Two Quality Turkish Films / Kerem Akça

2011.12.13
haberturk.com

“Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da” and “White as Snow”, both out on DVD this week, give us a chance to recall once more two successful Turkish films released in 2011. One bears the signature of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who is now in his period of mastery, and the other that of Selim Güneş, who has set his mind on becoming Turkey’s Tarkovsky.

We all need to appreciate Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s worth. The process that grew out of his rise on the international stage, and then of his increasing his budgets and making a ‘difference’, has also brought a range of other filmmakers into the industry. Seen from this angle, names who have recently come to the fore, such as Selim Güneş and Özcan Alper, have no way of saying ‘no!’ to this. “Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da” (2011) is also a work in which the director brings a new instalment of his analyses of Turkey to the screen, with a pinch of Tarkovsky, a pinch of Bresson and a pinch of Antonioni.

The grandeur of a true master

Although it starts out like a crime film, the work, which seems sworn to subvert that genre and stands out for the conclusions it draws from our country’s mosaic, certainly carries the true ‘grandeur of a master’. This is the main reason why Ceylan has gained international recognition in the eyes of the seventh art. The work, which deals, around ‘a corpse’, with the idea that the Turkish people cannot in fact manage anything at all, and depicts that ‘torpor’, has as its real aim the weaving of a dense cinematic language.

Accordingly, the skeleton that brings together all the links of the structure built through Fırat Tanış, Muhammet Uzuner, Yılmaz Erdoğan and Taner Birsel opens up investigation, justice, inquiry, crime and much more onto an abstract plane. In a nutshell, this is a universal work that holds its own against the directors who have been ‘a source of inspiration’ in world cinema in the 2000s, and against their films. It has long since borne fruit and will go on doing so.

Making a difference on provincial ground through a ‘Tarkovsky’ filter

Selim Güneş, together with Özcan Alper, is one of our young cinephile directors in whom Tarkovsky’s influence is felt most clearly. He is after a stylised film that wraps the Black Sea mise-en-scène in motifs, abstract images, sound editing and unusual angles. Perhaps, as he moves away from Ceylan’s world, which never breaks with ‘minimalism’, in pursuit of such a goal, he also reaches the mise-en-scène of the Black Sea village in a mystical way. This places “White as Snow” (2010) far beyond the uses of ‘cultural spaces’ we are used to in Turkish cinema.

Güneş’s work, while taking in the abstraction of its title, is a special film that instils a ‘provincial ground’ through a tableau of death, life and humanity. As a result, the individual moments in which the film’s silent atmosphere stands out are too many to count. In the end, “White as Snow” heralds the birth of an important director. It even aims to alert the festival audience to this. Whether the person in question will become a name like Ceylan, time will tell. Because the Tarkovsky ground and the Bresson ground are different things…

At this point, the real issue is to discuss who, in this period, will be lucky enough to inherit the label of the ‘duo’ of Semih Kaplanoğlu and Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, who emerged in the early 2000s and became masters without forming a school. Of course, it is possible to make in-depth analyses on this. But one thing is certain: Güneş is a modern, original and different candidate to follow one of them!

*****

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