Category: Genel

Halt and Catch Fire | Notes

I watched Halt and Catch Fire again, for the third time. I occasionally cried during the last season, probably due to the accumulated emotional investment of the binge-watch experience together with the idea of the loss of a central character. It’s one of AMC’s series broadcasted from 2014 to 2017. Some obsessive entrepreneurs contribute and witness the tech history from the early 1980s until the new millenium. We start with writing a BIOS and end up with the early search engines! Meanwhile, there are many significant developments such as personal computers with a ‘handle’ becoming prevalent, the first anti-virus programs, the amazing evolution of (online) gaming, and several phases of the internet and the world wide web parade.

The five (others might say four) main characters are:

  • Cameron Howe: coder, gamer, the young prodigy
  • Gordon Clark: hardware person, builder
  • Donna Clark: hardware person, investor
  • Joe McMillan: salesman and product manager
  • Jon Bosworth*: oldskool manager adapting new era

The challenges and interactions among these people are somewhat inspiring for me, even though I had never been in an innovation landscape that close. I’m just an ordinary programmer, not fascinated or inspired by any of the ‘real’ events in the domain. I’m indifferent to the majority of the breakthroughs in the tech realm. I try to follow and read them, but I’m not overwhelmed with them, i.e., just playing with GPT-3 to build stupid paraphrases of historical speeches. The reason why this series affects me is due to its dramatic aspect, together with its subject focus that is close to my day-to-day job. I enjoy witnessing the passion that I don’t have but also, it kicks me. I feel more aspirational in the last two weeks that I was re-watching the series. At the very least, it gives some -potentially distorted- context and historicity to the infrastructure I’m working on. It also reminds me some of the fundamentals of the domain.

Other than that, the characters’ challenges are interesting. There’s such a nice balance and distribution of the obsessions and longings of each person. Cam tries to do what she thinks is right and meaningful – connecting people with games. Joe always tries to be the explorer of the future. Gordon tries hard to make everything work in small increments and build a decent persona. Donna tries to defend reason and maintainability while being the key creative person in many achievements. Bosworth just sways, adapts, and tries to survive.

I like these kinds of historical software/tech dramatizations in general but Halt and Catch Fire was the epitome for me. I’m not counting, first, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014), or TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013), the second, because they belong to a higher purpose. Recently I enjoyed The Billion Dollar Code (2021) with all the tech/art debates and the Berlin Döner, but it was only an appetizer. The Social Network (2010) was a good take and a witty Sorkin/Fincher/Eisenberg collaboration. StartUp’s (2016-2018) best finding was to replace the criminal enterprise with investors. “Jobs” biopics, I recall that I watched, but I don’t remember a single detail. Devs (2020) was following one of the ultimate ideas in the futuristic realm with terrible storytelling. I didn’t follow Silicon Valley (2014-2019) for more than a season, but maybe in the future.

How To Act On Reality TV | Notes

My dear friend H. whom I owe many of my personal interests in film and music, has been spamming me about John Wilson for a week or two. Wilson has a docuseries called How To with John Wilson that I’ll watch soon if I find a legal way, but How To Act On Reality TV was the introduction to the filmmaker for me: it documents a workshop by a media professional who helps people planning to join to Reality TV. He gives tips to the participants about how to introduce themselves better and improve their self-expression, educates them about how the producers and the audience desire to see them on screen, and warns about the pitfalls to avoid acting while being hyper-authentic. Of course, the video itself is a great example of Reality TV. The whole workshop is recorded similarly. In addition, there are some familiar missions for the participants such as trying to get phone numbers from strangers in a park or a sudden singing performance on a supermarket aisle. On the other hand, the camera —and the editor— does not avoid including the scenes about the participants yawning. All in all, we need boredom too.

He manages to achieve exactly the sweet spot where authenticity intersects with essayistic intent. As the trainer says, “it’s the improv factor, that I like most… it’s also an opportunity to serialize in a way where documentaries can’t… I guess I’m not patient enough.” I felt that it was the very reason why I, and I think several other people, like YouTube or any other sort of personal content.

