Çeviri
Aşkını Ver Bana / Give Me Your Love
Hazırlayan: Nameera Ahmed
This paper tries to evaluate the processes which constitute the
documentary video project, aşkını ver bana, or give me your love,
which is a story, a subjective and artistic response, to the music of the
Mevlevi sufi order in Istanbul. The project was an inquiry into
discovering the role of sound in leading to the ‘unseen’, how sound can lead to
the flow of the unknown and becomes a missing link in the experience of the
‘spirtitual seeker’. This paper discusses where my project stands vis. a vis.
the different ‘modes’ of documentary, articulates the processes involved in
making the video, as well as discussing how aşkını ver bana itself
becomes a process of inquiry.
Bu tez, Istanbul’daki mevlevi müziğine öznel ve sanatsal bir
yaklaşımı, bir hikayeyi anlatan aşkını ver bana adlı belgesel video
projesini oluşturan süreçleri değerlendirmeye çalışmaktadır. Proje, sesin,
bilinmeyene ve “görünmez” olana giden yolda, arayış içinde olan için eksik olan
parçayı tamamlama rolü üzerine bir sorgu/arayış olarak görülebilir. Tez,
projenin, belgesel türünün farklı “mod”ları bağlamında konumunu ve videonun
yapımını içine alan süreci tartışmakla birlikte, aşkını ver bana’nın kendinin
de bir sorgu/arayışa dönüşmesini irdelemektedir.
I am ever so grateful to Can Candan for being my guide, mentor and a
source of inspiration. Without his knowledge, continued support and kind words
this project would not have been possible. Thanks to Erdağ Aksel for always
inspiring me throughout my college life and for his tough critiques. Elif
Ayiter for her continued guidance and advice throughout my two years of study.
Murat Germen for guiding and helping me, for always being available, and for
his critiques. Selçuk Artut for directing me with the sound corrections in my
thesis project and giving critiques in class. Leyla Özcivelek Durlu for
being a support and a friend. Alex Wong for helping. Bayram Candan for being a
friend. Ayşe Ötenoğlu, Önder Arslan, Soner Biricik, Inci Ceydeli, Viket
Galimidi and Hülya Köroğlu for their help.
David Rock for inspiring me with his beautiful voice! Demet Yıldız
for her wisdom and comfort. Tara Alisbah, Eden, Murat Varlı, Reyhan and Risalet
Ertürk for being my family in Istanbul.
And to Sabancı University for being my financial supporter in
making this project.
Special thanks to all the Mevlevis who were so kind and willing to
help me with my project whether it be through giving interviews, guiding me,
sharing their knowledge, or just being friends: Abdülhamit Çakmut, Ferit
Çakmut, Kadir Dede, Nuri Uygun, Hanefi Kırgız, İlyas Çelikoğlu. Thanks to
Serkant Dervişoğlu for being an inspiration, and Hüsamettin Yivlik for his
excitement and eagerness in helping me with my thesis project. Aylin for
providing me with archival material, and Serap, Cemile Abla, Banu, Fazıl,
Nagehan, Muhittin, Gizem, Hülya, for their companionship. And all the Semazens
and Musicians I got to know through this project.
Thanks also to both my music teachers, Mrs. Kanga with her
disciplinary but kind ways at the piano, and Safia Apa for introducing me to
the beautiful sounds of the ragas.
Thanks to my mother for introducing me to Sufism and my sisters,
Sameeta and Leena for all their overseas moral support and artistic critique!
Dedicated to dearest Abba. Thanks for letting me listen to all
your music collections and making me go to my piano classes!
The lovers lament like reeds, and Love is the flutist.
What marvelous things will Love breathe into this flute of the
body!
The flute is manifest and the Flutist hidden—
in any case, my flute is drunk from the wine of His lips.
Sometimes He caresses the flute, sometimes He bites it!
Ah! I lament at the hands of this sweet-melodied, flute-breaking
Flutist!
— Excerpt from Rumi’s Divan-i
Shams-i Tabrizi. [1]
aşkını ver bana (2006) starts by taking its
audience on a journey, although of a mundane nature, along a regular road, with
cars passing by, and the sound of traffic being all we hear. But as we
progress, ‘behind’ the traffic noise, one faintly discovers another sound, that
of someone singing. We proceed to an opening in a wall, where the singing voice
rises, as if to call us inside.
As the viewer enters the opening, a discovery is made: the
‘opening’ is a staircase within a mysterious-looking tunnel where the singing
voice rises, and then subsequently subsides. We climb up the stairs and
discover a cat sitting on another flight of stairs leading to a building. As if
to ‘welcome’ the visitor to her domain, the cat takes the lead in ‘guiding’ the
visitor. As we follow the cat through the old building, another voice comes in,
we do not know whose at this point, but a man telling us the story of the ney
(reed-flute). How the ney was part of the reed-bed before it became the ney,
how it lead its merry life in its marshy environment, and how a ney-player, a neyzen,
came to cut it and separate it from its place of origin.
Here starts the symbolic story of the ney, which takes the viewer
on a journey to an underground world, the world of the Mevlevis (Mawlawi
in Arabic), who “liken the plaintive sound of the reed flute, the instrument of
key importance in this music, to the bewildered human soul yearning for God.”[2]
The Mevlevis, who derive their name from Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi and come
together in a sufi order that follows his teachings and spirituality, believe
that the ney symbolizes a human being, who longs for the life before
he/she came into this world.
Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated.
