The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan: The Global Vision of a Turkish Filmmaker 9781350988552, 9781786733344

Citation preview

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Bülent Diken is Professor of Social and Cultural Theory at Lancaster University, UK, and at Kadir Has University, Turkey. In particular, his research interests include the sociology of cinema, and he has a number of previous publications, which include The Culture of Exception (2008) and Sociology through the Projector (2005). Graeme Gilloch is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He researches and teaches courses in visual culture-especially film and photography-and metropolitan and urban cultures. Craig Hammond is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK. He researches film from a sociological perspective, amongst other interests. His previous publications include Hope, Utopia and Creativity in Higher Education (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

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‘This is a rich, insightful and thought-provoking book which brings new light to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema from a philosophical standpoint. The eloquent and sometimes poetic style of the book charmingly resonates with the tranquil mood of the films that it investigates.’ – Asuman Suner, İstanbul Technical University ‘Through the lens of sociology and cultural theory, the authors examine the ideas emerging from Ceylan’s cinema, offering an in-depth, layered but accessible analysis of his filmmaking. [This book] makes clear why there is such a buzz about Ceylan!’ – Ozge Samanci, Northwestern University

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan The Global Vision of a Turkish Filmmaker BÜLENT DIKEN, GRAEME GILLOCH AND CRAIG HAMMOND

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by I.B. Tauris 2018 Paperback edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2022 Copyright © Bülent Diken, Graeme Gilloch and Craig Hammond, 2018 Bülent Diken, Graeme Gilloch and Craig Hammond have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3816-3 PB: 978-1-3502-5230-1 ePDF: 978-1-7867-3334-4 ePub: 978-1-7867-2334-5 To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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‘I am banished to the desert.’ (Mariya Voinovna Zubova, 1749–99)

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements

ix xi

Introduction

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon Origins Perhaps Sorrow (Trauer) Imagines Play (Spiel)

23 23 25 29 33 35

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Our Town: Homesickness in The Small Town and Clouds of May A Charmed Circle Sadness amidst Snow Gathering Clouds Muzaffer with a Movie Camera Cinematic Hide-and-seek

37 37 40 44 46 51

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale Departures Time and Motion Photography and Film Istanbul Redeemed

55 55 60 64 68

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Climates and the Problem of Nihilism: the Missing Season Summer Autumn Winter Spring?

71 72 76 81 82

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Contents 5

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Three Monkeys and the Oblivion of the Spectral Fourth Non-Place: Home as Shipwreck Hear No Evil and the Spectre of Oblivion The Shock of Remembrance

87 88 92 96

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Ante Rem, Revenge, Hinterland and Detection Wilderness: Unmasking the Sublime Ressentiment and Revenge: the Woman who Predicted her own Death Kenan, Cemal, Nusret… and Anatolia

107 113

Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology Money, Debt and Symbolic Exchange Vanity and Religion Not Resisting Evil Burning Money Fooling About

117 119 122 126 129 134

Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics Eidetic Kalospectrality

139 145

Notes Bibliography Index

149 169 177

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List of Figures 1.1 Origins. Cocoon (1995).

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1.2 He is dying. Cocoon (1995).

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2.1 Saffet at the fairground. The Small Town (1997).

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2.2 The laughter has left. The Small Town (1997).

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2.3 The late-comer. The Small Town (1997).

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2.4 The visit to Uncle Pire. Clouds of May (1999).

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3.1 Alone once more. Distant (2002).

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3.2 Flanerie under snow. Distant (2002).

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4.1 Beach scene (summer). Climates (2006).

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4.2 Motorbike scene (summer). Climates (2006).

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4.3 Autumn in Istanbul. Climates (2006).

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5.1 İsmail, the flat and the railway fence. Three Monkeys (2008).

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5.2 The flat, the train and the ocean. Three Monkeys (2008).

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5.3 Eyüp prior to the spectral visitation. Three Monkeys (2008).

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6.1 The storm facing protagonist. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

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6.2 Disembarkation on the Anatolian steppe. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

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6.3 Mukhtar’s daughter, Cemile. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

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List of Figures 7.1 Aydın’s hotel in Cappadocia. Winter’s Sleep (2014).

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7.2 The cracked window. Winter’s Sleep (2014).

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7.3 Aydın and his sister Necla. Winter’s Sleep (2014).

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Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for kindly allowing the use of images from his films in this book. Bülent Diken would like to thank Third Text and Taylor and Francis/ Routledge for permission to reproduce his 2008 article ‘Climates of nihilism’, which first appeared in Third Text Vol. 22, No. 6, p. 719–32. Graeme Gilloch would like to thank the Korea Foundation, whose generous funding enabled him to present earlier versions of the Kasaba and Koza studies at the Busan International Film Festival and Korea National University of the Arts respectively. Craig Hammond would like to thank academic colleagues at University Centre at Blackburn College for the many vibrant debates on social theory, philosophy and culture, which contributed, in no small part, to the inception of some of the concepts and ideas that he utilized and developed in parts of this book. The bleak wilderness of the desert always contains the latent potency of life-affirming transformation.

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Introduction

I With such international successes as Distant (2002), Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014), the contemporary Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (born Istanbul, 1959) has established himself as one of the most original and provocative filmmakers of the twenty-first century, acclaimed by international critics and cinephiles alike.1 It is curious therefore that to date there has been relatively little attempt by film and media scholars to explore the highly distinctive style, mood and thematic preoccupations of his films.2 This book seeks to remedy this unaccountable omission. In the following chapters we critically examine the films that have earned Ceylan such global recognition and prestige. To this end we identify the key themes that run through his cinematic work, outline the particular aesthetics evident in his films and frame them in a transnational context. Ceylan’s films encapsulate a number of acute tensions and seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes, contrasting and contradictory tendencies that are best understood as moments of dialectical interplay. Above all, we suggest that one can understand his work in terms of the presence/absence of relationships and connections, forms and patterns of relation and non-relation. 1

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan And so, on the one hand, his films present modern urban living as imbued with alienation and isolation. His films are peopled by estranged characters who ironically pursue loneliness as a cure for, or as inoculation against, their very inability to form meaningful and enduring social and sexual relationships. In this respect, Ceylan’s cinema has an indispensable diagnostic value for the atomistic qualities of metropolitan modernity and contemporary urban identities. These are longstanding and familiar themes in the sociology of the city, dating back to the work of Ferdinand Tönnies (1888) and perhaps best exemplified in Georg Simmel’s (1903) notions of urban indifference and the blasé personality in his seminal essay ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’. On the other hand, however, the rural village or small town is in no way privileged or valorized as some kind of safe haven enabling and preserving intimacy, mutuality and community. Rather, in Ceylan’s films, these non-metropolitan loci are suffused with boredom, frustration and blighted aspirations. This is a cinema of dislocation, of the in-between, the no-man’s land of suspension and indeterminacy, the neither-nor. These films dwell upon the ambiguous space of the liminal and envisage the ambivalent existence of the stranger and the outsider. Another paradox is apparent: marked by a highly idiosyncratic style, mood and set of recurrent motifs, Ceylan’s films might be seen as exemplary instances of the film director as auteur, as an individual with a particular cinematic spirit and unique aesthetic vision. Ceylan might seem the perfect contemporary embodiment of the film director as artist and visionary. Indeed, the very title of our book The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan would seem to privilege the role of the director in the film production process. These are his films. At the same time, however, these films fully testify to the connectionist or collectivist ontology of cinema, that is to say, to the proper recognition of the filmmaking process itself as a collaborative and associative endeavour with human interdependencies grounded in the complex technical division of labour. Moreover, one only need look to the casts of his films to see how particular actors play and replay different roles, indeed, as is parodied in Clouds of May Ceylan is not averse to using his own kin, his actual relatives, as substitute actors and cast members. This is a cinema of relations. And so, curiously, while his characters so often appear as anomic and atomistic figures, bereft of social relations 2

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Introduction and scornful of interdependencies, the movies themselves attest to the old maxim that, pace auteur theory, ‘films are never the product of an individual.’3 Indeed, these films manifest a spirit of collection and connection, constantly open up for the free association of seemingly contrasting and heterogeneous ideas, traversing different artistic genres and media, bringing together distant spaces and remote timescapes, short-circuiting actual ways of seeing. Like the filmic medium itself, Ceylan’s movies present the concatenation of time-space and bodies. A final paradox: lonely characters, failed relationships and unwanted and unwarranted proximities make for awkward silences. So often in Ceylan’s films what is most important goes unsaid or perhaps remains unsayable. There is a pervasive inability or unwillingness to speak, a communication breakdown on screen that is not a lapse or pause between utterances as some kind of silent state of exception, but rather an enduring condition of incommunicability punctured and punctuated by occasional voices. This is a cinema of silence. Sometimes. On other occasions, however, Ceylan’s films can also be very rich in terms of dialogue and narration. The stony silence of the snow-enshrouded schoolroom in The Small Town, for example, contrasts markedly with the subsequent flow of family conversation and storytelling around a camp fire. In Winter Sleep, too, we see how dialogue is prioritized and privileged to such an extent that Ceylan himself seems to be renegotiating the interface between cinema, theatre and literature. These films articulate and present continual shifts and transitions from movement to stasis and from speech/dialogue to silence. They are sometimes ‘movies’, sometimes ‘talkies’ and sometimes neither. Undisturbed by action, uninterrupted by chatter, the screen is left empty for something else: time as duration, as suspension, time as the inbetween. Dialectics, not at play, but at rest. Dialectics at a standstill. What Ceylan’s cinema offers us above all is this frozen moment, the ‘tableau’ or ‘gestural’, what Walter Benjamin memorably terms ‘the dialectical image’.

