Küçük Sinemalar! – Hallwalls, January 16th, 2011

Last Sunday, I screened a little program I put together of work by the contributers to the Küçük Sinemalar blog (a small experimental film blog in Turkish where we post upcoming show announcements, reviews, recipes, polemics, etc.) at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY. It included work by Can Eskinazi, Eytan Ipeker, Yoel Meranda, Mustafa Uzuner and myself. I also screened a film I rented from the Filmmakers Cooperative named Of Eh (1968) by Cengiz Yetken, whom I had never heard of; I felt that this screening could be a nice moment to also excavate some possibly interesting moments from Turkish film history. Naturally, the screening isn’t meant to be some kind of all-encompassing anthology of Turkish experimental cinema (whatever that may be.) It’s more of a survey, and one that I believe produced a rather interesting portrait of the country. I hope that I can continue doing screenings like, showcasing work by other people as well, both older and newer.

WordPress doesn’t allow me to add Vimeo’s hubnut widget; you can see the program and watch all of the videos right here (scroll to the bottom.)

If interested, and if you have about half an hour where you can wipe away the rest of the world for a bit, I do heartily recommend it and I’d be happy to further talk about it with you (I hesitate talking about what the program produced in me beforehand…) The page for the show at Hallwalls is here.

As you might gather, I feel pretty happy about how the videos in the program came together; it ended up combining in ways that made me see these works – all of which I was long familiar with – in new lights, with themes emerging that I hadn’t given (enough) thought to before. It’s one thing to watch each piece individually, clicking through everybody’s Vimeo pages; it’s another to see them projected back to back on a nice big screen.

I should make one small note about one of the videos, specifically Mustafa Uzuner’s Neyse Halim…: The title loosely translates as “What my state is…”, and is a part of a phrase that one says during the whole Turkish coffee fortune ritual. The complete phrase is “Neyse halim, çıksın falım.” Roughly: “What my state is, so let my fortune be.” If you know some elementary Turkish coffee symbolism, it might charm you even more.

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A small note of housekeeping: I found an essay by Keewatin Dewdney named “Discontinous Film”. I added a link to it on the Breer / Dewdney post.