"Since I was cut from the reedbed,
1 have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back. —
Excerpt from Jalaluddin Rumi’s Mathnawi
In these verses Mevlana makes an allegory of the ney with the
human condition. How "We have all heard this music in Paradise"[3],
how we were separated from our Source and came into this world. Thus, out of
its 25,000 verses, the very first 18 lines of the Mathnawi, one of
Rumi’s greatest and most extensive works, start with the story of the the ney.
Such was the importance Rumi gave to this instrument.
Mevlana Rumi (1207-1273 A.D.) who was a native of Balkh, in
modern-day Afghanistan, came from a lineage of well-known scholars and was
trained in the exoteric sciences and was well-versed with the Quran, the Hadith
(sayings of the Prophet), Arabic grammar, prosody, jurisprudence, history,
mathematics, astrology, logic, philosophy, and theology.[4] His family moved to
Anatolia, which was then known as Rum, thus giving Jalaluddin the title of Rumi
(from Rum) in later life. They eventually settled in Konya, where his father
got a teaching post.
But his “great mystical genius”[5] did not reach an absolute
evolution until his meeting with Shams-i Tabrizi, a wandering dervish. Shams,
considered to exhibit a “powerful personality possessed of great spiritual
gifts”[6]
transformed Rumi and they became inseparable. Their “Friendship is one of the
mysteries. They spent months together without any human needs, transported into
a region of pure conversation.”[7]
It was, however, after Shams’ sudden disappearance, whose loss completely
devoured Rumi, that he started to write poetry, began singing and listening to
music, and whirling, which he would do hour after hour. “Shams-i Tabrizi’s
influence upon Rumi was decisive, for outwardly he was transformed from a sober
jurisprudent to an intoxicated celebrant of the mysteries of Divine Love.”[8]
He started using all his sensory faculties to find his lost and ‘unseen’
Beloved.
aşkını
ver bana and the Unveiling of the Veiled
aşkını ver bana (2006) started out with the
question: how can sound lead to the ‘unseen’? Having been trained in the visual
arts, where the eye is given superiority over the ear, it was specially
intriguing for me to try and discover what the auditory derivative of such a
question could be. This inquiry developed from a previous paper I had written
inspired by the book, The Kashf Al-Mahjub, or the ‘Unveiling of the
Veiled’ by Ali Al-Hujwiri, a 12th Century Sufi whose shrine is in Lahore, in
current-day Pakistan. Although Sufi theory is too vast and deep a topic to be
encompassed by this limited paper, I find it necessary to try to briefly
summarize its beliefs and practices here.
The Sufis, who give importance to the essence of things, rather
than the form alone, get their name from, as some contend, the word ‘suf’
in Arabic, which means ‘wool’ (they traditionally wore woollen garments); while
others that the name is derived from safa (purity), while yet others who
say that they acquire their name from the A’shab al-Suffa
("Companions of the Veranda") or Ahl al-Suff'a ("People
of the Veranda") who were a group of people in the time of the Prophet
Muhammed who devoted their time in prayer on the veranda of the Prophet’s
mosque. They believe in the illumination of God’s beauty in every created thing
and Divine Love is what the sufi dervish tries to attain since “all things
participate in God’s Love, the motivating force of creation, so all things are
lovers.”[9]
The sufis think of this world as illusory and temporary, and to achieve Divine
Love, they must undergo sufferings in this world and try to train, control and
redirect their nafs (ego) which is the “lowest dimension of man’s inward
existance”.[10],
in multifarious ways.
Among a few of the sufi practices are zikr (remembrance of
God), muraqaba (meditation), sema (from the Arabic ‘listening’
and involves music and dancing, or whirling as in the case of the Mevlevis), khalwa
(retreat).[11]
Sufi dervishes require a murshid (teacher) to guide and help them
along the spiritual journey and therefore are concerned with direct personal
experience. Sufi writers make extensive use of parables, metaphors, and
allegories in their writings, and look for the hidden meanings in things.
Ali Al-Hujwiri named ‘11 veils’, on the sufi spiritual path, which
need to be 'unveiled' in order to reach the ultimate awakening, and get a view
of the ‘Beloved’. In my paper titled The Unveiling of the Veiled: the
Primordial and the Digital, I tried to explore the theory of the mystic
path, as is elaborated in the text to investigate whether there can exist a
relation between the concepts of the ‘primordial’ and the ‘digital’ as linking
with the spiritual traveller’s concepts of the Divine Mysteries. The paper
analyzed the relation between the primordial and the digital as both a
'backward-forward' as well as an 'inward-outward' journey: how in both there
exists an exploration of uncharted territories, a development of tools, a need
for skills, a non-linearity, and 'dream-like' experiences, as ultimate
detachment on the spiritual path from a world of senses, from this 'illusory'
world, and compared the ‘pilgrims of cyberspace’ with the spiritual voyager.
Without going into the details of the primordial-digital comparison of the
previous work, here I will make a link with Mevlana Rumi’s experience of music
as being mystic, and Al-Hujwiri’s theoretical work which discusses music’s
place in sufi practice and spirituality.
According to Al-Hujwiri “The universe is an abode of Divine
Mysteries, which are deposited in created things. Substances, accidents,
elements, bodies, forms, and properties—all these are veils of Divine
Mysteries.” The follower of Sufism has to be able to ‘unveil’ each ‘veil’ to
move ahead, to bring together knowledge of all things. Through the medium of
music one such veil can be removed to reach the Beloved. Of the eleven spelled
out by Al-Hujwiri, each ‘veil’ has its own distinctiveness, integrity and
value. However, the seeker goes back and forth from one to another and then
back again—a journey that could be more like that of a non-linear spiral rather
than a straight linear line. The folllowing is the list of veils that Al-
Hujwiri has laid out in order, and it is interesting to note that the first and
the last, Gnosis and Audition (the hearing), bring the overall link to a
completion.
