“A Thousand Songs One Life”, this poetic title might be a good hint to the complex relationship between the creative and private life (which was as well formed ny private and historic tragic events) of the Turkish singer and poet Lütfü Gültekin.
The film begins with a car journey through Gültekins former homeland in Anatolia, the birthplace of the artist. Old Photos and the voice over comments are telling about his ancestors who lived in extreme poverty or of the Dersim massacre which uprooted and exiled the family. Sometimes it seems the film tries to capture a human life like a landscape. Some parts of this landscape can be named, others not.
If I am not mistaken, than Gültekin learned the baglama ( stringed instrument) as an autodidact. His development as an artist had as well often to do with the music as a help for surviving. Even though Gültekin is a folk musician born in the Twentieth Century with all its technological devices to record music, it is still perceptible in this film that the beginning of folk music was once a permanent passing over from one generation to the next. The film captures the life and work of Lütfü Gültekin in different ways, Excerpts from songs and concerts, old family photos, a few shots of his home land and interviews with family members, colleagues and friends. Most impressing are for me the interviews with the artist himself. His talking directly in front of the camera reminds me as well in one of the oldest kind of story telling close to the oldest tradition of passing over music to the next generation. He sits in a chair and in the background we see a concert from him on a TV monitor. The contrast between his recorded art and his interview is interesting. In an almost laconic way, Gültekin tells about his struggle, often punctuated by tragic events. For a while – the person Gültekin exposed by all hardships in his life dominates the frame while his art remains for a moment literally in the background as an recorded memory. The film´s dynamic is always to separate these aspect and finally brings it together again. Gültekin tells a lot about his life as an immigrant worker in Belgian coal mines, about his fear during this dangerous and unhealthy work so far under the earth. He witnessed accidents and very soon his health was ruined by the infamous coal dust and he was retired as a coalmine worker. At the beginning of his stay in Belgium, he lost his sister and her whole family during a car accident. Despite his early life was full of tragic losses and struggles to survive as an artist and as a person, his creativity was always very strong. Lütfü Gülktekin did not only play folk songs, he also wrote songs, some of them inspired by Shakespeare or Brecht. He recorded many albums in different formations and gave a lot of concerts with friends, colleagues or family members. Among them there are as well concerts with his daughters.
“Love finds its destination” he says once in this film.
There was as well a long period of silence in his career. Frustrated by the music industry and its tendency to make more commercial pressure on the artists but as well his sadness about the fact that some singers covered his songs without even mentioning his name, he retreated for a while.
The film might be as well a kind of elegy about the loss of the thing we call home. Despite his homesickness to the place of his childhood, Gültekin created his own home with his music and the people he loved. There is a moving scene when Gültekin visit the graves of his beloved family members. It is the only moment when he seems alone and vulnerable.
As the film appears often as an artificial memory, his songs appear as well as one, especially when they are sung by friends or members of his family like his son Emre. Sometimes this songs are melting in my memory together with the old photos which made quite an impression on me. Despite all historic or cultural specifics, they often remember me of my own family albums. Once made mostly as snap shots, as a help to remember or to take a special moment out of time – the closer they are to its decay the more they look like pure poetry. Especially these photographs from our family from the time before we were born have a mystic fascination. They seem abstract as the last hints to the memories of our dead ancestors.
Bir Ömür bin Türkü by Sezer Aslan suggests a rare perception of history. On one side the recording devices like camera, record studios and literally moments taken out of time like photos of records. At the same time behind this devices of modern times there is an idea of the tradition of oral conveyed history evident especially in the interviews with Lütfü Gültekin and in the music which will be sung by generations yet to come.
Maybe that is the greatness of film and music. It can appear as strange or exotic at the beginning. But it is sometimes only a glimpse of a sudden idea while listening music or watching a film which can suspend this feeling of strangeness forever. It might be the fleeting moment but of a tremendous perception of a new world. Sezer Aslan´s portrait of Lütfü Gültekin is as well an interesting essay about traditional memory and the memory which is recorded and technological stored with modern recording devices.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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