Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul

Like many other commentators here, I went in expecting a taste of music that would satisfy my curiosity - and got more than I asked for. I heard and saw a powerful, exquisite, sometimes haunting, sometimes touching, lyrical, sentimental (in the truest way) and absolutely stunning blend of music and musicians. Reminded me a lot of some forms of Indian music (East Indian) but at the same time was very very different.

Starting from the the first track by Baba Zula to the Kurdish singer Aynur (what a voice) to Siyasiyabend to the jam session (or 'Jugalbandhi ' as we call it in India) in the small Turkish bar ft. Selim Seslar (Big fan now :) ), I enjoyed every minute and wished it wouldn't end.

One of the best music commentaries I have seen and heard in a long time.

I am craving for a CD of the sound-track and hope I can find it online somewhere soon and also for old and latest albums from Baba Zula.

A day later, the music is still etched in my brain and I don't want it to go away. Turkey and specifically Istanbul now seem such beautiful and exciting places - and I am going to start saving today to go take it in.

Faith Akin - this is a gem.

If you're a fan of Turkish and Middle Eastern music, you're in great luck. This film is a documentary of current music in Istanbul, spanning the traditional to the modern. It's very good. You could not do better if you went to Istanbul yourself. We get interviews with Orhan Gencebay, concert clips of modern musical icons, a road show with a Romani (Gypsy) audience, Turkish Hip Hop (surprisingly very very good), and much much more. Some of the best female vocalists I've ever heard. A Kurdish woman singing in a hamam (steam bath) who will rip your heart out. Lots of social and political background. If this is your thing, you'll have a grand time. I could barely sit still in the theatre.

CD soundtrack now available on amazon. Pricey.

Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) is a Fatih Akin film that was recently re-released on Mubi in 4K, 19 years after its initial debut.

Much of the money earned from "Head-On" was invested in Corazon International's budget. Corazon's debts were piling up, and bankruptcy loomed. Knowing he was an award-winning director, Fatih Akin realized his next film wouldn't be "Soul Kitchen" as planned. Instead, during the process of selecting music for "Head-On," a documentary about Turkish music emerged: "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul."

Akin made "Crossing the Bridge" as a breather, to escape the curse of the Golden Bear award. The film can also be seen as a supplement to "Head-On" and a transition to "The Edge of Heaven." During the film's preparation, Akin stayed at the Grand Hotel de Londres for six months and lost 20 kilos during filming.

Klaus Maeck, one of the film's producers, suggested Alexander Hacke, the bassist of Einstürzende Neubauten, to Akin when looking for someone to record the music for the scenes shot on the shores of the Golden Horn in "Head-On." Hacke and Selim Sesler, not knowing each other's languages, communicated almost entirely through their instruments, and the bridge built by music deeply affected Akin. This is the fundamental idea behind "Crossing the Bridge."

Einstürzende Neubauten is a band that works with sounds they record from their surroundings. Hacke also set off with a portable sound studio.

Initially, the film was planned as a noir-like film, with images interspersed between musical pieces. The character was a private detective whose mission was to uncover the city's music. Traces of this plan can be seen at the end of the film: Hacke gets off the ferry, passes by the dogs, returns to the hotel, and says, "Time to go... I couldn't solve the magic of this city, maybe I just scratched the surface."

Fundamentally, the film was planned to focus on artists who combine Eastern and Western music. Akin met with artists like Orient Expressions, Ceza, and Mercan Dede to learn about their influences. Names like Orhan Gencebay, Sezen Aksu, and Müzeyyen Senar emerged from these conversations. And, of course, Selim Sesler, who inspired the film, had to be included.

Before filming began, Akin saw a young female street musician in an underpass and quickly informed Herve Dieu. Since Johannes Grehl, the film's sound recordist, and Alexander Hacke weren't present, only the camera's sound is heard in the film. As Hacke couldn't be ready at all times, they only captured the sound and kept the camera's microphone running. This added another sound channel and caused the volume of some instruments to increase in the film because the camera and its microphone focused on the direction the camera was looking, which was the instruments.

All the musicians in the film chose their own locations. Baba Zula requested a boat, and since they said, "We are neither in Europe nor Asia, we are somewhere in between," the boat docks on two different shores in the film. Ceza's music talks about his love for his neighborhood, so they directly recorded in Ceza's neighborhood. Orhan Gencebay, on the other hand, didn't want to leave his office. Akin and Gencebay reviewed 20 films together for the old film footage in Gencebay's sequence.

Aynur came to Akin's attention when she accompanied a part of the Orient Expressions band. After Sesler's scenes were shot, Hacke, Akin, and the film's cinematographer Herve Dieu went to a nearby Turkish bath. Despite the heat, they wanted to shoot Aynur's scenes there because of the acoustics.

During filming, Turkey was experiencing an unprecedentedly positive and liberal period. Aynur's appearance in the film was a political statement in itself, and a long-banned Kurdish song was sung in the film. Aynur's album was legal in 2004 when the film was shot, but it was banned again a year later solely because it contained Kurdish songs.

Sezen Aksu's involvement in the film was limited to Akin's five-minute backstage visit after a concert: Aksu was sitting on a couch, sipping whiskey. Akin, with both excitement and broken Turkish, told her about the meaning of her songs to him, the songs he used to listen to on his Walkman when he was in love, and his desire to include her in his film. Aksu said, "I'm in," and the scene in the film was shot.

Alexander Hacke rearranged Aksu's song "Istanbul Hatirasi" for the film, but due to the high keyboard tone, eight takes were recorded. The eighth take was musically suitable and used in the film, but visually it didn't match the other seven takes. Since the sun had set, the visuals from the other takes were combined with the sound from the eighth take, along with historical photographs by Ara Güler.

