Educational Media Reviews Online

Conditioned is a diverse collection of 8 previously unpublished experimental and video art works by Turkish and Kurdish artists. These films seek to explore the intellectual and psychosocial conditioning of children in Turkey through social, political, and governmental indoctrination and conformity.

The works are generally disturbing in nature, with the exception of the last one, Isik’s inspiring documentary illuminating the hopes and dreams of students who build a group sculpture at an isolated boarding school in the mountains, titled Where Bluebirds Fly. The films range from artistically fascinating (Kaygun’s blurred kaleidoscopic ice-skaters in On Thin Ice), to rather boring (Özgen’s marching African-Turkish men in Origin), to confusing (a mother using an iron and ironing-board to straighten her daughter’s hair in Özgür’s A Young Girl is Growing Up), to downright unpleasant (two young girls singing an innocent song three times with increasingly bloodied and bruised faces in Özmen’s Our Village). Perhaps even less subtle are Güleryüz’s The First Ones, in which a group of uniformed schoolchildren recite the Turkish national anthem (recorded on visually striking 8-mm film), and Özgüven’s audio-video collage Delirium, which explores the more globalized brainwashing phenomenon of commercialized consumerism and the constant bombardment of advertising. Durmaz’s more cinematic film Koro, is dreamlike yet follows a more straightforward storyline of people visiting imprisoned friends. It mixes impressions of callous militant oppression by the gun-toting guards and the absurdity of the meeting point where the visitors and the prisoners come together beneath and between the guard’s legs.

The films are mostly in Turkish or Kurdish, and there are subtitles in English, French, or German. The language used in Koro is actually a fictional language (Ourbesh) so there are no subtitles, but I think I would have appreciated the film more if I could have better understood what the characters were saying and, at the end, singing.

The disc includes brief biographies of each of the filmmakers, as well as the filmmakers’ “statements” that go along with each film if you select a title individually. As with the films, these statements are all differently formatted, styled, and of varying quality. They range from interviews of the filmmakers discussing their works to merely cascading text shown with the film in the background, yet they all help to give meaning and explanation to the films. The booklet that also came with the disc is well-written by the editors/compilers of the Conditioned collection, Yekhan Pinarligil and Silke Schmickl, and provides a broader explanation of the compilation as well as descriptions of each of the films.

Not to dispute the artistic merit of these experimental films, I personally did not enjoy watching most of the works compiled in Conditioned. The booklet and filmmaker statements are valuable additions to the video content, since most of the films do not stand well on their own, being extremely obscure and abstract. Again, the exception is Where Bluebirds Fly, which was certainly the high point of this collection. The Conditioned collection is only recommended with reservations to academic libraries supporting curricula in experimental films, especially those looking for more global coverage.