Things Never Seen / Vanna Carlucci

2013.02.02
UZAK / Italy

Things Never Seen WHITE AS SNOW

Hasan walks kilometres of snowy road to sell ayran, to feed his siblings. Other lives stand alongside him: his mother, a stranger, a man suffering from lovesickness, a father who is absent and a landscape as white as snow.

The title leaves no way out: White as Snow warns whoever watches the film of a probable freezing of the limbs, a possible chapping of the lips or skin, or of the mere corollary of an eye exposed to monochrome light: but all of this is only the surface. White as Snow is in fact what lies in the frozen substratum, in the cave of white: Hasan, a twelve-year-old boy, has slipped into it with his whole skeleton, as if it were not the cold that frightened him, nor the grip of the wind, because he is the centre of living matter, of the matter that melts into the earth on contact with the sun; he is inside an isolated compartment and is in fact alone in the muffled padding of winter, in the silence of the ice, in the cotton that settles.

The first feature film by Selim Güneş, White as Snow belongs to a cinema (the Turkish one) that “suspends itself” (G. Costantiello), as if there were no gravity in bodies or in rocks or in the movements of the sea. In reality it is a cinema that still manages to pierce the breastbone, because it recognises itself in the form of nothingness. Selim Güneş is a photographer and has been able to internalise this “still” language into cinema, into the way he captures the place, the figure, the background. The place is embroidered to perfection; nothing seems to escape the outlines, the screen, the profiles of things, but the image is contained within the image, it does not overstep the form because it is the form that imposes itself. At the same time, however, the form de-forms itself to the point of being nothing; it cancels itself out in its aesthetic perfection, in the filming of white, which is a colour of light; and light is an open field, it is the gallop of a bloodied white horse through an unbearable whiteness.

Here, then, is the director’s aesthetic rigour: calibrating the weight of intensity in a vivid contrast that almost seems to want to keep the viewer at a distance through the calculated geometry of the images, far from a dirty reality made of imperfections; but the contingency of everyday life touches the film too, and so Hasan is a child who struggles against the absence of his imprisoned father, who befriends the nature of the woods and of winter in order to sell ayran and earn something for his siblings while his mother is away working. And so, to survive in the face of a loss, one must build oneself a better picture, a point of strength, a pure white snow, a perfect frame that nevertheless does not forget the feeling of loss and loneliness. Through all this the film remains spare, not one colour too many, not one word too many, but the writing moves slowly until it then changes course and takes on the tone of a fairy tale for young people: Hasan does not come home, darkness falls and there he is, lost in the woods, defending himself against the fear of the dark, and the fear of never seeing his father again bleeds from his nose: the memory that returns.

One might say that in Turkish cinema there is almost a will to expose oneself completely to the logic of the seasons, to their capacity to enter into a relationship with man. There is no challenge, only a contemplation of oneself before the fury of the sea breaking along the harbour quay (Sonbahar), or the awareness of a love dissolved precisely in the sense of a dissolve of images and faces into the grains of snow (İklimler); and Hasan resembles a crumbling body: like the snow, he waits for a sign, a change of season.

*****

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