How Does It Feel to Feel?: Recent Turkish Cinema. By Bilge Ebiri

A funny thing has happened to the way Turks think about their national cinema. In the past few years, thanks to a series of domestically produced hits and a number of smaller films that garnered attention at international festivals, the words “Turkish cinema” have ceased to be an insult; the expression “like a Turkish film” was once used by Turks as a snide description for any situation steeped in unlikely melodrama or garish emotionalism. That may seem strange to Western viewers whose recent exposure to this country’s cinema has mainly been through the emotionally reserved work of filmmakers such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Zeki Demirkubuz. A sampling of works screening at the Istanbul Film Festival, along with other recent Turkish fare, demonstrates this dichotomy. Wavering between extremes of expressive alienation and brash emotionalism, much of today’s Turkish cinema tries to find a footing for itself on the world stage and at home.

It would be tempting to compare Turkey ’s cinema to that of Iran , for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being geographic. And certainly, Ceylan’s first two films, The Small Town (Kasaba, 1998) and Clouds of May (Mayis Sikintisi, 1999), hint at a kinship with Abbas Kiarostami: The latter is a fictionalized film about the making of the former, similar to the Iranian director’s Through the Olive Trees (1994). Other, more recent work such as Ahmet Ulucay’s deadpan, harmlessly exotic coming-of-age story Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (Karpuz Kabugundan Gemiler Yapmak, 2004) or Semih Kaplanoglu’s oblique tale of urban dysfunction, Angel’s Fall (Melegin Dususu, 2005), suggest that younger directors may also be looking to Iran for stylistic cues. While this may lead to some foreign festival play, the results aren’t all that impressive. Watermelon Rinds, for one, is light and forgettable. Berlin title Angel’s Fall, though more distinguished thanks to some haunting performances and effectively grim cinematography, is the exact opposite. While the film has been criticized as “Ceylan-lite,” there’s nothing light about Kaplanoglu’s use of religious symbolism, his interest in the workings of fate, or his stultifying compositions. Perhaps that’s what’s missing here: Ceylan’s humorously studied understanding of human relations and his deft handling of offhand symbolism keep his films light on their feet, making his Tarkovskian flourishes easier to swallow. Without that, Angel’s Fall flirts with drowning in static morbidity.

But Turkey , while part of the Middle East , also considers itself a part of Europe and the Balkans. As such, a certain cultural schizophrenia—simultaneously Eastern and Western, both coolly aloof and jarringly expressive—is a part of the very fabric of Turkish life. One can even see this rift at work in the seemingly even-keeled Distant (Uzak, 2002). A lot has been written about Ceylan’s film, which is probably the best to come out of Turkey in the last several decades; there’s little need to repeat it here, except to note that few have mentioned the film’s portrait of the city of Istanbul as an emotional dike. The Small Town and Clouds of May dwelt on the natural world’s effect on human relations, but in Distant, the urban landscape serves as a bulwark to keep nature—human, animal, mineral—at bay. When a sudden snowfall shrouds the city’s minarets and skyscrapers, one senses that the intrusive landscape of The Small Town has caught up with Distant’s repressed protagonists.

Nature also catches up with the protagonists of Ugur Yucel’s highly acclaimed Toss-Up (Yazi Tura, 2004), which could be considered Distant’s stylistic opposite. Shot on DV in a dislocating vérité style that borders on abstraction, the film portrays the lives of two soldiers who return from the army with sharp psychic and physical wounds. Both of their tales turn on overpowering natural forces: One finds the inability to keep his urges in check leads to ruin among the snowy wastes of his hometown, while the other experiences the massive 1999 Marmara Earthquake, forcing a redefinition of his suppressed fears and a reconnection with his family. Although, like Ceylan, Yucel also tackles emotional alienation, he gives in spectacularly: Toss-Up builds to near-operatic crescendos that might have placed the film firmly within the tradition of Turkish tearjerkers of yore, were it not so expertly directed and acted.

Their stylistic differences aside, neither Distant nor Toss-Up have made many waves at the domestic box office. Ceylan was virtually declared a national hero upon his victory at Cannes, and Yucel, already one of Turkey’s biggest actors (this was his directorial debut), was feted wildly after Toss-Up historically swept nearly all the categories at the Antalya Film Festival, Turkey’s closest equivalent to the Oscars. But a post-Cannes re-release didn’t improve Distant’s domestic draw, and Toss-Up quickly faded from view.

