But of course they are not innocent. Grant Gee’s absorbing essay-film is a meditation or reverie about the Nobel prizewinner Orhan Pamuk and his multimedia creation The Museum of Innocence.
His 2008 novel of that title is about a forbidden love affair in 70s Istanbul between a man named Kemal and Füsun, the shopgirl he meets while buying a present for his fiancee. Kemal obsessively begins to collect objects associated with Füsun, with a view to creating a “museum of innocence” – and Pamuk did in fact open his associated Museum of Innocence in Istanbul in 2012.
Perhaps no film can entirely compete with the simple fact of this novel/museum’s existence, but the movie circles around the dual conceptual artefact beguilingly. It is about the way the agony of failure in love has been displaced into fetishising the city and all its occult links with this secret affair. (Gee’s camera drifts through the Istanbul streets, passing without comment a shop called “Crazy Secret”.) These memories are like butterflies pinned to a wall: in their pure deadness they have become vampirically alive, and perhaps gone beyond guilt and innocence, happiness and its opposite. (I have similar feelings visiting the British Museum’s Round Reading Room, now an inert exhibit, but where I used to work as a PhD student.)
This is something to compare with Joe Brainerd’s ecstatic memoir I Remember.
