Silent Cinema and Meditation
by Canan Balan in collaboration with Istanbul Silent Cinema Days

This program will first introduce the style and themes of the selected films in relation to their historical context. A guided group meditation (previous meditation practice not required) and film screenings will follow the introduction. We will then talk about our experiences during a Q&A session. This way, we aim to intensify the awareness of the moment and the effect of the moving images, which encapsulates and extends time and space. The interplay between what we see on the screen and the meditation session will take us on a journey to the depths and subtleties of our consciousness. The “silent” movies offer the audience a different experience than talkies, one that opens up to a conscious reverie and allows the audience to be seized by the images that are accompanied by live music. With the aid of meditation, we are better able to feel these silent films’ 104 references to the medium that creates the awareness of seeing, which is conveyed to the audience through visual attraction and a dynamism that resides in its smooth flow. The perception- opening and mind-clarifying effects of meditative silence can offer a unique experience in watching these films, which rely on bodily movement, a different time-space feeling, and an avant- garde aesthetic.

This selection investigates the possibilities of playing and traveling between different layers of consciousness through an archeology of cinema. It is possible to come up with a long bibliography ranging from film history to theory, pondering upon the intermediality of cinema as an important characteristic of its early years. The attractions of early cinema can cause a sense of journeying in a time machine within the dark theater. The idiosyncratic mode of narration, mis-en-scene, acting, and fiction of silent cinema require from the audience a state of mind that is not limited by the spectator’s world of values, and one that is open to an avant-garde aesthetic. The movies rely on one of the most obvious features of modernist art, namely self-reflectivity.

Already conducive to the meditative experience, the movies do not employ linear storytelling, and reject the boundaries of time and space, just like dreams, fairytales and daydreams do in this section. Meditation, which is a method for opening up the mind to novelties and diversity, and expanding beyond routines of habits, fogginess, and prejudice, will help us realize the details of its aesthetics and deepen the visual perception.

Both programs include women filmmakers who were less visible due to their gender, yet who were pioneers of different schools of their time in the history of cinema. It is unlikely a coincidence that Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac, and Lotte Reiniger, the mothers of surrealist, experimental, and animation cinema, made sensual films about sleep, awakening, dreams, tales, seeds and birth. It is also not a coincidence that as the woman pioneer 105 of meditation trainings in Turkey, Ezgi Sorman birthed the seeds of this project years ago under the name “Spectacle and Meditation”.

Ensemble for Somnambulists
Mara Deren, USA, 1951, 6’

Poet, writer, photographer, activist and pioneer of the American underground and experimental cinema, Maya Deren shot Ensemble for Somnambulists as a silent film after the introduction of sound to cinema. This unfinished film shows a dance of somnambulists in a timeless dark sky. Moira Sullivan, who wrote about the effects of Deren’s fascination with Haiti and voodoo mythology on her films, regards the film’s bleak atmosphere as the bottom of the sea in which Haiti Gods reside, and reads the cosmic journey of the sleepwalkers’ dance in the empty space, together with the artist’s creation process.

Invitation to a Journey
Germaine Dulac, France, 1927, 36’

A lesser-known medium-length film by Germaine Dulac is Invitation to a Journey. Dulac was a pioneer in the “pure” cinema and a lyrical visuality, which seems to flow in a stream of consciousness. In this film, we are shown a woman who dreams of and experiences a reality, in which she is liked, accepted, and truly appreciated, as an alternative to what her marriage and the patriarchal reality offers her. Dulac is also known for films with women characters who are stuck in domestic lives, and look for ways out. As the title suggests, the language of this film invites the audience to another world and reality, just as in a journey. The audience witnesses the filming of a dream aesthetics through flowing images, emotions, poetry, dance, and metaphors, instead of a temporally stuck narrative. In this way, Dulac again takes her place in the history of cinema not only as a woman pioneer, but also as a surrealist.

Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton, USA, 1926, 49’

This film is even more about cinema than The Cameraman (USA, 1928), in which Keaton played a cameraman. Sherlock Jr. shows the parallels between dreams and editing, the human mind and the screen in a very direct manner. It was also an inspiration for Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (USA, 1985). The film depicts a machinist, who aspires to be a detective and dreams that he enters the movie he projects on the screen, eventually becoming its hero. Keaton is among the significant silent film actors with a bodily control and discipline that help perform physically inapt and clumsy characters. As a film that blurs the boundaries between dream and reality, and one that shows the struggle of human beings with technology in a self-referential manner, Sherlock Jr. is among the great examples of Keaton’s cinema. It is also the most direct example of the relationship between dream and cinema in this selection.

Dreams and Fairytales

This selection consists of two short comedies from the early period of cinema and a feature- length animation from the 1920s. Carroll Catcher’s live music will accompany these cinematic hybrids of various media such as magic lantern and fairy tales with characters that have surreal experiences of time and space.

April 5, Wednesday, 19:00 SALT Galata

Let me Dream Again
George A. Smith, UK, 1900, 3’

George A. Smith, is the producer of the oldest movie in this 108 program. Cinema until the mid-1900s was full of examples that surprised and attracted audiences as a completely new technology. Directors such as George A. Smith were among the pioneers who used editing with point of view shots. Also known as a hypnotist, psychic and a magic lantern master, Smith is said to resemble George Méliès with his background and his contribution to cinema. He is the pioneer of this period’s famous “kiss in the tunnel” themed movies. Let me Dream Again, in which his wife acts, is inspired by the contrast between dream and reality, and presents with humour the difficulty of waking up from a dream, without another shot before or after the dream shot. By proving to the audience that the dream state can be just as similar to the waking life in the second shot (and part), the film manages to maintain a similar distance to the worlds of both dream and reality, and shows that the two can be depicted similarly in three minutes.

Dream of the Moon
Pathé, France, 1905, 5’

One of the recently restored films in the EYE Film Archive, Dream of the Moon is an example of the cinema of attractions, just like George Smith’s film in this selection. According to Elif Röngen, the silent cinema curator of the EYE Film, it is assumed that Gaston Velle and Ferdinand Zecca, who worked at Pathé Film around the time the film was shot, made this film together. As an example to the movies from this period about journey to the moon, it describes the moon with a human face, and shows how, after dancing with liquor bottles, a drunk man falls asleep into a dream, where he turns into a half-human form, manages to fly to the moon, and eventually, is expelled from the moon.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1926, 80’

The film, which was inspired by the story of Prince Achmed and Peri Banu in Arabian Nights, bears the signature of Lotte Reiniger, one of the woman pioneers of the era. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the movie is its use of an animation technique reminiscent of the shadow play. Reiniger, with her unique delicacy, films the language of fairytales with shape- shifting figures that we know from Karagöz and Hacivat or the féeries of early cinema. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is considered to be the oldest feature-length animation movie that has survived. The Greek poem written for the story by Nikos Gatzos, and the fairytale-like song “Noble Dame” composed by Manos Hatzidakis and vocalized by Savina Yiannatu, are significant in emphasizing the intermediality and interdisciplinarity of film, in harmony with the spirit of the period.