that is for the future

i hated editing, because all i did was delete, delete, and delete. i wanted all of my scenes to be much longer. i wanted them to be drawn out. i like the time in rivette, ceylan, tarkovsky, and kirastomi's films. this however is not completely my choice to make. i could've made a movie about me sleeping with pooh, and have The Blackbyrds' "Son Bedroom Talk" loop on endlessly. i could watch that scene for hours, and i always do in my mind. scene like those are for me poetry, i recite them within myself alle tage. issacs likes the "son bedroom talk" very much, he listened to that song many times while we were on the train. i could imagine that eric can feel the same amount of affection watching issac sleep. however i know that my audience does not share the same affection and connection to those images, so i try to make something to connect with them, a compromise. this movie is not for me, it is for them.

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yesterday i was walking the the river and i saw an old lady feed the birds. i had pooh bear stationed on the ground, and she walk by.

film has been on my mind.

for the last three weeks i have been shooting constantly, if i was not shooting that day i would be working out shots and ideas in my head. i have not be able to shoot many of the planned shots. eric was right, when we come back to seattle, we will bring the ideas that have flown forth along with our film making.

i know other people have had trouble with filming, and so have i, many of the material that i have filmed i had to disregard. i shoot over 5 hours of material in many locations or many days, and now it is a 8 minute film. and i still have not been able to shoot many of the shots i planned.

filming was relatively easy. i did all of the shots by myself with the help of a tripod, rocks, trees, or any structure to hold my camera. and i only edited for two days. and i didn't not start filming until very late. i wanted to gain work out what memory and berlin for me meant first of all, and when i film it all came together quite easily.

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today when i edited my section of the film, i decided to add music by Komitas and The Blackbyrds. i did not want to add music, because i wanted silence. however i did not want to bore the class, so i added music. it is my hope that maybe some of my classmates will read this blog. then maybe the movie will be easier to understand, because the first few blogs explained the concepts and i worked throught my thoughts in those blogs. maybe they would recognize the importance for me to have the compersor Komitas, an Armenian composer whos' music is deeply rooted and scarred by the history of his peoples. i also did not want to add pictures of the isreali wall, to me it is too explicit. however it is an easy comperation for the spectator to make. i wanted to have images of olives and olives trees, maybe compare and contrast the trees on top of "garden of exile" with mahmoud darwish's poetry and olive trees being uprooted in palestine and certain building (like military bunkers, and etc.) being abandoned and/or destroyed. i like olives i think they are very tasty. that is for the future. i know my film may be boring to watch, but i hope the music by Komitas helps.

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my section of the film is titled "remembering you". i remember the "you" in the film throught the work that i put into others.

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when i watch the film with the class, i almost cried, tears swelled up in my eyes and it was difficult to speak. when people talked to me, i tried to smile and be happy. it is painful to watch the movie each time, and editing the movie was very difficult.

my friend said that when she read my blog, she cried. when she told me, i didn't realize why, because i thought that what i wrote is usually boring. when i think backwards my first few blogs describing my motivation for the film about my mother, i know what she is talking about. pooh is still with me. and of course i am not suppose to type about that in my production journal, because these things don't have to do with the production of my film, nor memory, so i will stop

the others

"Goodbye Lenin which, while a good movie, is more about the character's relationship with his mother than it is an accurate portrayal of life in East Germany. Goodbye Lenin seems to reduce the Ossi existence to communist commodification -- to be an Ossi is about what kind of pickles you eat -- whereas Sonnenallee allows its characters to be much more than consumers. In interviews with the makers of Goodbye Lenin, they have mentioned that much of their inspiration for their treatment of East Germans came from TV shows on East Germans...."

orangesitcom, from imdb

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i won't ever watch "the lives of others" and dread that i have to watch "goodbye lenin" again.

i had a talk with eric and questioned him about new german cinema, post-fassbinder. i wanted to ask if there were filmmakers who tried to portray identity which are foreign to themselves in film. as an example fassinder portrays women, he is known to be a woman's film director, unlike bergman who is known to use women to talk about himself. "me boss, you sneakers", would be a great example of the film that i am searching for.

i am searching for an alternative cinema, which tells the stories of immigrants, turkish, women, auslanders, elderly people, outsiders, and etc. i do not want to want another coming of age, romantic, action, comedy, genre film.

some film that i have found, that may be interesting, though some are a bit on the genre side.