II In this book we seek not to resolve but to mimic and thereby intensify such notions of paradox, contradiction and dialectics. Indeed, they are central 3

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan to our own writing practice here; that is to say, we the authors attend to each other, thus necessarily converging and conversing as equals in a collective dialogue, while at the same retaining and freely experimenting with our individual styles. There are three voices in this book: they appear as individual; as counterpoint; as polyphony. As an experiment in elective affinities, the unfolding of this agonistic dialogue structures this book and is, in our view, both justified by, and in keeping with, the films themselves. In so doing, we provide a distinctive analysis of Ceylan’s entire body of work hitherto, treating the films both individually and comparatively through the pursuit of what we see as five key thematic continuities: 1. The particular configurations of time and space in Ceylan’s films with a focus upon the experiences of homelessness, nostalgia, migration, dislocation and duration. His characters migrate from the small town to the big city (Distant) or return to their rural roots (Clouds of May); they venture out on long expeditions into unfamiliar territories (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), or set up residence in remote locations (Climates, Winter Sleep) but wherever they may happen to be, wherever they chance to find themselves, they are dissatisfied, disenchanted, disillusioned, dislocated, desirous only of being where they are not. This, then, is a cinema of the elsewhere. 2. The recurrent preoccupation with a sense of absence. These film narratives offer not redemptive resolution and closure, but rather circle around distressing absences – of lost children (Cocoon, The Small Town, Three Monkeys); of the capacity for love, sympathy and mutuality (Clouds of May, Distant, Climates); of the possibility of sincerity and honesty (Winter Sleep); of former hopes and aspirations unrealized and now unrealizable (Distant). Bereavement and the bereft, emptiness and the missing – such forms of loss and of lack haunt the screen in Ceylan’s films. 3. In light of such displacements, temporal disjunctures and absences, Ceylan’s emotionally intense films are all characterized by a persistent and all-pervasive sense of mournfulness, melancholy and ennui, which are configured around the (im)possibilities of meaningful and significant action. These are ‘inaction movies’ emphasizing stillness, stasis, inertia. Brooding incessantly on past misfortunes, oblivious to the plight 4

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Introduction of others, his characters cocoon themselves in self-pity, resentment and cynicism. 4. As disembedded ‘exiles’ and outsiders, Ceylan’s characters experience and endure the tensions and contradictions of metropolitan modernity and the reconfigurations of tradition and landscape in a rapidly urbanizing and suburbanizing society. These are exemplary figures of negative freedoms, of autonomy conceived as mere escape from the annoyance and interference of the Other. This is a cinema of strangers and estrangement, of surfaces and superficiality, where interactions are instrumental and emotional life is attenuated. 5. While discussions of Ceylan’s films to date have tended to be framed in terms of his relation to the flourishing of a ‘New Turkish cinema’,4 our readings situate his films in the context of a transnational imaginary, undergirded by classic European (especially French, German and Russian) thought, literature and film. In this context, the international success of his films is both illuminated and illuminating.

III The complex relationship between images and ideas is our focus throughout. Just as we identify five themes within Ceylan’s films, so our analyses are informed by five abiding concepts, each designating a particular kind of visual construction and configuration. These are:  (a) the Deleuzean notion of the ‘time-image’; (b)  the corollary of ‘time-image’, namely, the ‘movement-image’ (understood here as narrative); (c) the ‘thought-image’, or Denkbild (both Gilles Deleuze and Walter Benjamin are inspirations for this notion here); (d) the image as puzzle, as rebus, as ‘spatial hieroglyph’ (a term coined by Siegfried Kracauer); and, finally, (e) the image as residue, as remainder and reminder, as ghost (here we invoke the figure of the ‘trace’ as articulated in the work of Ernst Bloch).

(a) Time-image Ceylan’s films are only partially ‘movies’; they rely on images of time as much as on images of movement. Accordingly, Gilles Deleuze’s notion of 5

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan the ‘time-image’ is central to our discussion. Deleuze proposes that, since the end of World War II, it is possible to detect a different and distinctive configuration of time and space in cinema. The ‘movement image’, which has been the predominant cinematic style until this period, allowed time to proceed only in accordance with ‘action’ in terms of a rational procession and succession of causes and effects that are explicit in and constitutive of the narrative of the film. Images are articulated within the narrative to produce meaning within this linear sequence. This temporality was determined by what Deleuze calls a ‘sensory-motor link’ defining the relationship between the character and the situation through a logic of unfolding interactions based on chain of causality.5 What is crucial in this respect is the role of chronological progression in the narrative of the film so that momentary disruptions (the use of ‘flashbacks’, for example) are subsumed within the overall and overriding flow of actions and events. Deleuze calls an image that breaks itself free from such sensory-motor links ‘time-image’: imaginative, purely optical or sound situations unfettered by the constraints of sequential narration. With the time-image, we no longer understand an act in a particular context but are able to perceive movement as it is caused by time itself, as a direct image of time. ‘Time is out of joint’: it is off the hinges assigned to it by the action in the world, but also by movements of the world. ‘It is no longer time that depends on movement; it is aberrant movement that depends on time.’6 A distinct focus on the time-image in this sense is necessary to understand Ceylan’s cinema for all his films tarry with affects and intensities rather than well-defined emotions. Thus we often see abrupt transitions between different moods, creating a sustained sense of suspense. Love and hatred become inseparable, disgust mixes with longing, forgiveness borders on ressentiment, anger results in the laceration of souls.7 These paradoxes of relation and non-relation find expression and non-expression in what we might term Ceylan’s dialectics of dialogue. On numerous occasions in his films, Ceylan makes use of dialogue only minimally for ‘in real life we always lie so dialogue doesn’t carry much information’.8 Consequently, instead of expressing feelings through dialogue, his films often reveal them by creating cinematic atmospheres. Such images ‘liberate’9 the sense organs for they act as stimuli for thought by disrupting the chronological 6

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Introduction understanding of events, that is, by disrupting the perspective of the actual narrative by difference, their intervention enables the viewer to see time as a virtual whole. In Ceylan’s words: I try to recapture those moments in life where you suddenly feel that connection to a wider universe. Sound too is very important to the way I create a particular atmosphere, more so than music. The sound, for instance, of dogs barking in the distance at night creates lots of feelings for the viewer.10

This ‘connection to a wider universe’ is of course an attempt at opening up and out of the present to the possible, to the Virtual, of being to becoming. With the time-image ‘we are not just within time, caught up in its flow; we can distance ourselves from immediate and automatic responses because we can perceive that world as this or that. It is the virtual that opens the power of human decision or freedom.’11 This is a cinema of latencies and potentialities.

(b) Movement-image (the narrative flow) However, Ceylan’s films are also very rich in terms of dialogue and monologue: indeed, on occasions, these dialogues are so extensive that they last more than 15 minutes of screen time. In this respect Ceylan’s cinema seems to be reconfiguring the relationship between film, stage drama and the short story/novel. When this is the case, we pay due attention to the narrative structure of the films. In this regard we consider cinema not as an art whose specificity can be reduced to its technical and material apparatuses but as ‘an art whose meaning cuts across the borders between the arts’.12 Ceylan himself often mentions literature as a significant source of inspiration for his cinema and acknowledges that the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov ‘has contributed to almost all of my films; indeed, beyond that, he has taught me how to live’.13 Thus his first film The Small Town is dedicated to Chekhov, just as Clouds of May, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep directly incorporate Chekhovian stories into their narrative structures. 7

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan While mainstream film audiences have grown accustomed to the ways in which daily language is reproduced in contemporary cinema, the challenge, for Ceylan, seems to be reproducing the intricacies and nuances of literary sense and meaning in a cinematic context.14 He readily admits that literary language is difficult to incorporate in cinema, especially when it is Chekhov’s and Dostoevsky’s. In Chekhov it is not unusual to encounter a villager who embarks on a five-page tirade. Recall his short story, ‘On the Road’, where Liharev tells a woman whom he met at midnight in a hotel his thoughts, which lasts eight to nine pages. But how impressive it is! To say that ‘this man cannot speak like this, cannot express him this well’ or ‘who speaks here is not Liharev but Chekhov himself ’ would only mean setting up an unnecessary barrier for ourselves. Though we can accept such things in literature; in cinema we find it much more difficult. At the very moment we think ‘this character wouldn’t say something like that’ or ‘somebody from this class or background does not talk like that’ we might feel annoyed and experience a certain degree of estrangement from the film. Therefore, it is essential to work with actors and actresses who can play these extended and weighty dialogues convincingly, making them seem as far as possible to belong to life.15

(c) Thought-Image, or Denkbild We do not want to limit our discussion of Ceylan’s cinema to its timeimages or narrative stories. What is most important to us is the way cinema relates to ideas. It is through these ideas that we seek to establish the web of relationships enmeshing cinematic images (of figures, of interiors, of cityscapes, of landscapes), the narrative and the technical apparatuses of filmmaking. In other words, we seek to explore Ceylan’s cinema not only on the basis of what is shown and said on screen but also in terms of how it thinks, how thought emerges in it, and at what points this thought reinforces or clashes with dominant opinions.16 Our key category here is that of the thought-image, or Denkbild. While it is certainly true that there is no shortage of moments in Ceylan’s films when we the viewers are

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Introduction treated to quiet and prolonged images of characters immersed in thinking, ruminating, pondering, musing, contemplating, wondering, remembering and brooding, as they stand or sit staring out across empty landscapes, silent snowscapes, depopulated cityscapes and/or watery expanses with passing shipping on the distant horizon, and it is true moreover that these moments in themselves encourage us also to pause, take stock, reflect on what has occurred, what we have seen and on what may yet be to come, this is not exactly what we mean here by the term ‘thought-image’. No, our concern is not so much with Ceylan’s myriad images of the act of thinking, actors thinking, but rather with the Denkbild as itself a mode of thinking, as a practice or technique of giving a distinctive visual/textual form to thought itself. Denkbilder, then, are fleeting and fragmentary moments of philosophical, theological, theoretical and aesthetic insight encapsulated and expressed in compressed literary or pictorial form. Gerhard Richter insightfully writes: The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic, usually without a developed plot or a prescribed narrative agenda, yet charged with theoretical insight.17

