Chapter 5 "Istanbul" black and white video

Being used to being in our semi-dark, desolate museum house, I like to stay indoors.The streets below, the roads beyond, and the impoverished parts of the city seem as sinister as those in black-and-white cop movies.The allure of this dark world has always made me more fond of Istanbul in winter than in summer.I love the autumn-to-winter evenings, when the bare trees tremble in the north wind, and people in black coats and jackets rush home through the darkening streets.I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark exteriors of the ruins of dilapidated wooden houses - I've only seen this texture, this shadow in Istanbul - when I look at the black and white crowds hurrying As I walk down the darkening winter streets, deep within me, there is a sense of shared joy and sorrow, as if the night covered our lives, our streets, everything that belongs to us in a great darkness, as if we An An returns home, stays in the bedroom, lies on the bed, and then can go back to dream of our lost prosperity, our legendary dream of the past.In the same way, when I watch the twilight fall poetically in the pale streetlights, engulfing the poor parts of the city, knowing that at least at night, the eyes of the West cannot spy on us, and outsiders cannot see the shameful poverty of our city, It's a relief.

Guller has a photograph that captures the quiet alleys of my childhood, where concrete apartments stand side by side with wooden houses, the streetlights are empty, and the chiaroscuro dusk—which to me represents the city—is already Advent. (Nowadays the concrete apartments have crowded out the old wooden houses, but the atmosphere remains the same.) What fascinates me about this photograph is not just that it reminds me of the cobblestone streets of my childhood, nor the cobblestone pavement, the iron bars on the windows, or the The crumbling empty wooden house, but because it suggests that, as night falls, these two men walking home with their long, thin shadows behind them are actually throwing night over the city.

In the 1950s and 1960s, I, like everyone, loved seeing "film crews" all over town—vans with studio logos on the sides; two giant lights powered by generators; loved being called souffleurs Prompters (in French) who had to shout over the roar of generators when heavily made-up actresses and romantic leading men forgot their lines; off-screen with children and curious onlookers staff of.For forty years, Turkey's film industry has ceased (mostly due to the incompetence of directors, actors and producers, but also because it cannot compete with Hollywood), TV still shows these old black and white films, and when I see black and white images of streets, old Sometimes I forget that I am watching a movie while looking at the gardens, Bosphorus views, crumbling mansions and apartments.The melancholy made me feel at a loss, and sometimes I felt as if I was watching my past.

When I was fifteen to sixteen years old, I imagined myself as an impressionist painter who painted the streets of Istanbul. Painting pebbles was my greatest pleasure.Before the aggressive district councils began relentlessly asphalting the cobblestone roads, the city's taxi and "Dom minibus" drivers complained about the damage caused by the gravel.They also complain about the endless road digging for sewers, electricity, general repairs.The pebbles had to be pried out one by one as the road was dug, which dragged the project on indefinitely—especially when the Byzantine-era cloisters were discovered underneath.When I'm done, I love watching the workers put the pebbles back into place—with an intoxicating, rhythmic technique.

The log mansions of my childhood, and the more modest cottages in the back streets, are in a charming state of ruin.Being poor and neglected, these houses were never painted, and the combination of age, dust, and moisture gradually darkened the wood, giving it that special color, unique texture, and the houses I saw in the back streets when I was a child were very beautiful. Commonly, I even thought black was their primary color.Some of the houses had brown undertones, maybe the houses in the slums didn't even know what paint was.But Western travelers in the 18th and mid-19th centuries described the brightly painted mansions of rich people, and believed that these private houses and other affluent features had a certain kind of rich and powerful beauty.When I was a child, I sometimes fantasized about painting these houses, but even so, the city without its black and white curtains is still palpitating.In summer, these old wooden houses dry out, turning a dull, gray, tinderbox-like brown, and you can imagine that they may catch fire at any time; during the long cold snap of winter, snow and rain also cloud these houses. The musty smell of rotten wood.The same goes for the old wooden monastic halls, which were banned by the Republic as places of worship, and are now mostly abandoned, and visited by no one but street bums, ghosts, and antiquities collectors.These houses aroused in me fear, worry, and curiosity in equal measure: a chill passed through my heart as I peered through the damp groves of broken windows from beyond the crumbling walls.

Since I understand the soul of the city in black-and-white images, I am fascinated by the line drawings of the few discerning western travelers—such as Le Corbusier—and any book with black-and-white illustrations set in Istanbul. (I waited all my childhood, but never saw the cartoonist Hergé using Istanbul as the backdrop for Tintin's adventures. When the first Tintin movie was filmed in Istanbul, a bootleg bookseller released a book called "Tintin in Istanbul" A black-and-white comic book by a local cartoonist who cobbled together his own renditions from the film with images from Tintin’s other adventures.) Old newspapers fascinate me, too, every time I read a report of a murder, suicide or attempted robbery , I smelled a long suppressed son

sometimes fear. In certain places - Tepebas, Galata, Fatih, Zyrek, a few villages along the Bosphorus, the back streets of Uskudar - the black and white I describe fog.On a smoky morning, on a windy and rainy night, the dome of a mosque where seagulls nest; in car smoke, soot from chimneys, rusty garbage cans, empty and deserted parks in winter It is also seen in the gardens and in the crowds walking home in the mud and snow on winter nights; these are the sad joys of Istanbul in black and white.Broken fountains that haven’t sprayed water for hundreds of years, forgotten mosques in slums, a group of schoolchildren in white collars and black coats suddenly appearing, old mud-stained trucks, all the more degraded by years, dust and no one’s patrons. A dimly lit grocery store, a shabby shop full of down-and-out, unemployed men, a city wall crumbling like so many ripped-off cobblestones, a theater entrance that after a while begins to look the same, a pudding shop, a newspaper vendor on the sidewalk, three Drunk men wandering the streets in the middle of the night, dim street lights, ferries traveling to and from the Bosphorus and the smoke from their chimneys, cities covered in snow.

