Where there is hope, there is also life / Dani Mežan

2017.06.23
total(no)subjektivni

Where there is hope, there is also life

The mountainside is wrapped in white. It seems that even the sun never peeks into the remote corners of Turkey. The winter bites, and people struggle through their everyday lives. The wolves howl their song, the bears do not sleep their winter sleep – instead, as the legend goes, they spit in a man’s face and make him think about his humanity. A child catches snowflakes with his mouth. A woman drapes white laundry over tightly stretched lines. White, white, white. An old man muses about the relationships among the villagers. A man waits for a love letter from his beloved, but it never arrives. When it finally does come, the hut burns to the ground and the letter is carried away by gusts of wind. Another man leaves the mountain for prison and leaves his family at the mercy of cruel nature and the cold. The villagers gather at his house and form a choir that mourns his departure in a sorrowful elegy. The red paint dripping from a board looks like the congealed blood of someone who long ago forgot how to hope. People hurry off in their cars and vans to who knows where. A stranger from Istanbul does not want a job in the forest. Lonely and bleak. Someone tells him: “Everyone who leaves this town cries; everyone who comes to this place cries.” White, red and weeping. The lyricism of a remote and hard life. A poetry that only Turkish film is capable of. That is why I love it and wait for its verses. Melancholic verses that call symbols back to memory. Symbols of loneliness. Symbols of alienation. Symbols of survival. Symbols of white horses riding alone through a snowy landscape. Symbols of expectation and hope. Symbols of oblivion. Symbols of a memory that yearns fervently. Symbols of love – absent and elusive. Symbols of nature and its colours, which bury man with their beauty and merciless power. All of this is a beautiful and allegorical Turkish film with a title true to its images – White as Snow (2010, directed by Selim Güneş).

A film that, with its fragility and its metaphors, reminds me of the films of the much-loved director Semih Kaplanoğlu (especially his latest film Bal, immortalised with awards). White as Snow likewise emphasises growing up, a childhood full of wrong turns and the struggle for survival. This is no picture of a childhood idyll, for now it is the child who has to provide for the family. To step into the trousers of adulthood. Into the trousers of his father, who will probably not return as the main “breadwinner” for years. And around the growing boy gathers a palette of people of one kind or another. A vignette of their fates and dreams. The film shows all this with something that is characteristic of Turkish film.

I could describe it as so-called pure cinema. A cinema of pure images, magical photography, minimalist haikus of dialogue and a poetics that knows that less can be more – and onward over the rainbow. The human fates it paints seem like a tapestry of wonderful colours even when the image drowns in the murkiness of a dazed white and a grieving black. Turkish directors are simply painters who use their brush the way a poet uses words or a sculptor shapes wood and marble. A pure and innocent film that strides with great, gasping steps through the snow giving way underfoot and looks with wide-open eyes through the snowstorm.

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