18- Steve McQueen, The Translator

Welcome to issue eighteen of The Attention Span Newsletter - the first one of 2024 after a short break - by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist based in Amsterdam. Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.

EPISODE SHOWNOTES

Blues Before Sunrise, an installation by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen.

McQueen’s first feature documentary, titled Occupied City/De Bezette Stad, inspired by the book Atlas of an Occupied City – Amsterdam 1940-1945 (2019) by Bianca Stigter, who also wrote the screenplay.

My essay for online magazine SKUT (published October 2023 in Dutch and in English).

The short video I made in March 2016.

Watch
Speaking of how the magic of Orlando still haunts imaginations and yet can be critically reviewed, I want to recommend you Paul B. Preciado’s wonderful film based on Woolf’s novel, titled Orlando, My Political Biography. It is a documentary in which Preciado blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and invites trans and non-binary people to the centre of the story as they perform lines from the novel. And another film I am excited about (how come I never saw it!) is the restored release of Sally Potter’s Orlando, which comes back to cinemas this week in the Netherlands.

Listen
And in my Orlando path this January, I have listened to the Historical Homos podcast where they discuss how Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West Invent the Lesbian Love Letter, and to an interview with Sally Potter on BBC radio’s This Cultural Life where she tells about the process of making the film thirty years ago.

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