3. Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019)

For details of Pelin Esmer’s filmography: http://​pelinesmer.​com/​en/​. Accessed on January 8, 2020.

The in-depth interview with Pelin Esmer was carried out in her office Sinefilm, Moda-Kadıköy İstanbul on January 1st of 2020. The interview is based on the accumulation and infiltration of the whole period that we have known each other. While the time-span of this chapter extends back to 2003, my acquaintance and friendship with Pelin Esmer goes beyond that, dating all the way from 1997 when we met in the Yıldız office of History Foundation. Esmer had recently graduated from Boğaziçi University with a degree in sociology. She submitted an essay titled “Beş Çayında Mozayik Pasta” (Mosaic Cake for five o’clock tea) for the quarterly İstanbul (İstanbul, October 1997, 53–56), published by the History Foundation, where I was then editor-in-chief. She contributed again in 1999, with an essay “Bir Nefes İstanbul” (A Breath of İstanbul) (İstanbul, July 1999, 104–105). Both pieces reflected her interest in oral history and the experiential representation of places with an emphasis on senses. These aspects continued to form the phenomenology of her later work as a director of films where the lived bodily experience and the senses were always important.

I have written the following in Turkish on Esmer’s films before:

“The Gleanersand I, however, is a film that denies the digital, this divorce from the tangible and time-bound. It offers an implicit critique of the Cartesian dream of immateriality, the fantasy of freedom from the body, from the gravity of earthly constraints, and from the suspicion of the senses. Varda’s film counters transcendence with immanence, insisting on matter, body, and duration, despite being made in a medium that is the logical outgrowth of the desire to overcome these things. With The Gleanersand I, Varda crafts a digital cinema that is materialist, feminist, phenomenological, and political.” Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality, Duke University Press, 2015, 74.

While answering the question of how she chose her objects of study in Virtual Memory, King says: “Varda was first: I published an essay about The Gleanersand I (2000) in 2007, which was in turn based on a conference talk from 2005. So I guess that means I have been thinking about these questions for ten years.” “The Digital, The Virtual, and The Possible: Riffing with Homay King on Virtual Memory”, by Regina Longo, from Film Quarterly, Fall 2015, Volume 69, Number 1. https://​filmquarterly.​org/​2015/​09/​25/​the-digital-the-virtual-and-the-possible-riffing-with-homay-king-on-virtual-memory/​. Accessed on January 8, 2020.

Homay King, Virtual Memory, 89. King refers to this sentence as a link to Maurice Marleau-Ponty and his method of phenomenology in his interpretation of Cezanne’s work, to point out to Varda’s line of embodied thinking in her filmmaking.

The sentence ‘production-direction-camera-editing by Pelin Esmer,’ which takes place in the poster of The Play, is a declaration of the freedom enhanced by the digital revolution. Esmer emerges as ‘the woman with a camera’ due to the technological revolution and the ways this transformation is changing our ways of seeing. The digital way of encoding information with the same unit makes it possible to represent all that addresses our perception, from film to architecture, music to photography and graphic design in the same medium. This reductionist aspect of the technology creates both its strength and weakness. Just like previous forms of technology, whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on the way it is used. Who is using it, and for what purpose? These are the critical questions. And here comes the critical cue that digit means finger. In that sense, The Play is one of the best examples of how the digital revolution can provide a freedom of expression. It is a revolution which saves the technology from the power structures dominated by the rich, the male and the institutions, and makes it accessible to the street, to women, to the young, to the minorities and to all of us. (My translation)

Feride Çiçekoğlu, “Yönetmen gider Mersin’e” (The director goes to Mersin) Radikal, 11.03.2006. http://​www.​radikal.​com.​tr/​hayat/​yonetmen-gider-mersine-866194/​. Accessed on January 8, 2020.

Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) https://​www.​imdb.​com/​title/​tt1065073/​ was filmed from 2001 to 2013 as a continuous narrative of the same central character Mason (Ellar Coltrane) but does not have the inter-active reflexivity of The Play and Queen Lear since the latter pair, filmed 14 years apart, present the same characters reflecting on their younger selves.