Akin to longstanding and well-established forms such as the aphorism, the maxim, the axiom and the vignette, and certainly similar in terms of its brevity and intended startling impact (that is, oriented to occasion a sudden shock of recognition in the reader), the Denkbild as a form of critical philosophical and theoretical writing finds its most eloquent advocates and exponents, Richter convincingly argues, in the disparate reflections of the first generation of writers associated with (if not fully paid-up members of) the so-called Frankfurt School – Benjamin, Kracauer, Bloch and Theodor Adorno – writers who shared a rejection of the ‘weighty tomes’ and ‘fat books’, as Benjamin once put it,18 of conventional bourgeois scholarship and who sought instead new and more immediate and intense forms of critical dialectical engagement in keeping with the broken world of capitalist modernity and the dislocated, ‘damaged lives’ of its alienated inhabitants.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan The ‘thought-image’ may itself be thought of in two slightly different ways: on the one hand, it is a moment in which contemplation, analysis and reflection themselves come together in an intense and productive manner, such as in the work of art. Philosophical insight, truth, crystallizes into a figure or representation, comes to take on a particular countenance or visage: Richter identifies Benjamin’s well-known fascination with Paul Klee’s enigmatic monoprint Angelus Novus (1920) and his reading of this figure as the ‘angel of history’ as an exemplary instance of such a Denkbild.19 Note, we would suggest that there are in fact two Denkbilder at work here: Klee’s image, and Benjamin’s interpretation of it. On the other hand, the Denkbild is a textual miniature in which, as Richter’s definition above suggests, an everyday object or trivial phenomenon is unfolded in a way that illuminates and illustrates complex levels of embodied meaning and unsuspected significance. Here, the Denkbild is discovered hidden amidst the everyday rather than as a construction of the artistic imagination. What is striking here is that the mundane and disregarded suddenly assume all manner of potentialities and possibilities: the thinker must turn to the truths lodged within even, indeed especially, the most seemingly humble of things. Yes, the domain of art may lay claim to the elevated realms of love, truth and beauty, but are these not also to be found, as Marcel Proust most profoundly and memorably discovered, in the taste of an ordinary biscuit dunked in a cup of tea. In this sense, the quotidian world is opened up as a rich storehouse of Denkbilder patiently awaiting the realization of their inherent meaning. The everyday world is composed of artefacts and elements in need of interpretation: the banal is, in fact, a domain of as-yetunrecognized and undeciphered riddles, puzzles or rebuses.20 And so the Denkbild becomes a kind of Vexierbild, a hieroglyph. In his Einbahnstrasse collection, precisely such a treasury of Denkbilder, Benjamin gives the following example under the rubric of ‘Optician’: ‘After a convivial evening, someone remaining behind can see at a glance what it was like from the disposition of plates and cups, glasses and food.’21 That spatial arrangements are key here is not insignificant: Kracauer posits the importance of what he identifies as ‘spatial hieroglyphs’,22 the distribution, composition and configuration of structures, objects, bodies, light, shade and colours coming together to constitute an ephemeral architecture for analysis. We 10

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Introduction will return below to the theme of the hieroglyph in relation to the work of Ernst Bloch. Suffice to say here that Ceylan’s films are replete with such spatial hieroglyphs, such complexes of meaning, such critical constellations. A final point: the thought-image is both made and found. Perhaps the clearest example of this seeming contradiction is to be found in Benjamin’s reading of the ‘epic theatre’ of his friend and colleague Bertolt Brecht, in particular, his analysis of the work of interruption and gesture. Benjamin observes how in Brecht’s plays one repeatedly comes across a particular dramatic device of defamiliarization according to which the action on stage is momentarily suspended, the characters suddenly frozen in mid-gesture, a ‘situation’ is created which challenges routine audience expectations and produces ‘astonishment’.23 ‘The most basic example,’ Benjamin writes,24 ‘would be a family scene that is suddenly interrupted by the entrance of a stranger. The mother is just about to hurl a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father is in the act of opening a window in order to call a policeman. At this moment, the stranger appears in the doorway.’ Here we have a thought-image of the thought-image, so to speak, as both design and discovery. The thought-image is a tableau that appears in the moment of interruption or intercession, the ephemeral cessation of happening that Benjamin terms ‘dialectics at a standstill’.25 And it is at this point that the Denkbild becomes a different order of image, no longer the thought-image but rather what Benjamin comes to term in his later historiographical writings the ‘dialectical image’,26 that pause in the flow of historical becoming in which a particular moment in the past is fleetingly recognized and redeemed by a precise moment in the present across the chasm of time that separates them. The wresting and arresting of such images is the task of the true historian, the historical materialist.27 It is also perhaps the work of the genuinely critical filmmaker: certainly Ceylan’s cinema is one in which such Denkbilder, such Vexierbilder, such dialects at a standstill, such dialectical images are omnipresent, encountered at every turn, inescapable.28

(d) Image as Puzzle, or Hieroglyphic Cipher This ethos is particularly conducive to Expressionistic readings. Aspects of Ceylan’s films evoke landscapes, characters and themes of undisclosed 11

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan longing. These, in turn, register as relative threads of bespoke associations that generate a surplus of meaning. To deal with such surplus, we approach Ceylan’s tropes (absence, loneliness and the mundaneness of everyday life) as hieroglyphic ciphers. Reminiscent of the utopian framework of Ernst Bloch, this philosophical position suggests that Ceylan’s films as cultural artefacts contain an expressive potency; the openness of their themes and images provoke traces of hopes and daydreams towards the edge of the predictable, the known and the familiar. This symbolic fecundity harbours a malleable tendency for anticipatory and fleeting considerations of – what Ernst Bloch would term – Not-Yet attained hopes and scenarios. Wayne Hudson summarizes the Blochian concept of the Not-Yet, with its fluid and redemptive associations: ‘not yet’ may mean ‘not so far’, in which case it refers to the past as well as to the present. Then ‘not yet’ may mean ‘still not’, implying that something expected or envisaged in the past has failed to eventuate. Here the stress falls on the past nonoccurrence, and in some cases this failure to eventuate in the past increases the likelihood of a future realisation. This ambiguity is even stronger in German since noch-nicht means both ‘still not’ and ‘not yet’. Or ‘not yet’ may mean not so far, but ‘expected in the future’ […] the utopian ‘not yet’ […] implies that something is ‘conceivable now but not yet possible’ […] Bloch uses all of these senses of ‘not yet’.29

Geoghegan (1996) also notes that a related and crucial aspect of the Blochian approach to understanding culture, and the Not-Yet, is the way that Bloch’s concept can recognize and emphasize the complexity of relative and chaotic associations.30 The notion of the cultural cipher or hieroglyph within Bloch’s writing is a key mechanism for invoking fresh and contemporaneous connections.31 For Bloch, the world contains a hieroglyphic secret, one that is continually expressed through art and culture; as such, it is the inevitable task of the human to decipher the traces of this secret and, as detectives, continually work towards achieving the essence of its form. Art – in its widest sense – is therefore not a copy or imitation of the world that exists, but is instead the gradual revelation of what it

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Introduction could be. Cultural and artistic creation is the human-inspired mechanism by which the Not-Yet is brought gradually to the Front of consciousness;32 once at the Front, subjective wish-landscapes can re-awaken the posited traces of a yearned-for future that is yet to be. A related Blochian suggestion here is that an ideological or cultural surplus ethereally dwells on the periphery of cultural  – and by implication cinematic – sources. Beyond the immediate theme and authorial intention of an artefact, a malleable trace of transformative possibility lingers. Korstvedt nicely summarizes this aspect of Bloch’s thinking, and recounts that art and culture, received as puzzle or cipher provides, ‘access to the inner-realm, and this is needed, for in the “darkness of the lived moment” […] we encounter something that reaches beyond and can break through not only the error of the world, but the prison house of the existentially specific’.33 This cultural surplus is where subjective yearnings ache for new forms of existence, alternative worlds and a transformed existence without alienation. Again, Korstvedt provides a useful synopsis here: In The Spirit of Utopia [Bloch] proposes that although many forms of knowledge are socially or culturally determined, and thus learned by observation, certain ‘archetypal figures of the human landscape’ (Bloch lists love, hatred, hope, despair, states of the soul) are innate, free from social or material conditioning, and therefore do not depend on any empirical knowledge. For this reason, the experience of these archetypal figures carries with it ‘an ontic surplus value’ of symbolic intention, which depends not on the existing world but subsists in its ‘own self- presence’.34

The cultural surplus, evoked from the periphery of the culture-work, contains seeds or traces of Not-Yet-Conscious (noch-nicht-bewusst) utopian material. Recognition of the cultural surplus acknowledges that new thoughts and articulations can continue to be birthed from the ideological debris of authored artefacts; thwarted hopes and incomplete experiences, that have Not-Yet been completed, adumbrate and re-manifest as apparitional murmurs of future possibility. The subjective gravity of the Not-Yet,

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan glimpsed through the refraction of a culturally mediated image, contains traces or thought-shards of a mysterious essence; as matter-in-potential the hieroglyphic ciphers of loss and estrangement, which recur throughout Ceylan’s films, are implicated as part of a wider unfolding of tendency and expressive possibility. In this sense, the utopian function of culture operates to provoke subjective thoughts and associations through the hermetic spring of the cultural surplus; the non-linearity and fluidity of this complex space must be discovered and rediscovered by each separate subject and each subsequent singular encounter. In this way, memories, traces and cultural heritages, embedded in the inchoate material of subjective pasts, give Form to a refraction of unspent anticipations. Likewise, the hieroglyphic philosophical manoeuvres invoked by the authors of this work assume to uncover connections not only within the cinematic techniques and narrative mechanisms invoked by Ceylan and his cinematic oeuvre; but more than this, we suggest that there is also a space of personal associations, inevitably laden with a cacophony of incomplete (and incompletable) utterances. This is in accord with the Blochian strategy, as Hudson (1982) notes, ‘Bloch’s books [are] […] unfinished by design […] with the reader left to supply the missing unities […] deliberately unprecedented, over-full of new and dialectically aimed ideas, which only slowly emerge from esoteric opacity as contemporary thought develops towards their reception’.35 Ceylan’s hieroglyphic images of lingering landscapes, silent motionless characters and stalled completions are potent ciphers, that productively and creatively connect with the fragmentary indeterminacy of the trace. Thus, detecting refracted irruptions both within – and, importantly, ‘beyond’ – the narrative architecture of Ceylan’s films, serves to reveal the mirage of trace-themes and trace-associations of hope and dignity.