Sonnenalle (1999)
Herr Lehmann (2003)
Knockin' on Heaven's Door (1997)
Erleuchtung garantiert
Architekten (1990)
Das Expriment
Eierdiebe (2003)
Agnes und seine Brüder
Montag kommen die Fenster

today i woke up at 6am to go shooting at the glass factory, it was strange being in a abandoned factory all alone, and walking in the pitch black. inside the glass factory, i forget that i am in berlin. it does not help to make me feel safe, that we are but a few blocks away from neo-nazi town. the last time my friend was at the glass factory, he spotted the neo-nazi and gangster, hanging out there. it is strange how this glass factory can be home to so many different people.

i must admit, i was scared.

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i quickly climbed up to the roof on the sixth floor, and tried to shoot the sunrise. the roof was icy and frozen over, so it very slippery, i had to crawl around, and still i had a tendency to slip. i felt a bit unsafe. i spent about an hour on the roof and it was surreal, all alone on top of an abandoned glass factory, as if this is a place i can call my own for this one moment, just this one moment. this must be how the graffit artist, nazis, and gangster feel, a sense of home berlin, where nothing is really owned, always shifting.

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the hour i spent filming the sunrise, most of what had been a waste. the footage was overexposed. having nevered worked with a video camera before i didn't know how to use its functions properly. i turned the shutter speed to the fastest one possible hoping that it capture the sunrise, because that is what i would do for a picture camera. however this still caused overexposure. i talked to some people and they said to fool around with the AE, which functions as the aperture, and to this i was clueless.

this is not the first time i have run into issues filming.

the day before i film in a heavily vegetated area, and it was dark, still 2pm, but dark. because the camera had to focus on so much and there was less light, it seem to blur everything together. the footage is trash. all together i have a few hours of footage but much of it can't use because of my ignorance of how to use the camera.

i can't wait for the editing process.

mirrors

a few weeks ago, i was riding the u-bahn home and in front of me there was a young woman. she was crying. her eyes were red, swollen from the tears and what may have caused it. the young man she was with neglected to comfort her and instead talked away with his buddy. her head leaned against the sideboard while, the young men howled and laughed. i sat and looked away to my left and i saw her reflection on the glass. beyond the glass i saw a two men also laughing and talking. the mirror image of the girl nestled perfectly into one of the man's neck. it made me very happy to look in the mirror and see the girl's image, instead of titling her head away from the source of her pain, in the mirror she leans into comfort. to me, still today, the image of her in the mirror stays with me.

i thought to myself, "this is cinema", this is a mirror, this is my vision, i like it and it makes me happy.

when we went to the camp, i wonder to myself the difference between people being lead there. before it was prisoner, now we are being like on a tour.

i like the rain and wind that day. it gave me a reminder of the conditions for living in the camp. i am glad for the weather.

while walking through the camp, i looked at people watching the camp. many people talked about subjects outside of the camp, like plans and the weather, but not relating it back to the circumstances of the past. it must have been difficult to line up in cold rain, we simply walked to the nearest building like good tourists.

i would have apperciate more time for our cinema and berlin class, because one day is used for screening, we only have one day for discussion and lecture in a week. that is not enough time to do both and class is rushed.

recently i had rethink my appoarch to my film. i do not know enough german to be able to write a poem in german. i have watch some tarkovsky and antonioni films, and have been wondering about cinematic space. why does tarkovsky cinema often get compared to poetry? to create poetry does not mean i have to write words, luckily in the cinema, i can also use images and sound, and so much more.

new german cinema

when i watch the new german cinema of the 90's, i feel nostalgia for fassbinder and his generation. i wonder about what has happen, why has the film industry become so youth oriented? filmmakers like becker and tyker, will eventually make film about themselves and their generation, however where is the older generation? are they not making film anymore? i would like to watch a film about something else rather than coming of age or a romantic comedy drama. or would i have to look towards austria, just like i do for poetry, to rikle and bachmann.

