Uğur Kutay who have continued his academic studies in Yıldız Technical University Art and Design Faculty focusing on cinema semiotics and aesthetics, will offer an alternative film reading toward the history of documentary film by scrutinizing the relationship between anthropology and documentary through the examples from the history of cinema. Kutay, known with his books “Andrei’s Gaze: Psychoanalytical-SemiologicalExpansions” (2004), “Camera that killed the Real: Documentary Cinema and Reality” (2009), writes weekly in Birgün Newspaper on cinema.

1 June 2011, Wednesday
18:00 – 20:00

The Side-Effects of Camera: “Anthropological Intervention”

“What we call technical progress offered us only comfort, a kind of life standard… And the means of violence in order for us to protect our power. We are like savages! We use microscope as cosh!” says Alexander, the main character of Tarkovsky’s latest film Offret/The Sacrifice.

We live in an age where a microscope used as a cosh is supposed to be the first thing to come to minds when ‘documentary camera’ is called; this is a microscope/camera directed ‘from up to down’, ‘from north to south’, ‘from west to east’, ‘from white to black’, ‘from rich to poor’, ‘from beautiful to ugly’, ‘from normal to abnormal’… Today documentary production has evolved into a terribly infirm laboratory work whereby ‘northern’, ‘western’, ‘white’, ‘rich’ and ‘normal’ documentarist is disguised in a scientist who investigates species of life that lay outside these definitions.

However, just like it is possible to develop a humane and egalitarian scientific cogitation without smashing the microscopes, it is possible to change this totalitarian discursive manner without breaking the cameras. Of course we should first of all enter the ‘laboratory of documentary’ and look at the structure of the microscope. And fortunately today the gates of the laboratory are open to everyone!

- Uğur Kutay