White as Snow / Erman Ata Uncu

2011.05.13
arkapencere.com, Issue 81

Underlying the wish to adapt a story for the cinema there should probably be the possibility of reaching the essence of that narrative, rather than spreading what happens in a few pages across the screen. The starting point of “White as Snow”, which takes Sabahattin Ali’s story ‘Ayran’ as its source, should be sought here too.

The story is about a little boy, whose mother works as a servant in another house and who has to keep an eye on his siblings, trying to sell ayran on a winter day at a station in a desolate place… In fact, at first glance “White as Snow” adds no extra element to this plot either. The helplessness of its child hero, struggling to make a living by selling ayran on a winter day, is the essence of the film too…

To get a film of eighty-odd minutes out of this plot, director Selim Güneş leans mainly on the supporting characters. The mother, for example, of whom we know in the story only that she works as a servant and comes home now and then to look after the children, is one of the characters seen most on screen in the film.

In the film we also become acquainted with the life of ‘the villager who sells winter pears’, and we know why the father, whose fate the story gives no information about, is nowhere to be seen. In “White as Snow” even the man who pays nothing for the ayran and asks the boy to let it go has a story.

Beyond all this, the most important change is, of course, that the 1938 story is moved in the film to the period after 12 September. But when it comes to shifting a source in time, one wants to see the reasons that make such a change necessary. Or one wishes to understand why the director made this choice. Doesn’t replacing the train with a minibus from the 1980s, attributing the father’s absence to his arrest by soldiers after the coup, and not fleshing out this event lead the film to stray from the essence of the story and move away from the original aim of bringing it to the screen?

Whether we should be glad or sorry that this attempt at a time shift, which can be read as a wish to build a new framework so that the story does not hang in the air once adapted for the cinema, and to tie up its loose ends a little more, fails to achieve its aim, is somewhat uncertain. For the places where “White as Snow” is most successful emerge precisely when it does not embark on such an effort. In the scenes where it examines the relationships of its hero, stuck in a desolate village, with those around him… Indeed, the rhythm it strikes while linking together scenes that focus on the characters’ daily chores sets “White as Snow” apart from the films on the ‘nature-man’ theme that have long relied on a familiar formula.

The scenes in which Selim Güneş lets us feel the camera’s presence and looks at what the characters go through from a distance are among the biggest factors in the film building a world of its own. In particular, the scene where the mother struggles frantically to find her child is an example, with its purely observing structure that does not rely on emotional closeness, of how solid an atmosphere “White as Snow” builds when the moment comes. But whenever an outside intervention appears and the film’s purpose begins to be voiced and spelled out by its ‘wise’ heroes, the world of “White as Snow” suffers serious damage.

Evaluating a literary adaptation against its source is, of course, a restrictive point of view from the outset. Judging the film by how closely it resembles the Sabahattin Ali story it is adapted from, or by how well it reflects it, is unfair to the film. But when a successful language is achieved at the points where it chooses to reflect the story (its atmosphere rather than its plot), and it then stumbles in the additions made to it, one cannot help going back to the story. Or, in other words, one cannot help thinking of a much more successful film that could have emerged had it not strayed from the story. For the opening scene, in which sound and image are used to highly impressive effect, deserves such a film.

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