Don’t Rush (Elise Florenty, Marcel Türkowsky, 2020)
The sounds of Rebetiko — a yearning voice and a plucked baglama — ooze from the speakers hooked up to an ipad commanded by a young man in a small Athens flat. Two other men dozily watch as swooning odes of love and loss, populated with tales of migrant identity, drug busts and police oppression, reverberate through the dark room, and out into a warm summer night and the lives of the pirate radio show’s unseen listeners. The slow, captive mood of the room spelled out best in the phrase scrawled across a mirror which, translated, gives the film its title.
The immediate charms of Don’t Rush lie in the very simple beauty of the experience, its relaxed atmosphere, its invitation that you too lose yourself in the sounds of another time. The quiet therapeutic pleasure of an evening in, apart from the outside world; Listening, perhaps smoking or drinking, and cocooning yourself within the sounds; Drifting away with it. We are welcomed into this deeply private, familial experience and never feel that we have intruded wrongly. This mood, that stirs the heart as it emotionally nourishes, is channelled through a construction that confuses time and emphasises the mediative intimacy of the space; as if it were a sacrosanct reliquary of hymn, devotion and incense. The images move freely and dreamily throughout the evening, blurring our spatial conception as the pirate radio audio confers a sense of realtime continuity. The easy comfort of the men furtively caught in the reflection of mirrors that provide only glimpses and clues as to the more mundane truths taking place.
The films opening shows one of the three men, crouched up on a stool, mirroring a youtube video open on the laptop in front of him, so that the young man croons along with the singer. The video is a scene from the film Rebetiko (1983), shown here as part of a reenactment of a reenactment, illustrating a shifting fluidity of art and media eventually reaching the present, digital, state that has enabled its accessibility and malleability; demonstrated by its curational use in the pirate radio show. We later see the same young man playing an instrument, mouthing the words to these songs from a century prior; a reminder that they have always been ‘reenacted’ and spread by mouth, each voice adding its rendition to an ongoing chorus. This is music that has been commercialised and become object, but as technology has in a strange way reversed, these songs once again, belong to anyone. Disconnected from the pressings and existing in disparate youtube uploads, creating a new aura in the here and now of this dimmed room.
A music that emerged out of the hashish houses of an Asia-Minor rocked by the first world war and the ensuing Greco-Turkish war, Rebetiko took hold as migrants fled conflicts, arriving in port cities around the Eastern mediterranean and New York. The handling of this material makes it a profoundly tactile ‘text’ film, where we watch the natural interplay between these texts and their audience, past and present. Over the songs our host comments on the history of the music, drawing particular attention to the words, and the slang that illustrates the insular origins of the genre. Sometimes, the songs inspire him to make digressions of a political or personal nature; he dedicates a song to his love and later muses on the human need for solitude. There is recognition that the continued experiences of these songs is not merely a point of novelty. Far from it, they are messages of validation, calls for contemporary political action and empathy; to play, to listen and to understand is a gesture of love to the migrant boats that rocked on the same waves then, as they do now.
To listen and share is a reaffirmation, not just of the listeners own political convictions, but of the songs themselves; art that originated on the fringes of society, was looked down upon, repressed by the state and only later acknowledged back into a national heritage by the establishment. Through nothing more than a quiet, transcendent mundanity, the pirate radio show — itself an outsider entity — is recasting and re-establishing the continued existence and relevance of this music’s subversive political context; one that echoes through the lives of the young men sat in a dark Athens flat and those who cross the land and sea.
Other films I watched this week
Strata of Natural History (Jeanette Munoz, 2012), Envío for Helga Fanderl (2010), Puchuncaví (In Progress) - Delicately sharp 16mm works, able to capture the echo of history in public spaces both in fast, fractured sequences and longer patiently observed life; the political nuances of which only seem more impressive the more chewed upon.
Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979) - A surprisingly moving and sad film anchored by the endlessly warm, inviting lead performance of Ben Gazzara as the titular American pimp in mid-seventies Singapore. Better than any other western film I can think of captures the transition from the dying days of militaristic, old world imperialism, as the Vietnam War draws to a close, and the dawn of the economic globalisation seen in the incoming tower blocks and open plan hotel lobbies.
Marriage Story (Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2020) - Image and poetry reclaiming both mundane domestic security and transcendental, religious overtures within contemporary lesbian love.
The Name I Call Myself (Rhea Dillon, 2020) - Dual screen film/installation barrelling through a multitude of black British LGBTQ lives — intimate and public, singular and communal — with exhilarating bombast and confidence.
When You See a Rose (Renate Sami, 1994), Protection Foil (1983), Cape Cod (2018) - Three shorts by the filmmaker, When You See a Rose and Cape Cod both presenting a sweet, deep inhale of the exterior world in 16mm and digital formats respectively. Protection Foil an uninterestingly symbolic, student protest film.
Leopard, Glasses, Stream (Helga Fanderl, 2012; 2011; 2010) - Monomaniac 8mm works presented together, each dedicatedly focused on a singular experience, the full charm of which somewhat eluded me; overly weighty to my senses, the viewer closed off from each pieces interior loops.
hello, hope you are keeping well. i spent a lovely saturday afternoon recording a new episode of buried in space with clem and will. we played lots of lovely music including one of the rebetiko songs featured in ‘don’t rush’. i hope you enjoy.
all the best,
james
xx