Innocence of Memories review
- Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul rendered strange and beautiful
4/5stars
British film-maker Grant Gee has got together with Turkey’s Nobel prize-winning novelist, and the result is a mesmerising, original meditation on love and the city
Meeting of minds ... Innocence of Memories Photograph: PR
Andrew Pulver
@Andrew_Pulver
Thursday 10 September 2015 10.53 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 27 October 201514.12 GMT
Having cut his teeth on music videos (and then graduated to the cerebral Joy Division documentary, on which he collaborated with Jon Savage), Grant Gee has reinvented himself as a formidable force in the microgenre of literary travelogues, a space hitherto largely occupied by Patrick Keiller, Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair. Gee headed for Suffolk for Patience (After Sebald), a reconstruction and reinvestigation of WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn; now he has cast his net much further afield, to Istanbul, and a creative meeting of minds with Turkey’s Nobel-prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.
As with his Sebald film, Gee has here carefully assembled a collage of textual fragments, painterly visuals and mysterious voiceovers. The major difference of course, is that Pamuk is still around; the author has contributed substantially to this film, which takes its cue from his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, by writing extra material and helping shepherd it to its present form. A peripheral character from Museum, a childhood friend of its female protagonist Fusun, is promoted to the film’s major voice, providing hindsight and context for the torrid, obsessive affair conducted in the novel between Fusun and her older cousin Kemal back in the 1970s. Passages of Pamuk’s original book are also read out, spliced onto dreamlike, phantasmagoric sequences in which Gee’s camera glides around the Istanbul streets – mostly bathed in a strange, sulphorous light and seemingly inhabited largely by packs of stray dogs.
But this more than a simple travelogue: Pamuk’s novel is partly an exercise in cultural fetishism, as, after rejection, the lovelorn Kemal meticulously collects every scrap connected with Fusun, however trivial – including jewellery, underwear, and hundreds of cigarette ends. Gee’s film takes us inside the actual museum that Pamuk opened as a real-world counterpart to the fictional one that Kemal creates; a double-meta construction that is only accentuated by the film casually referring to Fusun and Kemal as corporeal figures and Pamuk’s positioning of himself as a fictional character in a key scene in his novel. Added to which, Pamuk’s habits as a flaneur of the Istanbul streets, and his inclination to see the city as a repository of collective memory, both individual and cultural, give Gee’s film a kick into the most rarefied of intellectual spheres.
Notwithstanding occasional queasiness induced by the not especially advanced sexual politics on display (only partially excused by Turkish traditionalists’ obsession with female virginity), this a mesmerising film, richly textured and beautifully nuanced. With it, Gee has some claim to have joined British film-making’s premier league.
- Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul rendered strange and beautiful
4/5stars
British film-maker Grant Gee has got together with Turkey’s Nobel prize-winning novelist, and the result is a mesmerising, original meditation on love and the city
Meeting of minds ... Innocence of Memories Photograph: PR
Andrew Pulver
@Andrew_Pulver
Thursday 10 September 2015 10.53 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 27 October 201514.12 GMT
Having cut his teeth on music videos (and then graduated to the cerebral Joy Division documentary, on which he collaborated with Jon Savage), Grant Gee has reinvented himself as a formidable force in the microgenre of literary travelogues, a space hitherto largely occupied by Patrick Keiller, Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair. Gee headed for Suffolk for Patience (After Sebald), a reconstruction and reinvestigation of WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn; now he has cast his net much further afield, to Istanbul, and a creative meeting of minds with Turkey’s Nobel-prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.
As with his Sebald film, Gee has here carefully assembled a collage of textual fragments, painterly visuals and mysterious voiceovers. The major difference of course, is that Pamuk is still around; the author has contributed substantially to this film, which takes its cue from his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, by writing extra material and helping shepherd it to its present form. A peripheral character from Museum, a childhood friend of its female protagonist Fusun, is promoted to the film’s major voice, providing hindsight and context for the torrid, obsessive affair conducted in the novel between Fusun and her older cousin Kemal back in the 1970s. Passages of Pamuk’s original book are also read out, spliced onto dreamlike, phantasmagoric sequences in which Gee’s camera glides around the Istanbul streets – mostly bathed in a strange, sulphorous light and seemingly inhabited largely by packs of stray dogs.
But this more than a simple travelogue: Pamuk’s novel is partly an exercise in cultural fetishism, as, after rejection, the lovelorn Kemal meticulously collects every scrap connected with Fusun, however trivial – including jewellery, underwear, and hundreds of cigarette ends. Gee’s film takes us inside the actual museum that Pamuk opened as a real-world counterpart to the fictional one that Kemal creates; a double-meta construction that is only accentuated by the film casually referring to Fusun and Kemal as corporeal figures and Pamuk’s positioning of himself as a fictional character in a key scene in his novel. Added to which, Pamuk’s habits as a flaneur of the Istanbul streets, and his inclination to see the city as a repository of collective memory, both individual and cultural, give Gee’s film a kick into the most rarefied of intellectual spheres.
Notwithstanding occasional queasiness induced by the not especially advanced sexual politics on display (only partially excused by Turkish traditionalists’ obsession with female virginity), this a mesmerising film, richly textured and beautifully nuanced. With it, Gee has some claim to have joined British film-making’s premier league.
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