The Endless Waiting of the Provinces / Ali Reza Dürü

2013.03.25
Edebi Filmler

Trying to combine minimalist influences with a social realist approach, the film White as Snow makes the audience a partner in the silent waiting of provincial life. From the beginning of the film to the end, everything is in absolute silence and waiting, and what is being waited for is sometimes unclear. Hasan, who tries to sell ayran to the passing cars, waits for passengers; the man in the coffeehouse on the mountaintop waits for a letter; the bearded old man waits for customers; Hasan’s father in prison waits for freedom; Hasan’s mother waits for the time when she will be reunited with her children and her husband; Hasan’s two little siblings wait for Hasan to come home and for the food he will bring; the engineer assigned to the village waits to reach the village; the leaves of the trees wait for winter to end and for the season of blossoming, the wolves wait for an unprotected child to get lost in the forest, and the birds wait for other birds to echo their song. As I said, everything is waiting, in the cold-blooded guises of a chronic waiting, to play the roles nature has given it.

In such minimal films with so little movement, audiences used to seeing action on screen are generally disappointed. It is quite hard for those who do not see the hidden movement within nature to give meaning to the stillness of people. We should recall a truth that Yaşar Kemal once spoke: “I don’t exaggerate nature; nature is exaggerated already.” Indeed, this reality always goes unnoticed in films that use nature and the stillness of life not as a backdrop but as their main element. But the point is to see that nature is present in our lives with all its vitality, its motion and its movement.

*****

*** http://edebifilm.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/kar-beyaz-selim-gunes-2010.html