“White as Snow”, a photograph / Meltem Çavdar

2011.05.20
bilkimm.blogspot.com.tr

‘White as Snow’, the first film by photographer and director Selim Güneş, which he adapted from Sabahattin Ali’s story ‘Ayran’ and directed, brings to the screen the story of a little child crushed by poverty and heading towards disappearance, through the mystical atmosphere created by the simplicity of snow and its effective use of sound and music.

White as Snow is the film of one day on which Hasan, a little child separated from his mother and father, goes from his mountain village to the roadside and back on a cold winter’s day to sell ayran so that he can buy bread to feed his siblings. Twelve-year-old Hasan, whose father was thrown into prison a year earlier, is left alone with his two siblings when his mother goes to work in the town. The food brought by the mother, who can come to the village only once a week, lasts just a few days. So Hasan takes his jug Çiko, full of fresh ayran, and sets off. During this one day, as Hasan struggles against poverty and nature with a child’s stubbornness, he is at the same time in a world of daydreams and dreams.

In the film we are guests in the inner worlds of four more people besides Hasan. Hasan’s mother, a woman on her own; his father Demirci Halil, in prison; the poor trader Recep; the old villager Kadir Dede; and the young engineer who has come to work far from home: all of them are waiting for something in the film, and their expectations never come true.

Hopelessness after 12 September

Artvin, a highly political place in the 1970s, became a region where many people suffered during and after 12 September. That is why the screenplay’s greatest departure from Sabahattin Ali’s work is the role given to Hasan’s father. Fatherless in the story, Hasan in the film longs for his father, who is in prison and whose reason for being jailed is his leftism. Hasan’s father Halil is a blacksmith, but he is one of the town’s intellectuals. To survive, Hasan recalls his father’s courage, the courage that hammered iron and defied the established order. While his father could be both the cause of Hasan’s suffering and his salvation, the pocketknife left to him by his father is, as the ending of the story demands, not enough to save Hasan in the finale; it cannot be enough.

Hasan’s mother, with her anxious gazes full of waiting, whose voice we never hear; his father, having nervous breakdowns between the prison walls at the very time of Hasan’s hard day; Kadir Dede, who carries in his pear basket the heavy burden of having informed on a revolutionary from his village; Recep, the poor trader who could not be united with the one he loves; the engineer, who loses his own self out of fear of loneliness and grows indifferent to those around him…

All of them draw the viewer into a bottomless well of endless sighs and leave them helpless.

Selim Güneş adds “hope” to his film through the words of Grandpa Kadir: “Where there is life, there is hope…” But to give his film “depth”, much like Özcan Alper’s film Autumn, he drags the socialist individual into defeat and leaves him facing unbearable pain; yet, unlike the film My Father and My Son, he turns the revolutionary character, if not into someone fully repentant, then into a nervous wreck caught in mental crises.

Clichés and realities

In the film of the director, who wants to present this sociologically rich and humanly tragic story as a film that avoids sentimentality and stays outside the cosy village atmosphere, there is almost no dialogue, and where there is, it has no continuity. The mother never speaks in the film; the children do not talk at home, nor the men at the coffeehouse. All this can be read as the result of the director’s search for simplicity and his wish not to fall into the cliché of warm village people. Unfortunately, though, it leads to a loss of realism in the eyes of the audience.

In this film, with its slow-paced narration of pastoral images conveyed not through words but through image, sound and music, a deep and spiritual effect emerges – few words, many images – in the stylised setting created by snow in winter. Metaphors such as the horse, the wound opening on the horse’s body, the forest, the pocketknife, the cracks forming in the prison wall, the red paint dripping onto the ground, the cold, the wetness and the burning wooden shop are each a door opening onto the director’s world of imagination. Every moment is a carefully considered photographic frame. However, the director’s weakness for creating atmosphere, with its static sequences, makes it hard for the audience to hold on to the film.

The film’s music by Mircan Kaya and its sounds, in harmony with frames that turn into paintings, either soothe the viewer or alert them.

A photographic artist’s first film

The director, who searches for the new in every way, has made a valuable production in this first film because he steps outside the narratives we are used to. The research and experiments he carried out on the work of a major writer like Sabahattin Ali make the film worth watching.

*****

This article was written for the 20 May 2011 issue of the newspaper Halkın Sesi.

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