Six years ago, when Gökçen and I started talking, we were two people struggling to find a place within the film industry. What connected us was less our love for cinema than our hatred of its industry, and the frustration that came with it. We were both at a point in our lives when beautiful compositions, sound design, and lighting tricks did not impress us so much as irritate us. For many years, I was not someone who thought much about the relationship between cinema and its audience. I found it too unstable and far too devoid of objectivity. Now, I am writing these sentences after the loss of someone who always found the relationship between different forms of engagement and cinema deeply fascinating.

During one of our conversations, while I was sitting on a bench, I told Gökçen about an equation I had come across through a critic from the Japanese New Wave: an equation that positions the viewer as the instrument through which meaning within a film can extend beyond the space of the film itself. As usual, she was not immediately convinced by it. Gökçen did not particularly like complicated and ornate sentences about cinema. When I asked what she thought, she said that the film, the viewer, and all the relationships the film creates were not separate components of the equation; they were all in the same place. Later, she criticized me for being so obsessed with the fact that ‘movement’ to me personally meant to move from one place to another. It was a criticism that applied both to the way I looked at art and to the way I lived my life. One of the things I love most about Gökçen is precisely how comfortable she was with expressing herself.

That same evening, I came across these words by Ken Jacobs, talking about his own films:

“I don't even understand most conceptual work. I don't get it. In that way I do relate to the movies that want to offer you some kind of visual experience. Except you're the protagonist. You're entering the temple of doom; a new kind of growth. You have to find out what is in this thing for yourself and I'm offering it.”

Now I am writing these sentences after the loss of someone who did not particularly like complicated and ornate sentences about cinema. It has been a little over a month since we lost Gökçen. On the night we lost her, around two in the night, while I was trying to make sense of everything that had happened, the thing I found myself doing in the middle of it all was watching David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a film Gökçen loved and one that had inspired the Brief Encounters series we started on Chute a long time ago, at her suggestion.

This was not a planned memorial ritual for me. In the middle of all that grief, I simply found myself watching the film without knowing why. I have always been someone with fairly clear boundaries when it comes to forming emotional attachments to works of art. In fact, when we first started the Brief Encounters series with a film that Gökçen chose, I told her, “Please, let’s not start with a Xavier Dolan film. There must be better options out there.” Her response was, “This is my encounter. What matters for this series is not the film, but my encounter with it.”

Anyway, in a state in which I could barely understand what I was thinking or how I was supposed to think, I started watching Brief Encounter. I remember looking for Gökçen in every moment of the film. I wanted to know what she might have loved, and why, and how. I wanted to know every detail. Early in the film there is a scene in which Celia Johnson is standing at the station at night while a train passes by her. A scene that is not particularly striking, yet I watched it over and over and over again. For some reason, I became certain that Gökçen must have loved this scene.

Celia Johnson standing on the platform with a confused expression on her face, a man she has only just met standing on the opposite platform, and a train passing between them, followed by a black screen. Such a classic train station scene.

It made me think of our conversation I mentioned earlier, on the relationship between a film and the person watching it. I felt, quite violently, that perhaps I had underestimated this connection far too much. If I don’t count the tears I shed every time I watch Spielberg’s A.I., then this is a state of mind I have largely failed to understand.

Then came the same questions again: how can I understand a friend who loved cinema this much without needing to hear her words? How can I continue a dialogue with a friend who loved cinema this much when she is no longer here? I thought that looking again at the images she had loved so much, through the filters she brought to them, might be a form of dialogue I could still have with her. While carrying the grief of no longer being able to speak to her, perhaps this way of communicating could feel like a small consolation, despite all the pain. Then, as if everything had been written into a carefully planned script, Żuławski’s Possession, Gökçen’s favorite film, arrived in cinemas that same week, years after its original release.

For the past two years, I have been receiving support from a therapist because of anxiety and panic attacks. My first panic attack was triggered by sound. Because of that, I haven’t been able to watch horror films in a cinema or at home ever since. As someone who loved the genre dearly, the situation itself had become a horror film to me. My therapist had told me a few weeks prior, that as part of a therapy assignment, I should go and watch a horror film in the cinema and stay seated even if I become very uncomfortable. I had shared this with Gökçen at the time and we talked about it at length. She was very interested in the connection between cinema and therapy and continued to ask me questions about it from time to time. So when Possession arrived at the cinemas, everything suddenly turned into something I had to do, with all these things converging at once.

Since I was afraid that people might notice it if I became very anxious, I bought a ticket on the very first row for the first time in my life, accepting that I might end up with a stiff neck. I kept looking around, hoping that no one would sit next to me. My heart rate had already begun to rise.

Then the lights went out, and I was alone.

From the very first second of the film until the last, I thought about Gökçen. I tried to watch the entire film again through her eyes, years after I had first seen it. Through her relationship with Berlin, her relationship with the body, her relationship with eroticism, her relationship with the concept of love… I tried, for the first time, to see everything through all the perspectives I knew she would bring to it.

Perhaps that is why, during the famous metro scene, I suddenly remembered photographs Gökçen had taken of herself in that same metro station. I watched all of Isabelle Adjani’s madness with tears in my eyes and a smile on my face.

I was looking for something in every frame without knowing what I was looking for.

It felt as though we were watching the film as two people, while at the same time I felt completely alone.

All that tension of the film became a deeply contradictory emotional state.

The entire film felt like some kind of funeral ceremony.

How can I continue a dialogue with a friend who loved cinema this much when she is no longer here?

To look again at the things she loved, through her eyes, feels a little like inviting her ghost in. It is strange how quickly the tastes and aesthetics people build for themselves can become a source of sadness and consolation to someone else.

A word can be elegy to what it signifies.

Maybe it is an expression of the excessively tight bond we form with art.

Or maybe it is, as Gökçen always criticized me for, simply looking for more meaning than there needs to be.

Whatever it is, there is only one thing that remains: how powerful it is to summon this ghost, and how much cinema loves ghosts.


I miss you.

Baran.