(e) Image as Trace Building upon the non-linearity and complexity of Bloch’s thought and concepts  – sketched out above in relation to the hieroglyphic image as cipher – the Blochian notion and interpretation of the trace is also of key analytical importance. In this sense, for Bloch, narrative and 14

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Introduction symbolic aspects of various cultural works can evoke traces, which in turn elicit hints of alternative and transformed scenarios.36 As one of the main vehicles of Bloch’s wider philosophical project, the evocation of a culture or ‘film-imbued’ trace emergence is something that not only operates as an authorial trick to instigate an open context of fluid interpretation, but also provokes an extra-artefactual impact which ‘throws us back upon ourselves’, to establish an Expressionistic experience of uncanny longing. Approached in this way a trace encounter makes visible thoughts, connections and associations that would otherwise remain unarticulated and hidden. In concealing the undercurrents of inner moments, the un-narrated traces take us beyond the visual context and narrative specifics of each film. Hence, the divergences and fleeting points of theoretical cross-reference developed within, and across this book, reveal and speak about a host of filmic residues and traces, which connect with undisclosed troves of thwarted moments and fractured interiorities. The slumbering or missing trace of expectant hope and active transformation serves as a reminder that beyond the fate and discordancy of Ceylan’s characters, traces of possibility act as mediatory reminders of stalled hope and possibility. As Bloch insists, nothing ‘is more human than venturing beyond what is […] [a]nd humans on earth can alter course toward a destination that has not yet been decided – toward redemption or perdition’.37 Of course, approaching the rebus of Ceylan’s films through the filter of the Blochian trace is a puzzle for the theorist wishing to analyse cinema, but as Ceylan fills the canvas of each film with lonely wanderers and anti-heroes, both film-as-hieroglyph and trace-penumbra of cultural surplus gesture beyond the straightforward visual architecture of images and surface meaning of dialogue. The trace-perception of an event, and its associations, belongs to interiority, and as such, should be recognized as an important source of subjective and creative contemplation. The Blochian trace within the hieroglyphic context of Ceylan’s films represents a powerful principle of discomforting reflection, elicited through the characters and tropes of loss, mourning and regret. The trace as an inner space both manifests microcosms of contemplation and serves as a catalyst for imaginative possibilities. It also acts as an 15

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan ultrasensitive time-detector; its dynamic abilities can shift instantaneously between accumulated instants unfettered by the constraints of metric time and context. Unpredictably, trace-experiences re-attune to the swirling constellations of memories and associations. The internal manifolds and convolutions of time mean that instants are liberated and accidentally reemerge and flourish. Such thoughts emerge as rejuvenated reinterpretations, subject to shifting, dynamic and colourful manipulations and adjustments. Loaded with anticipatory possibilities, such incidents of creative imagination are born of many spaces, times and instants. Cartographies of shifting meanings and indistinct territories cannot be reduced to a linear sequence of technical points. The highly subjective and deeply personal minutiae of such irruptions therefore render any attempt to predict or routinely systematize them as inevitably doomed to inadequacy or failure. To hear things from within the infinite expanse of interior space, we recall affinities from amongst the flotsam of slumbering instants; mental offertories of shards and images offer fresh opportunities to actively engage in the sculpting of alternative thoughts and images. As an idea and evocative image, the creative, prototypic idea of a thwarted, and then rewritten or refreshed childhood (as in Three Monkeys) becomes a key and corroborative transpersonal thought-vehicle with a potency to ignite the futuregrasping stretch of the imagination. So, to Blochianize trace aspects of Ceylan’s films is to open our analyses to a new spatio-complex language, which, in turn, prepares the way for a revival of Blochian philosophical treasures. Fragments of Ceylan’s films, read through Bloch’s interpretive concepts, suggest that a multifaceted and manifold approach to image, hieroglyph, trace and emergent meaning be afforded a relativized and non-linear space. This theoretical and conceptual perpendicularity allows for an analytical fluidity, a theoretical transitoriness and destabilized space, which is ripe for nuanced and Expressionistic articulations. For Bloch this is where the philosophical profundity of culture and film traces emerge. The re-articulation of a beautiful essence of future possibility emanates through the dialectic reverberation of, on one side, loss, stasis and death and, on the other, the empty and mysterious space of the Not-Yet. This is by no means a simple conceptual space to define or schematicize, rather, it is potentially a philosophical chasm, where a narrative trace 16

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Introduction embedded in a film character’s past somehow gives form to unspent anticipations in the non-linear heritage of the fuzzy and unknowable world of the filmic witness. In the crannies of Ceylan’s films, mediated moments of trace recognition assimilate and fuse with latent estrangements and compulsions for revival. But, in the cyclical perdition of Ceylan’s characters and lonely landscapes, there is no immediate or remediable solution for a good or certain future. Confronted with reminders of incomplete material from the past – spectrally lingering in the present – a creative engagement with unfolding thought-images and undisclosed possibilities emerges.38 Written in this spirit, the structure of the book reflects the following chronology of Ceylan’s films.

IV Chapter 1 focuses on Ceylan’s first film. The short, wordless black-andwhite Cocoon (Koza, 1995) is an enigmatic and intriguing work eschewing any conventional linear narrative so that the relationships between the three figures depicted (an old man, an old woman and a young boy) remain unspecified and indefinite. The scenes shown and tempo of the film ensure a pervasive mood of melancholy and/or mourning. In that it is left to the spectator of the film to construct a meaningful storyline from this sequence of picture puzzles, we propose how Cocoon may be understood as an exercise or experiment in cinematic sorrowfulness or Trauer. Chapter 2 examines Ceylan’s quasi-autobiographical early films, The Small Town (Kasaba, 1997) and Mayɪs Sɪkɪntɪsɪ (Clouds of May, 1999)39 both of which are set in the provincial town of Yenice near the city of Çanakkale in the north-west of Turkey, where Ceylan himself, though born in Istanbul, actually grew up.40 Based on Corn Fields, a short story by his sister Emine,41 Ceylan’s award-winning first full-length film, Kasaba,42 is discussed with a particular focus on the themes of boredom, duration and the experiences of childhood as depicted in extended scenes of schoolroom ennui and rural rambling. Then we turn to Clouds of May. A fully formed, independent narrative in its own right, we propose that this film nevertheless constitutes the key part of an unofficial cinematic quartet:43 17

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan it is preceded by Koza and The Small Town and then followed by Distant (Uzak, 2002), Ceylan’s international breakthrough film and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Moreover, as a film about the making of a film, Clouds of May provides Ceylan with opportunities not only to explore his abiding preoccupations of landscape/cityscape, human alienation and dislocation, the complications of family life and the passage of time, but also to reflect on the film medium and the cinematic through the interlacing of melancholy and comedy. Chapter 3 examines Distant (Uzak, 2002), Ceylan’s third feature film, which is an account of the awkward relationship between two cousins, Mahmut and Yusuf, who find themselves reluctantly sharing a flat in Istanbul. The middle-aged Mahmut is a morose professional photographer reduced to making an unglamorous living photographing tiles for a trade catalogue, while the younger man, Yusuf, has travelled to Istanbul in search of work at the docks as a cabin boy or steward after the factory in his provincial village has closed down. With distant echoes of The Odd Couple (1968), Billy Wilder’s black comedy about two squabbling mismatched men sharing a New York apartment, the film is concerned with the uncomfortable dynamics of masculine intimacy in the context of contemporary post-industrial Turkey, and the difficulty both characters have in interacting with others. Slow-paced and stylistically spare with minimal dialogue, the film is concerned with the emotional isolation of these characters, and their frustration at being unable to find fulfilling work and relationships. The scene where the two of them are slumped in front of the TV silently watching Stalker is a poignant reminder of the extent of Mahmut’s failure to realize his own creative ambitions as well as a concise indication of the parallels between the philosophical journey undertaken by the protagonists of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science-fiction masterpiece, and the mundane existential inertia of the two men in Ceylan’s film. As with other films by Ceylan, physical space and landscape are foregrounded visually in this film so that the term ‘distance’ has a complex and manifold significance. The film’s title refers to the separation of the city from the surrounding countryside, the fragmentation of the family, the paradoxical isolation of city-dwelling, the impossibility of emotional 18

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Introduction and sexual intimacy for these men and also the symptomatic desire for travel and escape. Appropriately for a film about a photographer – and Ceylan himself was and remains a prolific photographer – Distant draws the spectator’s attention to the film image through static camerawork, precise framing, the measured tempo of the film’s editing and the sparsity of music and dialogue. This is a film about looking but, while inviting us to look at it, the film refrains from offering us seductive, spectacular images. Thus for the viewer of the film, looking is seldom a satisfyingly rich source of visual pleasure and plenitude. Instead, we are invited to identify with Mahmut and Yusuf, who are ultimately consigned to observing the world around them as voyeurs, from a remote, alienated viewpoint, a male gaze reduced to a nadir of scopophilia. Chapter 4 focuses on Climates (2006), Ceylan’s first film to be shot using digital cameras.44 This film dramatizes the fears and frustrations of a young couple. He is a cynic who lives in a world without value. She, on the other hand, has values and goals but they are not realizable: values without a world. Consequently, the couple find themselves united in disunion, in a non-dialectical synthesis, oscillating between sensualist pleasures and suicidal passions. As such Climates offers a powerful dramatization of the disjunctive synthesis between two kinds of nihilism diagnosed by Nietzsche: radical and passive nihilism. To discuss this, the chapter elaborates on the concept of nihilism, developing a systematic account of the concept in its four main forms: escapism, radical nihilism, passive nihilism and what Nietzsche calls perfect nihilism. It focuses above all on the relation between passive nihilism (the negation of the will) and radical nihilism (the will to negation), between the hedonism/disorientation that characterizes contemporary culture and emerging forms of despair and violence. After all, most significant problems of contemporary life have their origins in this paradoxical coupling. Interestingly, however, although the film is entitled ‘Climates’ its structure is more reminiscent of the succession of seasons. Thus it starts with summer in South Turkey, then moves into fall in Istanbul, and then ends with winter in East Turkey. The chapter associates each of these seasons with a certain type of nihilism. There is, however, a fourth type of nihilism, which corresponds to the missing season in Climates, spring. Why is this 19