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i don't believe in the myth that berlin is a city without memory, a city of nostalgia.

i can believe that a film like adam's apple will never be made in berlin.

our time in berlin is almost over

when i first went to the memorial for the murder jews of europe i saw a tiny bird. and i followed the small bird, i followed it for about 10-15 minutes. then i realize that i would've liked to film it, so i pulled out my camera and while i was doing so, the bird flew away. i spend the next hour walking around the memorial, not with the mission of looking for the bird, i wanted to walk around more. it was cold. when i finally found the bird, i pulled out my camera and it flew away very fast. it did not fly away into the sky when i was walking with it, only when i pulled out my camera.

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i have a camera but for the first five weeks i refused to take pictures with it. i did not want to pose, take pictures of a past experience, i felt that i would rather experience the time at hand. i rather liked the experience of following the bird and walking with it, when i had the camera i felt rushed and quite unnatural. i like walking slowly.

if my film will be about memory and experience, how will i ever have any footage if i don't film my experiences?

our time in berlin is almost finish.

i have come to greater level apperciation for the complexity of the filmmaking process. now that i have begun to work on a film of my own, i can see how difficult it is to get everything coordinated.

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take for example a typical narrative, most shots are of close-ups or mid-long shots, and they usually have the interaction between two people, not including the cameraman, so that makes a minimal of three people. i have one person. when i shoot myself walking, i cannot have the camera follow me, the image can be stagnate. when we are so attuned to the present day moving following people, it is different to watch still space, still life, and look at a photograph, that is what is not expected in film.

and also the handheld options is not one that warrant, because it is too shaky, it gives me a headache watching such footage, so i won't want to put the same difficulties for my viewers.

i've come to appreciate herzog's fata morgana much more, and many other documentary film makers, now that i realized how much creativity had to be put into creating a solid progression of images and sounds.

at first i wanted to film myself walking through empty space. i like walking. and it has turned out quite differently because the images don't seem to match or have much energy or substance. i think of the scene from "where is my friend's house", where the little boy run up a hill and it crosses zig zag, so it takes him a while to reach the top, yet he is running fast. or i think of the scene where a person will be walking in the distant and as time passes he comes closer and passes by the camera. i like how space can be traveled over time and how it can be displayed through cinema.

however i find it difficult to film such a scene in berlin because we don't have many hills or vast expanses of land, and any of such places are usually filled with people, or illegal to trespass. i also have difficult framing the picture, and have to do many re-take and at many time do not know how the image will turn out, so i have to keep on coming and re-shoting it.

why do you live in berlin

i like to meet and talk to people in berlin, that were born in berlin and want to die here.

last night i found out that berlin's nickname is also called "little paris". when i asked Mélanie, if she wants to die in berlin, she said "I don't think I want to die here, but I think I want to at least try to get German citizenship before I leave. This way I can come back anytime - here or anywhere else in Europe." she has been working in berlin as a translator for 8 years. will new berlin be the old paris. last night he mention "little paris" with a sense of pride, and a hint of nostalgia. i want to ask wolfgang kohlhasses that same question, why are you in berlin? i wonder how he will answer it.

last weekend in leipzig, bettina told me how wondering it is to have so many old buildings. the buildings are used to screen films, as dance halls, places of social interaction and so on. she does not like berlin, because it is not the same in berlin for her, those buildings are not lived spaces, they are commercial. last night i mentioned the photo exhibit by atget to mr. "little paris", and asked him about the reconstruction of berlin after the 50's. the sense pride in him, turns into mixed of nostalgia and questions never asked before. how long will berlin exist as "little paris", until it fades away like paris, like, rome? then becoming a musuem of itself?

