genel | yalpertem

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 thought he was in solidarity with the migrant workers. 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.

Phoenix (2014) | Notes

Phoenix tells the story of Nelly who is freed from Auschwitz. As a demolished survivor with wounds on her face, she goes out of the hospital after an aesthetic surgery with bandages and starts looking for his husband. The loss and the recovery of identity after the camp start with the physical transformation. She is a singer, sadly we can only hear her singing towards the end. Her husband is a pianist. There’s a catch though about the whole capturing event. Did he run away and leave her? Both she and we are not sure. Nelly takes her time to find him and to find out.

She strolls in the dark ruined streets, tries bar-crawling in order to find him. Meanwhile, the woman who is helping her to run away is planning to migrate to Israel, she tries to persuade her too about the exodus. Unlike Nelly, who is still unable to process the horror, Lene is full of resentment about how the history unfolds after the camps, particularly about how Jews forgive all the perpetrators. The focus of Phoenix reminded me of the book I’ve read in Turkish which was also referenced a lot in the other texts, but I couldn’t find an exact English translation online, maybe the essays are translated and published in a different structure, as in At the Mind’s Limits. Jean Améry’s essay collection “Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne” was dealing with the survivors’, particularly intellectuals’, existence after the camps. It’s a hard and heavy topic for me to write about in a film-note-blog-post, so I’d better switch back to the film. It seems like, erstwhile, Améry launched the final scene.

“Für […] mich heißt Jude sein die Tragödie von gestern in sich lasten spüren. Ich trage auf meinem linken Unterarm die Auschwitz-Nummer; die liest sich kürzer als der Pentateuch oder der Talmud und gibt doch gründlicher Auskunft.”

If we go back to Nelly, after a short pursuit, she encounters her husband in a bar called Phoenix -reborn with a red dress- but he does not recognize her. Instead, he offers her a deal to act as if she is her wife to possess her inheritance. The second tier of the drama begins here. As Nelly is drawn together to her husband as a role-playing stranger, some archetypical narratives unfold. Johnny teaches her how to walk, what to wear, how to greet her friends after the comeback. She yields. Despite the despair, she values the joy of re-encountering with the loved one. It feels like a repetition of the first encounter with the lover.

The theme of the man forming the woman towards a desired object/subject traces back to Pygmalion and its variations. Vertigo, the film noirs, and the Frankenstein story can be counted as side-references. The director mentions the Frankenstein relation in one of his interviews, but I honestly don’t buy it, I don’t think there is enough ground for the convergence to that story, a hidden attic does not give enough material. Nina Hoss walking in the night like a vampire was another conceptualization by Petzold about the vampire stories which I didn’t really think of while watching the film. Another, maybe the last remark from the director was the actress Nina Hoss’ comments about him -as a director- following a similar path like the protagonist when it comes to director shaping the actress. Petzold is well known for his films with female protagonists but the distance between him and a woman filmmaker also lay on a great deal about the gaze and the intimacy of the director, storytelling, and the acting.

In many of Petzold’s films, I encounter a couple of scenes that I admire. In this one, the finale was exquisite with Nelly unexpectedly singing a song that proves her identity and epitomizes the whole ambivalence in the film.

Die Eingeladenen / The Invitees [Sinema Transtopia]

I found an institution that curates films and discussions around those films that they’ve selected. I attended three film screenings there which were about the migrant workers in Germany. Just in case they might remove the schedules from their website, I’ll annotate the ones I watched there. I really liked the fact that they don’t screen good films but taking these films as artifacts that one can talk about. It’s good to watch terrible films too, only if you’re in a movie theater where they present 16mm film.

The best one I saw was a documentary called Geld fürs Brot (1994) by Serap Berrakkarasu and Gisela Tuchtenhagen that tells the story of women workers in an industrial canned fish factory. A film that was able to convey the joy of the people working together with the smell of the fish that permeates into the clothes and body. I found the interview questions of the filmmakers full of directives towards the pain and despair. However, the sincerity they achieved was remarkable. There was a weekend scene where one of the workers cooked some food and there were a lot of leftovers. She was insisting the film crew about taking the extra food with them while leaving. That felt like a great example of engagement and relationship that is built during a film. Another good one was a scene during dinner with a couple where the woman was complaining about the gender roles to the filmmakers and her husband having no idea about what the discussion is about. She was telling the filmmaker, “You understand me, he doesn’t.”