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan fourth season missing in Climates despite the fact that the name of one of the main protagonists is Bahar (‘spring’ in Turkish)? Chapter 5 turns to Three Monkeys (2008). The film starts with a night sequence in which a lone man drives along an unlit and isolated road. As he hits something – a human being – his realization is interrupted by another approaching vehicle. With this, Servet, an ambitious politician, takes the decision to drive away and leave the body. Servet’s self-interested decision to protect and preserve his own career kick-starts a sequence of events which soon implicates the lives and familial relationships of Servet’s driver Eyüp. Subsequent decisions and choices serve to extend the web of destructive and deceptive lies. The unfolding relational labyrinth is juxtaposed to the slow red pulse of a lighthouse in the harbour, with blue oceanic horizons and the distant trace of passing ships. Whilst the possibility of alternative life choices and journeys silently linger, the ethical, more difficult choices are never the ones preferred or confronted. Haunted by latent possibility, the ghostly apparition of a lost child (or childhood of possibility) belies the array of repeatedly missed or thwarted opportunities – choices which could potentially alter the eternally recurring, cyclical course of lost moments. The implied allegory of the ‘three monkeys’ permeates the film and the intersecting relationships: as such the themes of ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ are repeatedly played out, whilst the missing fourth element of ‘do no evil’ lingers as an unresolved spectre. Chapter 6 explores Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). The film is the closest the director has come so far to genre filmmaking. A variation on the ‘police procedural’, this long, slow film follows the journey of a group of provincial policemen, soldiers, legal staff and two murder suspects to find a corpse buried in a remote rural location. However, in Ceylan’s hands, the drama and suspense of the criminal investigation is displaced by a focus upon the mundane interactions between the men conducting the search as they drive across the empty landscape in search of the burial site. Whereas the ideological and thematic preoccupation of the detective film typically lies in detailing the circumstances of the crime itself (victim and perpetrator; the who, how and why of it all), the intricacies of the judicial system or the technical and forensic processes of investigation, Ceylan’s unsensational, unheroic film emphasizes the ordinariness of the event and the 20

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Introduction individuals involved. The film culminates not in a trial or redemptive narrative resolution but in a grim, unspectacular autopsy. As its title suggests, this film is also an investigation of the narrative process, an exercise in cinematic storytelling that inverts the conventions of mainstream film narrative, stripping away dramatic action to concentrate upon the silences and longueurs that would normally be edited from genre film. As a result, rather than focusing upon characters in action, the film is concerned with characters in conversation and, frequently, with characters lost in thought reverie and nostalgia. As well as detecting clues amidst the mundanity of everyday life and relationships, the film also explores the symbolic potential of travel, migration and journeying. There is little explicit sense of redemptive movement or travel towards emancipatory or transformative moments. However, incorporating the Blochian analysis of the detective theme (with its notions of ante rem, lacking knowledge before the beginning, and the interpretive trick of interpolating readers or viewers through the un-narrated content of cipher and trace), we claim that in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia there is a search for clues, meaning and cause; the dark, macabre and nightmarish quality of the themes and encounters are imbued with a latent and unspoken dawn of alternative possibility. Chapter 7 engages with Winter Sleep (2014), Ceylan’s most recent film and Cannes Festival prize-winner. It deals with the life of an intellectual (Aydın) and his withering, suffocating relationship with his wife Nihal. Their relationship is detailed through a Chekhovian narrative that intimates a series of ethical questions regarding evil, free will and the capacity to act. It is highly significant in this context that the protagonist is a former theatre actor – thus, making use of Shakespearean allusions, the film reveals a world that has become a stage. This also serves to frame the politico-ethical consequences of the spectacularization of the social. The film’s success is grounded in its ability to portray the dissolution of the social. To this disintegration is juxtaposed a controversial form of relating, religion, in different forms. Thus the film confronts us with Islamic and Christian ideas while it focuses on money, debt and guilt, revealing the injuries of economic exchange. But the film also signals that today capitalism itself has become a religion, that we should look for religion not in theological categories but in the profane and banal workings of the 21

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan market. Hence the chapter revisits the essential link between capitalism and religiosity. Teetering between or, better, toying with countervailing tendencies – beauty and banality, the exquisite and the excruciating, the profound and the absurd, narcissism and nihilism – Ceylan’s film confronts us with the contemporary fate of the individual and of the social in our own disenchanted times, of the spirit in these most dispiriting days.

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1 The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon

Origins First films are inevitably frugal affairs – limited in scope, restricted in budget, if not always constrained in artistic ambition. At best, such films manage to make virtues out of the enforced improvisation and minimalism. Financial exigencies typically ensure that these films are short in duration, actors are non-professionals and few in number, sets and settings are found and/or arranged ad hoc and camerawork and sound are kept relatively simple. Moreover, the apprentice filmmaker is required to be more cinematic bricoleur than director, that is to say, a true auteur who must write the script, find the cast and locations, direct the action, operate the camera, arrange the lighting, edit the rushes, borrow the music, mix the sound and probably make the tea, too. And all this jack-of-all-trades labour may go largely unnoticed and unrewarded. After all, first films are all-too-easily overlooked or underestimated by commentators and critics as mere juvenilia, film school stuff with little connection to, or significance for, the later mature works, the eventual signature pieces. As such, these miniature movies are often deemed to warrant little in the way of detailed discussion and/or serious evaluation. First films are wont to become forgotten films. 23

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Wordless, shot in black and white and with a running time of just 18 minutes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cocoon (Koza, 1995) exhibits, indeed exemplifies, many of such characteristic features of the ‘first film’, so much so that two of the three characters portrayed on screen are not just nonprofessionals, they are in real life Ceylan’s own parents Emin and Fatma! Nevertheless, to neglect this little film as just an additional extra, as mere filler tucked away inconspicuously on the Artificial Eye Distant DVD, would be an error for at least two reasons. Firstly, as even the most passing acquaintance with Ceylan’s later films will confirm, minimalism is not just a practice imposed by stringent budgets and shooting schedules but rather an abiding aesthetic principle. Small casts of non-professionals and newcomers to the screen, family included; static camerawork; sparse dialogue; stillness rather than action; simple interior sets and found locations; the absence of special effects – these are the very hallmarks of Ceylan’s cinematic style and distinguish his entire oeuvre.1 Secondly, Cocoon unmistakably introduces and encapsulates what will become enduring themes of all his subsequent films. For example, as will become clear in this chapter, in its very openness to interpretation, its ambiguity and ambivalence, it insistently calls into question the very processes of filmmaking and viewing as activities of meaning-making and storytelling. Moreover, human existence as both ‘natural history’ and ‘historical nature’ is envisaged (literally: given a face) and located in time and space, as figures peopling seasonal landscapes and inhabiting the gloomy half-light of simple domestic interiors. Above all, Cocoon imagines (again, literally: turns into images) the interwoven work of individual memory and mourning in a profound meditation upon and poignant invocation of death. Despite its brevity, it is fair to say that Cocoon is not only the initial instalment of what we term here Ceylan’s unofficial ‘Clouds quartet’, but also the humble point of origin of his distinctive cinematic imagination. For us, it is, indeed, nothing less than a miniature monochrome masterpiece. Any serious exploration of Ceylan’s cinema must, then, begin with a careful exposition and considered appreciation of Cocoon. Accordingly, in this chapter we recognize that despite its brevity, this wordless black-andwhite film constitutes an enigmatic and intriguing work which intentionally lays itself open to manifold interpretation. It deliberately eschews any 24

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon conventional linear narrative so that the relationships between the three figures depicted (an old man, an old woman and a young boy) remain unspecified and indefinite.2 At the same time, while it is thereby left to the spectator of the film to construe and construct a meaningful storyline from this sequence of picture puzzles (Vexierbilder) the scenes shown and tempo of the film nevertheless ensure a pervasive mood of melancholy and/or mourning throughout. Hence, we propose that Cocoon constitutes an exercise in cinematic sorrowfulness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928/1985), his famously ill-fated exploration of the German seventeenthcentury drama of mourning, the Trauerspiel,3 we suggest that Ceylan’s little film is a representation of the sadness attendant upon death as past event (the boy as ghost) and as inevitable future. It is a sometimes still, sometimes moving memento mori. In so doing, we invoke a number of key Benjaminian concepts: allegory and meaninglessness; natural history; the muteness of Nature; ruin. It would be foolish to say that Cocoon is a Trauerspiel, even a Lilliputian one. Rather, as a rebus or puzzle, a hieroglyph, it is a game composed of Trauerbilder (sorrowful images), constituting a kind of Trauerspielerei (sorrowful playfulness) or Trauerspielzeug (sorrowful plaything or toy).