It’s not hard to see why many of today’s directors feel compelled to submerge the emotional lives of their characters. During the 60s, 70s, and 80s, most Turkish films were overblown melodramas with cardboard characters, recycled dialogue, and shameless, sudden third-act tragedies. Either that, or they were fly-by-night send-up/ripoffs of American movies; some of these have experienced an unlikely resurrection at the hands of underground video enthusiasts and midnight movie programmers in the West, playing under titles such as Turkish Star Wars.

The only films that made it abroad at this time were politically charged social critiques. If a film garnered any praise abroad, it was assured suspicion at home. Yilmaz Guney, a popular actor-turned-director who made some of the most provocative films of the 70s, spent most of that decade in prison because of both his involvement with revolutionary politics and a 1974 altercation that resulted in a judge’s murder. That didn’t stop him from using surrogates to direct The Herd (Suru, 1978) and Yol (1983), both of which were banned at home and lavished with awards abroad, the latter taking the Palme d’Or.

The ghost of the iconic Guney (who died in 1984) still haunts Turkish cinema. His face can be seen on posters in the homes of characters in the relatively apolitical films of Ceylan and Demirkubuz. Ceylan also gave a shout-out to Guney as he accepted his Grand Prix at Cannes for Distant. There is heavy speculation that Fatih Akin, the Turkish-German director of Head-On (2004), has a long-gestating project about the refugee filmmaker. Most immediately, one of the year’s most interesting titles is veteran director Erden Kiral’s Yolda, which recounts an incident during Guney’s final incarceration when he changed prisons, trailed by a car containing his wife and the director whom he fired from his latest project. (The story is also autobiographical: Kiral was the director fired by Guney from Yol, which was completed by another surrogate, Serif Goren.)

For obvious reasons, local critics seized on the speculation that Kiral wanted to settle an old score with his former master. This seems a bit unfair, not the least because Yolda is so spare in its emotions that it doesn’t really settle anything. Kiral, as evident in his earlier A Season in Hakkari (Hakkari’de Bir Mevsim, 1983) and Hunting Time (Av Zamani, 1988), has always been the most melancholy of Turkish directors, more at home among the desolate landscapes of Anatolia than the messy pitfalls of human relations. In Yolda, he finds his ideal subjects: an aging, wounded artist afraid to reveal his vulnerabilities and a younger artist unable to break free. This is all played out against a bleak, isolated horizon that offers no comfort: In the film’s most striking scene, the car containing the prisoner drives around a small town, trying to find the penitentiary to which he will be transferred. The prison is not there; the car drives and drives quietly in the blistering heat, until it, and by extension the world beyond, becomes a Kafkaesque prison unto itself.

Yolda ’s repressed feelings are enough to make viewers scream. Emotional violence does occasionally bubble to the surface, but only for brief bursts. Guney was famously a passionate roughneck (his life was littered with drunken brawls), but in Kiral’s version, he’s aloof and quiet, uncomfortable expressing himself. When he does finally break down briefly, the effect is jarring, almost pathetic.

In a sense, the portrait of Guney in Yolda bears a resemblance to the protagonists of Zeki Demirkubuz’s films. Estranged, submerged males unable to navigate the emotional terrain of human relations, they often operate in a world where the threat of violence—often domestic—is constant. The cuckolded protagonist of The Confession (Itiraf, 2002) sulks quietly while his wife weaves lies around their marriage. When he does burst open, Demirkubuz extends and plays up the emotions to absurd degrees. Indeed, the sheer discomfort provoked by such scenes may account for why many critics still remain cold to Demirkubuz—the hyperrealism of the acting in his films gives way to kabuki-style hysterics at points. The way his protagonists gravitate between emotional poles has seeped into the very tone and texture of the films, as they oscillate wildly between the static and the histrionic.

