Innocence of Memories: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum and Istanbul

Listen to Jonathan Lethem's wonderful introduction to this film, recorded at BAMPFA on June 2, 2016.

There was a man named Kemal, who obsessively loved a woman, Füsun. Unable to keep her, he collected her in objects: hairbrushes, knickknacks, lipstick-laced cigarette butts . . . Out of this fictional fixation came Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, opened in 2012; there the visitor relives his 2008 novel of that name through “the magic of ordinary objects.” Ordinary magic is also in Pamuk’s relationship to his natal city, Istanbul, where the self-described flaneur habitually prowls, relishing its secret corners, its disorder, and its melancholy. As the old city comes down for the new, so stories are cut down with it. Hence, city as museum.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Narrator
  • Pandora Colin
  • Mehmet Ergen
Screenwriter
  • Orhan Pamuk
  • Grant Gee
Cinematographer
  • Grant Gee
Language
  • English
  • Turkish
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 90 mins
Source
  • The Match Factory
Preceded By

Dead World Order

Dana Levy, France, 2012

The Maison de l’Armateur. 

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 6 mins
source
  • Video Data Bank