:mentalKLINIK///article_Prof. Dr. Z. Tül Akbal Sualp

Vacuumed and sealed image subjects of city and scenes from alleys

Prof. Tül Akbal Sualp*

Socially produced space (of Lefebvre) holds both trespasses and smooth transgresses in between actual, visual, cognitive and virtual borders where “looks” are multiplied and even seek for the fourth look (of Willemen and Lacan) of dialogic understanding and encounters (of Bakhtin). The city moves in and out here and there. Habitants neither gain confidence or security feelings over their cognitive maps (of Lynch), nor can resist against the flow. No map is sustainable. Both the city and the habitants are like morphing organisms. There are indefinite and indefinable negotiations, conflicts and crashes. I would like to discuss whether the living city space stands for the tower of Babylon or is a hope for the fourth look, hetoroglosia and dialogic encounter, or only offers a terminal for passengers of nobody’s lands to stand by for some time; or whether all of them coexist simultaneously. I also would like to question whether what we broadly call visual culture today might be as a veiling shield in between those looks and produces the irresistible flow in between the looks and dialogs and contributes to the production of “out-of-focus”, “visually made image subjects” as well.
In the era of “post-industrial”, “post-modern”, “post-colonial” society and the multicultural, electronic, mass mediated, transnational capitalist world the boundaries, definitions, experiences and the cultural constructions of home and exile are all shifted and transformed into different physical, cultural and experiential dimensions. There, the ways of seeing, communication and meaning are displaced and sanctioned to be in the different spaces of exile. This transformed, displaced, indefinable, and terminal space hangs in the limbo without gravity where the text is unanchored from the context and meanings are free floating and text cannot flow, only the intertexts and the incomplete words remain.
Taking into consideration the fragmented and fractured experiences of the world population encompasses the technology of dominating television environment that produces and reproduces the partial images of the whole; and in the process, capturing the whole or comprehension of the context becomes almost impossible or at least a quest. The way it functions and produces its own environment overlaps the simulation technology, which dominates technologies and ideologies (of Druckrey and Aronowitz). It seems that the ways of seeing are yielded up to the kaleidoscopic images of the globalized represented by multinational technology. Television, as a dominating visual culture medium, gets the images of life in bites and pieces and, through the cut glasses of shattered experiences produces patterns which veil the daily life experiences and social wholeness. This technique becomes perfectly appropriate with the experiences of fractured world. Television reproduces its own screen time with its fast flowing and tensile temporality as a prolonged, terminalized duration of time and its own screen space where there is no gravity, no sense of distance, dimension and scale. Television re-appropriates its chronotope. This simulated chronotope is reproduced by parts whose contextual relation does not exist and no comparison is possible. Television seeks mainly the flow, almost nothing else.
As I approach to street as a possible third space (of Bhabha); a produced and reproduced space which has a use value as a social space (of Lefebvre); a carnivalesque space holding dialogic encounter of different cultures (of Bakhtin) and possibility of the fourth look (of Lacan & Willemen) and all these properties we see that street, as an interactive and dynamic reservoir of possibilities for an alternative public sphere based on experience and production (of Negt &Kluge) and its own alternative visual, experiences in the crossroads of these possibilities. I would like to discuss the exile of dialogical encounter (of Bakhtin) in everyday experiences and its resistance to the unifying forces of the mass mediated world. This recently emerged problematic experience is a cultural phenomenon of the specific chronotope (of Bakhtin) of the “posts”, electronic and mass mediated era. This specific chronotope in daily culture has no spatiality in space and has terminal temporality in time. In this work I would like to see whether “out-of-focus”, “visually made image subjects”, that are vacuumed and sealed, are looking for off-screen spaces for cognitive maps in the emerged environment of simulated chronotope of the ideologically appropriated world of the “televizionalized” lives and the broken wholeness of daily experiences of urban life. I would like to convey comparative study of the films of 80s and 90s including the Turkey’s cinema of this specific chronotope and mass mediated visual culture sources such as commercials and cognitive maps of ordinary peoples in the city of İstanbul. This comparative study may open up a space to analyze this particular way of looks in hybrid forms and the aesthetic tendencies laying over the tension between the cognitive search and survival strategies under the shifts of the imperialism, which is re-mapping and rearranging the world system.
