The movie stands on a tripod: City, person, and object. City: Istanbul. Person: Ara Güler. Object: The Tekfur Palace.

Enis Batur is the most widely translated poet among the contemporary Turkish authors. In our movie, he is conversing with photo-journalist Ara Güler, who was awarded the title Master of Leica in 1962, an honour accorded to very few photographers in the world. Thema: The possibility of Istanbul's, Ara Güler's hometown with its 4500 years of history, vanishing from the face of earth.

Ethnically, Ara Güler is a member of a minority group, namely Armenians. As an artist he is a world-renown personality. In his own words: Someone's hometown is the place where his memories are. Today, there seems to be no one left who dares to get into a passionate relationship with the city. The city, just like the Tekfur Palace (only remaining example of Byzantine secular architecture in the world) in it, is disintegrating slowly. The palace has some unmatched architectural properties; it was used as a stable for elephants, a ceramic factory, and a dormitory for Jews throughout its centuries of history. The palace is completely left to its fate today and it is slowly crumbling.

In the movie, while trying to reflect Istanbul in its many layers, we made use of a technique utilizing different camera angles and montage. The movie is split into two halves; on the one side, the speed of the chaotic rat race and the unnerving, non-stop accumulation of 4,500 years of Istanbul history; on the other side, the layer-by-layer, stone-by-stone representation of the static state of Tekfur Palace, a building which is crumbling slowly in the middle of this chaos.

Clearly, as we were producing the movie, the limitations imposed by the form of our material and our intellectual choices effected each other. For example, when we wanted to present slices of Ara Güler's life using the photographs we had, our decision to display different photographs for unequal durations on the screen is a result of our perception that the moments frozen in a life always have different densities and flow rates.

To summarize, if the movie is interrogated frame by frame in the context of its own unity, the conclusion that we hope will emerge is: Its meaning is in its form.

The main objective of the movie is to arouse the curiosity of the viewers about a building, a person, a photograph that they would possibly never be interested in, if they did not see the movie; and to make them question the nature of the film's unity. Hopefully they will continue questioning, so that we can continue making movies.

Ara Güler

Ara Güler, one of the most distinguished and internationally renowned of creative photographers, was born in Istanbul in 1928. In 1962 he was awarded the title Master of Leica, an honour accorded to very few photographers. He interviewed and took photographs of various famous personalities from Bertrand Russel to Winston Churchill, Arnold Toynbee to Picasso and Salvador Dali.

In addition to extensively photographing the life of Istanbul, he had travelled over most of the world apart from South America, and his photographs had been distributed throughout various countries by the Magnum Agency and printed in various newspapers and periodicals.

Works by Ara Güler were exhibited in Glimpses of the Human World in Canada in 1967, Ten Masters of Colour Photography in the New York Gallery of Modern Art in 1968, and the Fotokina Fair in Koln in the same year. In 1972, an exhibition was opened in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Just to name a few more: In 1986 in San Francisco. In 1987 in Washington D.C. In 1988 in Koppenhagen, Odense, and Helsinki. In 1990-91 in Strasbourg. In 1992 in Sevilla. In 1993 in Argenteul. In 1995 in Dusseldorf. His photographs were also exhibited in Das Imaginare Photo-Museum (1981) and the Ludwig Museum (1997) in Köln.

A large number of Ara Güler's photographs are to be found among the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque National in Paris, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester U.S.A., and the Nebraska University Sheldon Collection.

The Tekfur Palace (The Palace of the Porphyrogennetos)

The Tekfur Palace is the only palace that remained from the Byzantine Period in the world. It was built adjacent to the land ramparts of Istanbul between Edirnekapi and Haliç.

By some researchers, it is dated to the late 13th century and identified with the Palace of Constantine Porphyrogennetos, a son of Michael VIII Palaiologos. However, it is possible that the 13 th century building uses parts of older constructions. Porphryogenitus means "born in the purple," the royal color of Byzantium. The Byzantine Emporer Constantine XI spent some of his last days here before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It was used for various aims after the conquest of Istanbul in 1453. In the Ottoman period, it was used even as a stable (even for elephants for a brief period) and as a dormitory for Jews, until a ceramic factory was established in the building during the 18th century.

The facade with its decorative brick settings is definitely one of the best and most impressive works among the few pieces of secular Byzantine architecture that have survived.

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