White as Snow / Aytuna Tosunoğlu

2014.01.18
filmelestirisi.com

It is a film adaptation of Sabahattin Ali’s short story “Ayran”. In general terms, “White as Snow” can be described as the meeting of the conclusion that life is nothing but a struggle, and of holding on to it, with a poetic narrative. It is the story of twelve-year-old Hasan, who suddenly finds himself in the world of adults when his father is arrested and his mother has to go to a distant village to work. Hasan has to look after his two younger siblings. In White as Snow, Hasan has to contribute to his mother’s income. Even if the story, put this briefly, amounted to nothing more than this, the fact that it is a literary adaptation obliges us to dwell on the long and difficult efforts with which the person who adapted it – that is, the screenwriter and director Selim Güneş – brought this film to life. This piece aims to offer a theoretical exploration of how the director visualised the literary text in his hands.

When we think about the relationship between the written text and the visual text, the processes by which works are created run in opposite directions. While the visual text works from the external phenomenon (external reference), that is, from perception towards the inner drive, towards signs, in the written text this process runs from a proposition made up of signs/symbols (internal reference) towards perception. This reversed way of working gives rise to “matching”, an important problem in adaptation. The elements of two different communication systems have to be brought into an equivalent position. It is therefore obvious that no adaptation will be perfect, because every work is built with the conventional usage of its own system. Another consequence of this difference is that, while language produces images in the reader’s mind, visual language records objects and shows every viewer the same images – even if they may be interpreted differently. This in turn leads to a very common result: when a book is adapted for the cinema, the film does not satisfy someone who has already read the book.

At this point, the degree of fidelity between the adapted work and the adaptation has gained importance. What determines the success of a book’s adaptation for the screen is not a word-for-word transfer from one medium to another. That is, adapting a book means the adapter’s personal reading of the book, and the images reached as a result of this reading gaining reality by being transferred into visual language. The adapter (screenwriter/director) has to decide what the book says and what it is about, and to find its equivalent in visual language. The matter of deciding on the equivalent and on the subject depends directly on the background and the intuitions from which the screenwriter’s/director’s world of images draws. Apart from this, adaptation is the result of an implicit or explicit relationship between the author of the book and the adapter (screenwriter/director). Since what is produced is a work of art, reinterpreting the work matters more than the effort to remain completely faithful to the original. Undoubtedly, the interpretation of the screenwriter/director, who can be regarded as a second genius, is more important than a one-to-one adaptation, so that the film too can establish its own independence. This is exactly what screenwriter and director Selim Güneş has achieved in White as Snow. By grounding the story on an “empty space”, he offers his audience the opportunity to make an interpretation through the images, matching and interpretation he proposes.

So what is this “empty space”?

To describe it, I turn for help to a theft that took place 101 years ago: on 21 August 1911, at the Louvre, which is closed on Mondays, weekly workers are working inside the museum to whitewash/paint some of its sections. One of the workers steals the Mona Lisa, which is on display, because it resembles the lover who left him. The reason the painting was stolen, and who stole it (or who was behind it), have remained subjects of speculation to this day. After an investigation/inquiry lasting about two years, the painting is found at the bottom of a trunk in this worker’s home. The worker is sentenced to prison; the Mona Lisa, from the day it was stolen, becomes famous and turns into a commodity. However, the point I want to draw attention to is not the theft of the painting, but the state of the painting not being in its place.

Right after the painting is stolen, people start forming long queues in front of the museum to see this empty space where the picture once hung. Most of the visitors who come to look at the empty space left by the painting have never been to the Louvre before, or have never seen the picture. As Darien Leader relates, Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod (too) go to Paris three weeks after the theft to see the empty space left by the Mona Lisa. Brod notes in his diary: the Mona Lisa itself is not there, but its image is everywhere.

