MARGARETE. FILM PRESENTATION
REVIEWS:
"Turkowski's 'Margarete' at Noorderzon 2012"
During performing arts festival Noorderzon (Groningen, The Netherland) Polish performer Janek Turkowski offered a surprisingly small and intimate filmic refuge from the predominantly big and spectacular main programme . His Margarete evokes a time long gone, on the other side of the Iron Curtain: captured on 8mm and super8 by an East German lady named Margarete. Since the mainstream success of films as Das Leben der Anderen (2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) the cultural imagination tends to favour a slightly bleak visualisation of everyday life in the DDR. Margarete shows us something else.
Turkowski stumbled upon the film material on a flea market in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Attracted by the immaculately packaged reels, he pondered on eventually repurposing this stock in some form of artistic bricolage. His resolve eventually developed in an interesting artistic-documentary hybrid, using both analogue and digital projection accompanied by Turkowski's real-time narrating skills. During the early development of his piece, he grew less interested in imbuing new artistic meaning to the material. Instead, he gradually became more fascinated by the familiar and yet impalpable aesthetics and narrative fragments of the original owner's life.
Margarete's celluloid life is filled with idiosyncratic moments one comes to expect from 8mm amateur footage: amiable bus trips to various holiday destinations, birthday parties of friends and family, and fragments of her everyday environment. However, this nostalgic imagery is juxtaposed by Turkowski's own search for artistic and personal meaning. As we playfully try to reconstruct the historical, social, and geographical coordinates of Margarete filmic existence, Turkowski's own digital life takes over. (...)
During his own audio-visual journey he hopes to directly access the past, with the help of Margete's memories. Janek soon realizes that the elderly woman's fragility - she is almost deaf and blind - obstructs his final bid to unravel the truth behind the shadow play of this particular 'Ossi' past. As he finally wanders on the flea market where he started off, he makes a shocking discovery: between a variety of 'Ostalgic' antiquarian goods the stand has on offer, Turkowski finds more traces of Margarete's past.
The tragic and painful deterioration of the elderly woman suddenly pales in comparison to the awareness that someone near her, aims to profit from her deeply personal belongings. Luckily some of her heritage fell in trustworthy hands.
Report Janek Turkowski's 'Margarete' at Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival.
By Tom Slootweg. http://homemoviesproject.wordpress.com
"Nerdy detective work"
Nostalgic performance about a strange woman's 8 mm films.
At an outdoor market in Berlin, theatre man Janek Turkowski finds a set of private 8 mm films and a projector. For the small cost of 20 Euros he takes the bargain home to Poland and begins to play with the material. The films show a woman in East-Germany, from the fifties, via the sixties. The same woman on a bus ride, at work, in the woods, parades, scenery, parties - those sorts of things people film. Turkowski systematizes, digitizes and looks for connections. Slowly he unravels the way to the owner of the material.
The Performance Margarete is low-key, pleasant and suitably nerdy. Turkowski places us on chairs and cushions on the floor. He serves coffee and tea and lectures on his own slightly intense interest for this relatively coincidental and rather unsensational material. The original films are transient and hence in a strange way connect us more to the people silently flickering in front of us. They go onto old Eastern Block buses, they go sightseeing, they walk their dogs. With humor and irony Turkowski talks about the amount of time he has put in to slowly uncover and construct stories from the material.
After one hour he has untangled everything as far as he got, from Poland via Germany to Russia and back. And we are a little wiser. Perhaps we haven't learned much about the specific Margarete, but correspondingly more about the ties that bind us to complete strangers, to each other and to history. This is a low-key and sympathetic little performance about big words like time, nostalgia and compassion.
Performed all week on the Bastard-festival.
Critic by FRIDA HOLSTEN GULLESTAD
Adresseavisen, Monday 10 September 2012
"Margarete: discovering of life"
I rarely leave theater so much convinced that what I just saw is a touch of the unattainable, yet important and significant. Yesterday I spent an evening at the Kana Theatre where Janek Turkowski presented his project titled 'Margarete. The Presentation of Movies'.
During this over one-hour meeting Janek did not just show us movies; he suplemented his precisely prepared presentation with his own commentary, telling us about his experiences of encountering the past of an unknown woman. Several years ago he went to a German flohmarkt, a market with stalls offering old stuff, and found celluloid movie tapes from a private collection. They contained records of everyday life, trips, and meetings of a woman whose name and address were written on boxes with the tapes. (...)
Bizarre, random encounter with an old woman's life, the experience of searching for a possibility of recording someone's memory complements material beauty of these movies. There is a gentle breeze of the past in them, caught in flickering shake of 8mm tape. There is also something important, yet unpopular - a positive dimension of the story, experiencing the beauty of life, its joyful dimension, pleasure of discovery.
Kamila Parandowska www.teatrblog.pl
"Theatre is not a Church"
Theatre is not a church, theater is a meeting place. Janek Turkowski invited us to a small room, filled with woven mats, smell of brewed tea with lemon and cinnamon. In the atmosphere of complete trust and security, we learnt the story of Margarete Ruhbe.
Janek Turkowski accidentally came in possession of several dozen celluloid tapes with records addressed to a certain Margarete Ruhbe. Driven by curiosity, he decided to reconstruct the story of 'the protagonist'. (.) Turkowski interestingly develops the issue of 'memory'. His film presentation (i.e., non-theater) shows the sad truth how fallible human memory is. People, forgetting their own past, are sentenced to confirm themselves in its awareness. They do it by using new technologies - film, photography - media which are only seemingly reliable.