All big cities hold both trespasses and smooth transgresses in between actual, cognitive and virtual borders, bridges, doorsteps, alleys and crossroads where “looks” are multiplied and where they even might seek out different looks. But there are borders, even cells with strongly built-up separations, which are hard to transgress. The borderlessness is a fabrication of the long narration of globalization and Postmodernism. However it seems we all have accepted the global flows in which capital, labor, people, and places, images and symbols all flow; and “experiences” of rearrangements of international division of labor drastically shatter the life of the ordinary men and women on the street level. For them globalization or the suffix of all “posts” mean squeezed lives at the corners, which are celled, bordered vacuumed and sealed. So they carry their borders with their bodies. They dwell in the city and so do their borders. People who survive the era have become vacuumed and sealed image subjects, the ones who are lucky enough to be saved from the casualties of war hunger, abundance and famine; just because they are not living under the zones of war and deprivations are hunted by another trap in which they have become out of focus and visually image made subjects.
These polycentric and multicultural experiences also stand for the fractured urban experiences, multicultural confrontations, distrust to unknown others, strong discomfort in material life caused by the rearrangement of the division of labor, and the trouble in configuring the gender positions. The polycentric looks coming from different provinces may open up a space for us to see the tension between the cognitive search and reactionary survival strategies under the shifts of imperialism, which is remapping and rearranging the world system. As Bakhtin says, historical time is condensed in space, and as his theory overlaps with the Lefebvre’s theory of socially produced space, he adds: “...to perceive the filling of space not as an immobile background, a given that is completed once and for all, but as an emerging whole, an event...Time reveals itself above all in nature” (1986:25).
We now witness with our own eyes that time flows and leaves traces on the social landscape. These imprints, which are now visually detectable, are the signs of the history and they are, as Bakhtin elaborates in his work of Goethe, “...traces of human hands and minds that change the nature, and the way human reality and all man has created are reflected back on his customs and views.” (1986: 32) In ontological terms the chronotope functions as ‘the primary means for materializing time in space’ (1981: 250) The unspoken or the empty text in heteroglossial dialogical space is re-presented and re-produced as the off frame spaces of our pictures about the world. Most of the time, we skip over those images; they are arrested in the corner of our eyes and buried in the vast zone of the social leftovers, untold/invisible experiences lay beyond the stories and/or cognitive maps of the city dwellers.
With the veiling effect of new forms of representations and the apparatus of ideologies of technologies the sense of touch, feeling of distance, concepts ‘here and there’, ‘now and yesterday or tomorrow’ have all been mutated in the simulations and fictions. The imagination, fantasy, communication, knowledge, witnessing, the all human experiences have been replaced in the space of electronically industrialized, produced space of mass media territory.
Since the time people started not having “conversations”, their speech has become silent and liminal (of Bhaba); when they start talking it seems, not dialogical but monological, with no specific addresses, as if the dialogue lines are all shifted and do not match each other. We might call this recent phenomenon “speech in exile”. Any speech, which is personal and which contains depth and thought cannot reach its listeners anymore. We are standing on the doorsteps of self, language, hetoroglossia and the horizons of the experiences; looking out before the fractured, invisible, inaudible world, out of focus. This is nobody’s land. Terminal spaces of all kind - electronic, noisy, and crowded - veil ones perceptions. It is too fast as well.
Television is an environment itself and has its own appropriation technologies that are both structural and instrumental. The way it functions and produces its own environment overlaps the simulation technology, which dominates technologies and ideologies. Television seeks mainly the flow, but almost nothing else. It uses and abuses other media productions through juxtapositons. This technique becomes perfectly appropriate with the experiences of broken wholeness. The fragmented and fractured experiences of the world population encompass the technology of dominating television environment that produces and reproduces the partial images of the whole; and in the process, capturing the whole or comprehension of the context become almost impossible or at least a quest. It seems that the way of seeings are yielded up to the kaleidoscopic images of the globalized represented by the multinational technology. Television, looking mirror, gets the images of life in bites and pieces and, through the cut glasses of shattered experiences produces patterns. Pattern comes to dominate the experience. Among the pieces the edited ones are magnified and we see the world through this looking glass: shattered, patterned and magnified; veiling the daily life experiences and social wholeness.
Television reproduces its own screen time with its fast flowing and tensile temporality as a prolonged, terminalized duration of time and its own screen space where there is no gravity, no sense of distance, dimension and scale. Television re-appropriates its chronotope. This simulated chronotope is reproduced by parts whose contextual relation does not exist and no comparison is possible. Especially in the late 20th century, with the growing effect of globalized, ‘mass media dominated’, differentiated new space, with highly specialized technologies, as Margret Morse named as a ‘nonspace’, the ideologies and different forms of representations of those technologies have been emerged and have replaced the horizon of daily life experiences.