How To Act On Reality TV | Vimeo

Don’t Look Up (2021) | Notes

A professor and a Ph.D. student discover a comet that will hit the earth in a couple of months. They try to transmit this information to the officials who can initiate action at this scale. However, their attempts in talking to the media or the president of the U.S. don’t end up with concrete action. Their message is lost inside the social media frenzy, political and business interests, the avoidance and the rejection of truth, etc. When the president decides that it’s the right time to tackle the issue, they team up in a project to do some propaganda about “saving the world” and to deflect the comet. But at the very moment, the Apple/SpaceX CEO intervenes and changes the plans since his team finds some very valuable minerals inside the comet. The passion for profit takes precedence over saving the world.

In terms of its overt messages, it is a critical movie. In terms of its screenplay, storytelling, and puns, pretty mediocre. Its success can be found in transforming the mainstream media and communication critique to superficial characters and dialogues. That is also its defeat. If it’s only a dinner of family and close friends that you can put against the whole extravagance you observed, it means you’re unable to build any counter-discourse against it. Cate Blanchett does her best for underlining what these patterns do to one’s own self, but it doesn’t suffice in the end. I felt sorry for Meryl Streep while watching her struggling with the terrible dialogues written for her part.

Günter Wallraff, Lowest of the Low | Notes

Lowest of the Low (‘Ganz unten’ in the original, ‘En Alttakiler’ in Turkish) is Günter Wallraff’s undercover participatory journalism book where he disguises himself as a migrant from Turkey and attempts at experiencing the daily lives of the migrants in Germany. It was published in 1985, and translated to Turkish too –that’s how I read it after a recommendation from a friend. It is apparent that the book had caused debates and had a considerable impact when it was first published. It seems to have become popular in the 80s in Turkey too, but it was a forgotten book as of today, or maybe I just never encountered it in another text or a bookstore.

It’s not the only sensational work Wallraff published. Even though I haven’t read the other ones, there are some other journeys he took throughout his life, starting with working in a tabloid newspaper or, lately wearing blackface to act as a Somali. With his work, he is criticized both from the right (as expected) and from the left for his methodology being racist. Even though I admired his way of working, there are also some disturbing aspects of his methods, maybe mainly not putting his own identity on the table in his personal observations. One main question for me is about the will to present his own experience instead of building close relationships with people he wants to represent and strengthening their voices. He tries it from time to time in the book, where he transmits the dialogues without intervention. Nevertheless, Lowest of the Low was impressive in general.

Wallraff disguises himself as Ali and builds a story around the challenge of not being able to speak Turkish. In his story, he is the son of a Turkish father who leaves him at a young age and a Greek mother. He grows up in Piraeus with his mom. When others ask him to speak a little bit of Greek, he gives examples from his early courses about Ancient Greek, Odyssey in particular. Despite being 43 years old, he does some physical training and acts as if he is around 25-30 years old. He thinks that he sees the other face of society by his experience.

I don’t aim to summarize or transfer the disgraceful experiences he was exposed to during his life as Ali. He narrates all these in the book in a way that I cannot even cover the gist of it. Instead, I want to note jobs and places he worked just to remember and go back in the future.

As first steps, he repairs the barn of a mansion in Cologne, and works at a farm in Lower Saxony, next to Grohnde Nuclear Power Plant. He goes to a football match between Germany and Turkey in Berlin, 1983 and to a meeting of CSU in Passau where Franz Josef Strauss also joins. He even pretends that he’s a follower of the Turkish nationalist movement and Türkeş, leading to him having an autograph from Strauss.

After working some time at Mcdonald’s, he critically examines the company’s work culture, which might look pretty ordinary (in a negative sense) today but was surprising for him back in the 80s. After the service sector, he starts to work in construction sites, without papers (GBI, WTB, DIMA), and as a subcontracted laborer.

