From Sabahattin Ali’s Pen to Selim Güneş’s Photographs: White as Snow / Seray Genç

Yeni Film Dergisi, October-December 2010, Issue 21

White as Snow, adapted from Sabahattin Ali’s story Ayran, is the first film by Selim Güneş, a name known and familiar to every photographer or photography enthusiast who has passed through İFSAK. Making a feature film out of a short story is perhaps something that takes courage. Selim Güneş shares both his courage and his dream with us. This dream is the moment you capture and freeze in a single photographic frame turning into moving images, and those moving images in turn coming together into a narrative, a cinematic narrative. That he set out from a story by Sabahattin Ali naturally says a great deal. So does his placing the story on the eve of 12 September…

Life in Sabahattin Ali’s stories carries a realism that touches not only a person’s surroundings but also their inner world. The film is at its strongest where Sabahattin Ali’s stories also grip us. Helped by the film’s young actor Hakan, with his lovely way of speaking and his natural movements, it is the moment when Hasan, whose father is in prison and whose mother works as a carer far from the village, and who, amid all that poverty and in the snow and cold, walks from his village to the roadside to sell ayran to passengers going by in minibuses, cannot get his money from the newly arrived engineer. It is his taking the money at first and then being forced to give it back. Apart from all the beautiful images and music in this film, perhaps containing them but going beyond them, this is the scene that produces a dense, silent meaning and feeling. Since for a long stretch all the frames, scenes and fragments at the start of the film do not set the story going, or the audience cannot piece these fragments together, I think the story as a whole never reaches the power of this scene.

Although I would like to write that Mircan’s music at times overpowers the narrative, priority in this piece has gone to the claims made after the film won the best music award, which moved beyond a matter of seeking one’s rights, widened their scope, lost their level and turned into another kind of attack. Not content with saying that the film’s music belonged to the musician Uğur Işık, whom Mircan thanked and named both at the press conference and when receiving the award, Murat Bardakçı went on to speak of the recent films of Turkey’s cinema as “little watched” (the loss belonging to the majority in this country, while the film loses nothing of its worth), “made, as he imagines, with his own taxes” (without knowing the source of the funding given by the Ministry of Culture), “tied to a certain group or ideology” (implying that he himself belongs to none), “not winning Oscars” (as if awards from European festivals counted for anything), “these kinds of films of Turkish cinema”, and so on. Exposing both his knowledge and his style, and seized by a kind of fit of rage, he was devoting his column to writing about cinema! Considering the extent these debates reach and the shape they take in our country, we can say that if they overshadow the film, this time it will truly be a loss for cinema.

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