Point of View

If everyone sees everything differently, how can we even speak of truth? What you call people's shared realities — what are they but a shackle they have fastened on themselves, all together? Five people watch one event and tell five separate stories. The endless quarrels at family tables are partly this; everyone sits at the same table, but no one eats the same meal.

If you are different, if I am different, if we are all different from one another a billion times over, then how can we think the same thing, how can we believe in the same way?

Cinema knows this best. Wherever you place the camera, that becomes the story. Shoot the same scene from over the other man's shoulder; your hero turns tyrant, your tyrant turns victim. Point of view isn't an innocent preference; it is a way of building a world. And everyone lives behind their own camera, in the lead role of their own film.

But is art like that? It is neither an idea nor an emotion. Art is a passion present in every healthy soul. As Gazi Pasha — Atatürk — said: “A society left without art has had one of its lifelines severed.”

And these are the very days my beloved country is living. When it ought to be practicing art, art and the artist thrash about in a decision mechanism cheapened either by overly commercial or by absurd political ends. Every climate that makes the artist ask “what is permitted” instead of “what should I create” breaks its own mirror with its own hand.

And now I understand the reason for a paradox I could never make sense of — why, despite all our striving, no beautiful film comes out of us...

Did you say good morning? No, it hasn't dawned on us yet. But dawn is not far off.

Stay with art, stay well... Enjoy the show.