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when berliners ask me why i am in berlin, i tell them that i am a student at humboltd and am studying berlin and cinema, and the historical interaction between the two. they are the not interested until i tell them that i want to write a poem in german. then i tell them about ingeborg bachamnn, maybe then about brecht, celan, trakl, rilke, and so on. and from there it goes on... the people that i have met in berlin have treated me very well, and the poem will be for them, as well as for myself.

i hope i can complete it, i have been learning german for a month now, and it takes me half an hour to write one paragraph. from now on i will try to write in german as much as i can.

the poem will be written all in german, it will be worked out in my head, it will not be written down in english. i will work it out in german.

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bettina got mad at me last week, she said if i want to learn german, why am i living with americans? i agree with. if i live in berlin, i should live with berliners, not the tourist and sojourners. i would also like to meet people many immigrants like my father, who worked and bled into the land so much that it is apart of him. where will he die? danke schoen.

distance for nearness - memory for forgetfulness

i like jaana, she is half estonian and half armenian. she grew up in estonia, and considers herself estonian. and if that is the case why does she have the initiative to declare herself armenian in front of the turkish people? is it because she still identifies herself as armenian...?

i want to explore the relationship other people have with their own past and how that creates situations that an individual identifies with. i try to distance myself from my own personal haunting memories, and learn from other, and maybe that will give me guidance to deal with my own ghosts.

when i said the poem was going to be about kumi, i meant it somewhat jokingly. the poem will be about my mother, who died when i was a baby. the poem will then be about my relationship with women.

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i didn't find out my mother's name or the cause of her death until i was 18 and had to fill out my college application which asked for my mother's name. what does her absence mean and how does it stay present? how can i confront and accept her? what does her memory mean to me? i am figuring myself thought these unanswered questions. when i was a child, i cried my myself to sleep constantly and woke up with a salty aftertaste. one dream that is still vivid is of her, standing on a pendulum with a blade attached to the bottom swinging back and forth, and i am situated in the middle where the blade is inching towards me moment by moment. she is large, dress in white and i am couched in the infant position, very small.

i know that her memory is still very strong in me. my father hides her from me.

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i read an article a few days ago by Ursula Duba, relating the experience of teaching the holocaust to germans, "the German students at these schools responded with sullen anger" and "several students exclaimed, 'If it wasn't for people like you spreading all this sh--, we wouldn't be mistreated by the rest of the world!'" i can relate to the german students. because even thought i don't remember any lived experience with my mother, i am reminded of her death quite often. everytime i see a mother and child, everytime i... alle tage.

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in "auf der andersen seite", there is a scene with the german mother and the turkish girl in the kitchen, the mother says that when turkey joins the EU everything will be fine for the turkish people. the girl than angrily replies and explains why she is in germany to escape political persecution.

"To this day, Turkey denies that there was an Armenian genocide. Japan still mostly clings to silence in regards to its history of horrific war crimes. The horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia have yet to be prosecuted. And the recent genocide in Rwanda is already experiencing revisionism among many Hutus in that country."
-Ursula Duba

in "snow" by orphan pamuk, there is a but a few lines about how the armenian genocide, and it caused quite a scandal.

in germany there is an significant number of turkish people seeking a future in germany. how does the german treat the turkish people? does the past hinder of present?

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mother, what have you been doing all of these years? i would like to see you again and talk to you. or maybe not since you are dead. where is pooh.

explaining my blog

i know that my blog may not be an usual production journal, so i will explain a few things. my part of the movie our group is making will be showing me write a poem in german, simple. my first blog is about what the poem will about, kumi. all of the others blogs will be me trying to explore memory. my poem will be about my how to deal with the memories of my mother. i will try to be as concrete as possible without over-explaning. i use the blog more as an exploration of ideas, rather than to set examples out. for me it is a ongoing process, not an ending.