Perhaps Cocoon is a teasing, tantalizing film: it starts simply enough with a sequence of a dozen old photographs which seem to tell an all-too-familiar story of the comings and goings of love  – of a man, of a woman; of the man and woman pictured together on their wedding day; of them as a smiling couple; and, eventually, of them as an unsmiling couple, the woman’s arms now folded to enclose her and exclude him as the warmth drains away from their wearied relationship. And then, the moving images begin depicting three characters: an old man (Emin Ceylan) who walks and observes the fields and woodlands of a rural landscape; who inhabits a humble wooden house where, it seems, he is living out his last days, watching TV alone at night, quietly waiting perhaps to be reunited with the one whose grave he visits in the overgrown cemetery. 25

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan One of the photographs of the couple presented in the initial sequence lies on the ground outside and is blown away by the wind. The man uncurls his fist to reveal a small photograph of an old woman. We have already seen her (Fatma Ceylan) seated on a ferry as it heads across a stretch of water towards a town on the far shore. Now she is there stroking the old man’s hand; now she is entering into the garden of the house carrying a bag as if arriving on a visit or returning from a journey; now she opens the bedroom door to find the old man lying ailing, dying perhaps, upon the old-fashioned bed; now she attends him and tends to him in what could be his last hours, wiping his brow, gently holding his wrist, lighting the stove to make some tea. Surely these are the two individuals whose photographs of years ago opened the film. They are together now; perhaps they are together again for the first time following an interlude of many years spent apart. Perhaps she has returned so as to walk the fields with him once more, to sit together in a small copse of trees beside a fire; to rest indoors and knit as he reads and the old clock ticks away the evening hours; to share his last days. In bed as the morning sunshine streams in and the man goes to the window, she lies on her side, awake, a tear running across her face. Perhaps she has come home: to care for a failing old man she once loved, in a story of final reconciliation. Perhaps. And then there is the young boy (Turgut Toprak), the third and most intriguing of the characters in Cocoon. He first appears wearing a black cap, running, climbing and playing alone amid the fields and woodlands; subsequently wearing a fur cap, he is shown kicking over a hive of bees with that casual destructiveness of children. His eyes unflinchingly meet and return the gaze of the camera turned upon him. The viewer is invited to wonder:  who is he? Maybe a grandchild? This seems unlikely somehow: after all, he is only ever shown alone, never with the old couple. Is he the only child of some neighbour, aimlessly seeking distraction, prone to small acts of mischief to pass the long lonely hours? Perhaps. But where are his playmates? Indeed, as we will suggest later, there are other, at least equally plausible and certainly more compelling identities for this perplexing figure. In any case, the sequences depicting these three figures are interlaced with each other and then with images of and sounds from Nature: grasses 26

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon

Figure 1.1 Origins. Cocoon (1995). 

and trees rustling in the wind; gates creaking and doors banging as the gusts increase amid gathering storm clouds, the clouds of May perhaps; quiet, trickling waters teeming with tadpoles and tiny fish; thunder and rain, and finally the silence of snowflakes flecking a window pane; a duckling, a tortoise, a dead bird, a decomposing cat. And all the while, in the background, the slow, ceremonious music of Johann Sebastian Bach as the sonorous thread which ties these images together. Yes, this is a wordless, voiceless film, but certainly not a silent one. Indeed, it is the very absence of dialogue itself that concentrates the ear upon the gently restless landscape as soundscape. We will return to this. As for the images themselves, what is most important is their fundamental ambiguity and indeterminacy. Although these images are, as cinematic montage, inevitably presented in a temporal sequence on screen, there is no clear logic or coherent narrative structure in evidence. Instead Cocoon consists of a series of brief and fragmentary episodes that do not obviously cohere into or compose any definite story. It is as if the work of 27

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan the film editor is still to be done; or, rather, as if the editor has deliberately chosen not to work with these images at all, but instead to play with them, wilfully eluding any proscribed linear narrative so as to open up all manner of possibilities, a multitude of opportunities for connections and correspondences, for the telling of tales. Indeed, even in the account provided so far of what is depicted, we have already made numerous assumptions and undertaken considerable interpretive work with which other reviewers, not least you the present reader, might legitimately take issue. After all, the three people shown remain incognito, their identities unspecified, their relationships unspoken. Or is it five people: those in the photographs may not be the old man and woman pictured in their prime. No, indeed; one cannot be certain of any of this. One should only speak of Cocoon in the conditional. As if. Maybe. Perhaps. By now it should be clear that, however unclear the meaning of Cocoon, it is something other than a conventional film. Indeed, we suggest that it is a film that ironically foregrounds accepted cinematic conventions – dialogue, narrative continuity, plot  – by virtue of their very absence. What Ceylan presents us with here might best be described as a cinematic rebus or moving picture puzzles, a series of images which we, the viewers, may draw upon to configure and compose the narrative. Hence, the work of meaning making is deferred, postponed, passed on. It is left for us as spectators to do the storytelling. This radical openness to competing interpretations is key to any understanding of Ceylan’s little film. Nothing is certain, nothing is self-evident here: characters, settings and temporalities are all obscure, opaque. Even after repeated viewings, one is left none the wiser. One must resign oneself to the absence of any final or definitive reading. This must remain provisional (contingent, subject to change) and improvisional (ad hoc, unforeseen). Now, one might rightly insist that this polysemic potentiality and imagistic indeterminacy is true not only of Cocoon but of all films, all works of art, all texts, to differing degrees. This is true, but in most cases there is usually at least some notion of a ‘preferred’ reading, arguable boundaries to the plausibility of contested readings and counter-readings. Ceylan’s film seems to lack even these: beautiful, suggestive, exquisitely composed, his images nevertheless seemed marked by a self-conscious authorial 28

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon intentionlessness. This is an eccentric take on the notion of a ‘director’s cut’: in his very first film as director, Ceylan deliberately cuts himself out of the movie.

Sorrow (Trauer) Deploying the terminology of conventional semiotics, one might say that in Ceylan’s Cocoon (to the degree that it is indeed his film and not ours), each image, each signifier, possesses manifold signifieds, none of which can claim primacy. This very superabundance of potential meaning paradoxically results in the hollowing-out of any specific or particular sense. Meaning anything is, in effect, the same as meaning nothing in particular, nothing at all. For those familiar with the work of Walter Benjamin, this apparent contradiction of ever more meaning as ever less meaning will inevitably call to mind his understanding of the work of allegory as elaborated in his now-revered Trauerspiel study. According to Benjamin, the highly ornate allegorical language characteristic of the Trauerspiel dramatists makes for such a surfeit of possible allusions and meanings that any definitive sense is lost. There is a frenetic accumulation and stockpiling of allegorical references and images whose precise meaning is concomitantly emptied out. Benjamin observes, ‘[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.’4 The profusion and proliferation of meaning in allegory leads to verbosity, to language as mere prattle. And this, for Benjamin, is precisely what the playwrights of the Baroque sought to express: on the one hand, the Babel of human languages in the God-forsaken world which we have endured since the Fall; and, on the other, the misnaming and overnaming of Nature that has reigned triumphant throughout historical time in the absence of the perfect Word of God’s Creation and the immediate, paradisiacal language of Adamic naming.5 In this overnaming of things, the arbitrariness and multiplicity of signs does a two-fold injury to Nature: it is rendered silent; and it is rendered sorrowful. Indeed, Nature is silent 29

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan because sorrowful, sorrowful because silent. In a particularly memorable passage in the Trauerspiel study Benjamin writes: Because it is mute, fallen nature mourns. But the converse of this statement leads even deeper into the essence of nature: its mournfulness makes it become mute. In all mourning there is a tendency to silence, and this infinitely more than inability or reluctance to communicate. […] To be named – even if the name-giver is god-like and saintly – perhaps always brings with it a presentiment of mourning. But how much more so not to be named, only to be read, to be read uncertainly by the allegorist, and to have become highly significant thanks only to him.6

And this brings us back to Cocoon, this film in which human beings say nothing and the only sounds to be heard are those of voiceless Nature: the rustling of trees and grasses in the wind; the babbling of waters; the patter of rain; the rumble of storms and the banging of wind-blown doors and windows; the final soundlessness of snowfall. Following Benjamin we might say that the world presented in Ceylan’s film is mute because melancholy, melancholy because mute. The only human accompaniment to this is music, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach no less, the great composer of the Baroque. Music for Benjamin is a form of human sound-making in which the meaning of words, the process of linguistic signification, has been displaced or superseded by the pure acoustic qualities of the sound itself. Music here is lamentation extended beyond human utterance, as pure melodious expression of the inexpressible. And it is such sorrowful music, so faintly audible yet ever present, that underscores Cocoon as cinematic elegy. ‘For the baroque,’ Benjamin writes, ‘sound is and remains something purely sensuous; meaning [by contrast] has its home in written language. […] The antithesis of sound and meaning could not but be at its most intense where both could be successfully combined in one.’7 Ceylan’s first film is this one. However provisional, however imperfect, we wish to propose a reading of Cocoon that focuses upon this notion of an ineffable and enduring sadness. In its sombre, shadowy images, Cocoon is, for us, not simply the imagination of sorrow – sorrow as such, and human sorrow – but its wordless

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon invocation. And such a reading rests above all on an interpretation of the figure of the child, the young boy who plays so absentmindedly amidst the landscape. Who is he? For us there are three plausible possibilities, each of which involves the intimate interwoven character of mourning/melancholy and memory, each of which configures the child as a troubling spirit besetting the old man and woman, as a ghost haunting the fields and forests. First hypothesis: the boy is the old man as a child and what we see here are memory images of those innocent carefree, careless days long ago when this rural setting was a playground for the man who still wanders it, now grown old and weary. The mood here is one of nostalgia for those childhood days that are now long past, for the child one no longer is. And the kicking over of the beehive? Perhaps this was an incident from the man’s childhood and he now, years later, tends the very hives that he once so casually despoiled. So although these moments seem to occur close together in terms of the film, they are in fact separated in time, separated indeed by a lifetime. Such a temporal play would no doubt be in keeping with Ceylan’s inventiveness but other possibilities beckon.

Figure 1.2 He is dying. Cocoon (1995). 

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Second hypothesis: the young boy is the couple’s son, whose premature death in childhood has left them in lifelong mourning without even the company of each other for solace and consolation, for this death dealt a fatal blow to their marriage too. It is the dead boy’s grave that the old man visits at one point. This child will of course always remain a child, a playful poltergeist who is not averse to undoing the old man’s labours. If this is the case, then this child prefigures Ceylan’s 2008 Three Monkeys, in which, in an extraordinary because so utterly unexpected scene, a drowned boy suddenly appears in the bedroom and at the bedroom door, a boy who is never mentioned in the film but is surely a lost son. Perhaps the boy in Cocoon is an early anticipation of this anonymous apparition. But there is no child in the photographs that open Cocoon. This absence suggests an alternative, third hypothesis: the boy is the child that the couple never had. This is why the smile has left their faces, why the woman folds her arms and withdraws from her husband, why she eventually leaves him, returning only as death approaches. This boy is the child that never was, that has eluded them and haunted them at the same time. His absence is experienced with the same intense anguish as any mourned dead child. This is not mourning as such: mourning is the sorrow that attends the loss of the loved one and which is supposed to abate in the course of a lifetime. Rather, this is melancholy: the sadness that attends an impossible love, the love for one who never existed, sadness that does not, cannot, diminish with the passage of time. There is a circumscribed period of mourning; there is only the ongoing duration of melancholy, this is its incurable pathology. Melancholy haunts us unto our own death. In its preoccupation with ageing and with death, with the human struck dumb with sorrowfulness amidst sad Nature, Ceylan’s film depicts what Benjamin refers to as Naturgeschichte, ‘natural history’,8 that is to say, attends to the human being as a natural creature subject to the inescapable work of time, to the painful and persistent processes of decay, disintegration and finally extinction. Such a creaturely fate is presented in the images of the dead and decomposing cat and of the washed-up bird. These are intimations, anticipations, of what will befall us all. Tellingly, this very notion 32

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon of ‘natural history’ and the ‘lifecycle’ as ‘deathcycle’ provides Ceylan with the fascinating title of his film: Cocoon (Koza).

