Dreaming Istanbul on Kab - Short Film Series on Istanbul

Dreaming Istanbul is a documentary and an experimental series consisting of seven parts, which creates an original, intriguing and penetrating insight into one of the most historical cities in the world: Istanbul

Introduction

As an introduction, here is a selection of animations from the seven films of 'Dreaming Istanbul' series. Just click on the picture's boxes to reveal the universe hiding behind our Istanbul's peregrinations

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Presentation

Aldous Eveleigh is an English painter and traveller, who likes to navigate the spheres of reality and illusion, so as to reveal what we don't readily perceive. In Istanbul, a city between two continents, two seas, two epochs, Aldous and his team take us on an audio-visual odyssey in seven short episodes where the streets of the old Byzantine and Ottoman city, its peoples and its cultures unveil themselves from new perspectives.

» Octobre 2009	Episode 1 and Teuton adventure. The first opus of the Istanbul Dream is finally done. With the subtle music by Dryden Hawkins, it strikes a fine figure. Meanwhile, Aldous exhibites himself, in Cologne in Germany, at the cafe gallery Salon Smitz where this first step of the adventure will be shown. Only 6 to go!

» May 2009	The final stages of animation. Aldous Eveleigh, in London, is close to painting the last animations - struggling between blue screen and files uploading, while Pema Wangye is putting this whole stop-motion experience into shape. We'll get around 50 animations spread over the seven films.

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Film Card
Original Title: Dreaming Istanbul Year of Production: 2009 Countries of Production: UK / France Duration: 7 X 4 minutes Shooting Format: DVcam Shooting Location: Istanbul Authors/Directors: Julien Tréfouël Gilles Blaize Author/Painter: Aldous Eveleigh Music Composer: Dryden Hawkins

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SYNOPSIS

	Film#1: The Dream Begins. The pace of the streams. Aldous is sleeping. Seagulls, cats and pretty girls, the weaver souls of Istanbul, have already noticed his presence. He is sleeping and his dream is holding court above the Bosphorus. There are two men close to him, looking at the dream that plays with boats. The tallest man stands up and shot the video down. The story begins. On the surface of water the shores of Istanbul are taking shape. Chiaroscuro, silhouettes of minarets, people on a boat, Aldous painting them. It feels as if they were making love, caught in a bacchic trance. Was it a vision? Or a veil lifted on another Istanbul, where docks become kind giants, where two women turn into a mandolin player, where we go from boat to boat to finally reach Istanbul.

	Film#2: The Port. Aldous is standing still in the middle of the port. He is getting ready to paint, maybe on his sketchbook, or on a sheet that he is trying to unfold. Around him, children, young men, patriarchs observe the stretching seconds. There are passers-by, a flurry of ferries, the mean bash of fishermen. Time is looping, drifting away and returning under the influence of a spirit-rapper, a photograph, a barbarian god. Aldous paints, and time bustles, movement bolts. Straight in the middle of the port, he catches the strollers' dances, the subjective race of the wind that revels in the odours and the colours of the fish market. Time in this Istanbul port is a patchwork, a dichotomy between periods, from where seagulls escape, smoking chicha barges, finally the night escapes from the day.

	Film#3: The First Steps. Water lifts, duality is drained. The only thing left is paint. It represents the roofs of the Golden Horn. Before this multitude, on his hill, as a frog on hot tin roofs, Aldous set himself in motion. These are his first steps in Istanbul. Followed by the tall man - a gentleman for a moment - that grabs the movie camera, Aldous disappears behind a clump. And here he is, in the streets of the city, sketching stroke by stroke the life all around, this mad face, that bootblack, or these coffee coloured toilets, trying to shape a rough unity from this abundance of details. His gaze moves forward, from the crowd to the underground desert, from the bazaar to the army of smokers, all witnessing the Harlequin, the one who holds the secret code to the old tram, the next destination of the dreamer.

	Film#4: The Chalice. The City is a crossroad. One passes and passes again, stops by, for a second, and finally leaves again. By walking, on wheels, on rails, Aldous dreams about Istanbul, about the Eastern Rome at the junction of worlds, about the mix of Anatolians, Bulgarians, Uzbeks and Norwegians, of liberated women, veiled women, flower-women. All paths lead to Sultanahmet. Here, the Blue Mosque faces Hagia Sophia in a spiritual duel, a fight of epochs and space where tulips, tourists and the shadows' dance all blend in. Following the man with the video camera inside Wisdom's den you will pass under the temple keepers' eye into the depth of darkness just to get the sky, the cupola, the chalice. To eat the divine food.