My childhood memories are inseparable from this blanket of snow.Some kids can't wait for summer vacation to start, but I can't wait for the snow to start—not because I can get out and play in the snow, but because it makes cities look new, covering not just the mud, filth, ruin, and neglect, but for everyone The streets and landscapes offer a certain surprise, a certain sweetness of imminent menace.It snows for three to five days on average every year, and the snow stays on the ground for about one week to ten days, but Istanbul is always caught off guard. Every time it snows, it is like welcoming for the first time: the back streets are closed, and then the main roads; Queuing outside is like wartime and national disaster.What I love most about Snow is that it forces people to come together and bring together people who have been cut off from the world through thick and thin.Snowy Istanbul looks like a remote village, but contemplating our shared destiny brings us closer to our glorious past.

In one year, unusual arctic temperatures froze over the Black Sea from the Danube to the Bosphorus.This was a shock to Istanbul, which is actually a Mediterranean city, and people still talk about it with childlike glee after many years. To look at a city in black and white is to look at it through a dark history: its quaint appearance is no longer important to the world.Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a certain simplicity that expresses the melancholy of the end of the empire, the painful face of the fading eyes of Europe, Old-fashioned poverty that must be endured in the face of an incurable disease.The attitude of resignation nourishes Istanbul's inner-looking soul.

If you want to see the city in black-and-white images, see the fog that covers it, and breathe the sadness that its residents embrace together, you only need to fly over from some wealthy Western city and go straight to the bustling streets.In winter, everyone walking on the Galata Bridge wears the same dull, tawny clothes.The Istanbulites of my day had avoided the bright reds, emerald greens and bright oranges of their honored ancestors.In the eyes of foreign tourists, it seems that they are deliberately dressed in this way to achieve some moral purpose.They don't mean to - but there's a hint of humility in their heavy melancholy.This is the attire in a black and white city, and they seem to be saying: This is a way of mourning for a city that has declined for a hundred and fifty years.

Then there were the packs of dogs that every Western traveler who passed through Istanbul in the nineteenth century would mention, from Lamartine and Nerval to Mark Twain, that continued to add drama to the city's streets.They looked exactly the same, the same coat color, for lack of a proper word—something between gray and charcoal, that is, no tint at all.They are a major concern for the city government: when the military staged a coup, sooner or later the general pointed out the threat posed by the dogs; the government and the schools campaigned again and again to banish the dogs from the streets, but they still fled the city run away.Although they are terrible and united to challenge the government, I have to pity these crazy and lost creatures still clinging to their old territory. If we see the city in black and white, it is partly because we know it from the engravings left by Western painters: the natives have never painted it in its former glory.None of Haussmann's paintings panders to our visual taste.Nor is there any article or work in the world today that teaches us to appreciate Ottoman art or the ancient Persian art that influenced it.The Ottoman miniaturists took their inspiration from the Persians; as the classical poets sang the city not as a real place but as a word; Do something that passes by.Even their Book of Rituals was concerned with the Sultan's slaves, subjects, and his gold and silver treasures.The city is not a place where people live, but an official gallery viewed through a fixed-focus lens. So when magazines or textbooks wanted old images of Istanbul, they used black and white prints by Western travelers and painters.My contemporaries tended to overlook the subtly colored pastels of the ancient Istanbul empire by the German painter Merlin, whom I will talk more about later.Resigned to fate on the one hand and convenient on the other, they like to see their past in easy-to-reproduce monochrome paintings, because their sadness is confirmed when they gaze at a colorless image. In my childhood, high-rise buildings were few and far between. When night fell, the houses and trees, summer theaters, balconies and windows of the third dimension of the city were wiped away, giving the city crooked houses, twists and turns. The streets and rolling hills have a certain dark demeanor.I love this engraving from Arom's travel book from 1839, where the night is on a metaphorical mission.Depicting the night as a source of some kind of evil, the painting documents Istanbul's so-called "moonlight culture".Like the simple ritual of many flocking to the seaside to watch a moonlit night, a full moon, a moonshadow on the water, the twilight of a half-quarter moon, or (as in the engraving here) a moonlight peeking through the clouds that keeps the city from being completely dark : The murderer had just put out the lights, too, lest anyone should see him commit crimes. It’s not just Western tourists who use the language of the night to describe the city’s elusive mysteries: if they know a thing or two about court feuds, it’s because Istanbulites also like to whisper about victimized harem wives whose bodies are smuggled under cover of night Outside the palace wall, it was taken to the sea and thrown into the Golden Horn. The famous "Salazar Murder" (in 1958, when I could not read, but it caused panic in our family, and even in the city, so I knew every detail) used the same familiar elements.This appalling report fueled my black-and-white fantasies of night, rowboats, and the Bosporus that remain nightmare material.The gangster, whom my parents first told me, was a poor young fisherman, but as time went on they made him into a folk monster.He promised to take a woman and her baby out on the Bosporus in his rowboat, but then decided to rape her and throw her baby overboard.The newspapers nicknamed him "The Devil of Salazar."And my mother, fearful that another murderer might be hiding among the fishermen casting their nets near our summer cottage in Heberiada, forbade my brother and I to play outside, even in our own garden.In my nightmares I saw fishermen throwing children into the waves, their fingertips clung to the hull of the boat.I heard their mothers screaming as the fisherman slammed their oars over their heads.To this day, when I scan the murders in the Istanbul newspapers (which I love to do), I still see them in black and white.