Imagines A cocoon is, of course, a silk casing spun by certain moth caterpillars to protect it during its pupal stage when it metamorphoses into an adult insect. A  cocoon is a soft shell within which a new life takes shape and from which the adult insect must emerge. Having given protection to its vulnerable occupant, the cocoon becomes the very thing that must be escaped from, bitten through, dissolved by powerful chemical action. The cocoon completes its work in the moment that it is ruptured, rent apart. The cocoon succeeds in its task only when it is left behind as residue, as remnant, as ruin. But most cocoons are never broken from within since the silk moths, now extinct in the wild, seldom live to emerge as adults. The cocoon itself, of course, has become a precious commodity, unravelled into its constituent threads and then spun once more by human hands into silk. The cocoon is no longer a safe housing for an intermediate stage of life but a final entombment of the unfortunate pupa. In preparing for the next stage of its life, the caterpillar spins its own silky shroud. The unfortunate silkworm busily prepares itself for a life hereafter which it will never live to see. Cruelly, in readying itself for a new life, the silkworm condemns itself to death. And more. In a felicitous coincidence, the formal term used by entomologists to designate the adult insect that emerges from the cocoon is imago, the same Latin source (meaning ‘resemblance’ or ‘semblance’) as the word for ‘image’. So what emerge from cocoons are imagoes or, the term more commonly used, imagines. The cocoon is then the casing within which develops, and from which emerges, the imago; it is the soft-spun origin of the image. Cocoons hold the future imagines within them. And so it is with Cocoon which is, as one might expect in a first film, an experiment in miniature of formal techniques and themes which will later become not just recurrent features but indeed the defining hallmarks of Ceylan’s cinematic approach: a partiality for the static camera; a predilection for long takes 33

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (especially close-ups) so as to prolong time and the sense of duration; the minimal use of dialogue and an emphasis on natural sound and the agonistics of extended silences; a preoccupation with landscape and the restlessness of natural flora and fauna; a focus on the intense difficulties and forlorn failings of intimate human relationships and interactions; an abiding preoccupation with envisioning the quietude of existential longing and suffering; alienation, loneliness and boredom. And Ceylan’s films are always reflexively attentive to the work of filmmaking itself. There are two aspects to this in Cocoon. The first concerns his exquisite use of lighting and shadow as part of the continual framing of figures. Characters are caught momentarily in the light of open doorways, at windows, in mirrors, in photographs. Indeed, perhaps the most memorable instance of this is when a clenched fist is opened out thereby unfurling a photograph of the old woman. Ceylan never forgets, and never lets the viewers of his film forget, that these images are a sequence of frames, of stills. These films self-consciously present themselves as film. The second is more complex. Ceylan’s privileging of duration over action, of the serene beauty of images  – of natural landscapes, of flora and foliage in motion, of still and flowing waters, of the careworn faces of humble people, each line a moment in a lifetime – over plot and narrative, and his foregrounding of natural sound against the solemn backdrop of Baroque music, cannot but call to mind the films of the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–86), a filmmaker Ceylan holds in the highest regard and to whom he has sometimes been compared. The images that constitute Cocoon are very much in the image of Tarkovsky’s images, certainly not as pastiche, but rather as cinematic homage. And this is where things become complicated. For precisely such images set to precisely such music are intriguingly to be found in Ceylan’s third film, Clouds of May (1999). As discussed in the next chapter, this film is explicitly about the process of filmmaking itself: the central figure, Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir), has returned to his home town, the very town that features in Ceylan’s previous, that is to say, second film The Small Town (1997), to shoot a movie using the town’s residents, including his own family, as actors and extras. Indeed, and this is Ceylan’s extraordinary gambit, scenes from The Small Town are restaged retrospectively as parts 34

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The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon of a film shoot in Clouds of May. And so we see Muzaffer trying with little success to direct his ageing father, Emin (Emin Ceylan), and his mother, Fatma (Fatma Ceylan), in a scene that will form a long episode in The Small Town of a family eating and arguing around an outdoor fire as a summer evening gives way to night. Ceylan’s real-life parents, who play the anonymous old man and old woman in Cocoon, also appear in his two subsequent full-length films The Small Town and Clouds of May. Indeed, in Clouds of May, Muzaffer takes some test shots of his ‘parents’ and then, one evening, screens them on the family television at home. What is remarkable about these images is how closely they resemble those of Cocoon, even to the inclusion of Bach’s music. In short, in Clouds of May, Muzaffer not only supposedly directs what will become The Small Town, but also, in the process of auditioning his family and testing his equipment, he produces the images that will constitute Cocoon too. Indeed, given the noticeable stylistic differences between The Small Town and Cocoon, it is really the latter, Cocoon, that is truly Muzaffer’s film. In short: The Small Town and Cocoon play hide-and-seek amidst the Clouds of May. Now you see them; now you don’t. In these self-referential cinematic games, Ceylan is teasing his audience while toying with the conventions of the film medium itself.

Play (Spiel) This notion of a ‘test film’ as a precursor to the film ‘proper’ is fundamental for an understanding of Cocoon as a locus for the incubation of images because it returns us to the writings of Benjamin once more. Among his many reflections on children’s toys,9 Benjamin suggests that their origin is to be found in the work of artisans who, as forms of practice, as tests of manual dexterity, ingenuity and skill, and/or as models and prototypes for future full-scale works, would fashion from leftover materials diminutive versions of their craft as playthings for children: all manner of small figures and animals, tiny chairs and tables for dolls houses, Lilliputian versions of implements such as spades and knives, hammers and saws. Through miniaturization, tools (Werkzeuge) are transformed into playthings (Spielzeuge).10 For us, as a kind of ‘test film,’ a piece of filmmaking apprenticeship, Cocoon is precisely such a cinematic toy: a concentration 35

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan into less than 18 minutes of screen time of those innovative techniques and incipient themes that will find expanded and expansive representation in subsequent works.11 Here we glimpse, in abbreviated form, images imbued with sorrow and the passage of time, pictures of the ailing of the human body, the grief attending the loss or absence of a child, of death and natural history, testimonies to the melancholy muteness of nature and the impossibility of language, to the hope of reconciliation and redemption. As a concatenation of Trauerbilder, Cocoon is a first taste of such cinematic sadness. And as such, it may be tempting to think of Cocoon as a kind of filmic Trauerspiel in miniature, a Trauerspielchen, or alternatively as an x-ray of the Trauerspiel,12 in which its skeletal components, the bare bones, are in place even if the soft tissue is missing. Such conflations may often obscure more than they illuminate, and always run the risk of inattention to the cultural, historical and theological specificity of very different works and texts. Nevertheless, we can surely allow ourselves a little room for toying with such rubrics and nomenclatures as in keeping with the playful plaything that is Cocoon:  with its mischievous myriad of meanings, its guessing-game of imagistic interpretations, its cinematic hide-and-seek, it is, after all, a kind of ludic Trauerspielerei; or perhaps best of all, as monochromatic kaleidoscope, it is a cinematic toy, a Trauerspielzeug.

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2 Our Town: Homesickness in The Small Town and Clouds of May

Homesickness is a suffering unlike any other. (The Small Town)

A Charmed Circle In the extraordinarily long third scene of The Small Town (Kasaba, 1995) – Ceylan’s first feature-length film and, according to our interpretation here, the second part of his unofficial cinematic quartet (with Clouds of May [Mayɪs Sɪkɪntɪsɪ, 1999] and Distant [Uzak, 2002]) – the viewer is presented with three generations of a rural family gathered around a campfire as the light fades on a mild evening in a patch of woodland adjoining cornfields and rolling hills. While his wife (Nine, Fatma Ceylan) roasts the cobs of maize and peels the apples, the ageing grandfather (Dede, Emin Ceylan) is lost in recollections of his sufferings abroad during the war, musings on his intense attachment to the family lands now threatened by government conniving, and grumblings about how expensive everything has become. His son, the father (Nuri/Baba, Sercihan Alioğlu), is a qualified engineer of some sort.1 University educated and much travelled, he has returned to live in the town where he grew up in order to introduce technical improvements in water supply and

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Figure 2.1 Saffet at the fairground. The Small Town (1997). 

drainage. In the darkness, he becomes a storyteller, recounting tales from classical history and bookish French sayings for his two children: Asiye (Havva Saglam) and her younger brother Ali (Cihat Butun). We have already seen much of these two youngsters: in the first part of the film, on a silent, snowy winter’s day in the local school, the viewer has endured with Asiye the all-pervasive boredom of the classroom, the tediousness of the lessons interrupted only by the late arrival of carefree İsmail in his tatty worn clothes and sodden socks; we have shared her tearful humiliation when her teacher (Latif Altintaş) inspects her meagre packed lunch and, sniffing it disdainfully, instructs her to throw it away; and we have also seen Asiye and Ali together wandering the breezy sunlit countryside earlier in the day, the day of the fireside family gathering, finding distractions here and there, Ali displaying that naïve cruelty of children: throwing fruit at a tethered donkey, upending a tortoise and leaving it to struggle helplessly on its back.2 And Saffet (Mehmet Emin Toprak, Ceylan’s real cousin), the twenty-something nephew, has spent the day in aimless wandering, too; or perhaps it was another day altogether since Ceylan provides us with no clear chronology here. In any case, all days are pretty much the same for Saffet when there is nothing to do, no-one to see, no-where in 38

