Kalan / What Remains

Director, Cinematography: Cynthia Madansky
Dance: Leyla Postalcıoğlu
Music: Cenk Ergün, Jeff Snyder, Jason Treuting
16 mm ◊ 15:10 min.

“Am I the only mad person in this country?” — Leyla Erbil

While formally a contribution of Cynthia Madansky’s Feminist Writers Series, Kalan could also be seen as a third chapter in the artist’s work responding to the city Istanbul, following Devotion (2003) and Tarlabaşı (2014). As the former detailed the end of relationship by way of a nation in flux, and the latter zeroed in on the devastation caused by state-sponsored gentrification, Kalan borrows from Leyla Erbil’s titular novel (known as What Remains in English) to take stock of an increasingly surveilled metropole.

Erbil’s novel was published in 2011, while its epoch-spanning reflections on violence and power extend back to the Byzantine empire. Kalan—both the film and the novel—present history as overlapping and cyclical. Nowhere is this better evinced than the references to tanks, tear gas, and water cannons, images that echo the city’s more recent history, of protests and aftermath.

Throughout the film dancer Leyla Postalcıoğlu, exists within the context of the city, her body one of many, her presence as much of a part of the urban landscape as police barriers and scaffolding. Throughout, alongside the textual intertitles, Madansky also intercuts archival photographs of anonymous men and women, each victims of forced disappearance and state violence. These fleeting and ghostly images may be what remains, but Madansky doesn’t permit these traces to be lost or forgotten. They exist, as much lamentation as warning.

Part of the Feminist Writers Series, an ongoing suite of films, inspired by the words of radical international feminists. Ranging from canonized to little-known figures, and unbeholden by genre, the films cite and respond to works of poetry, novels, theatre, theory, political writing, and other nonfiction.