The names of the women and the characters they acted are as follows: Nesime Kahraman (the teacher), Fatma Fatih (Hatice), Zeynep Fatih (Emine), Saniye Cengiz (the doctor), Ümmü Kurt (Recep), Fatma Kahraman (the nurse), Cennet Güneş (Seyfi), Behiye Yanık (Iraz), Ümmüye Koçak (Aytül). In addition to these main roles, some among them acted additional roles, such as Fatma Fatih wearing a moustache to act as a man.

The five women who were invited by Pelin Esmer to participate in the initiative of the theater of greater municipality of Mersin in 2017 were: Fatma Fatih, Zeynep Fatih, Behiye Yanık, Cennet Güneş and Ümmü Kurt. In addition to the director of the theater, Hüseyin Arslanköylü; the art director Ahmet Aksoy and another employee of the theater; Erkan Güzel also joined the group throughout the trip to the villages during the full month of August in 2017.

Once the group arrives at a mountain village after the dangerous trip, some locals meet them, among them a man in his fifties, with a mustache and an angry attitude. He declares that the municipality should build their road instead of dealing with trivia like staging a play. The art director Ahmet Aksoy listens to him carefully and says, “We came for the play, and we learned your problem, so your road will be built and we’ll come back again, that’s good, no?” Instead of hearing the man’s answer, cut to the rehearsal scene where the man with a mustache is wearing a headscarf and he is acting the daughter of Lear. During the performance, he gets the greatest laughter when he demands that Anamur (a region in Mersin) is hers, since Lear gave it to her as her share of the kingdom. This is one of the joyful highlights of the film. I attended a test screening of the film in Soho House İstanbul on November 17th with my friend Jennifer Clement from Vancouver Film School. She is head of the department of Acting for Film and Television. The film did not have subtitles so Jennifer was curious after the show as to what the man was saying. When I summarized the scene, she remembered her own experience of traveling with a theater troupe when she was a university student in Canada. They were staging a play about the right of the women to birth control and a high school director managed to mobilize the local authorities and to stop their performances in a certain region. We pondered the similarities and the differences between the two experiences, some thirty years and many seas apart.

This format, which is theorized and laid out in detail by Ismayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (“Tiyatro”, Sebat Basımevi, İstanbul 1941) and by Nurhan Karadağ (“Köy Seyirlik Oyunları”, Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları, I. B., Ankara 1978) is revisited by Nurhan Tekerek in 2007:

Some characteristics of village spectacles are similar to worship rituals of villagers. Kidnapping the Girl, Dying-Incarnating, Collecting Food, Eating Together and Blessing in the authentic plays, permanent updating of the plays and their getting affected by the actual and finally laughter are the common elements. Dramatic village plays, with a structure of presentational theatre, are played all together. In other words, they are played to villagers by villagers who deal with this activity. … Some of the plays with the aim of fertilizing based on rituals can have obscene content. Such plays are played separately by women and men.

Nurhan Tekerek, “Köy Seyirlik Oyunları, Seyirlik Uygulamalarıyla 51 Yıllık bir Amatör Topluluk: Ankara Deneme Sahnesi ve Uygulamalarından İki Örnek: Bozkır Dirliği ve Gerçek Kavga” (Dramatic Village Plays and Ankara Deneme Sahnesi which is an Amateur Assembly for 51 Years with its Practice of Spectacles and Two Examples of its Productions: Bozkır Dirliği ve Gerçek Kavga) Tiyatro Araştırmaları Dergisi, 24:2007 • ISSN: 1300-1523, 67–124. http://​dergiler.​ankara.​edu.​tr/​dergiler/​13/​905/​11574.​pdf. Accessed on January 8, 2020.

Mithat Fatih worked as the grip in the crew.

Terry Gross hosts: “Glenda Jackson on Playing King Lear: Gender Barriers ‘Crack’ with Age” (April 23, 2019) https://​www.​npr.​org/​transcripts/​716305342. Accessed on January 8, 2020.