The first of the Divine Veils which is mentioned is Gnosis or
“Ultimate knowledge”. Gnosis can be through cognition (rational) or emotion
(feeling). Gnosis becomes the progression from the ordinary to the
extraordinary, from the observation of object/form to the higher consciousness
of form as seen in the documentary aşkını ver bana: Hanefi cutting holes
in a kamış (reed) while a ney (reed-flute) plays in background.
Al-Hujwiri says: “Gnosis is more excellent than cognition, for it leads to
‘right feeling’”, which is a superior form of consciousness. To achieve Gnosis
many sufis choose to take on a spiritual journey. Physical stations begin to
correspond to spiritual stations and openings. Linear and non-linear movements
can characterize both trajectories, and process can itself be destination.
Faith and love lead to contemplative experience of the Beloved. The true object
of pilgrimage is not to visit the sanctuary but to obtain contemplation. The
process of the journey is considered just as important and rewarding as the
union or ultimate destination itself—movement becomes marker rather than just
the object of the pilgrimage at the end.
The second veil is Unification. It implies “harmony in the
experience of creation”. “The following of the Dervish Path is pursuing a
concealed Unity in spite of, and not by means of, the claims of diversity”. It
is the consciousness of perfection and harmony in everything. The seeing of all
aspects of form supporting each other, not as dualistic opposites, or only
separated parts, but part of a larger whole. The rest of the veils mentioned
are: “Conviction beyond the Rational”, “Freedom from the unnecessary”,
“Inward-Seeking, Meditation” (truth about form lying within the recesses of
form), “Outer giving, giving of oneself into this world”, “Re-direction of the
senses through abstinence”, “Code of the Spirit”, and the eleventh and last one
being ‘Audition’ which leads to contemplation. This last aspect or veil
connects most directly to the themes of the documentary being discussed here.
“Audition is superior to sight” since sound leads to the unseen,
connects to the flow of the ‘unknown’, and becomes a missing link in the
experience for the seeker. Of the auditor, Al- Hujwiri says, he “ought to hear
the spiritual reality, not the mere sound.. .One who in that audition follows
the truth will experience a revelation, whereas one who follows his lower soul
will be veiled.” The sufi concept of the lower-versus-higher self is being
applied to the receiving of music by the follower. The self can operate at a
lower, animal self, or at a higher, more spiritual level. The attraction to a
Beloved can start from a worldly attachment slowly moving to the highest plane,
that being the Ultimate Truth. He can also be ‘transformed’ and find a higher
level by ‘tuning in’ to the highest level of musical reception, allowing the
unveiling mentioned by Al-Hujwiri. Sound being non-tangible and emotionally
evocative, helps in leading from material reality to higher sublime states.
Another sufi shaykh, who echoes Al-Hujwiri’s philosophy, has said:
“Audition is that which makes the heart aware of the things in it that produce
absence, so that the effect thereof is to make the heart present...” Thus music
allows an emptying of everyday consciousness, and actually drawing out from the
inside, an inner, purer state. Therefore, “as in Unification, the heart has
love and the soul has contemplation and the spirit has union and the body has
service, so the ear also must have such a pleasure as the eye derives
from seeing.” Knowledge moves ahead as it gains emotional energy from the
musical experience and then again towards rational-cognition— back and forth
the cycle continues towards a transformation.
“Whatever is heard by longing lovers increases their longing for
vision.”[12]
Al-Hujwiri says: “When the heart throbs with exhilaration and rapture becomes
intense and the agitation of ecstasy is manifested... that agitation is neither
dancing nor foot-play nor bodily indulgence, but a dissolution of the soul.”
Thus, devotional music especially leads to this most important contemplation
and attainment. An example from aşkını ver bana which highlights this
experience is the scene where the retired army officer says, talking about the
importance of music: “böylecene göze görünmeyene tutabiliyorum”, or “I
can hold onto that which cannot be seen by the eye”. The serenity and then
again the pain of the ney, a music building up towards the whirling
ecstasy, aim to reach that ‘dissolution of the soul”.
aşkını ver bana was a project to explore the
theme of listening for the ‘unseen’ and in so doing, find out about the
importance given by the Sufis to music and how music becomes the missing link
in the path for the seeker, a query which is illustrated in the diagram above.
The film takes on a journey, through whose artistic and narrative processes it
seeks to question and search for the ‘unveiling’ by creating a matching
audio-visual experience for the viewer. The style of the video seeks to unravel
the mysteries, trying to de-mystify the age-old genre of the music of the
Mevlevis, of treating primordial themes in a novel way, and expressing the
sublime in a mundane way. Or conversely, trying to reach the sublime through
the channels of everyday sensuous experience.
aşkını ver bana and its Relation to My Previous Projects
Before I arrived at the documentary, I worked on the proposal of
an installation project, taking off from the paper mentioned Unveiling of
the Veiled: the Primordial and the Digital. The aim of this installation
project was to illustrate, or symbolically ‘unveil’ the eleven veils of
Al-Hujwiri by juxtaposing primordial objects with digital objects. The plan was
to use eleven large-sized urns (3 meters in height) placed along a circular
path.
