Still from Postcards from the Orient (2020) by Sis Gürdal
turkish filmmaker sis gürdal expands on her short film ‘postcards from the orient’ and its challenge to stereotypical tropes of femininity & cultural identity
Late June of this year, POSTSCRIPT was kindly invited to participate in a live evening event with The Showroom for their Collective Intimacy digital revival on theVOV. An initiative by Outset Contemporary Art Fund in collaboration with art+science collective Visualogical and technology platform Vortic, the programme was a part of an online art festival that allowed art institutions to digitally revive their most celebrated exhibitions for audiences across the globe.
For this special event, POSTSCRIPT hosted a screening programme titled On Cultural Self-Reclamation and the Female Gaze, bringing together female artists, creative directors and filmmakers whose works explore and deconstruct stereotypical and non-contextual tropes of femininity, identity and cultural influences. It began by expanding upon the conversations from POSTSCRIPT’s recent film, ‘english rose’, directed by Remi Laudat for POSTSCRIPT’s third print issue, The Defiance Issue, which addresses presentations of womanhood and feminine beauty. The second screening of the evening, Postcards from the Orient by filmmaker Sis Gürdal, is a film that offers a surreal reimagining of Eastern women and highlights the problematic representations of these women in Orientalist art. The screening was followed by a conversation between POSTSCRIPT’s Creative Director Chinasa Chukwu and Gürdal, examining the project in more detail and the reclaiming of definitions of femininity, womanhood and sensuality on personal terms. Below, we feature their discussion.
Chinasa Chukwu: Thank you for sharing Postcards from the Orient with us. It’s a truly mesmerising yet subversive depiction of Middle Eastern women’s sexuality and cultural identity. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to make Postcards from the Orient?
Sis Gürdal: Yeah sure. I was researching the colonialist gaze and, more specifically, how the formation of the Eastern woman came into context in Orientalist artworks, specifically in my native country Turkey. The representation of the Eastern woman in general, more specifically through Western art, is very much a blurred line between fantasy and reality. So, in the context of the Ottoman Empire, for example, Western artists were commissioned to paint the women of the harem, which is the many wives of the sultan. They would not be allowed in these spaces where the women lived so what they would do oftentimes was to hire women from the streets and ask them to pose for them, for money, and they would imagine these scenarios where [the women] live really luxurious lives—eating fruits, bathing, only enjoying and having a pleasurable experience. And these portraits ended up in museums all across the world and they are still representing Eastern women globally.
For me, I was thinking about how the depiction of Eastern women in art isn’t just about the other, it’s more about how the Western artist positions himself as the desired—the person who is making these paintings. The West is inherently advanced and the East is suppressed, behind and underdeveloped—that’s the dynamic that creates this artwork. So, there is a lot of material in academia about this but obviously, we can’t hear from the subjects of this artwork, and the women who are painted remain in the centre of the discussion as voiceless subjects. So as a tribute to these women, who have been misrepresented, I really wanted to make this film and I wanted to give them a voice.
Still from Postcards from the Orient
I love that. That was actually one of my questions. Elvira [Vedelago] and I spoke earlier about the importance of the female voice in projects like these. For me, part of Postcards from the Orient's subversion is through the voice speaking throughout. You just said you wanted to give them a voice but was it important for you to have the voice carry on throughout, rather than for instance having [an] instrumental play and having the voice for a section?
For me, it was a really important part of the project to create a dissonance between what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing. For the spoken word, I collaborated with writer May Ziade, who did an amazing job and elevated the project by giving it such a strong voice. The narration is actually the only way we hear the perspective of the women, so it’s an essential part of it for me. And May did a lot of research, going into it, to look through all the literature that represented these women from a Western perspective. So it was kind of like an answer to all of that. I think having that clash between what we’re hearing and what we’re seeing is essential because that’s how it should work. We should hear the voices of the people we’re seeing being talked about, posted about, written about; there’s always a dissonance between those things and that’s based on how we see and how we choose to see.