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one major influence i have is 'Salman, the solitary' by Yashar Kemal. in the book he explores the war from the prespective of the turkish people who's lives were destroyed. and he does it without directly mentioning the armenian genocide, and many people who will the book will be affect by the content, without knowing the context. do the german have a book like Shizuko Go's "Requiem"? what is a victim? a movie that i like is "devil on the doorsteps" by Wen Jiang, it deals with the historical past in an very mature way. it is lays out its own wounds and mistakes, weaknesses, not just the historical enemy, like many movies about war.

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i am learning from Kemal, how to deal with my our troubled past, and i hope maybe that will create a ripple effect. will i be able to express myself well enough so that people can share my experience?

to live

for the last week, we, spent most of our time going to the market to get pots, knives, spices, and many other pantry items. i, alone, have spend close to 200 euro. we were trying make for myself a home in berlin. how is it feasible to live in berlin?

Franziska membership's name is "ITDONTFEELLIKEHOMETOME", sometimes i don't feel like home to me. i haven't gotten a chance to talk to her about living in berlin. Chiara grew up in berlin, and when i asked her why she is leaving berlin to teach deaf children in Israel, she gave me the same reasons i left seattle, it is a cold city. ed simplified SID for me. he and said that seattle is the suicide capital due to seasonal induced suicide? i can imagine being crushed under the clouds, and lost trying to find my shadow is on a gray day, lost and seeming to disappear.

i met a girl last night, who's name i probably would not remembered, or even have known, but luckily her name and number is still on the card in front of me. i would like to see her again and cook dinner for us. when we walked around, i saw the scars on her arm, and made sure to soften them when i got the chance. i tried not to be noticeable sentimental. she turned away from me in the morning and tried to hurriedly leave. i wanted her to remember later, even if she doesn't remember last night. last night is the only night so far, but it will not be the last. i walked her home in the morning and we talked, she taught me a little german. her name is janine and she has three beautiful freckles and eine nossal, lippa, sinie, und eine gross lahaine.

jaana is from estonia, also lives in berlin, and she loves berlin. she has been here 1 and half years, and needs to work on her german. great men live in paris, but never die there, so what about berlin? i wonder where jaana will die. joel was talking to jaana for a couple of hours last night, and i offer to give joel jaana's number and e-mail, and he decline, then accepted, and when we got home, he again declined.

chiara says that she admires the turkish people, for their livelihood and feels disturbed by their arranged marriage tradition. jaana says that when her little sister was in turkey, she didn't see as much women wearing traditional scarves in Istanbul as in Berlin (pardon my ignorance on the proper naming of the scrave, i did look it up, but got lost once again). jaana when she gets very drunk, tries to start a fight with the turkish people, she defiantly declares that she is an Armenian. the turkish people respond by smiling, providing her with hospitality, her new home is in kreuzberg and she loves it. she does not know how to feel about living in kreuzberg. jaana also admires how the strong, close, and warm the turkish culture is and continues to grow.

hilter declared that, no one will remember the Jews in 50 years, because no one remembers the Armenians. for me it is not difficult to imagine nuclear war eclipsing WWII.

joel said that there was no great wars left for our anyone anymore we can't be cool like our grandpa. he wants to do something amazing like walk from north to south korea, das ist der hammer. i think that everyday you are at war (and so does joel), epecially during peace time. i gave him "alle tage" by ingeborg bachmann to read. it is the war we fight alle tage with our daily difficult, and what we losers continue to challenge. i do not know much about anything. the most i can do is try to be a friend instead of being indifferent. i have much to learn about kreuzberg and will repeatedly visit the turkish market instead of doner kebops shops. for now the only way i know how to live is that, i cannot rest until i deserve to die.