I would call Janek Turkowski the editor. He independently selects fragments of films he wants to present to the audience. In certain moments he manipulates recorded images to impose his own interpretation by adding sound or short written dialogues to the movies. Technical interventions of Turkowski are very interesting, especially at the stage of verification of the recordings. Two parallel records - on celluloid tape and digital media (representing today's image of locations recorded years ago) - bring the idea of simulacrum to mind. Recorded image contains a real image, and de facto becomes the one.
Joyful is the fact that this year's edition of SPOTKANIA goes far beyond the framework of theatre. 'Margarete' is not a documentary theater. It is rather a project bearing some feature of a document, interesting in the context of 'encounter' with a human story.
Patrycja Terciak
"Oddźwięki" festival newspaper SPOTKANIA 2011 nr 2. 02/10/2011 Łódź
"Margarete in The Szwalnia Theatre"
On Friday evening the Szwalnia Theatre hosted the Kana Theatre. At 5.00 p.m. a presentation combined with the author's narrative began. It was not a performance for ordinary theatre-goers, but rather a metaphysical journey.
The Kana Theatre presented a series of unusual and original films from the 1960s. There would be nothing extraordinary if not for their past. The 8mm tapes were acquired at a flea market in Germany, along with the entire equipment to display them. After many hours of watching them, it turned out that each of sixty tapes contains records of the same, old woman. The tapes enable the spectators to follow the journey she took. We can admire images of Russia, Germany, and cruise ships. Besides multitude and diversity of landscapes, the tapes include snippets of celebrations, parades and family gatherings. A recurring motif in films is a figure of an old woman and her dog. Interestingly, all the films which were saved from destruction by the author of the presentation were addressed to a certain Margarete Ruhbe.
The address shown on the tapes and the women's name inspired the author to dig into the content of these home recordings. Watching carefully each minute of the films, the author caught details, which would not be possible to register in one's memory at first viewing. He created the entire panorama of family travels, mutual relationships, and enigmatic glances at the camera lens. (...)
The Kana Theatre, presenting its work connected with 'studying' of Margarete's home records, showed how many secrets are hidden in an image. It also showed what may come out from acute observation of reality. If you are curious why Margarete carries two bags while walking, why the old man closely monitors every movement of the camera, and if the author was able to find the protagonist in the end - go to the Szwalnia Theatre.
Mar&Jan www.plasterlodzki.pl 18.06.2011
Life recorded on celluloid
When does a document end and when does theatre begin? Where is the boundary between detective investigation and an exciting exploration? What is the difference between coincidence and destiny? Was it Jan Turkowski who came across Margarete Ruhbe, or the opposite - she came across him? The author of the event invited us to encounter his own adventure. In mysterious scenery, filled with smell of incense, padded with a woolen lace blanket, after offering each of us a cup of hot tea, he told us the story of his acquaintance with Margarete.
While on holidays in Germany, during one of many trips with his son and his mother, Jan Turkowski drifted to the street leading to flea market. For a song one could purchase there old projectors, celluloid tapes, clichés with photographs. A few euros is enough to buy someone else's memories, to view lives of unknown people, to invent missing events and to arrange them in completely new stories. To exchange little money for extracts of someone's life, and - consciously or not - to give him or her a new identity. Janek provided himself with 31 short films from a series of 'old lady's trips'. The film began innocently. A woman with a man walk in the woods with a dog. In front of the camera they perform scenes from everyday life. Black and white colors and coarse reflections, indicating age of the tape, combined with hum of the projector gave an amazing effect. Images from life of Margarete were distant from unambiguity. Each event could be over-interpreted, especially that it was soundless. (.)
In the introduction I asked where a document ends and when theatre begins? In Janek Turkowski's presentation it is hard to find clear boundary. Can we risk a term 'documentary theatre' to describe his work? In my opinion, it would seem to be a perfect definition. Yet what would such 'documentary theatre' suppose to mean actually?
Ania Waroch, "Oddźwięki" festival newspaper SPOTKANIA 2011 nr 2. 02/10/2011 Łódź
"Festiwal Bramat"
All in all, seven theatre groups and four musical bands were presented, plus one Seeker (if I can use this term); his actions impressed me most deeply. The event that made the deepest impression was surprising because it did not relate strictly to theater; it was rather oscillating somewhere between a document, chat, investigation, encounter, and something else, difficult to clarify. The perpetrator of this confusion was Janek Turkowski who invited us to a small room. We brought our cups of coffee there and took our seats, gradually reducing distance between us, moving closer to each other, to make more room for other people. Then we listened to a tale about Janek's adventure, related to excavation of the past of an old German woman, whose memories were thrown somewhere between rubbish on a German flea market. (...) We watched pieces of recorded memories: walking the dog, landscapes and architecture, which was also immortalized. Boredom, boredom. Yet somehow we were not bored at all. And how about the protagonist? A nice, ordinary, featureless woman became interesting to us, we were curious of her ordinary life. And for a while we became attentive, concentrated; we looked on someone's life placed in the find, discovered by a strange man who - for some unknown reasons - wanted to wade into the world of old recordings. We stopped. Just like Margarete was able to stop Janek for a while, so he was able to convey that state very accurately to the receivers; the state in which the force forbiding us to rest, telling us to experience, chasing us mindlessly in different directions at the same time, completely without purpose - was eradicated for a while. Margarete domesticates and invites us to a place where we can experience deep emotions because of an intimate encounter with a person who is close to us, or with ourselves. I must admit that this project is a carrier of many artistic values.
Kinga Binkowska, Teatralia Szczecin November 19, 2010
