ABİDİN DİNO THE FILMMAKER

Although no specific examples of his creative activities in filmmaking have emerged apart from the documentary GOAL! Abidin Dino directed in 1966, cinema has been a significant component in his body of work. Dino, who was not just a painter and writer, but also an illustrator, cartoonist, ceramicist and sculptor, entered the world of cinema at the age of 21 in 1934 through his acquaintance with Sergei Yutkevich, the Soviet director of the documentary Ankara – Heart of Turkey (1934). Impressed by the sense of movement in Dino’s drawings, Yutkevich invited the artist to Russia to learn how films were being made there, to which he attended.

Not until 1966 was Abidin Dino presented with the opportunity to actually make a feature-length film. He was in his forties when he was presented with the offer to direct the documentary of the 1966 FIFA World Cup by the producer Octavio Sonoret, his Chilean friend living in Paris. He always had a natural flair for documentary as evidenced in his art seeking to capture the reality of life, its poetry and movement. Moreover, most of the scenarios and plot lines he wrote for his unrealized film projects were realistic. For these projects, he either wanted to convey the reality of Adana (a major city in the southern Turkey) where he lived for a period of time, or aimed to present people he admired, such as poet and mystic Yunus Emre and Yaşar Kemal, one of the prominent novelists of the Turkish literature, through the eyes of a filmmaker.

The series of storyboards of the GOAL! sheds light on Dino’s artistic view of filmmaking as he includes all the possible scenes that would take place on both inside and outside the football stadium. As such, these drawings give one the impression that they functioned more to convey the film in Dino’s imagination than setting the scenes for the end product as seen in traditional storyboards. In the article he had penned for the magazine Yeni Sinema in 1967, Dino wrote “Even before the event was filmed, I had produced hundreds of drawings, determining the concept we would use to film the match, when which cameras would film from which angles at which size, what kinds of close-ups and distancing we would use to probe the subject. (…) the director has no way of predicting exactly what will happen in the course of the game, but it is certainly possible to explain what you expect from a cameraman in a given situation.”

Dino endeavoured to examine the FIFA World Cup not just as a sporting event but as a social phenomenon, including the surrounding city together with the matches. Even though most of this material depicting the post-match London had been left out from the final edit as the matches proved exciting.

Dino’s storyboard for GOAL! demonstrates his aim to highlight and analyse the relationship between the stadium and the metropolis surrounding it. In the article he penned for the Yeni Sinema magazine he wrote “In fact we even did almost sociological research on the subject of spectators that couldn’t be used. None of these things were the result of coincidence... Even the parts that remain in the film are interesting from this aspect…”