HD. June 2010.

***

Above: Legend of Nile. miniDV. 2008.

Only in the last week or so did Eytan İpeker begin uploading his videos online. Eytan and Yoel grew up together, and it’s obvious in every way that their conversations grew to influence each other. Yoel even told me that in highschool, before even encountering films by Brakhage et al, Eytan had written an essay named “The Possibility of an Abstract Cinema” (or as it’s called in Turkish, “aman da aman!”) Eytan’s work is also abstract, though , there’s more of a reference to simple geometric shapes, which makes sense as most of his videos come from the same set of footage of his piano. Legend of Nile, one of these “piano pieces”, has the overlaid and highly manipulated vertical lines continually crossing the frame horizontally. The video slowly progresses through different blues, blacks and golds, different rhythms, chronicling this river through the days passing over and under it, reflected by it.

Above: So Abstract. miniDV. 2009.

I find Yoel and Eytan’s work absolutely unmistakable, though it’s difficult to put to words. I’m tempted to say that Eytan’s work has a drier sense of humor, which he makes apparent in a piece like So Abstract above or like in The Eternal Wink, and I’m tempted to say that Yoel’s videos are more “organic”, but these comparisons aren’t fair to either filmmaker. It’s a difference that is apparent not only in their visual choices, but also in the rhythms which the films build – Yoel’s breathing can be staccato, if you will, with sudden breaks from the parameters of his medium, whereas Eytan’s pacing is often more even, and his surprises come from within his own structures.

I write this now as both these videomakers will be presenting work at the Toronto Film Festival, in the City to City shorts program. Yoel’s video Television is also viewable in New York City at the White Box Gallery for their Stirrings Still show.

Hopefully, I’ll see them sooner rather than later.