In order to liberate the space of dialogic encounter of intercultural environment where the interconnectedness and independence of diverse areas and the experiences of these multiply located people can have the possibilities for an encounter, we might look at the abilities of the street of polarized cities, their ‘media free’, ‘globalizing fiction effect free’, unsterilized, relationships which are both in conflict and dialogue, and at their different forms of representations, even presentations.
Public life is fractured and fragmented so are its spaces and to representations. It seems that the experience of city dwellers is forced to remap, to reconfigure the conditions of coexistence, order, division of labor, and to re-conceptualize the survival qualities, definitions and experiences of the self and the other on the levels of class, gender and ethnicity, again. The city moves in and out here and there. Habitants neither gain confidence or security feelings over their cognitive maps, nor can resist against the flow. No map is sustainable. Both the city and the habitants are like morphing organisms. There are indefinite and indefinable negotiations, conflicts and crashes.
These maps actually resemble terminal experiences in a passage where we, people, live in between space and time relations. The people of terminal chronotope are on the passages. They need to rediscover their “being there” and beyond and now they are like the fleneure of the earlier century strolling around and waiting for the passage to be carried away to the beyond. Although, morphed flaneur/flaneuse carries the basic characteristics of Benjamin’s definitions, such as, resisting incorporation into the social space, retaining his/her ‘individuality’, enjoying to be a spectator in the middle of the crowd and in center of the flow. The flaneur as a historical figure has been morphed into a flaneur/flaneuse who is also historical figure. And the morphed one now has liberated gender segregations of the former one. Its class position has also changed; he was a free member of the bourgeois, who had free time to dwell and have the joy of just being the spectator of this urban spectacle which is the scene filled by lower classes (workers, soldiers, street vendors and so on) Now He/she is the member of different classes and not enjoying looking at the others. The look has shifted all the way around and the meaning of the joy as well. Moreover we should not forget that this new historical figure has gained another training in dwelling in these morphed arcades, which have also provoked the tension and the direction of the gaze in between the class positions. What I suggest here is that when we look at the situation from the point of view of the new dweller on the street level, new experiences of the emerging conditions also problematize the power relations in between “being seen” and “looking at”. They are male and female coming from lower classes or groups like students, musicians, bartenders, shopkeepers, followers of cultural events. They stroll the street in a way knowing that they are part of the spectacle and spectate yet they do not always see it as a joyful experience. They are also in speed, and do not have much time. They feel most of time detached from social milieu not because they see themselves as an individual and apart from the street scene but because of fractured reality and veiled social relationships. They do really not look at the doorsteps, half opened doors or the windows suggesting another panorama of the social milieu they exist in, they look at them through the looking glass: television. As if they have dressed the images of TV. They have sealed themselves with the monitors of TV screen to be protected from the causalities of daily life: the emotionally hazardous zone of social reality. They have dressed to quickly forget, flow and fade out. Since we are in this accelerated flow and our ways of looking are superseded by TV and the world we live in is no more comprehensible by our actual or real experiences and perceptions and we have become accustomed to fictions and representations and without them we no more make sense of this world, we become dizzy by this speedy flow and trained eyes, we lost the focus. Our look we adopt is out of focus and we as imaged subjects are out of focus. We have become alien and cannot recognize, comprehend or have cognitive map of space of the bodily- lived experiences. This is what we are offered by the flow of everyday media: looking without seeing, living without experiencing. Yet we don’t survive on image TV and fiction. We still live in a physical, biological, emotional and social world. For Ballard we have been surrounded by highways, advertisement, and media, international finance by which everything is fictionalized; so now, the task of the author is to invent the reality. (Ballard, 1984: 98) So may be we are to invent or discover the reality in invented ones.
Dynamic and changeable space is interrelated with time and society in a dialectic relationship. As Lefebvre says, “everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious and against a skyline of uncertainty and illusion” we can stalk the history of human experiences and power relations. (Lefebvre, 1990: vii) The way our life is divided into spare and working hours, the way we reproduce ourselves, the way of life and class struggles and representation of all these struggles and the space of energy belong to the human experiences and intercultural history is inscribed in time and can be traced in socially produced space. In these traces there lie dreams, frustrations, utopia, angers, conflicts, struggles and encouragements. All these human conditions’ articulation, utterance and /or representation can forward us to detect the social and cultural; enable some to create, rearticulate, publicize. Some of these conditions and experiences are defined through the relationships of hegemony as public or private through which the conditions and relations of reproduction of representation are defined. In that sense our negations in everyday experiences; our cognitive maps become twofold activity. On the one side it is about negotiations and survival tactics and complex comprehension and positioning one’s self and the other which all become readable in the matrix of diverse forms of representations.
