Sight Unseen presents Note To Self: Films of Nazli Dinçel

62 minutes

Director: Nazli Dinçel

An evening of visceral and provocative handmade films that explore bodies, acts of the solitary, text, language, visual information and personal exposure. Nazlı Dinçel’s work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire in juxtaposition with the medium’s material: texture, color and the passing of emulsion. Her use of text as image, language and sound attempts the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society.

 

 

Filmmaker will be present and Q&A to follow.

 

 

Leafless

16mm, 8min, Color, Silent, 24fps, 2011

Leafless is an expansion of collections, a hand processed love poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.

 

 

Her Silent Seaming

16mm, 10min, Color, Super 16 Image-Sound, 24fps, 2014

A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (2011) and motifs of the “feminine”. These decorative objects are re-valued through a controlled act of cutting, with an allusion to synchronization. Direct sound of cuts and hand processing are composed of 26 frame shots. Un-synced, it reveals a hearing of past images, as an act of translation.

 

 

Sharing Orgasm: Communicating Your Sexual Responses (Educational Found Film)

16mm, 12 min, Color, optical sound, 24fps, 1977

 

 

Solitary Acts #4

16mm, 8min, Color, Optical Sound, 24fps, 2015 Exacto Knife, Typewriter

The filmmaker films herself masturbate the object of debate. She hears others claim her body, her habits: those in her conservative surroundings as a child. She learns how to read.

 

 

Solitary Acts #5

16mm, 5min, Color, Sound, 24fps, 2015 Exacto Knife, Fishing Line, Sewing Machine

The filmmaker films herself practice kissing with a mirror. She recalls teenage memories of overconsumption, confusing oral fixations that are both sexual (kissing) and bodily (eating). She ends up eating the carrot she is masturbating with, and feels a sense of cannibalism.

 

 

Solitary Acts #6

16mm, 11min, Color, Optical Sound, 24fps, 2015 Exacto Knife, 1.5mm Letter Punches, Hammer, Leather Puncher

The filmmaker films her subject in a private act, complicating what could be considered a solitary act. This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex, narrating from the perspective of the female. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. The aborted child takes the place of her lover.

 

 

VOID (4.INABILITY)

16mm, 4min, Color, Silent, 18fps, 2016

This is a re-destroyed film that I was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed both in ruins: at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with a former partner. Film was destroyed in ocean water.

 

 

Shape of a Surface

16mm, 9min, Color, Optical Sound, 24fps,Turkey, 2017

The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.

 

 

Between Relating and Use

16mm, color, 9min, sound, 24fps (Argentina/USA) 2018

Laser engraver, Ektachrome Borrowing words from Laura Mark’s “Transnational Object” and DW Winnicott’s “Transitional Object”, this film is an attempt to ethically make work in a foreign land. Transitioning from assuming the position of an ethnographer, we turn and explore inwardson how we use our lovers.