I did think it mattered obviously, but hearing about the kind of research that was put into it I think gives it an added complexity, makes the work even more layered than perhaps would be obvious at first glance. So Postcards from the Orient, as you’ve mentioned, is a critique of colonialist portrayals of Middle Eastern women. Do you feel like as an individual your sexual or cultural identity is something that you’ve had to reclaim from this damaging portrayal? And if so, how does that relate to your personal ideas of femininity, womanhood or sensuality?
I think that at its core, Postcards from the Orient is about the act of defining identity. For me, the most challenging part of defining my womanhood had to do with how it relates to finding my position in society, because of the way that womanhood is taught. I’ve experienced that in different cultures and received clashing ideas of what that should mean. You’re taught to think and feel in specific ways, usually depending on your culture, and that points to certain aspects about right and wrong. So the biggest thing that I’ve had to reclaim was that blank canvas to build my own idea of what it means to be a woman. I think that’s actually what the film talks about and what it reclaims as well, so to speak, that we need to define femininity and womanhood on our own terms.
“the biggest thing that I’ve had to reclaim was that blank canvas to build my own idea of what it means to be a woman. I think that’s actually what the film talks about and what it reclaims as well, so to speak, that we need to define femininity and womanhood on our own terms.”
Thank you for expanding and for being so open as well. To speak a little about the visuals that you use to convey this message, though Postcards from the Orient takes on visual language that is reminiscent of colonial orientalist depictions, the film itself obviously subverts those stereotypes of Middle Eastern women’s sexuality and daily life as you’ve pointed out. Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose to use this approach rather than create a film with an entirely different visual style?
Going into this, I felt like the film wouldn’t be effective if it was done any differently than how we as an audience recognise this imagery. We had to recreate those specific paintings that were focused on these women as sexual objects. By doing this we would be creating a sense of familiarity and then try to destroy it as much as possible throughout the voiceover. And obviously without being too derogatory, but we’re trying to break the film by using the perspective of that Western audience. We needed to recreate that sense of otherness for that exercise to work. So the aesthetic remained the same, but we also used other things, like the score, the camerawork, and the art, to try and convey the idea that there is something else going on here that you should pay attention to. There was also a separate part of this project, which is a small detail but we sculpted parts of the women’s bodies in the project and this was also to highlight the fact that anything that specifically portrays these women as sensual objects instead of human beings is the way that they are going down in history through these paintings. I think that recreating it was a bigger part of the challenge but it was also our goal.
I love that Postcards, for me certainly, is a film that you come back to in many different ways and there is always something else for you to uncover, and some other concept or message that you haven’t quite picked up. Because you’re right, if you do watch it with the sound off, it can feel like an entirely different film. And then you switch on the music and you listen to what’s actually being said. Okay, so what sensitivities, if any, did you have to be aware of while making the film, in the industry and then in society in general? You’re Turkish, for instance, but you made the film in New York, was there a reason for that?
I think that you always need to be extremely sensitive to your own voice when you’re representing someone other than yourself. For me, this was essential in keeping the film truthful. When it specifically comes to critiquing another perspective, which is what this film is based on, I felt like I had to be extra sensitive that it wasn’t making accusations and that it was just questioning things. Because we should ask the audience to think for themselves. So in that sense, it was always just inviting the audience to ask those questions, and I think that was a really tricky part of the project because we’re making all of these grand statements, and we’re setting a tone, and we’re suggesting and we’re hinting at a lot of things. But I think in that way, putting these projects out there is to do more than just raising our voice—I think that I was very aware of. So we stated the facts, history, real events but subtlety was essential in that. And why we shot in New York, I think that there were certain dynamics that needed to be recreated. For example, if I’m doing this in Turkey, I think that creating that sense of otherness would be much more difficult for me. Whereas I was doing it in New York and I was recreating the perspective of a Western artist, so in that sense really just creating that Occident perspective was essential.
Thank you for expanding so much on the complexities involved in the development of the film. My final question is what do you want audiences to take away from the film?
I think it’s hard to ask anyone to take anything away from my film. I can say that my biggest takeaway from making this film was to look at my own way of seeing and how that might misrepresent something or someone. Because the biggest thing for the film is how misrepresentation happens, and that’s where a lot of hearts get broken. I think that’s where we need to pay attention the most.
Amazing, thank you so much, Sis.
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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