White as Snow Ayran / Seray Genç

Yeni Film Dergisi, June–September 2011, Issue 23

“Little Hasan walked on without thinking of anything. Neither his two little siblings waiting at home for him to return, nor his mother working as a servant in the district centre four hours away, were on his mind at that moment. Nor was he thinking about whether he would manage to sell his ayran. There was only one thing in his head: the necessity of walking this road again, of going back…” Sabahattin Ali (1)

Sabahattin Ali’s head is a mountain, his hair is snow. He has wild winds. The plains are too narrow for him, and the cities are traps. His dwelling is the mountains. Sabahattin Ali, who gave new life to folk poetry, is one of the most important writers of our literature – with his poems that have become household words through songs and folk songs (Benim Meskenim Dağlardır, Aldırma Gönül, Leylim Ley, Ben Gene Sana Vurgunum), with his Anatolian stories drawn from among the people, with their conflicted situations and characters, and with his novels, including Kürk Mantolu Madonna, in which his literary accumulation is reflected in an admirable way. The realism of Sabahattin Ali’s stories and novels led to a complete reassessment of realist narratives in our literature. It can be said that in some of his stories the lyricism carried by Russian realism is rebuilt for Anatolia. What makes him important is not only his pen but also his outlook on life, which is reflected in what he wrote – his very life itself. His years as a student and as a teacher in various cities of Anatolia, his years in Germany, where he went on a scholarship, the magazine Marko Paşa, which he published together with Aziz Nesin and Rıfat Ilgaz, and the prison experience that has shaped so many intellectuals in Turkey are the important turning points of this life. The event that ended this life was perhaps the first of the dark murders of intellectuals in this country whose real perpetrators have never been brought to light.

After leaving prison, Sabahattin Ali goes through very hard times. As if being unemployed were not enough, he is also left alone, as fear keeps people away. He can find nowhere to publish his writing. When he wants to go abroad, he cannot even get a passport. Forced to leave this country, where he cannot even obtain a passport, and to flee abroad, he is murdered in suspicious circumstances in 1948 at the Bulgarian border by a member of the “National Security” service named Ali Ertekin, who had been hired for money.

Sabahattin Ali’s stories and his novel Kuyucaklı Yusuf have been adapted for the cinema before. Now a state-sponsored project film of Kürk Mantolu Madonna is on the agenda. The state’s earlier reach towards Sabahattin Ali is highly suspicious. This time, too, there is nothing wrong with our approaching this hand with suspicion. Since a piece dealing directly with this subject has been written within this section, let us confine ourselves to expressing our shared concern on the matter. The stories Kağnı, Ses and Gramofon Avrat were the source for the film Azap Yolu (1967, Yılmaz Duru), while Metin Erksan’s television film of the same name, Hanende Melek (1973); Aydın Çeçen’s Düşman (1977); Feyzi Tuna’s Kuyucaklı Yusuf (1985); Yusuf Kurçenli’s Gramofon Avrat (1987); İrfan Tözüm’s Devlerin Ölümü (1990) and Orhan Aksoy’s Hasan Boğuldu (1990) are the films adapted from Sabahattin Ali’s works.(2) White as Snow, adapted from the story Ayran in his collection of stories Yeni Dünya, has become a different Sabahattin Ali adaptation, one we encounter after many years. Selim Güneş’s film, which salutes Sabahattin Ali, childhood, his own childhood and his homeland, has also become, cinematically, the film of a search. His bringing a short story to the moving image, enriching his purpose and his story with an approach that bears the influence of his identity as a photographer, should be regarded as a bold undertaking.

The story Ayran is the story of Hasan, who on a winter’s day tries to sell a jug of ayran, calling out “fresh ayran”, and who has taken on a great responsibility at a young age. Far from his mother, who works in the town four hours away, Hasan, for whom life amounts to selling ayran at the station and feeding his little siblings, walks the same road back and forth, summer and winter, even though it takes hours. The ache that Sabahattin Ali’s stories leave in one’s chest is felt in this story too. In both the film and the story, the moment this ache is felt most strongly comes in the dialogue between the engineer and Hasan. This scene is also the point where the film meets the story most deeply.

