Resistanbul

When the camera moves it's not like a professional's but a citizen's, that unsmooth motion that's come to mean there's no money behind it, & they don't want yours, that's not the reason they want you to see. Before it moves, you see a city that's forgotten it's divided into isolated parts, that's forgotten who owns it, or maybe remembered; you don't see the people in the streets learning & teaching this, but you see the lights in the windows flicking on & off to be with them, the way you blink your eyes to clear them, & people banging on pots & whistling & yelling as if it were the beginning of a new year, as maybe it is. When the camera moves, it's with a hand's sweep, not a machine's, across the face of a modern city, far from blackouts & ruins at least on the surface, so you'd think they'd be happy the way it is, the way it was, but no. You can hear the joy in the racket they're making together, joining their privacies to make something else, & see it in the lights, as if the city's laughing, or sending a message in Morse code, first to itself, to each other, then to the powers that have taken their city away from them, & then through the ethers all over the world—to where I'm sitting in Manhattan watching, weeks after it happened, thinking of how long it can take to send a message & how long to receive it, thinking of someone in a movie in Havana about Chris Marker in Chile, who said "Beginning in 1968 we started to have this idea of filming everything."