In that light, the loopy premise of Demirkubuz’s most recent film, The Waiting Room (Bekleme Odasi, 2004), sounds ideal: Demirkubuz himself plays a director trying to adapt Crime and Punishment whose unfeeling demeanour drives away everyone around him. The film’s deadpan style masks its intensely personal nature, but it also suggests that Demirkubuz has lost some of his serie noir edge. What made the director’s prior work so valuable was its delicate balancing act between thriller and art film; Demirkubuz’s influences are not only from Dostoyevsky, but Dashiell Hammett. His long silences and stylistic digressions have always been anchored by a keen sense of genuine terror for his protagonists, both external and psychological. But in The Waiting Room, Demirkubuz never quite finds the language to convey the emotional demons of a sedentary director at work.

The Waiting Room has an interesting forebear in Turkish cinema—Ali Ozgenturk’s cause celebre, Water Also Burns (Su Da Yanar, 1987). That film focused on a director’s attempts to adapt the life of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet to the screen, and the attendant emotional wreckage. But whereas Demirkubuz goes for quotidian realism, Ozgenturk opts for theatrically heightened emotions: In the film’s final scene, his protagonist finally calls “Action!” on his film with all the bluster of an officer yelling “Fire!”

Ozgenturk, a Guney protégé who had already been imprisoned in the early 80s for the social criticism in his film The Horse (At, 1982), found himself at odds with authorities over Water Also Burns (Hikmet was a dedicated Marxist who spent much of his life exiled in the USSR, and whose work was regularly banned). No such problem has occurred with his more recent films. Ozgenturk’s latest, The Time of the Heart (Kalbin Zamani), is his most classical work to date, very consciously so: it begins with an animated cliffhanger featuring a romance between Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie, and an unsolved murder at Istanbul’s historic Pera Palas Hotel. The film’s story also centres on the same hotel—it’s a time-hopping mystery about a woman loved by three different men over several decades.

Ozgenturk began his career in the theatre, and his films all have a very self-conscious understanding of performance and ritual. His earliest works, including Hazal (1979) and The Horse, relied on a raw, poetic naturalism that initially endeared him to fans of neorealism and rugged Third World aesthetics, but those films too were often steeped in performance, in traditional rites, gatherings, and dances. For Ozgenturk, emotion and human relations are almost always subsumed into ritual; he can be seen as Turkey ’s answer to the Taviani Brothers. And like the Tavianis, this approach also makes him one of Turkish cinema’s keenest social critics.

Despite solid work from veterans such as Kiral and Ozgenturk, much of recent narrative Turkish cinema has been alarmingly solipsistic. One particularly irritating trend has been an obsession with myth. This can be bracing in the context of a film like Yolda, where a character struggles under the weight of his own iconic status, but in the context of a film like this year’s Istanbul Tales (Anlat Istanbul), which adapts popular fairy tales to an Istanbul setting, it can be deceptively corrosive. Still, local critics and audiences have eaten it up, and the film even won a major prize at Istanbul . Perhaps what one thinks of Istanbul Tales depends on how original one finds the idea of Snow White’s Wicked Witch being portrayed as a Mob boss, or the Seven Dwarves as, well, one dwarf. Or Cinderella’s fairy godmother as an aging, flamboyant homosexual. You get the picture.

Luckily, documentarians are taking up the slack. For starters, Tolga Ornek, a Turkish blend of Ken Burns and Cecil B. DeMille who combines elaborate narrative flourishes with talking-head documentary filmmaking, recently unleashed his massive Gallipoli on hundreds of screens, and Fatih Akin screened his documentary about Turkish music, Crossing the Bridge, at Cannes . But Istanbul ’s most electrifying film was Pelin Esmer’s The Play (Oyun), a riveting documentary about a group of women in a remote village in Anatolia who form their own local theatre group, then write a play based on their harsh lives, fully conscious that their feckless husbands will comprise the audience. Esmer’s film avoids the obvious exploitative pitfalls of her subject matter and instead allows these audacious, charming women to speak for themselves; it’s a credit to her remarkable balancing act that The Play works both as biting, hilarious social criticism and as a tender tale of village life. The makeshift village stage provides Esmer’s heroines with an outlet for their suppressed rage that allows them direct expression. For all its humour, The Play has the energy of a long-gestating scream. It’s also a bracing corrective to the aestheticized melancholia on display in much of the rest of today’s Turkish cinema.

How Does It Feel to Feel?: Recent Turkish Cinema

By Bilge Ebiri

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How Does It Feel to Feel?:
Recent Turkish Cinema