Hasan, the little character of Sabahattin Ali’s story Ayran, has no father. The father’s absence is not explained in the story. However, the fact that the mother has to work far away, that theirs is a family whose well-being the villagers never ask after, the possibility that the mother might come home with a new sibling, and, with all this, the danger of even more weight falling on Hasan’s shoulders, carry certain connotations. In the film White as Snow, this story written in 1938 is shifted, though not very explicitly, to a period of military coup, to 12 September 1980. The father has been arrested for political reasons after being informed on, and that is why he is absent. One may also think that the family has been ostracised for political reasons. The setting moves from a train station to a rest stop in a mountainous area for the minibuses running between the village and the town. New characters are also added to the film. All of these are what Selim Güneş, who comes from the same region, has brought from himself. Recep, who is hopelessly in love and runs the tea stall at the rest stop; Kadir Dede, who informed on the young men of the village, causing Hasan’s father to be taken away in handcuffs by the gendarmes on a wedding day, and who has begun to feel remorse; Hasan’s jug Çiko; and Zagor, whom he loses to the waters, are Selim Güneş’s other contributions.

During the film, at moments when viewers who do not know the story would struggle to put the pieces together, Kadir Dede’s narration comes to their aid. The old man, who comes to the rest stop to sell things just as Hasan does, tells a villager he is on friendly terms with about Recep’s story, what has happened to Hasan, why his mother is far away and what she does there. While the film tells, through rhythmic transitions and parallel editing, what Hasan’s mother, who looks after the mother of the town’s mayor, his father, spending his days in prison, Kadir Dede, who sells pears, Recep, waiting at the rest stop, and the engineer who has come to the small town do over the course of a single day, the viewer begins to wait for the points of connection where all these characters can be seen as a whole. In fact, it is possible to say that the characters in the film are also in a state of waiting. As pastoral images and human faces come together, human waiting, hope, loneliness, and the drawing near to and away from the feeling of compassion each turn into a photograph, each as a matter of its own.

Unlike in the story, Hasan’s having no one and being left alone with the howling of wolves in a harsh, cold nature, and his mother, Recep and Kadir Dede thinking of him and running towards him, are among the concrete forms of the hope that the film wants to keep alive rather than lose. Another is Hasan’s simple wishes, now turned into dreams, for the strength and love he needs to stay on his feet. The conversation with his father as they hammer iron, the journey in the back of a truck with his mother, father and siblings… Perhaps this is why one of the quotations in the film is John Lennon’s saying, “where there is life, there is hope”.

In White as Snow, Selim Güneş – a master photographer directing a first film in his homeland – unmistakably transposes to Artvin the realist characters of Sabahattin Ali’s Ayran, their psychology and the depiction of the outside world they live in, and visualises them with a lyrical style and interpretation all his own. It is nothing new for nature, especially the nature of the Black Sea region, to appear as part of films that have left, or are set to leave, their mark on recent Turkish cinema. This nature is present in White as Snow too. This time, the Black Sea on a winter’s day… Rather than the end of Hasan, who on a winter’s day is obliged to go back, what the film reflects is a feeling, a region, a daily life that includes the people of the region, and a slice of history. White as Snow is adapted from a Sabahattin Ali story, or rather it carries a greeting to Sabahattin Ali. Based on a screenplay the director developed by adding his own childhood, the film also stands out for its stylised images and Mircan’s music. It may also be said that this striving to stand out at times goes further, to the point of pulling the audience away from the film’s story.

I think that even in this first film Selim Güneş stands at a crossroads, and that in his next film we will see which road he chooses after it. We can define this fork along two axes. The first is a stylised world: the appeal of the visual world, or a visual perfection that overpowers story, theme and cinematic feeling. The second is to follow a human story or feeling and pass it on to the viewer as a storyteller. The dominance of photography in the film inevitably takes us to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s first film, The Small Town. The Small Town, too, alongside a flowing, warm story, showed many moments caught at the instant the shutter was pressed. Nuri Bilge Ceylan turned this background in photography into masterful cinema. With the wish that Selim Güneş will not neglect storytelling in particular… The influence and presence of Sabahattin Ali in White as Snow shows us the way in this sense.

*****

Notes:
1- Sabahattin Ali Bütün Öyküleri II, Ayran in Yeni Dünya, p.37, YKY, 1997
2- Sevengül Sönmez, A’dan Z’ye Sabahattin Ali, p.429, YKY, 200