The urns were to represent the ‘primordial’, since clay vessels
were an integral part of ancient civilizations. From the outside, one would
only see simple clay vessels, but as one approached, and looked inside an urn,
one would discover in each, a digital object from the new media, a video
display, a digital sound, projections from a projector hung from the ceiling
into the urn, etc. The viewer would symbolically ‘unveil’ a veil by
audio-visually ‘reading’ the contents inside each urn.
Besides this installation project, I worked on some other
preliminary documentary shorts that I made in the Fall of 2005. These short
films were precursors to aşkını ver bana and continue that search for
the primordial in their different ways and styles. The short documentaries, My
Return (2005) and From my Grandmother’s Diary: when far from home
(2005), both acted as a means, in trying to dig up something from my past. They
express a longing to return to my origins and to re-locate that vanished
moment.
The documentary From my Grandmother’s Diary symbolizes that
longing by presenting a recipe for a food from my own native land. The ‘recipe’
for the film came up from my memories from childhood, when I would watch my
grandmother cook the simplest, most basic food. In its being a recipe for food,
it is at the same time a recipe for reliving those moments from the past with
all their associations and memories. The close-up shots I used, seemed to be a
natural result of my grandmother’s eye for details, and the need to look carefully:
the way certain vegetables should be cut differently, which spices go with
which food, etc. This piece of documentary is at the same time, a practical and
mundane representation of a fantasy, and a recipe wrapped up in a dark box full
of dreams. The candlelight and the low-key lighting give it that ‘atmosphere’
of a reverie which is long lost and vanished.
Whereas in From my Grandmother’s Diary the longing is more
subtle, it makes a much stronger and overt comeback in the autobiographical
piece, My Return. It is literally a timetravel into the past with the
old photographs from my childhood and my voice-over talking about my birth in a
Karachi hospital.
It is a self-representation from my point-of-view, so the images
are those of what I see. And even when I do appear, it is in the form of my
photographs, or my hands and feet, as I would see them. It takes on, both a
backward-forward and an inward-outward journey: taking a peek into my past and
into my soul. The language of the narrative is in a story-telling mode, which
is both simple and poetic, like a story I would have heard from my mother in my
childhood. It is full of nostalgia, and though not sentimental, expresses the
longing inside me to return to my past, and literally, as my own voice-over
informs, to my mother’s womb.
The theme of the mother’s womb had also been explored in a
previous project of mine, which had been titled, The Return to the Womb.
Although an interactive virtual 3D environment, and not a documentary, it aimed
at providing a comforting, educative environment for abused women. Its organic
and fluid environment with its warm colours mimicked the inside of a mother’s
womb, and in so doing providing abused women with a ‘safe’ and comforting
place, away from the harshness of the real world.
One of the very basic difference between exploring the very
varying media of the virtual environment and the documentary, is that the
virtual environment is a timeless environment, whereas the documentary is based
on a timeline, has a beginning, a life and a death. The virtual environment is
completely imaginary and alienating from the ‘real’ world, whereas the
documentary takes us right into the middle of ‘real-life’ events and happenings
and where the “bond between documentary and the historical world is deep and
profound.”[13]
Here arrives the problem of the documentary.
Although the documentary appears to be, at first glance, a medium
which provides us the ‘facts’ about life with an omniscient voice and an
objective ‘truth’, on the contrary, it is a subjective medium of expression. It
is a way of story-telling, like its counterpart, the fiction film and just like
the fiction film, it creates its own world within a world with its own
narrative. There is no one formula for making a documentary and a filmmaker,
just like any artist, presents his/her own reality, by taking decisions
throughout the filmmaking process, like how to use the camera, whether a shot
will be close-up, or long shot, or extreme close-up, or medium shot. How to
compose his/her subjects in the frame, what lighting to use. At the editing
stage, he/she has to decide which interviews to use, how to develop the ‘voice’
of the documentary, and how that voice will affect her narrative. All these
decisions make up the very personal and subjective narrative of the story.
Basil Wright, the filmmaker of Song of Ceylon described the
documentary in his essay, Documentary Today (1947) as “an artistic
interpretation of reality”[14],
and John Grierson, considered the father of the British documentary film,
states one of the advantages of the documentary as “it cannot only observe the
living material of the world, it can also reproduce it...and it is a world of
material peculiarity necessary to our minds and our imaginations”.[15]
Bill Nichols, a historian and theoretician of documentary film, in
trying to correct the misconceptions about documentary, which has gained much
popularity recently, says it “suggests fullness and completion, knowledge and
fact, explanations of the social world...More recently, though, documentary has
come to suggest incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression,
images of personal worlds and their subjective construction.” According to
Nichols, in the documentary, “people are treated as social actors: they
continue to construct their lives more or less as they would have done without
the presence of a camera. They remain cultural players rather than theatrical
performers.”[16]
In his 2001 book, Introduction to Documentary (Indiana
University Press), Bill Nichols defines the following six modes of documentary:
•
The Poetic
Mode reassembles fragments in a lyrical form.
•
The
Expository Mode employs a ‘direct address’ and the ‘voice-of-God’ kind of
narration, and which is associated with the 1920s-1930s and the World War II.
•
The
Observational Mode documents life in a less intrusive manner and developed in the
1960s due to advances in technology leading to the new lightweight camera
equipment not previously available.
•
The
Participatory/Interactive Mode records the encounter between
subject and filmmaker, where the filmmaker actively engages with her subjects,
asking questions and even sharing experiences with them.
•
The
Reflexive Mode deals with the issues of representation and acknowledging the
presence of the viewer, and became more prominent after the 1980s.
