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.
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