Word: turkish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...markings -- once scorned as impossibly brisk -- at face value. The performances are therefore far nimbler than is typical, but such is the virtuosity of Gardiner's 60-piece orchestra that the music never seems rushed or scrambled. Listen, for example, to the famous finale of the Ninth / Symphony. The "Turkish march" usually sounds like an inappropriately comic intrusion in an otherwise profound movement. Gardiner takes the passage nearly twice as fast as most other conductors do, and as a result it sounds fitting, a natural outgrowth of the period's fascination with martial Janissary music...
...film shifts gears with the introduction of Neshe Yasin, a Turkish woman poet who delivers a poignant Proustian reverie on a village from her childhood called Peristerona. Yasin's recherche du temps perduis the most explicit instance of the film's obsession with the question of memory. All the film's participants are intent on memory, remembering what was lost and the crimes committed by both sides. The film implies that the future of Cyprus depends in part on whether people can move beyond the memory of crimes, injustices and mutual recriminations...
Yasin conducts interviews with Turkish and Greek women. This section of the film is the most wrenching. The encounters with Hassan and Kizilyurek's charming aunt leave one unprepared for the intensity and impact of the interviews in this section. Particularly harrowing is a Greek woman's description of abuse by Turkish soldiers. She describes women being raped, and men killed. The memories are so vivid and so traumatic that she breaks down and tells the camera that she cannot continue. The camera pans to Yasin who is herself overcome and crying against the wall. This lacerating moment indicts cruelty...
Finally, the film turns to Charalambos Demosthenous, a flute-maker and priest. He relates how his son was killed during the Turkish invasion. As a memorial to him, Demosthenous planted a palm tree at the edge of the ocean. The film shows Demosthenous performing his paternal duty by watering the tree, and Chrysanthou and Kizilyurek make their own pilgrimage there, buckets of water in hand...
...viewer. Even Amedeo Modigliani's Portrait of a Girl, which is the only complete frontal portrait in the show, has eyes covered with aquamarine paint, making her eyeslits seem like precious stones. As girlish as she looks, she seems on the verge of womanhood. Picasso's Woman in a Turkish Costume dissects the sitter and renders her face with the same ostentation as her costume...