Akin and Andrew Bird often struggled with the transitions between pieces during the editing process. The first three months were spent reviewing 90 hours of footage, often evaluating scenes until their last frames. The film's most significant feature is that the visuals dominate the music. The camera and editing determine the rhythm, keeping the music in the background.

In "Head-On," the main idea is summarized in a single line for the first time in Akin's films: "Life's what you make it." In the opening credits of "Crossing the Bridge," Akin uses Madonna's "Music," which he considers her only good song. The line "Music makes the people come together, music, mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel" is the main idea of "Crossing the Bridge."

Akin had only been to Cannes once before "Crossing the Bridge." That was in 1998 for the film market screening of "Short Sharp Shock," and he remembers passing in front of the red carpet on his way from the hotel to the screening venue. Thierry Fremaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, invited Akin to the competition jury the year "Crossing the Bridge" was released. That year, the competition jury consisted of Emir Kusturica, Javier Bardem, Nandita Das, Salma Hayek, Toni Morrison, Benoît Jacquot, Agnès Varda, John Woo, and Fatih Akin.

"Crossing the Bridge" was screened in a sidebar section at Cannes that year. During the screening in the Buñuel Theater, Emir Kusturica shouted "Bravo!" in the hall during Richard Hamer's speech in the East-West section of the film.

At the celebration after the film, Emir Kusturica, Salma Hayek, Javier Bardem, and others were by Akin's side. First, Selim Sesler took the stage, and later, Akin DJed. There were also people from finance companies at the party, but none of them had seen the film and had bought it without watching it.

In Germany, "Crossing the Bridge" was seen by 100,000 people. In Turkey, it was released in 20 theaters, and the film's soundtrack entered the top 10 charts in Turkey. Akin never forgets one of the praises for the film: "You make a film about the extraordinary and the beautiful that we see every day but no longer notice because we're used to it. Then you come and show us our city."

Crossing the Bridge: the Sound of Istanbul received one of the most rapturous applause from the audience when it ended and very deservingly so. I did not expect too much from a musical documentary but the movie proved to be much more than that. It was also a visual documentary of Istanbul with stark contrasts of old and new, western and eastern, poor and rich, modern and traditional. Black and white photographs of old Istanbul by world famous Armenian photographer Ara Guler were exceptional. But of course main theme was music, and by God, what a variety of it! It was in a way similar to Bueno Vistas Social Club; the love and the respect of the interviewer -Alexander Hacke here replacing Ray Cooder- for the musicians exuded from the screen and engulfed us all. The music was mostly very interesting. The jazz session by a group of Romany gypsies in a small Western Turkish town was mind blowing. I will not be surprised if the travel agents start getting group booking requests for Kesan after the movie is released. But I most loved Muzeyyen Senar who looked amazingly elegant in a sort of burlesque way and whilst tipping her "Raki" declared courageously: "My voice and I are 86 years old!" Well done Faith Akin. I bet there are many more Turkish musicians who are feeling left out: Go for Volume II please.

Akin's prize-winning 2004 movie Head-On/Gegen die Wand depicted the appealingly chaotic world of a self-destructive but dynamic Turkish-German rocker named Cahit (Birol Ünel). This documentary is an offshoot of Head-On and explores the range of music one might find in Istanbul today if one were as energetic and curious as German avant-rock musician Alexander Hacke of the group Einstuerzende Neubauten (who arranged the sound track and performed some of the music for Head-On) and had the assistance of a film crew and Turkish speakers provided by director Akin. You get everything from rap to the most traditional Turkish classical song, with rock, Kurdish music, and Turkish pop in between. It's as chaotic and open-ended a world as Cahit's, one where East is East and West is West but the twain—somehow—do meet.

Like Istanbul itself, which sits on the edge between Europe and Asia and brings the two worlds together while remaining sui generis, this is a mélange that includes Turkish pop, Turkish traditional songs, Kurdish laments, Roma jazz musicians and group of street buskers (Siyasiyabend), lively and offbeat shots of Istanbul street life, and some talk on camera about synthesis and some personal and musical history by singers and musicians. Working out of the Grand Hotel de Londres in Istanbul's Beyoglu quarter where Cahit stayed at the end of Head-On while looking for his beloved, Hacke roams around the city with crew and equipment interviewing people and recording their music.

He begins with some loud rock by the "neo-psychedelic" band Baba Zula – these are musicians he bonded with while putting together Head-On's score and he stands in here for the absent bassist -- and by Turkish (including brave female) rappers – thus causing some oldsters to walk out of the theater early on and miss the predominantly tuneful and easy-to-listen-to sounds that makes up the bulk of the film. (Head-On's narrative excesses were tempered periodically by musical interludes performed by a traditional Turkish orchestra sitting outdoors on the other side of the Bosphorus.) Hacke gives us the opportunity to meet and hear performances by some of the best known living Turkish singers, including Müzeyyen Senar, a lady in her late eighties whose aging, elegant musicians remind one of the way the great Egyptian songstress Umm Kulsoum used to perform. Hacke gets songwriter-movie star Orhan Gencebay to do a striking solo on the long-necked oud he's written all his songs on, and persuades the now elusive great Sezen Aksu.to do a special performance of one of her most famous songs, "Memory of Istanbul." This is a coup, and so is the lament by a beautiful Kurdish songstress Aynar recorded in a bath whose acoustics are spectacular, if only they could have turned down the heat – singer and musician's faces stream with sweat. There is also a young Canadian woman, Brenna MacCrimmon, fluent in Turkish, who sings Turkish traditional folksongs with expression and fervor. The sound mix is of high quality throughout. One would like to see a sequel; many great exemplars of Turkish popular and classical music have necessarily been left out.

Film released summer 2005 and shown at festivals in 2005 and 2006. Opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York City in June 9, 2006.