Bad News / Good News
2005, 3 min. (video, color, sound)

Bad News / Good News is a video diptych, which explores representation of gender and sex, issues of stardom and melodrama in cinema.  Bad News is a video/sound collage comprised of de-contextualized representations of a woman in terror, agony or anguish.  The footage is extracted from three Turkish films entitled The Crying Woman (1967), My Beloved Hooker (1968) and They Call Me “Flashy” (1969). All three films star the same actress Turkan Soray, also known as the Sultan of Turkish cinema.  Images of the same woman reacting to tragic events accompanied by highly melodramatic music and sound effects are juxtaposed one after another. Yet, the cause of the tragedy remains unknown since the narrative is fragmented and the melodrama  is isolated. Good News, is also constructed from segments of old Turkish films, starring Cuneyt Arkin, probably the most famous actor in Turkish cinema. Unlike her female counterpart, he is always active; initiating action rather than receiving, inflicting pain rather than enduring. By juxtaposing the woman in continuous positions of weakness, passively experiencing the post-tragedy, forever reacting rather than acting with the violent, active powerful man, the video creates a splitting experience for the viewer as it builds its own music out of fragments of separate narratives.

CIGDEM SLANKARD

www.cigdemslankard.com

Cigdem Slankard was born and raised in Turkey and received her BA in translation and interpreting from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) in 1999. She first came to the United States in 1998 to study film and video at State University of New York in Binghamton. In 2002, she received a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking from Ohio University. She has written and directed several short film and video projects including Spare Change (2002), Three Three Minutes (2001) and Palindromes (2005). Her work has been included in several exhibitions and film festivals including Istanbul International Short Film Festival in Turkey, Ohio Short Film and Video Showcase of the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH; INVIDEO, an annual international video art festival in Milan, Italy; and Exhibition 280, a national juried exhibition hosted in the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia.