One of Istanbul's most popular art spaces, SALT Beyoğlu's Long Thursday program will feature a silent film screening, an exhibition and a performance tomorrow.
One of the films, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Zemlya (Earth) is a silent classic and one of Soviet cinema's most influential works. It will be screened along with a live performance by musician Ekin Fil.
The program "Sounds of Cinema" will pair the screenings of three silent classics with live music performances. The program will begin with "Zemlya" (1930) at 8 p.m.
Before that, as part of the exhibition, "Continuity Error," the performance "Unemployed Employees-I found you a new job!" (2006-2018), shaped through spontaneous dialogues betwee
n visitors and five people hired to work around a representative production line, will take place until 7 p.m. The exhibition will cover spread the second and third floors at SALT Beyoğlu.
Meanwhile, two bookstores, the Serving Kitchen and Robinson Crusoe 389, have returned to İstiklal Street after renovation works.
At SALT Galata, the exhibition "Bureau of Unspecified Services" will be open until 10 p.m. on Thursdays.
SOUNDS OF CINEMA
Starting on Long Thursday tomorrow, "Sounds of Cinema" will hold the screenings of three silent classics with live music performances in the Walk-in Cinema until April 28.
On April 26, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's "Zemlya" (1930) will be shown. The last addition to "Ukraine Trilogy," this film is not just considered a Dovzhenko masterpiece but remains one of the most important and influential examples of Soviet cinema.
Set in a small village in Ukraine, "Zemlya" depicts an ongoing struggle between a group of farmers trying to purchase a tractor and the well-off landowners.
Examining the era's politics surrounding the collectivization of land ownership, the film is a direct response to another great Soviet filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein and his 1929 film "Staroye i Novoye" (Old and New).
On April 27, Dimitri Kirsanoff's 1926 film "Menilmontant" will be on screen. The film is considered a harbinger of the poetic-realist French cinema of the 1930s. During the screening, Egemen Kırkağaç, Ege Tülek, and Alper Yıldırım will perform using a combination of acoustic instruments and electronic sounds.
"Menilmontant" is about two sisters, whose parents brutally murdered, moving to the Parisian neighborhood of the same name, and eventually pursue the same romance. The story follows on as these young women part ways. Unlike the other films in the silent era, "Menilmontant" doesn't contain subtitles, and uniquely combine French avant-garde filmmaking and Soviet montage.
On April 28, a surrealist film from Japan, Teinosuke Kinugasa's "Kurutta Ippeji" (A Page of Madness) (1926) will be screened along with Sumatran Black's music.
After a woman is institutionalized for the attempted murder of her own son, desperate to be with his wife, the husband begins work as a janitor in the same mental asylum. This surreal film is a product of an avant-garde group of Japanese artists known as the Shinkankakuha (School of New Perceptions).
Both a leading member of the group and one of the four screenwriters, Yasunari Kawabata would win the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming Japan's first Nobel Prize recipient. Lost for 45 years, the film was rediscovered by Kinugasa in his garden storehouse in 1971. As the film had no original sound, to decorate the story and characters, a local cabaret along with traditional "benshi" performers would accompany the film during its screenings. Organized in collaboration between SALT and Fol, the program will be free for all. All films selected are shown as the original provided by the distributors.