•
The
Performative Mode can often be autobiographical in nature, and
17 aknowledges
the emotional and subjective aspects of documentary.
Although Nichols has classified these modes, a single documentary
does not necessarily have to stick to one mode. In fact, most documentaries can
borrow from more than one of these modes, depending on the needs of the
filmmaker.
aşkını ver bana and the Participatory/Interactive Mode
Unlike the observational mode, where the filmmaker usually records
events with a ‘fly-on- the-wall’ attitude and with the least amount of
intervention within those events, the participatory mode engages with the
subjects more actively and in so doing she becomes part of the events being
recorded. aşkını ver bana can be classified as constituting of mainly
the participatory mode, although I think it also overlaps a little with the
observational mode.
I, the filmmaker, take both a proactive role, as well as a role of
a silent observer. I arrive at the ney-maker’s studio, where he shows me
the processes of making a ney. I ask him questions, although from behind
the camera, making my presence ‘visible’ to the audience. On the other hand, I
also observe silently as Husamettin Yivlik and Serkant ‘perform’ their
conversations without any of my proactive intervention. However, the extent to
which I affect their conversations is debatable, since I do have an influence
with my presence on them in some way.
I sometimes cause the actors to act in a way which is the
‘every-day’ norm for them, or I cause them to ask questions which they would
not have asked if I were not present, like in the case of İlyas Çelikoğlu, a ney-player.
He gave me answers to my questions, told me stories from his past, but was also
inspired to say these words: “Bu güc nedir? Sizi buraya
getiren
17
http://www.mediaknowall.com/Documentary/definitions.html. acquired, August 09,
2006 güc?
Evet, onu sormak isterdim...Onun icin olmaz diye bir konu düşünmemek lazım”,
which translates as “What is this force? The force that brings you here? Yes, I
would like to ask this question. For this reason, one should not think of
anything as unattainable”.
This is the force of the documentary. It takes people places which
they would not have even imagined they would go to. And since I choose to work
with this medium, it propels me into undiscovered lands and unexpected
situations.
After the ney is cut from its source, as Nuri Uygun tells us, it
is brought to the ney-maker’s studio (in our story, Hanefi Kırgız, the ney-maker’s
studio). We see Kırgız cleaning, oiling, heating and cutting holes in the kamış
(reed) and turn it into a ney. He jokingly blows into it and remarks
“’I will become a good ney’, says the kamış! ” And while we see
close-up shots of Kırgız making holes in the ney, we hear the sound of a
beautiful ney playing. We wonder where that sound is coming from and the next
shot we see is of a woman playing a ney in a public performance.
This surprises the viewer, because we are not used to seeing women playing such
instruments. The surprise technique employed in the film, heightens the
interest of the viewer. Just as the musician finishes playing, another ney
-player is brought in. This is İlyas Çelikoğlu, an elderly musician, performing
for the camera, in his own private room. In between his performance, the shots
are cut to him talking directly, and in a very personal manner, to the camera,
about how he got interested in playing, about his youth and tells us the story
of how he got smitten by love in his youth.
Although the narrative voice of aşkını ver bana is that of
its actors, it tries to break through the limitations of the interview-based
form, by introducing characters talking to each other, as in the case of
Hüsamettin Yivlik and Serkant Dervişoğlu, and the speech by Ilyas Hoca
which he gave at a moment of inspiration spontaneously and was not in response
to the questions of the filmmaker.
It uses the direct address of the interview to try and avoid the
problematics of a voice-over narration, which can become an omniscient
all-knowing ‘voice’ and sometimes even didactic. Instead, it leaves it to the
actors to illustrate in their own way, their own culture and viewpoints. As
Bill Nichols says “The emergence of so many documentaries built around strings
of interviews strikes me as a strategic response to the recognition that
neither can
18 events speak for themselves,
nor can a single voice speak with ultimate authority.
“The voice
of the text is not above history but part of the very historical process on
which it confers meaning” — Bill Nichols
aşkını ver bana tries to stay very much within
the historical process mentioned by Bill Nichols above, by employing the
participatory mode rather than the expository. It wants to involve the audience
in that process as much as it involves the filmmaker. Rather than giving the
feeling that history is in the past, it wants to give the feeling that history
is a process.
The tone-of-voice in aşkını ver bana is pensive, and of a
longing. From Ilyas Çelikoğlu talking about his youth, to Hüsamettin Yivlik
making the analogy about the relationship between God and the spirit with the
television and the remote control; to Nuri Uygun’s last speech informing us about
the Mevlevi belief in the human’s longing for beautiful music. All of these
give a pensive, deeply thought-out personal views of the characters and at the
same time help to form the narrative.
Rosenthal, Alan. Ed. New Challenges for Documentary. Nichols,
Bill. The Voice of Documentary. University of California Press, 1998.
 |
Bıdık, the cat She is the first character to
appear on screen, sitting on the entrance of a building, where it seemed she
was waiting for someone to come visit her domain, and then subsequently takes
the ‘lead’ in taking the filmmaker inside the building, and up the stairs.
Bıdık was a surprise element in the process of shooting the film, since her
appearance was by ‘accident’ and not by design. While writing the editing
script for the film, however, I decided to give her key importance by attaching
meaning to her presence and making her the ‘guide’ for the filmmaker, as an
allegory to the ‘spiritual guide’, in showing the way to the ney-maker.
Hanefi Kırgız The technician and the practical ney- maker. With his
demonstrations, one learns of the processes involved in making a ney. He
appears in the introductory chapter only, although his sequence is quite
detailed and long.