	Film#5: The City Lights. The City Lights. Night. Lighted minarets. Seagulls. Please welcome the aerial ballet, the choreography of light where the bird thinks it's a star and the minaret an axe of sky, proud as an Ataturk's general. If upstairs the city lights are coming alive, downstairs, the streets of Istanbul are swarming with flitting crowds, eager for pleasure, music, carnival, Aldous. He is standing, straight as a minaret, sketching sweet merchants and pretty girls. The next second - he has disappeared. The lights, the packed main streets leave the place to a maze of dark, deserted narrow streets in which Aldous and the film's team are getting lost. At the bend in an alley, a door, green. It opens into a strange world of faunas, dancers and Ottoman artists.

	Film#6: The Interworld. The daylight again. The slow difficult emergence along a corridor. Does a hangover exist in dreams? This is a singular feeling, to be between two worlds, two states of mind, on the razors' edge. What to do when the Istanbul barber puts the blade on the neck? One choice is to let go, let it ride, and let the images pour forth. From one side the Bosphorus, the force of the flow, the number of boats, and then the lighthouses smoking fags. From the other side, two lands, two continents, where the mosque rubs shoulders with anarchists, where women are arrayed with the national flag, where the union of Turkish differences expresses itself by a jump of joy.

	Film#7: The Wake-Up. A coffee, black, Turkish. An Ataturk portrait. A band of Gypsies singing in the street. A crowd becoming a clown in the street. A fruit and vegetable merchant unrolling the red carpet in the street. These are the last moments in Istanbul, these kind of moments are to be savoured from a table outside a café. Here, now, there is no duality anymore, no opposition between East and West, between the grounded and the flowing, just a flock of colours, sounds, and scents. To paint Istanbul is like looking at the smile of a woman, like sleeping in a hammock dreaming of Barbarossa's parrot, taking a scalper for a pretty girl. Wake up Aldous! ... now is the time. Leave this Istanbul's dream, let this tanker drift along the Bosphorus. Let the pretty girls fade...

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The Creators

Like Istanbul herself, this film is at the crossroads of four creators' paths : Aldous Eveleigh, Dryden Hawkins, Julien Tréfouël and Gilles Blaize.
Aldous is a roving painter with a punk romantic outlook. He roams the cities of the world, sketching life on the streets, taking photographs and transforming them through paintings and animated film into another reality. Dryden is one of the major figures in the British experimental electronic music scene. Attractive and disturbing, his music brings to the picture alternately a depth and a brilliant surface, light and darkness, which makes a natural narrative element for this film. Julien is a man of the cinema. Whether behind or in front of the camera, directing sequences or conceiving those to come, he seizes images, with a rebel gaze freed from any constraint, of life as it passes within his frame. Gilles completes this quartet. Creator of tales, he is an alchemist tumbler, who juggles with materials, images, sounds, animation, writing, indeed with anything within range of his imagination to make stories about this world, and others.

"Drawing for hours out on the street, day after day, means that the sounds, shapes and action all around me enter my consciousness unmediated and when I look at the photograph [still from the film], as if it were an ink blot, a damp-stained wall or an abstract pattern, then what comes to mind and what I glimpse there are traces and associations coming from all around me while I was drawing.
With paint applied with a deliberate crudeness to contrast with the print surface, not in opposition to but maintaining a strange alliance with the photographic image, I bring out the unbidden images from my sub-conscious, to turn the pictures of places into paintings about people.
So the paintings interspersed among the different narratives are part of the film; this is the artist's vision alongside the documentary-makers' fantasy. Dark, turbulent currents below the luminous, polished surface of the film describing the character and psychology of an ancient city on the water, at the crossroads of the old and the new - in a dream of Istanbul."

Aldous Eveleigh

Dryden Hawkins

"Dreaming evokes unrealities and shaded landscapes. Scenes and matter transform without law or reason. We all have to find the reality within the reality.
Sound alters us during listening. We enter our own domain induced by the potion of Sound and Music. We have to hear the sound within the sound.
Where lies the reality in "Istanbul Dreaming"? Will it be within the world behind the animations or within the world behind the film? I hope that no answer to these questions arrive through the music!"

"Stories possess a prodigious power. They have the capability to announce what doesn't yet exist. It often happens to me to live a story invented, weeks, years before. And I can understand the elders that preferred transmitting their stories orally instead of writing them down, fearing to capture a too greater power that would strangle it. However, in this collaboration with my 3 accomplices, I took the risk of capture. Because this story precisely talks about the reality, the illusion, of what existed and what may never happen in Istanbul. Between Aldous's art, Dryden's inspiration and Julien's intuition, an imaginary Istanbul is developing, funny, sultry, sometimes frightening, an Istanbul located on another earth, where modern myths are pushing the antique legends. Using various visual and narrative techniques, music as the only speech - because there isn't any language barrier in a dream - makes this film an Istanbul fantasy, but who knows the next experience of the reality."		Gilles Blaize