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FacebookSaturday February 27th, 2010 at 6pm
Rodeo Gallery
Tütün Deposu / Annex building
Istanbul
Istanbul’s Rodeo Gallery will be screening Baadeh Sabah (The Lover’s Wind) this Saturday February 27th.
Category Posts
Baadeh Sabah Screening at Rodeo
BubuWeb: They Do Not Exist
They Do Not Exist (Laysa lahum wujud)
Abu Ali Mustafa
Arabic with English subtitles
1974, 25 min
Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali in 1974, They Do Not Exist takes its title from the infamous Golda Meir quote. Abu Ali, one of the first Palestinian filmmakers and founder of the PLO’s film division, began making films in 1968 in Jordan, along with Sulafa Jadallah and Hani Jawhariya. After Black September, Abu Ali and the others had to leave Jordan but continued making resistance films in Lebanon.
Abu Ali’s contribution to Palestinian cinema is significant, as well as his contribution to international cinema. He worked with Jean-Luc Godard (who apparently has said his soul is Palestinian) on the film Ici et Ailleurs. Godard is “a great filmmaker; dedicated, creative and imaginative. We were both concerned to find the right film language appropriate to the struggle for freedom,” says Abu Ali.
BubuWeb: Hamlet Hovsepian
Head 1975, 16mm, 12 minutes
Yawning 1975, 16mm, 2:20 minutes
Itch 1975, 16mm, 4:30 minutes
Untitled 1976, 16mm, 4:25 minutes
Thinker 1975-6, 16mm, 6:40 minutes
Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers. Rarely seen, these are gems of Armenian avant-garde art and are gestures of deviance; political commentaries that positively reverse the image of isolation current among cultural pessimists, as a seizure of space in a world of standardization, of the mass society. Hamlet Hovsepian’s film is not only the result of a small revolt against the deadly passivity of this society. The reduction it carries out, its silence, gives a universal turn to the meaning of emptiness, to the abstract space, and the frequently extended time.
View Hamlet Hovsepian’s films on UbuWeb
BubuWeb: Parviz Khatibi’s Seh Mullah
Seh Mullah
Parviz Khatibi
Farsi (no subtitles)
1985, 53 min
Parviz Khatibi was an iconoclastic intellectual, active across countless media, who kept one foot in popular entertainment and the other in political activism. During the Shah’s regime, Khatibi relentlessly published a satirical weekly named Haji Baba despite harsh censorship and several arrests. After the Islamic revolution, Khatibi continued the publication of the paper both in Iran and later in exile in New York and Los Angeles. In the realm of popular culture, he was a successful playwright, a key figure in the golden years of Radio Iran where he hosted a popular four hour morning show, an accomplished film directer (over 20 pictures under his belt) and a successful songwriter. Most notably, he penned the lyrics to Vigen and Delkash’s Bordi Az Yadam – one of the most iconic songs of Persian pop history. His gift for sharp but poppy lyrics is evident in Seh Mullah (1985), a made-for-television satirical musical mocking the then leaders of the Islamic Republic. In characteristic Khatibi style, the play utilizes popular folk and joke musical tropes combined with found footage and video effects to voice fervent political commentaries. The mullahs, played by actors donning clumsy masks and fake beards, are often seen singing, dancing and being chastised by their wives. In one scene Khomeini, with a baseball bat in his lap, calls Saddam Hossein on the telephone to share his woes and suggest a war between their countries to solve all their problems. Khatibi himself appears throughout as a diegetic narrator.
BubuWeb: The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War
Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen
(The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War)
Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu
Japanese and Arabic with English subtitles
1971, 70 min
Co-edited by Red Army (Red Army Faction of Japan Revolutionary Communist League) and PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine)
In 1971, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, both having ties to the Japanese Red Army, stopped in Palestine on their way home from the Cannes festival. There they caught up with notorious JRA ex-pats Fusako Shigenobu (see “Jasmine on the Muzzle,” Bidoun 17 Flowers) and Mieko Toyama in training camps to create a newsreel-style agit-prop film based off of the “landscape theory” (fûkeiron) that Adachi and Wakamatsu had developed. The theory, most evident at work in A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations.
In 1974 Adachi left Japan and committed himself to the Palestinian Revolution and linked up with the Japan Red Army. His activities thereafter were not revealed until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1997 in Lebanon. In 2001 Adachi was extradited to Japan, and after two years of imprisonment, he was released and subsequently published Cinema/Revolution [Eiga/Kakumei], an auto-biographical account of his life.
BubuWeb: The complete films of Artavazd Peleshian
Born in Leninakan, Armenia in 1938, Artavazd Ashoti Peleshian is an influential director of poetic film-essays. His films utilize a cinematic method developed by Peleshian called “distance montage” to capture everyday life in a manner which transcends documentary. Sergei Parajanov has called him “one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema.”
“Eisenstein’s montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film… Sometimes I don’t call my method “montage”. I’m involved in a process of creating unity. In a sense I’ve eliminated montage: by creating the film through montage, I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning.” —Peleshian