Nuri Uygun A pensive, ney-player and teacher.
At first we do not see him, we just hear his voice narrating the
story of the ney in the introductory section of the film. He
makes a physical appearance after Hanefi Kırgız and the ney-making
process.
İlyas
Çelikoğlu An elderly romantic ney-player who
seems to be from a bygone era. He tells us his own story, when he
was smitten by love in his youth, and how he started playing the ney.
Esma İneci A young student and enthusiast of the ney
Serkant Dervişoğlu A young semazen
(whirling dervish). His appearance is both in his conversations with Hüsamettin
Yivlik, and in the sema sequences, where he is the main character
followed by the camera.
Hüsamettin Yivlik An outsider, a muhibban
(friend of the Mevlevis) in whose uninterrupted/perennial world, time never
seems to move, even though the clock in his room keeps ticking at a steady but
monotonous pace. He is a practical observer of the Mevlevis.
Kadir Dede Represents a wise, but
practical observer of The choice of these characters helped me to develop a
cohesive narrative: the stories they told, their style of narration,
tone-of-voice, and physical appearances all contributed to forming a unifying
whole in the story. I had done other interviews and shootings as well, like the
one with Ahmet Çalışır, a Mevlevi musician in Konya, but for the purposes of
maintaining a comprehensive narrative, I decided not to include him.
The space within the video is ‘contained’ between the stairs
sequences at the beginning and at the end. Just as the tunnel-staircase takes
us ‘into’ this world, it also takes us out. One seems to be entering into
another, mysterious land from a fairytale. But we tend to realize that in this
land of the Mevlevis, the people are normal, ordinary people going about their
daily lives. ‘Containing’ the environment gives a solid, tangible quality to
the story of a topic which is mystical in nature. The viewer is not informed,
as the film progresses, about the characters’ role in their lives. He is given,
on the other hand, visual clues as to who they are, and what they do, as the
story progresses.
The visual language of the documentary has a raw, ‘rustic’ feel to
it. Mainly warm colours give a feeling of comfort. There are no non-diegetic
inserts like intertitles, thus the story keeps the viewer in its own world.
The acoustic environment created by this video seeks to heighten
the audience’s perceptions. The environment noise, like that of traffic, birds,
the filmmaker’s footsteps are kept intentionally audible to create the
‘soundscape’. These road sounds also symbolize a journey or voyage which the
filmmaker has undertaken which she shares with her audience. Raw, mainly
unmodified sounds complement the rustic-looking visual world of the video, like
the crusty sound from Kırgız’s knife as he cleans the dry kamış. We can
hear heavy traffic, cars blowing their horns, which gives us the clue that his
studio is in a busy part of town. The sound of İlyas Çelikoğlu’s husky ney,
gives the feeling of an incompleteness, of an imperfection.
The treatment of sound in this video is mainly diegetic.
The sound sources are those coming from the original sources of the people and
events taking place, to heighten the feeling of the ‘now’. For this reason, the
video does not use a non-diegetic soundtrack, rather, it utilizes the original
music recorded by the filmmaker. The foreground sounds, intended to attract
attention, like the voices of the interviewees or the ney performance of
Nuri Uygun and his student, also help the listener to keep their attention
focused on the present events of the story, and are utilized most evidently, to
meet the artistic needs of the filmmaker, and to help create a sense of the
present and the ‘now’. The background sounds in aşkını ver bana belong
to a second audio track, or even a third track, and accompany the foreground
sounds, usually starting from a piano (soft) sound, reaching crescendo,
gradually becoming louder until they become part of the foreground: as in the
scene where Hanefi Kırgız cuts holes in the ney while the music from
someone playing the ney enters in the background.
There are audible soundmarks in the story which act as
audio markers throughout the video. Like landmarks, they mark the appearance of
certain characters and/or events on the timeline, and within a soundscape, a
listener can begin to recognize their appearance. The conversations between
Hüsamettin Yivlik and Serkant have a clock ticking in the background. This
clock-ticking before the appearance of either of them on the screen, gives the
audience an audio clue as to what or who they will see on the screen next. The
clock-ticking symbolizes the passage of time in a timeless world.
Also, the voice of the filmmaker in certain places heigtens her
presence, and demonstrates the interactive quality of the video. There is
constant insertion of sequences where there is music playing, which seeks to
give a ‘feel’ of the Mevlevi music, like the sema sequences. Rather than
just providing facts about this genre of music, it seeks to provide an
experience and a taste of this music, to the audience. Besides the maestros and
the orchestra, there are sequences with students playing as well. This
heightens the ‘process’ aspect of the video, whereas the maestros playing the
music symbolizes the completion of the process, which does not come at the end
of the process, but goes along with it.
The
3 chapters: Ney, Aşk
and Ses
The story is based on three chapters: Ney, Aşk (Love) and Ses
(Sound). Although not ‘visibly’ marked by the use of intertitles, they
are derived from the ceremony of the sema to form the basic backbone of
the story.
The sema ceremony always starts with a ney taksim (a
taksim is an instrumental improvisation), a prelude which is always
played in the largo, a slow and broad tempo. The ney taksim is
followed by the other instruments which slowly rise in tempo to andante,
a walking pace, to which the semazens start to walk in slow, swaying
motion around the semahane. As the ceremony advances, the tempo keeps on
rising according to the needs of the four selams, to which the semazens
whirl, until it reaches the fastest tempo, in the third selam of the sema
which is where the dervishes ‘search’ for God. This can be described in the
language of the Western Classical Musical tradition as Presto, or fast
tempo. The tempo again slows down, in the fourth selam to which the semazens
still whirl, bringing the ceremony to a completion.