wind will carry us

when i first came to berlin, the first thing that caught my attention was when i was walked aimlessly around and got lost further and further away. and there it appeared in big graffiti letters, "THIS IS NOT AMERICA".

i felt home. and for the next few days i walked a minimum of 6 hours a day to conitue to explore.

later that same day i meet my first berliners and now friends, simon and markus. we talked about biking, critical mass, played frisbee, and they showed me and told me about their neighborhood. the next day, we went to a hardcore german punk rock show, and i marshed with the rest of them, and got to play drums on stage. simon did not marsh but i got markus to come into the pit. we were cursed at, had beer poured onto us, and continually knocked around. luckily i came out with only a twisted ankle, a ruined shirt, and a swollen neck. i couldn't sleep the next few days and my fravorite shirt is ruined. the lead to the punk band came up to me after the show and thank me personal for my enthusiasm, along with many other random punk rockers. this not a bad way to start my journey in berlin. it makes me happy.

it makes me made mad when people watch and violently push me in the circle and find excitement from that. what pleasure is derived from being behind the screen and not have to worry about any consequence. ungrateful bastards all of them. so what we did inside the circle was, we braced ourself together, we hugged eached. then we sprung around in circle and pushed the pushers back, we let the wind carry us and hopefully one day they will too.

markus and simon have been kind and considerate, very hospitable. they spent considerate time and explained to me all about their neighborhood, and showed their loved for berlin, their home. when i went to simon's house, he served me water from a bottle, when he was sick and drank water from the faucet. he let me borrow his bike for critical mass, and i have had it for over a week and a half.

when i went to critical mass, there were four police vans packed with the polizei. the polizei came to us and asked if we were there for critical mass, the older man played dumb and returned with a question. "what critical mass is?", and we followed his routine example. the man seems to be having fun, the polizei very pissed. the current german polizei has learnt a lot from the stasi, and the old men from the east german people. only a few people met at the main street, and after an hour we then pretended to leave and went our seperate ways, but actually made a rendezvous at the park. the other folks were waiting for us. i felt like we were on a secret operation. we then road in the street and blocked all traffic, heading towards mitte in pouring rain. i came home drench in mud.

how does it feel to be a memory

i went with danny to daemond's house a while back for a poetry workshop. the prop that daemond came up with is to write about an old woman confronting the death of her husband, and having to confront it again. one of the lines, i came up with is "how does it feel like a memory", which they both liked very much. it was one of the only poetry workshop i have ever been to, and one of the few times in my life that i tried to write a poem. daemond is now married, i was at his wedding three days before boarding the plane to berlin, danny is touring the us.

two questions that i asked many people in our group are
"why did you come to berlin" and "what do you expect to do in berlin".

when i was asked that question, i answered that my quest was to marry a smart, rich beautiful, loving european woman, get eu citizenship. truth is, i want to move to virginia and marry heather pooh. chessa said that the reason i can't have a good relationship is that pooh bear is kumi. pooh bear is not kumi, pooh bear is pooh bear. i have many memories of both pooh bear and kumi, but i sleep with pooh bear every night, not kumi. i rarely ever think about kumi, although i am constantly reminded of her, as when i walked around see all the bears in berlin, and of how happy she'll be to see those bears, especially the bronze statue with a dozen bears playing with each other. i wonder how pooh bear feels about it, he was excited at first, but now is hesitant to answer. chessa asked me why i am not with kumi, and i asked chessa to go out with me. and we walked around a little bit, but not much more, she has gone to amsterdam.

(ed is sitting next to me, and he is playing ipod and remembering when he first got it, because memory is in the object.)

if you are a memory kumi, where do you exist? pooh is too much of pooh to be you.

i do not know why i am in berlin, the decision was based on a whim, and as to what i plan to do, i want to write a poem, and maybe dedicate it to you-