The nature of ideological cultural reproduction creates intertextuality in all levels of human experience. Every mode of production carries some characteristics from the other mode of productions, some of them being articulated to the existing forms and some surviving in the dynamics of the cultural reproductions as repressed and hidden forms. These survivals are taken away from their historical context or survive in fantasies, utopias, which might belong to the future and their reproduction occurs through transformations, remembrance, repression, influence, reference, quotation, representation, misunderstanding, misreading and also transgression.
We also might have the opportunity to have a broaden space for dialogues of inter-cultural environment that can also open up a resistant, avant-garde, freed space of representation of technologies and ideologies of the dominant. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam say, we are studying the horizon of multiply staged representations in the longer history of multiply located oppressions by studying the film makers’ conscious or unconscious creativeness when they re-represent the space and the human experiences. (Shohat & Stam, 1994: 5) These filmmakers’ productivity can be regarded as a liberating act of the ghettoized histories and geographies in productive relationships with the audience of multiply located and trained eyes. Assuming that human experiences are not identical but interconnected, certain type of films and film-making can create a space, as Willeman says, in which we can recognize spaces where history can be seen at work, and the horizon of multiply performed representations. (Willemen, 1994: 141- 161)
Inventing the reality in the films of the street people of 80s and 90s tells the stories of public and private on the doorsteps, alleys, playgrounds of the project houses, roads, slams outskirts and getthos. These directors are coming from different geographies, having different looks at and sound of the division of labor, poverty, unemployment, and life of the underclass of the differently located but polarized cities all around. Coming from Britain means coming from strong documentary tradition, social and class realism, and kitchen sink film traditions as well, The films of British cinema of 80s and 90s not only strongly reserve class analysis but also take critical and analytical position and give a new life for class analyses. For the lost look and the voice of the working class in the films of 80s and 90s, British cinema’s stubborn camera takes us to the narrow streets of working class neighborhood. Camera moving again toward in to the little houses, dark kitchens, doorsteps; singing songs together with neighbors; chatting women solidarity of back streets, squatters, refugees of the 80’s of all kind now cover the other’s others more in the depth focus than ever. In the films such as My Beautiful Launderette, (Frears, 1985) Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, (Frears, 1987) Distant Voices Still Lives, (Davies, 1988) Naked, (Leigh, 1993) Raining stones, (Loach, 1993) Brass off (Herman, 1996) and many others, not only the life stories of homosexuals, migrants, women and children join to the working class, but the different regimes of film making from the aesthetic to mode of production, create a horizon for film making in which gay and lesbians, feminist and the left-wing work together.
In France Les Amants Du Pont Neuf, (Carax, 1991) La Hain, (Kassovitz, 1995) also ask for our look, not the gaze, at the polarized city, in which unemployed, underclass, either quietly and with hesitations, survive the inconvenient at the deserted corners of the city or become the pushed away ones and reserved out in the projects from where city keeps its myth for “beauty”, “civilization” and “egality” and at the very center of it Eiffel Tower stands for the older myths and powers. And the American friends take the road again, as if this expanded country is a long and breathtaking street. It is the aura where the road movie was born, may be. The map of the lost face of the ageographical city, as Michael Sorkin mentions, can be drawn in these road movies. The new protagonist is not a anti hero anymore may be we can name her/hm as non hero and s/he looks for the sharable street life, which might have been lost somewhere on the road or in the history, in this vast land. Houses look like inns, show rooms, hostels; something disposable ones. For the children of street as they are on the way, street becomes both public and private space regardless of the forms of physical reality and cyberspace. The reactionary act and feeling of discomfort find their utterance and look at those roads. (from Doom Generation ( Araki, 1994) to Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989); from Stranger Than paradise (Jarmusch, 1984) to Colors (Hopper, 1988)). Street is out of focus and the perception and cannot be seen even from the bird’s eye. Children of those roads are scattered and in panic which might be the source of incomprehansibleness of the lost social wholeness that has been sized to the end long before by the media, architecture, and by the division of international labor. Now, they, on the roads, only trace back the invisible lines of being social. In Hong Kong, on the contrary, street becomes every kind of space for 24 hours. Whatever private is cornered and attached to the private corporate buildings like post-its; narrowed down, as if it has been just left to the safekeeper for infinite time where we can not talk about public either. Kar Wai arrests these images in Chunking Express (Kar-Wai, 1994). A claustrophobic small flat unbelievably patched to the big shopping mall with a view of the malls escalator. Moving images of real life become so fast that camera eye can not catch but only record them as moving lines of body silouthes and blue, red and yellow neon lights.