I also watched some really weird institutional education and integration films that document how indoctrination works for migrants in asymmetric power relations. One of the films about teaching the rules inside the factory reminded me Staplerfahrer Klaus – Der erste Arbeitstag (2000, oh, now on YouTube). When I first watched it years ago, I was sure that this film was mocking some real-life educational content, glad that I watched what it mocks.

Here is their website: https://bi-bak.de/en/bi-bakino
Here is their about us: https://bi-bak.de/en/about-us

Good Luck in Germany, 01.10.2021

Guten Tag (Episode 26)
FDR 196?, 15 min. german OV, 16mm

Tipps für den Alltag II, Ausländische Arbeitnehmer im Industriebetrieb
FDR 196?, 12 min. OV with german subtitles, 16mm

Viel Glück in Deutschland (Episode 2)
Thilo Philipp / Uwe Krauss, FDR 197?, 15 min. german OV, 16mm

Zu Gast in unserem Land: Kemal
Herbert Ballmann, FDR 1977, 50 min. german OV

“I am a stranger here,” “I am a foreigner,” “I don’t speak German” are all phrases that can be learned in the Goethe Institute’s elaborately produced 26-part language course series, Guten Tag (Good Day). With a great deal of artistic imagination, scenes around “Language, Culture, Germany” are staged and slowly intoned in an effort to bring the newly arrived closer. Viel Glück in Deutschland (Good Luck in Germany), on the other hand, prepares employees for everyday life in the workplace with vocabulary such as “time card,” “personnel office” and “the foreman is waiting”. In Tipps für den Alltag (Everyday Tips), the portrayal of what is characterized as typically German and represented as the ideal norm also has a comic effect, while the depictions of foreign workers can certainly be perceived as problematic. Similar patterns can be found in the educational film series produced by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Zu Gast in unserem Land (A Guest in our Country). Here, younger generations belonging to the social majority are prepared for confrontations with the so-called “guests”. Following the screening, there will be a discussion in which we dissect the persistent stereotypes unreflectively projected onto later generations of people with an immigration history and the racist behaviors that are subsequently internalized. (ML)

Nurse Kim’s Message Home + Ekmek Parası, 02.10.2021

Nurse Kim’s Message Home
FRG 197?, 16 min. OV

Ekmek Parası – Geld fürs Brot
Serap Berrakkarasu / Gisela Tuchtenhagen, Deutschland 1994, 86 min. OV with english subtitles

In Ekmek Parası – Geld fürs Brot (Money for Bread), the money doesn’t stink, but the fish does. A smell that is difficult to wash off. Women from Turkey and Mecklenburg work in the fish factory in Lübeck. Here, the camera acts as accomplice: Serap Berrakkarasu and cinematographer Gisela Tuchtenhagen establish a closeness to the workers who candidly describe (in Turkish) the working conditions at the factory, answering questions about life, death and dreams. The supporting film, Nurse Kim’s Message Home, produced by Hoechst AG, is accompanied by a paternalistic voiceover and follows a group of Korean nurses working in Frankfurt after the recruitment agreement with South Korea in 1971. (MB)

Bağrıyanık Ömer ve Güzel Zeynep + Geyikler, Annem ve Almanya, 08.10.2021

Bağrıyanık Ömer ve Güzel Zeynep
Yücel Çakmaklı, Turkey 1978, 30 min. OmdU / OV with English subtitles

Geyikler, Annem ve Almanya
Tuncer Baytok, Turkey 1987, 71 min. OmdU / OV with English subtitles

Two figures are particularly central to migration: those who return home and those who remain at home. Despite this fact, both are often forgotten in discussions about migration. With two films found in the archive of the Turkish state broadcaster TRT and shown for the first time in Germany, this film evening is dedicated to these two often neglected figures. In Bağrıyanık Ömer ile Güzel Zeynep, Ömer, a returned migrant worker, confronts his wife Zeynep about adultery in front of her lover: Poetically he shares the memories of his time abroad. The result is an idiosyncratic view of 1970s Munich from the perspective of an immigrant worker whose self-image has been wounded. In Geyikler, Annem ve Almanya, Nigar recapitulates her childhood in Turkey during the absence of her migrant father. Memories of life in the village, the move to Istanbul, longings for the father’s indefinite return, and the mother’s sudden departure for Germany reveal the effects of migration on a child’s life. (ÖA)

In cooperation with Philipps-Universität Marburg, funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation).