A story of Still life

Still life

We are in the shanty town bellow Istanbul. It resembles the cave that was recently discovered in Vietnam. The smell of light and rain is sitting on the first row of the cinema hall. We, are far at the back. Solar shafts have migrated here for one and only reason. To please the eye of Leigh-Cheri, the liberal, environmentalist princess that once fell in love with Bernard Mickey Wrangle, the terrorist. She made her world in a cave under the earth, so that it's not round and so that it has an end. In that way she could follow her lover “to the ends of the earth”. A dry moon, suitable for paper birds, hangs from the top of the tallest tree column in the garden, tomb of Bernard. Leigh-Cheri and the cyborg grandmothers buried him inside the tree many years ago. And now they make wise ruined birds out of it. “This is how love stays”, she says. The cave would have been rocky and greeny and boring like all landscapes and jungles, without Leigh-Cheri's shanty town that hosts the poor cyborgs and people who lost their houses in the earthquake of 2030. Every now and then she stitches the paper moon that sails over the cardboard sea which is covered with cellophane to reflect the birds. She is not melancholic, because all melancholy got sank in Bosporus since forever. She believes that her present is the most violent moment in time, because of the nostalgia of the future. Thus death becomes purely aesthetics. All of the princess’s birds have escaped from the ancient Mariner. That's the myth they grow up and live with till one of the inhabitants decides to make a toilet extension in his house and use them as a roof. The birds are wise because they are romantic. And they are romantic because they have never seen the moon. Leigh-Cheri finds her solitude romantic and has a wing on her arm that makes her feel like Odette. Her hands though, drink the pulp of rotten vegetables like mosquitos in the hot summer nights, while she wonders weather Ferhan Mimar is ever going to finish the construction of her palace. She remembers the time she got buried in a pyramid with Bernard by her jealous Egyptian husband, and had to make a bomb and blow herself up to open a hole and save her beloved terrorist. They both ended up deaf. By the first quarter of the twenty second century, the vegetarian princess will have eaten the jungle.

My story and characters are taken from and inspired by:

Tom Robbins- Still life with Woodpecker*

Samuel Taylor Coleridge- The rime of the ancient Mariner

Ettore Scola- Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi (Ugly, Filthy and Mean)**

Pier Paolo Pasolini- Uccellacci e Uccellini***

Michel Gondry- The science of sleep

*more specifically: the characters of Leigh-Cheri and Bernard, the fact that they were trapped in a pyramid by her husband and she had to blow it up, the fact that she wanted to follow her love to the ends of the earth, the cardboard sea and one or two more ideas are taken from this novel. Also, the book adresses the issue of "how to make love stay". Robbins says that the answer is: "through mystery".

**this film tells the story of a family that lives in a very poor shanty town in the periphery of Rome.

***Pasolini says for this film: Hawks and Sparrows was my movie that I loved and I love more, first of all because it is "the poorest and the most beautiful". One of the three main characters in this film is a raven, an intellectual of the left before the death of Palmiro Togliatti.


Also: I am not vegetarian.