The empty space left behind by what had been there before became a filled space in the minds of those who came to look at it. Every individual who saw the emptiness brought it to life in their own mind. Because human beings are more inclined to create from nothing than from something. The act of removing an object corresponds to the production of an emptiness. In 1911, what people flocked to the Louvre to see was the empty space left by the vanished Mona Lisa. What happened was people going to see a work of art not because it was there but, on the contrary, because it was not there.

In life we are surrounded by crowds. Today, even the insides of homes are full of things bought because they were cheap, with the thought that they might be used one day. Perhaps because the human eye is disturbed by emptiness, people do not mind moving among the crowd of objects squeezed into every gap: coffee tables, floor lamps, magazine racks, chests of drawers, bedside tables, rugs and so on. What is more, when homes are full, things now spill out onto the balconies: balconies are enclosed with the latest sliding glass systems and added to the living space. This can be seen as a reflection of the spirit of today’s people, who do not like to leave empty space.

Carrying on with life squeezed between images is a backpack that grows ever heavier on the back of the people of this age. In a world where everything affects the individual excessively and there is no empty space, for an individual living with a backpack that gets a little heavier each time, the artistic activity they watch requires an effort to create emptiness. As Paul Klee once said about the painter Piet Mondrian, “Creating emptiness is the most important act. Moreover, this is true creation, because this emptiness is positive.” Today’s understanding of cinema seems to have adapted to a world that has changed human life technologically, where everything has become formulaic – where even concepts have been turned into pills. Most of the films watched in cinemas now give us the experience of travelling along with a bullet fired from a barrel, flying like a bird over crowded streets, watching cars crash into each other from many angles, and feeling emotions within the frame of conventions. This only helps the backpack grow heavier and heavier. Selim Güneş’s cinema promises to rise by getting rid of this unnecessary weight.

Good use of emptiness produces a silhouette of the subject. In Selim Güneş’s White as Snow, while images of nature are shown in long shots, a car or a person moving along the road points to the sensory gains in the film’s story: the person is alone, the man driving the car is alone, the woman is alone, the children are alone, the future is uncertain. Visual gains coming from the past settle into the appropriate places of the present field of perception, completing it in the most useful way, in White as Snow…

What is at stake is that, if what was there before is no longer there, the person looking at this empty space that has been created sees something about themselves. Selim Güneş has managed to make us follow a ghost that he himself is pursuing.

In this first film, Selim Güneş presents the concept of empty space that we tried to describe above. The director’s narrative language works through these gaps. In his films, the heroes do not pass before us as clichés. Mortality appears not as a religious theme but in relation to what lies before and after it. His heroes live within the spontaneity of life and are among us. Anything forced would fill this empty space, so it stays far from Selim Güneş’s viewfinder.

His view of women – unlike that of his contemporaries – contains empty spaces. In White as Snow, the woman is not the object of a situation but herself: she is plain, she makes her intentions clear, she is not excluded, she is not turned into a cliché. She is, therefore, a “human being”. For Selim Güneş, nature expresses the closeness of a sibling. The director’s being at peace with nature is also an expression of his being at peace with the notion of time. The story he scatters through nature appears before us with the simplicity of a tree, a snowflake, a wind. The lives lived inside and outside the window do not express two separate worlds. One does not exist to test the reliability or protectiveness of the other. Life goes on both inside and outside; it moves on, it changes, it tests.

The director’s technical use of the camera, with the movements a camera is able to make, also emerges as an element that strengthens his narration. Güneş’s camera does not hop, does not jump, does not turn into news footage, does not fly and does not run away! It simply pans and tilts on a tripod… People who are talking are not shown over each other’s shoulders, so the whole is not broken into pieces. Characters placed within general views and wide angles are presented as if we were watching them there, from a short distance away. Doesn’t life itself give us this possibility too: we observe, and we fill in the empty spaces ourselves. Because our brain is eager to fill this emptiness, and we also sense that hope about life will be born from this emptiness. Let us end by saying that the directors who can offer this in cinema are few… (4 / 5)

*****

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