I followed the sequences of the sema and its tempos in
creating these chapters. The Ney chapter is a prelude, which leads us
into the story. Even among the 25,000 verses of poetry in the Mathnawi
(Mesnevi in Turkish) of Jalaluddin Rumi[17], the ney comes at the
beginning, as an introduction to the Mathnawi. As mentioned earlier,
this signifies the importance of the ney in Mevlevi culture, giving rise
to the need for making Ney the introductory chapter.
The second chapter, Aşk or Love, signifies the 3rd selam
in the sema ceremony. It is where the tempo rises to its zenith. Love is
the frenzy, and the climax. “Music is the language of the heart”, as Kadir Dede
puts it, it is where, in his words, “music flows from the ear to the heart”.
This scene is of dramatic significance in the story and in John Grierson’s
words, who gave a lot of importance to the dramatization of a film, heightens
“the living drama on the spot”[18].
Love leads us to Sound and Sound leads us to Love. Love is the
main running theme whereas Sound takes us places never visited by the eye. The
Sound chapter is the finale, just as in a music composition. Its mood is
pensive and its pace is slower. But, just as soon as we think the film will end
with the playing of slow music, it again gains a little tempo with the
appearance of the lady musicians, and then goes back to the story of the Ney
to pull us out of the underground world and onto the streets again.
In aşkını ver bana, the attempt is to treat the
super-ordinary as the ordinary, and the sublime as the mundane. The ‘sublime’
(which comes from the Latin sublimis (exalted)), is what the treatment
of such a topic would normally be like. Instead of romanticizing and
sentimentalizing the story, the filmmaker chose to address it in an ‘everyday’
and ‘normal’ fashion which can relate to our daily lives. The introductory road
sequence, the presence of the cat, the ney-maker’s studio, the
interviews with people in their own ‘real’ environments, all these demonstrate
that. The speech by Hüsamettin Yivlik about the analogy of the spirit with the
television and the remote control is a prime example in the story of
representing the sublime through the mundane.
The attempt is not only to make the sublime the mundane, but also
vice versa. The mundane takes us to the sublime, and the sublime brings us back
to the mundane. Even though there are sequences from the sema, which can
be considered having a taste of the exalted, they are broken with the
interventions of the interviews.
Bill Nichols calls the observational mode, the “tradition of
filming ordinary people.”[19]
It is the lives of ordinary people that make the documentary dramatic and all
the more exciting.
The ‘process’ in general was extremely important in the making of aşkını
ver bana. Being a beginner in the medium of the documentary, the making of aşkını
ver bana was a learning experience for the filmmaker. I learnt about the
methodologies of making a documentary on the job, from conceiving the idea, to
learning how a documentary treatment should be written, to the art of
conducting interviews, to understanding the camera and microphone settings, to
writing an editing script and finally applying the script to the footage. I had
to develop my own techniques for juggling the camera and the microphone
simultaneously while taking interviews (all of which would normally be tasks
undertaken by the camera, sound and light experts).
Dealing with a foreign language on a large scale such as this
video, also required me to develop my language faculties further. I learnt some
of the Sufi and music terminology used in the Turkish language which would help
me to convey my wants, needs and questions to the interviewees, besides the
terminology which is specific to the Mevlevi culture. I attended some of the
classes in Mevlevi Culture so that I would be able to learn and understand, and
in turn represent the Mevlevi culture better.
Consequently, I decided to apply the ‘process’ in the documentary
and its creative aspect itself and tried to make the making of aşkını ver
bana ‘transparent’.The very first opening scene of the story starts with
the filmmaker walking down a road from where she finds the ney-maker. It
is here that one process leads to another process. The filmmaker, in the middle
of one process of shooting with the tools of the camera equipment, is led to
record another process, that of making a ney. The ney-maker shows
us the different processes involved in making a ney, and for this reason
these shots in the ney-maker’s studio were all hand-held shots to
highlight that process.
I also wanted to show the process of learning to play the ney.
The students, both of Nuri Uygun’s, Esma, the ney enthusiast, who talks
about her experiences with the ney, and İlyas Çelikoğlu’s student who
appears soon after, both represent that learning process. Besides seeing
students with their ney-learning process, we also hear accounts from
different people about their learning experience with the ney. Serkant
Dervişoğlu talks about how difficult the ney is as an instrument, and
Hüsamettin Yivlik narrates to us his funny experience as a school boy when his
teacher asked him to practice blowing into a soda bottle for a month before
starting to blow into the ney!
The use of handheld shots of the camera, even in some interviews,
which would ‘normally’ be shot on a tripod, have been used intentionally to
highlight the ‘process’ in the story.
The out-of-focus shots turning to fully focussed shots also serve
the same purpose. They
represent the learning experience, and become part of the creative
process. These hand-held and out-of-focus shots also bring to light the
presence of the filmmaker, making the story more of an ‘interactive’ experience
for the audience, thus making aşkını ver bana itself a tool within an
inquiry.
The one-woman production team had its advantages and its disadvantages.
The research and the preproduction stage were not affected by the one-woman
team in a negative way. In fact it simplified matters to be my own boss and to
make my own decisions. It was at the shooting stage that I had to overcome some
difficulties.
