Youth for Human Rights

Speaking of incompetent education systems; here is a brilliant campaign that could be a bit of help to fill the gap.

Beat It

Of course, Istanbul had to do it as well. MJ@ Galatasaray square.

Movie Sum Up

As the summer comes to an end, I have started to spend more time on watching movies at home. Here is a short sum up of what I've been seeing in the last couple of weeks and short descriptions of their impression on me:


High and Low / Akira Kurosawa / 1963





This one has been waiting for my attention ever since I came back from India. Calcutta's entertainment stores had a surprisingly good selection of movies at very cheap prices so that I could sample some lesser known Kurosawa and Bergman movies. 


High and Low was a nice and surprisingly entertaining thriller. What I particularly liked about it is the ability to observe how Japanese culture re-interprets itself  to cope with the capitalist world. 


Of course Kurosawa's touch is very evident. His style could at best be described as theatrical. You can tell this by only looking at the way he positions his characters on the screen as if it was a stage. Particularly at negotiation scenes at the main character's villa, every move of his characters (almost 10 of them), number of steps they should walk, angles they should hold to the camera is clearly calculated in great detail and dictated. Just like in Bergman's cinema.


Hiroshima Mon Amor / Alain Resnais / 1959





This one is a tough one. One of the best movies I have seen for quite a long time. 


Actually this wasn't the first time I saw it. I had seen it in Istanbul's film festival some 10 years ago. But by then  the movie just couldn't attract my attention and had bored me to death. It is funny how sometimes you have to experience life first before you can understand such creations.


Hiroshima Mon Amour is about two married people, a Japanese architect and a French actress, falling in love and about the only two days they spend together. The movie is set in Hiroshima with occasional flashbacks to French woman's youth at her home town of Nevers. The terrible emotional baggage Hiroshima carries and scenes shot in Nevers where she had her own share of WWII's horror, act as a brilliant Leitmotiv between the characters' past and today and for that matter between the two characters as well.


The movie has a very famous but also a quite disturbing opening sequence.


Elle: Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hiroshima. That is your name.
Lui: Yes, that is my name. Your name is Ne-vers. Nevers in France. 
---
Elle: You're destroying me. You're good for me. 


Der Baader Meinhof Komplex / Uli Edel / 2008


I think new products of the German cinema like Der Untergang, Das Leben Der Anderen and Fatih Akin's movies mark the brilliant point it has come to. They are easily entertaining yet they never compromise from European sensibility. 


This particular movie is about Rote Armee Fraktion - RAF (Red Army Faction), a terror group which influenced German politics quite harshly in 70s. What I have found particularly interesting was how lost  people could build and rebuild their values to justify their terrible actions; actions that cause them to become marginalized even further and eventually become ever more lost.





The movie opens with the best demonstration scene I have ever seen. It is so well taken that depicted unsymmetrical violence applied by Iranians and by the German police brings tears to your eyes. And the music used at this scene. Oh boy.

Tiny Bit of Heaven

You get seated at your desk to work in the silence of the night, see some chocolate left from the night before on the table. You light up a cigarette, inhale the smoke and throw the piece of chocolate into your mouth. As it dissolves on your tongue, being needled by a sweet restlessness, you look around. Something is missing; just a sip of coffee would suffice, you think, but kitchen is too far away. There you see the mug you had your  morning coffee from. Tiny bit of sip of cold coffee is still left in it. You drink it to hold and let it dance with other sour tastes in your month. For a little while, you are complete in simplicity. You just had tiny bit of heaven.

Turkey's Not Europe

Couple of weeks ago, when reading through, the temper hit my head and I felt the urge to contribute in a discussion board on Sunday Telegraph's site.


To understand the average human being's thinking pattern, one should really spend some time on reading newspapers' commentary sections - my favorite sports among with listening to religious radio stations. (topic for another entry). There you would understand how difficult it actually is to reach a peaceful world with current education systems (and with the current nurtition diets for that matter) on the globe.

There is so much to say on this topic that I couldn't include. Anyway; shallow as it is, I'm copy and pasting my stuff here:

Hello from Istanbul; I believe the Turkish perspective is definitely needed here.

First of all; I must say that I was deeply shocked by the level of ignorance displayed here in the commentary section and the apparent confidence displayed when doing so. It seems to me that everybody is pretty sure that nobody else knows much about the topic anyways and feels free to speculate about or even create historical “arguments”.

The paradigms we grow in establish a very essential part of our thinking process. The average being isn’t able to think out of this cage and completes his life having nothing added to the human culture. To maintain a monster-poor-savage Turk image is the easiest; so it is to forget that history isn’t that easy to grasp especially looking from only one side. 

I will not argue whether Turkey should join the EU or not – to be absolutely honest I don’t care. All I care is some historical facts.

First of all, when Turks overtook the city of Istanbul 1453 it didn’t end a glorious Byzantine empire. They merely finished a painful process that had started 200 years ago by a force which was far more barbarian in the way they treated the city. You might be very interested in finding out who: For any questioning mind, here are Google key words: “Constantinople Latin Invasion 1204″.

Moreover, the conquest didn’t end the Byzantine culture, in fact Turks acknowledged that culture and built upon it. In our music, other art forms, imperial architecture, traces of the Byzantine culture is very evident


While kingdoms in Europe were persecuting the ones that weren’t from their own, in Istanbul, Christian (Catholic & Orthodox), Jewish and Muslim lived side by side for centuries. I mean side by side. Today in districts of Istanbul like Ortakoy or Kuzguncuk you still have a mosque, a church, a synagogue at the same little square – all still active. By the beginning of 20th. century there were more churches in Istanbul than there were in London.

Secondly – it’s true that Christian minorities were forced to leave their soils and even got killed in great numbers during the last years of 19th. century and first 20 years of the 20th. century. But we must place these facts into the big picture of that time and realize that nation state transformation was in place anywhere in the region. Turks wanted their own nation state and unfortunately they acted towards it in a shameful way. But they were not alone. Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbians, Macedonians did it. And Armenians tried to do it. And none of these nations have sent Turks who had been living on the same territory for centuries with flowers and waved good bye.

Thirdly, in 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus based on its rights coming from the London agreement which was signed between the UK, Greece and Turkey. In 1974, the military administration of Greece decided to add Cyprus island to their motherland. Some acts of terror have started, killings of civilians took place. And Turkey moved in making sure that only one third of the island is taken.

History is like this. No one is innocent. And I mean no one.

We are perfectly aware of our strengths and flaws. A strong sense of confidence is growing in Turkey. We have been transforming our identity and surroundings in the last 20 years in a positive direction. Yet we know we have to cover much more. This transformation process isn’t that smooth. Lots of ups and downs but eventually we clearly see where we want to reach and EU is not an essential part of it.

We are neither European nor Middle Eastern. We are a mixture, a fusion, just like our beloved city of Istanbul and we love every bit of this richness.

Illustration of two faced Roman god - Janus. One face looks towards the east - past, the other one to the west - future.






I believe I could finish with an anecdote. In 1964, when the Cyprus conflict started to gain pace, Johnson – the US president at that time – sent a message to Turkish president Inonu where he openly threatened Turkey against any military action in Cyprus. Inonu’s response was a public statement; ”if it’s necessary to do so, a new world would be set up and Turkey would not hesitate to take its part in it”

Please excuse possible errors in my English.

Completely Legitimate Act of Protest

This one was taken at the Zoo in Berlin. The inscription says: "Attention! Lion splashes urine through the lattice."