Confronting The Elephant and Writing From Within
Film criticism has come as a by-product of my long-term infatuation with literary criticism. As a student of English Literature, the more I got acquainted with delicate ways of “reading”, the more of an enthusiastic concern it became for me to see what I can do in practice. This is not to say that first there was literature for me and then came cinema.
This is to say that I ended up a film critic as I studied to be a literary critic, and literature has remained in my life as an academic concern ever since. Cinema became a field of interest for me in the junior year of my education in literature -and only because of that, perhaps quite as its consequence- when I read Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and then watched Milos Forman’s film based on the same play. Thinking in retrospect, this was a marking experience for me because it somehow shaped my career, as it made me understand that these two mutually independent art forms are also mutually complementing halves.
I cannot possibly explain how elated and honoured I am to be a part of Berlinale Talent Campus 2010 in the course of my career journey. But I can certainly say how lucky I consider myself to be in Berlin this year, a centre of growing global attention and a most glamorous cultural nexus, the status being righfully earned by its industrious, noble-minded and sophisticated people. And it is my greatest pleasure to have this chance for closer contact with the fabric and ambiance of this beautiful world-capital.
Film criticism, in my opinion, is all about confronting the elephant when no one else in the room has the courage to do so. But this takes more than courage shown individually, and requires a fair degree of independency in the room. In that sense, film criticism in my country, Turkey, has the same existential problems as the field generally suffers around the world. The rise of independent media, in print or online, is sure to help the field to have a more meaningful existence and provide film critics with better means for their works. And the rest, I believe, is all about writing from within.
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