Turkish cinema seemed to lose its voice in public sphere and its streets as well in the 80s. Films were mainly about private confessions, which publicness is censored and self censored. Turkish cinema sounded like murmuring and mourning. Street had been first banned then forgotten. In order to feel one should remember. If the memory is assaulted, feelings and emotions might have been disturbed as well. If the street and space for the public sphere are erased private sphere might have been eroded as well or vise versa. Remarkable yet, unreliable examples have appeared recently. We can observe two diverse tendencies. One can be thought in the track of international entertainment and consciousness industry, make their contribution in veiling the sounds and looks of the living streets. In their representation of life they turn the experiences of the streets into a raw material of the mass media industry for consumption via the reproduction of the ideologies of these new forms of the representation. Fictionalized experiences replacing the daily life practices not only blocks the possibilities for the other forms of representations but also become functional in the international market of globalizing fiction effect industry, not as a finished work may be but to be recycled in the hands of bigger and authorized ones. Eþkiya (The Bandit, Turgul, 1996) and Ağır Roman (Altıoklar, 1997) are the outstanding ones of that trend. But the other track being more silent since they do not use the opportunities of the public relations, can be join to our comparative discussion. Tabutta Rövaþata ( Somersault in a Coffin, Zaimoðlu, 1996) Usta Beni öldürsen e (Sawdust Tales, Pirhasan, 1997) and Masumiyet (Innocence, Demirkubuz, 1997) are compatible with their diverse and similar properties in their disclosural story telling which opens up a space for “inner film”, “fourth look”, memory and our common cognitive maps of the world today. The first line for the map comes from the establishing shot of the Once They Were Warriors (Tamahori, 1994, New Zelland). On the scene we see the outback landscape. When camera pulls back slowly we realize that it is only a billboard; behind the bill board is the highway and under the highway there is the poor and crowded life of the deserted working class neighborhood. These images recall the others depending on the camera locations. May be the view of the high way becomes the view of the highway of the high-tech buildings of North America of the Crash (Cronenberg, 1996, Canada) in which our highly specialized class protagonist step out their luxurious balcony and watch. The far away and off screen city that we imagine can also be a common “fourth look” of Tabutta Röveþata and Usta Beni Öldürsene of Turkey, La Hain of France, Angel of Fire (Angel de Fuego, Rotberg, 1992) of Mexico and others. The spatial design of sequence in which the bill board and the highway and then the outcast land can resonate the visual design of BladeRunner ( Scott, 1982 USA), tell the stories of relocation of other geographies of our times and find its look in Chunking Express , Autumn Moon (Qiuyue, Law, 1992) Naked, On the level of street it meets the frontal presentations of the Do Right Thing, Samy and Rosie Get Laid.







*Prof. Dr. Z. Tül Akbal Sualp (Istanbul, TURKEY)

She has been teaching cinema, media and cultural studies in various Universities in Istanbul and gave lectures at Humbold University in Berlin as a visiting Professor last year. She recently has become the faculty member of Cinema and TV Department at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. She has her BA degree in Psychology and studied Political Science, Cinema Studies and Sociology (Cultural Studies) in New York and İstanbul in MA and PhD levels. She has been writing articles on cultural studies, cinema and critical theory in some journals and the editor of Kültür ve Toplum 1/ Culture and the Society 1, (Hil, 1995), Oyun/ Play (2002) and the author of the book titled ZamanMekan: Kuram ve Sinema/TimeSpace: Theory and Cinema (Bağlam 2004) and co-author of the short fiction: Wanting Book Odd Notebook. (MudamCamp de Base & :mentalKLİNİK, 2004) and also co-author of the book titled From Liberties To Losses and Afterwards (De-Ki 2008) Her recent research interest includes «space and time in cinema and culture », « urban space and cinema », and « technology culture and public sphere»

Professor Zeynep Tül Akbal Süalp, PhD. & MFA
Istanbul Bahcesehir University, School of Communications, Department of Cinema & TV, İstanbul, Turkey
e-mail: tul.akbal@bahcesehir..edu.tr & tulakbal@ hotmail.com