VERDICT: Sirin Bahar Demirel's stimulating bricolage short combines archival imagery with animation to examine how pictures tell stories and whether they can be mined for truth.
Between Delicate and Violent is a film about how meaning is or can be transmitted by the things we make.
Made by Sirin Bahar Demirel, this 15-minute short seeks to explore the way that paintings, photographs or embroidery can be loaded with the real emotions of the situation behind their creation, as well as the depiction of said situation that they were created to convey. She begins by drawing a parallel between the glowing molecules in the brain that represent memory formation and the collecting of photographs in an album, before interrogating what we choose to add to our personal memory compilations.
Across the film, the nature of this inquiry shifts and changes – beginning with a question about her grandfather, who was a painter. Family photos, colour fields, hand-drawn elements and clippings of paintings are cast together on screen like the contents of a scrapbook. Through a narration accompanying these images, Demirel contemplates whether the impressions left in the paint by her grandfather’s hands might also suggest, in some esoteric way, the other kinds of marks his hands left. Similarly, to what extent may the flowers embroidered by her grandmother hold onto or release the traumatic memories of her life? How far is our reading of these visual expressions – or, for that matter, any creative text – defined by our understanding of their construction?
In Between Delicate and Violent, Demirel seems to want to work through these questions but to also understand the degree to which re-forging the various archival materials at her disposal can bring their underlying truths to the surface. Images are obscured or distorted – photos are scratched, sections are concealed, and details are expunged – while others are juxtaposed or embellished with hand-drawn additions and animations. In some instances, these interventions act to recontextualise the meaning of a picture in line with the narration, but more broadly the film creates an exquisite graphic representation of the way the archive lives, forming new connections and being reformed in its reception.
Director, screenplay, producer, editing: Sirin Bahar Demirel
Sound, music: Onur Kahraan
Production companies: Bilsart (Turkey) Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Competition for Short Documentary)
In Turkish
15 minutes
