INTERVIEW / A heart-wrenching fairy tale… / Müjgan Yıldırım

2011.05.16
evrensel.net

Selim Güneş, director and screenwriter of “White as Snow”, is an engineer who has also devoted his heart to photography for many years. He is an artist who has put his name to many exhibitions and books in this field. He worked in photography, but cinema was a beloved he had nurtured inside him since childhood… Until he arrived where he is today with White as Snow… White as Snow drew considerable attention at the festivals it took part in, both at home and abroad, and most recently it was awarded the “Special Jury Prize” at the 15th Sofia International Film Festival (SIFF). As soon as he was back in İstanbul from Bulgaria, we talked with Güneş about his film…

In your first film you adapted Sabahattin Ali’s story ‘Ayran’… What did this story mean to you?

I had read ‘Ayran’ years ago. Its feeling affected me deeply. The thought ‘This story would make a fine film’ had also settled in a corner of my mind. Necati Güngör called ‘Ayran’ ‘a story that pierces your heart like a bullet’. It affected me to that degree too. In most of Sabahattin Ali’s works, the sense of reality and the visual quality have always moved his readers. The impact of this dramatic story resulted in ‘White as Snow’. I describe White as Snow as ‘a film like a heart-wrenching fairy tale in the whiteness of the snow’. And I think that is what affected me in the story too…

While reading the work, I had imagined a child walking alone on a deserted, snowy road with a jug in his hand as a striking image. A child moving like a small speck within a wide-angle view of snowy, harsh nature. It was tremendous for conveying the feeling of loneliness… And when I thought about what went through Hasan’s mind and what he did while waiting to sell ayran, I sensed that this story would make a poetic film. Many such things kept turning over in my head while I was reading that short story and then turning it into a screenplay…

Did you face difficulties in turning ‘Ayran’ into a screenplay? Feelings, moments, situations where you and the story agreed or parted ways?..

I think stories, as literary works, are closer to film. That made my job easier. But I also needed some additions. For example, one of the main characters, Hasan’s father, does not exist in the story. The story was written in 1938. The events take place along a railway line. I moved the story to the roadside, to the Eastern Black Sea and to the period of my own childhood. And I added the character of the father. At the beginning of the film, the father is taken to prison as a political offender. In parallel with what Hasan goes through, we watch that same day of the father’s in prison…

Yours was a long project; from the very beginning, could you foresee where it would be today?

There was always a feeling that it would be a good film. And so it turned out. Now I think my second film will be even better. I hope it turns out the way I think.

What kind of responsibility was it for you to be from Artvin (Borçka) and to bring this project to life there?

The reason I shot the film in Artvin has less to do with my being from Artvin than with the effect Maden village had on me. Your aim is for your film to be good. The film comes first. I did the location scouting in Zonguldak, Kastamonu and Artvin. Maden village was in Artvin. That is why my choice fell on Artvin. And so I adapted some things in the screenplay with Artvin in mind.

Your film, with its emphasis on the visual, its stillness and its sparse dialogue, inevitably feels like a nod to Tarkovsky…

The film is the story of one day in a child’s life… In this one-day story there is hope, there is courage and there is love… White as Snow is a film like a fairy tale in which daydreams, memories and dreams mingle with reality… In this film, which speaks to these feelings, what I tried to emphasise is the ‘hope’ in John Lennon’s words, “Where there is life, there is hope”… Because of the atmosphere created by the film I made with this in mind, I was found close to the cinema of Tarkovsky abroad and to that of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Turkey. I was proud of both. But I also think my path is different from theirs.

What do you want to do with film – does it pick up where photography falls short, or complete what photography leaves unsaid?

For me, how you say something matters more than what you say. That is, how you say what you say. How you say it depends on the elements of the art form you are using and on your skill in expressing your own world through those elements. I have always been involved in cinema. I always had the desire to make my own film. Photography and cinema will always be there for me. But standing side by side…

There is also a reference to 12 September in the film; do you think there has been a reckoning with 12 September?

The reference in the film is to coups. For the reckoning to be complete, the consequences and the suffering caused by the coups must come to an end. The consequences have not been erased, and the suffering has turned into a lingering ache…

The film says ‘hope in spite of everything’; are you as hopeful as your film?

John Lennon, who said “Where there is life, there is hope”, still gives us a friendly wink. I have hope and I always will. And there has to be hope…

Your identity as a photographer is a good deal older than your identity as a filmmaker… Is a photographer’s eye an advantage for cinema?

Both an advantage and a disadvantage. If you think of what you are going to tell in photographic terms, you drift away from cinema. That is, you should not think of it as a single image. When I began writing the screenplay, I studied my lessons like a student for about three years, read books and did research. One of the things I had to pay most attention to was deciding what the images would be like. A photographic image may be very good visually, but if it loses its meaning in the moving image, that is a disadvantage. A knife-edge situation, you see. I took great care to use the advantage. What is the scene telling, where should the camera stand, what should the shot size be, what should the perspective be, which lens suits that perspective, and what will my framing be? And the result: did I get what I wanted in this shot? So I decided on the images by paying attention to these questions, working backwards from the end. In making the final decision, I think my background in photography contributed to my film. When I watch the film now, I see that this is so.

*****

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