Turkish time travel

Harry Mount looks across the Dardanelles and sees yesterday’s weather today

In Canakkale — the biggest town on the Dardanelles, where more than 130,000 British, Australians, New Zealanders and Turks were slaughtered in the 1915 campaign — Mark Wallinger, the 2007 Turner Prize winner, has dreamt up a clever little work about memory. On the Asian quayside, looking across to the Gallipoli killing fields on the European side of the straits, is an old shipping container, tricked out like a 1950s picture house; think Cinema Paradiso, and you get the idea.

Using a 1950s-style sign, Wallinger has named it ‘Sinema Amnesia’ (Sinema is Turkish for cinema). The sign says that the film now showing is Ulysses — as in the James Joyce novel about a single day in Dublin; also as in the Latinised name for Odysseus, who fought just down the coast from here at Troy. Step inside the cinema, and all these disparate references come together — there’s a continuous film showing the view from the quay across the Dardanelles at exactly the same time yesterday.

It may all sound a little gimmicky, but it works. However obsessed you are with the weather, it’s future weather you’re always worried about; you pretty much forget what the weather was like yesterday. So there’s something rather comforting in seeing yesterday’s weather today — it fills up a gap in your memory, like suddenly remembering that you left your keys on your bedside table.

The pleasure is heightened if yesterday’s weather is different from today’s; but, even if it’s the same, Wallinger’s virtual view, on rough-quality film, is engagingly different from the real-life view you see outside the cinema.

When I visited, yesterday’s overcast view on film looked like a Corot — with the modern addition of several container ships moving slowly, left to right, north towards Istanbul and the Black Sea; while today’s real-life view was sparklingly clear, flooded with harsh Aegean light, even in winter.