But this arrangement’s most obvious advantage was that it made it
easier for me to conduct the interviews, making the interviewees open up easier
and feel free to talk. It gave me the chance to spend extra time with my
interviewees, to chat with them on a one-on-one basis, to explain my project in
detail, and in turn to get to know them better. When one is alone with the
camera, one is free to experiment at one’s own pace and time. And since I was a
beginner, I got the chance to practice the various settings of the camera and
the microphone, learning as I went along at my own pace.
Through this participatory documentary, I as the filmmaker, take
on the role of the traveller in seek of knowledge, and the wandering ‘pilgrim’,
who actively participates in the events coming across her and thereby becoming
one of the actors in the film. Besides being an attempt at trying to discover
what the relationship between music and Sufism is in general, why the Sufis
give so much importance to music and listening, it is also a discovery into
Mevlevi culture.
To get a fresh look at Mevlevi music and culture, and at the same
time to have an ‘interactive’ experience with the medium of the documentary,
was one of my aims in making this video, which changed my perception of what a
documentary can be. I decided to make a non-fiction video, because it is a very
vivid mode of story-telling. By using real-life events and people, one can tell
an articulate and coherent story from the footage acquired. Although one can
make completely different stories, and of any length from the footage
available, the length of aşkını ver bana, thirty-four mins and fifty-two
seconds, gave a natural completion to the story. If it were any shorter, it
would have remained too abrupt, and if it were any longer, it might have become
too overblown for the audience. Also it would not have been possible to do
justice to the material with the time constraints I was working with.
Being my first full-fledged documentary, I learnt a lot from it,
not only the technical but also the creative and theoretical aspects involved
in making a documentary. But most of all, what gave me pleasure in making aşkını
ver bana was the learning experience gained from the interaction with so
many different people with their different ideas, styles, and opinions, who
were part of my documentary-making process.
Andante: (in Western Music terminology, from Italian) at a walking
pace
Aşk: (in Turkish) love
Crescendo: (in Western Music terminology, from Italian) getting
louder
Dede: (in Turkish) spiritual teacher
Hadith: (in Arabic) sayings of the Prophet
Hoca: (in Turkish) teacher
Kamış: (pronounced ‘kamush’) reed
Largo: (in Western Music terminology, from Italian) slow and broad
tempo
Muhibban: (in Mevlevi terminology) friend of the Mevlevis
Ney: (in Turkish) reed-flute
Neyzen: (in Turkish) reed-flute player
Piano: (in Western Music terminology, from Italian) soft
Presto: (in Western Music terminology, from Italian) fast tempo
Sema: (in Turkish) or sama (in Arabic) is a term that means hearing
in Arabic and Persian. In the Turkish Mevlevi tradition it refers to the
ceremony of the whirling dervishes.
Semazen: whirling dervish
Ses: (in Turkish) Sound
Taksim: (in Turkish) instrumental improvisation
Aitken, Ian. Ed. The Documentary Film Movement. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
AlHujwiri, Ali B. Uthman Al-Jullabi. The Kashf Al-Mahjub,
trans. Reynold A. Nicholson. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1996.
Banani, Amin, Richard Houannisian & Georges Sabagh. Eds. Poetry
and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual
Teachings of Rumi. Albany: State University of New York, 1983.
Landy, Marcia. Ed. The Historical Film: History and Memory in
Media. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Lewis, Franklin D. Rumi: Past, Present, East and West.
Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000.
Nelmes, Jill. Ed. An Introduction to Film Studies. London:
Routledge, 1999.
Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1994.
Nichols, Bill. Movies and Methods. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976.
Öztürk, Yaşar Nuri. The Eye of the Heart. Istanbul:
Redhouse Press, 1995.
Rabiger, Michael. Directing the Documentary. Woburn: Focal
Press, 1998.
Renov, Michael. Ed. Theorizing Documentary. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Rumi, Jalal’uddin. The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, Ed.
& trans. Reynold A. Nicholson. Cambridge: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1926.
Wrightson, Kendall. An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology.
From Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecolog y.
Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 2000
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/WFAE/about/wrightson.pdf.
Retreived 06-09-2006
[1] Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The
Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. Albany: State University of New York, 1983.
[2] Öztürk,
Yaşar Nuri. The Eye of the Heart. Istanbul: Redhouse Press, 1995.
[3] http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi m1310/is 1996 May/ai
18450238. Retrieved: 2006-08-28.
[4] Chittick,
William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.
Albany: State University of New York, 1983.
[5] Öztürk,
Yaşar Nuri. The Eye of the Heart. Istanbul: Redhouse Press, 1995.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Banks,
Coleman. Rumi: Selected Poems. Penguin Books, London, England, 1995.
[8] Chittick,
William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.
Albany: State University of New York, 1983.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Chittick,
William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.
Albany: State University of New York, 1983.
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism. Retrieved on 06-092006.
[12] AlHujwiri,
Ali B. Uthman Al-Jullabi. The Kashf Al-Mahjub, trans. Reynold A
Nicholson. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1996.
[13] Nichols,
Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2001.
[14] Interview
with Ian Aitlen (1987) The Documentary Film Movement. (Ed. Ian Aitken).
[15] From an Untitled
Lecture on Documentary(1927-33). The Documentary Film Movement. (Ed. Ian
Aitken).
[16] Nichols,
Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2001
[17] The
Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi. Ed & Trans. Reynold A. Nicholson.
[18] First
Principles of Documentary (1932) From, The Documentary Movement, An
Anthology. Ed. Ian Aitken
[19] Rosenthal,
Alan. Ed. New Challenges for Documentary. Nichols, Bill. The Voice of
Documentary. University of California Press, 1998.
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