double bill #24

Both Els Opsomer’s 10th of November | 09:05 and Cynthia Madansky’s Devotion are fascinated by the commemorative standstill ritual carried out in the name of the Turkish Republic’s founder, Atatürk. However, while Opsomer’s camera explores the gesture through distance and stillness, Madansky’s gaze overtly assumes the personal and inevitably biased position of the foreigner. 

The outsider’s camera frequently uses social rituals to encounter a foreign country. In Madansky’s travelogue à la Chris Marker, the narrator roams Istanbul’s multifaceted urban landscape as she grieves her separation. Both are viewed through the unorthodox lens of these rituals. From the European to the Anatolian side, from one hotel room to another, Madansky moves restlessly, occasionally pondering, through the voice-over, the binary preconceptions regarding religion and secularism, tradition and modernity that are held about Turkish society.

The discordance between voice and image in Devotion and the duration of 10th of November | 09:05, respectively, haunts the viewer: what is the hidden meaning? In Turkey, what Madansky recognises as the beauty of impermanence also implies a flipside: a pattern of repetition deeply embedded in social and political structures that is rather ominously highlighted in Opsomer’s film.