Ali tries hard to be baptized and meets with several priests who reject his will to convert to Christianity. Only toward the end, one migrant priest accepts his request. He even tries his luck with Sannyasins, followers of Bhagwan, but he is also ridiculed and rejected there. An infobox among the pages redirected me to an interview Bhagwan gave to Der Spiegel in 1985, where he had some terrifying appraisal of Hitler. That wasn’t mentioned in Wild Wild Country, or maybe I missed it. This religion-side-story ends with Ali discovering the funeral services in order to send his corpse back to his country after his death.

I found out that going step by step with every other experience will be hard for me. I couldn’t even cover the majority of the book. Let me take a short note about the drug trials he attends, the factory near Hamburg that produces brake pads by processing asbestos, his long-lasting knot at Thyssen, his dear boss Adler and Würgassen nuclear power plant.

Throughout the book, Wallraff refers to numerous occasions that tarnish one’s physical health and self-esteem. Even though I read some critics who argue that what the author cares about in the end is his personal gains after these projects he did, when I think solely about the book, I found Wallraff’s effort and position positive and solidarity. As I understand, his conclusion is a puzzling one. How did these people tolerate all this misery?

Bergman Island (2021) | Notes

As an admirer of Isabelle Huppert and part of the touched audience of L’avenir (2016), I was curious about Mia Hansen-Løve’s new work. I noticed that she made another film in between which I haven’t heard at all. Maya (2018) has around 500 user votes on IMDb —at least, I’m not alone. For this one, the “Bergman” word in the title raised my expectations while hinting at another story of artist/intellectual characters.

A filmmaker couple, Chris and Tony, goes to a creative retreat at Fårö Island during “Bergman Week”. Tony is in the limelight and gives an interview after the screening of his film during the event. They participate in cinephile discussions, touristic Bergman safaris, and watch Cries and Whispers (1972) in a sacred film theater while working on their new projects. After some introductory sequences on the state of affairs of the couple and the sense of the location, Bergman Island steers more into Chris’ story. She is writing a film script where a young filmmaker Amy and her first love Joseph encounters after years in a wedding of their common friends, again in Fårö.

The film does not care much about praising or subverting Bergman but it comes with a couple of questions and jokes. The guide welcomes the couple to the shooting location of “Scenes From a Marriage” with a “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce” trivia. Chris and Tony stay in different flats that have a view of each others’ windows and while trying to focus on her screenplay during a writer’s block, pointing out to Bergman’s massive legacy that is felt in the room, Chris asks “How can I sit here and not feel like a loser?”. On the flip side, during a discussion with the akins of Bergman, she questions how to perceive a man who was “as cruel in his art as in his life”. He had six marriages and nine children where he most probably left all the domestic duties to his wives.

Apart from Bergman, I thought that the focus of the film was lingering around relationships and artistic imagination. It reminded me of my recent reading of the “Beautiful World, Where Are You” in the encounter of the second-degree fiction couple Amy and Joseph, of the people who picked up and sustained some sort of life story but constantly are doubtful about it. “I love two people”, one of them was saying. The tension Amy was having about bringing only a single dress that is “more cream or off-white” to a wedding and the surfacing of this dress during a tense encounter with the lover referred to a question of commitment and relationship.

Some interesting trivia I read about after the film about Hansen-Løve was that she is an author in Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote Eden (2014) with her brother who was a DJ in the 90s in France and had retreats in Fårö that gave her the idea of shooting a film there. In the film, Chris meets with a young Swedish man Hampus and spends the day with him instead of joining the Bergman Safari with Tony. The parallel editing of that particular day was highlighting the wondrousness of a random encounter and a twosome social event compared to a predetermined tourist attraction in a group during an exploratory and artistic journey. I’ve read that Hampus was someone Hansen-Løve met in her actual visit to Fårö and she included him in the film with his real identity. I read it as one of the many efforts to make an autofiction-like film.

Trivia: Denis Lenoir, the cinematographer of Bergman Island, publishes his production journal in American Cinematographer. Here is Part I.