Feride
at 06:03, 3 May 2005
Posts: 1
|
About Sally Potter’s YES
“I just saw the film YES and I wanted to share my feelings with you, before
time tames them.
I am so moved, as was rest of the audience for that matter. It was the first
screening at Istanbul Film Festival, and there was so much emotion at the
theater. I had loved Potter's Tango Lesson also, but this is so much
stronger, so obviously and uniquely made by a woman, so familiar yet so
difficult to express. My mood changed back and forth for a number of times,
when I was at the brink of finding it pretentious due to verse form or
exaggerated and almost becoming a melodrama but then I gave in and then the
film wrapped me up and then there I was, weeping through the end credits
until I was aware of the lights and suddenly there was the name of John
Berger, with special thanks to him. And I said to myself, are we only a
handful all over the world, is it something good or bad that we should find
each other and that we all end up knowing each other?”
These were my words, shared with a friend on the eve of the first screening of Sally Potter’s Yes in Istanbul, in early April, 2005. Since then, the film has become stronger in me, rather than the opposite.
I realized first of all, that this is one of the few films which has touched me erotically. Understandable, since made by a woman, that it should make its male character more attractive for a woman spectator like me. But how to explain it for a male student of mine who finds himself fantasizing the man (Simon Abkarian) also? His explanation was simple: The film was erotic but the woman (Joan Allen) was rather old for him. I said I did not believe this was the reason and then my student was asking himself whether he had suppressed his gayness all these years and then we had a long discussion as to how we, as women, have been asking the same question to ourselves for years until we came to grips with the notion of gaze in films. Pure theory would never have been as enlightening for this graduate class in Film-TV as this discussion inspired by Yes.
The film spoke right to our feelings and peeled off all our defense mechanisms since it was made with such strength and passion. Not that it is utterly about eroticism or about love in the narrow sense of the word. On the contrary, love in the film Yes is only a gate to grasp life as a whole, especially life as it struggles against death, nationalism, fascism, racism and all the dark sides of human nature triggered by the events following September 11, 2001. And that is why “saying yes” to life is so important now, just as Nietzsche would have us say – YES, even if it is written on sand and even if it is to be washed away by each new wave, YES once again, in all rhythms of the body and the nature.
Feride Cicekoglu
Professor at Film-TV Department
Istanbul Bilgi University
Istanbul - Turkey
|