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May particular to go. Out of work, he momentarily finds diversion at the local fairground. But the festive fun and games of the small town are really for children, and are certainly not enough for him. On the rides, smoking a cigarette, eating an ice cream, Saffet remains incongruous, out of place.3 And even now, lying a little way off from the fire and the rest of the family group, he seems at one remove from events. He suddenly stirs himself in the darkness and begins to rail against the insufferable boredom of the locality, his own sense of isolation now all of his friends have passed their entrance exams and headed off for university elsewhere, and his feeling of entrapment in the small town. He longs for the big city, for Istanbul, as an escape from the small change and claustrophobia of rural living. ‘I don’t want to stay here and rot’ he tells the family gathered by the fire. But his uncle, the father of the two young children, the intellectual, will have none of it and proceeds to berate Saffet for his indolence and fickleness: the young man is nothing but a work-shy, unsteady, good-for-nothing just like his late father. As someone who, by contrast, has made something of himself through diligent study and hard work, the father has no time for the self-pity and carping of those who choose to fritter their hours away in idleness and indulgence. Saffet does not mince his words in reply: ‘How can you be so distant and insensitive?’ he asks. You have never had a good word to say about your own late brother. And anyway, everyone laughs at you, at your pride and pomposity, behind your back. Saffet turns the tables on his uncle: it is the father who should be ashamed of himself. He has not only been disloyal to the family but has also, through his snobbish superiority and high-handedness, brought them all into local disrepute. Astonishingly, Saffet’s rejoinder finds support of a kind from the grandfather: turning to his son, the old man asks: ‘Didn’t you study to get away from the fields? I don’t understand what all that education was for?’ And so the talk continues, back and forth; the men arguing, bemoaning their lot; the women listening patiently, interjecting a few home truths here and there; the children drowsily watching the flickering flames. This remarkably drawn-out scene occupies almost half of the film’s entire 82-minute running time. As should already be evident, it exhibits several of the hallmarks, both technical and thematic, of Ceylan’s cinematic imagination. Some of these we have already seen in at work (or, in play) in 39

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Cocoon; others will return (will be replayed) unmistakably in Distant. And so the viewer is treated to: the use of monochrome images; the long, slow takes and static camera; the insistence on real time; the focus on duration and inaction; the disclosure of the tensions between and disappointments of family members; the misunderstandings and mismatches of conversations as individuals speak to themselves and past each other; the acute attentiveness to location and setting combined with the pervasive sense of the dislocation of characters themselves; and, above all, the quiet but profound melancholy that suffuses the whole and that tests to the limit the patience of the cinema audience.

Sadness amidst Snow What is most impressive about The Small Town – striking would be the wrong word – is the shifting moods or atmospheres that quietly but insistently pervade the film. One can perhaps distinguish three moodscapes which blend and blur into each other, immersing the viewer in subtly changing patterns of emotion and affect: quietude itself, longing and melancholy. Together these leave the viewer with a profound sense of a sad yearning for other times and places, regret for the past, vague hopes for the future, a powerful impulse to be elsewhere. One might say, then, that The Small Town is an envisioning of nostalgia as homesickness in a double sense: a pining for a home that is no more and a malaise borne of being trapped at home. The first of these moods, a feeling occasioned by silence, is experienced in some of the opening shots of the film, a montage sequence ‘introducing the audience to the small town’s universe of meaning’4 and providing a panorama of its sites and spaces in the depths of winter: snow-covered streets, houses, mosques and minarets, workplaces and yards. We will assuredly return to Ceylan’s persistent use of snowscapes in his films in the next chapter in our discussion of Distant but what is noteworthy here at least is how snow possesses both a visual and auditory significance for The Small Town. Firstly, it lends itself to monochromatic filmmaking, transforming the visual realm into a subtle chiaroscuro of whites, charcoal greys and black, obliterating certain features, accentuating others. Against the white backdrop, those dark-clad figures who have no 40

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May choice but to brave the elements stand out, like the child İsmail, whom we watch through the frosted panes of the schoolhouse as he wends his way down the bleak wooded hillside, running, sliding, tumbling. Such swift motion in the distance is set in counterpoint to the stillness which otherwise pervades the town. The cold has brought business to a standstill. The icy streets are empty, save for a strange solitary man (Muzafer Özdemir) who slips and falls, much to the laughter of a boisterous group of watching children, a laughter in which he tries to share until he realizes the cruelty of their merriment: they are laughing at him, not with him. Secondly, the snow serves to stifle and muffle the usual sounds of everyday life. Ceylan lets nothing disturb these images of stillness and quietude; no noise, no voice, no music. Even the barking of the neighbourhood dog seems muted, half-hushed, unanswered. Silence, like the cold, seeps indoors too. The high spirits of the children in the classroom end with the arrival of the teacher and thereafter only one voice is heard: a girl, Nazl, is chosen to read aloud the ‘rules that govern social life’ from the text book, the words on the page recited by her in a single breathless, unchanging tone without modulation or inflection. In the quiet of the classroom, boredom and weariness take hold. Time seems

Figure 2.2 The laughter has left. The Small Town (1997). 

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan to slow; every moment seems extended, elongated.5 This all-pervasive, unendurable ennui is only really the precondition for and prelude to what is most important here:  a sense of longing, of wanting to be elsewhere, of hopes and happiness thwarted and/or unfulfilled. The children turn to stare out of the classroom window wishing they were playing outside or at home. And they are not the only ones. The teacher too gazes forlornly through the glass into the snowy distance. We wonder: what has brought this educated man to this small town? What were his hopes upon graduation, when, newly armed with his teaching certificate and buoyed with enthusiasm for his new vocation, he perhaps imagined himself inspiring an admiring host of eager bright students at a leading academy in the big city, the gifted and talented children of elite families in Istanbul or Ankara? And now he is here, in this backwater, teaching the rudiments of the constitution to this motley group of young pupils who turn up late for their lessons with holes in their shoes or with rancid packed lunches. ‘If only’: this is what preoccupies him as the voice of the next diligently reading child, Pınar, fades into the background. And this sense of ‘if only’ extends well beyond the school to those for whom education did indeed provide the chance of escape (the father, who has nevertheless now returned) and to those who find themselves left behind by more academically able and ambitious peers (Saffet). Boredom festers into frustration and disappointment that what once might have been has not come to pass, and this in turn drifts into weary resignation and resentment, to brooding and melancholy. Unrealized aspirations and lives unfulfilled return us, of course, to the family arguments around the open fire. Indeed, this sense of despondency and dejection is given particular inflection during the course of the conversation when, as a warning to Asiye and Ali about wandering too carelessly about the countryside, it is revealed that a boy, ‘Kashirahmet’s son’, was once accidentally shot and killed by a neighbour, İsmail from Torhasan, a keen hunter of wild boar and small birds. We do not learn the name of this unfortunate victim, nor any of the other circumstances (when? where?). No more is said of the matter, but the name ‘İsmail’ cannot but call to mind the class clown who arrives late for school earlier in the film. Perhaps this İsmail is indeed the very child who is shot at some unspecified moment between the scenes in the snowbound schoolroom and the family fireside 42

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May

Figure 2.3 The late-comer. The Small Town (1997). 

gathering at which his death is mentioned in passing. Perhaps his absence when his name was called by the teacher at registration is a silent premonition of his untimely death. Poor İsmail will never run, tumble, slide down that snowy hillside again. He will never hang up his sodden socks to dry by the classroom heater again. He will never be late for his lessons again. Of course, the viewer cannot be sure of any of this. And so Ceylan’s ingenuity here is once again that of suggestion and inference, playing with ambiguity and indeterminacy, teasing his audience with possibilities, potentialities and conjectures. But one thing is certain: just as in Cocoon, the fields and woods of this locality adjoining the small town are haunted by the figure of a young boy killed by a stray bullet. And then a thought occurs: could it be that the mysterious boy in Cocoon is the very one whose death is mentioned in The Small Town, a deceased character fleetingly referred to in one film playing his part, playing happily, in another. This may be a stretch of the imagination, but that is precisely what Ceylan’s films do: they stretch our imagination. And this is particularly true of the ‘Clouds quartet’ because of the intricate and inventive way that the scenes and characters of one film are so deftly interwoven with those of another. Since key elements of Cocoon and The Small Town reappear unmistakably in Clouds of May, one should not dismiss the possibility of anticipations and premonitions of 43

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan such intertextuality. A possible answer emerges to the puzzle pondered in the previous chapter: the boy who haunts the old couple in Cocoon is not (or not just) a ghost from beyond the grave, but from beyond the film. He is a visitation from The Small Town. And if so, the identity of the anonymous old man can now be guessed: he is surely none other than İsmail, the careless, guilt-ridden hunter.

Gathering Clouds A fragment of the 40-minute scene from The Small Town reappears in a slightly revised manner in the course of Ceylan’s second feature-length film, Clouds of May, released two years later. Gone from the fireside now are the mother and father; gone, too, the young daughter Asiye. And Saffet is now to be found on the sidelines, indeed out of the picture altogether, so to speak. Although he is still complaining bitterly about his intolerable existence in the town, he is now at least hopeful of a way out. He has a new job: he is acting as a prompt, reading out the film script, feeding the lines the old grandfather is supposed to parrot. For, in a breathtakingly audacious gambit, Clouds of May slowly reveals itself as a kind of fictionalized account of the making of another film: none other than The Small Town itself. And, to be sure, it is not just this almost unendurable and highly acrimonious family evening around the campfire that features in the later film:  there are more than enough other intimations that the other parts of The Small Town are indebted to the filmmakers depicted at work in Clouds of May  – Emin’s returned son Muzaffer (Muzaffer Özdemir) and his cameraman/sidekick from Istanbul Sadık (Hatice Bodner). And so, for example, filming is shown taking place in the local school where the silent tears of a child humiliated by the teacher are captured by the camera; a local fairground is featured; the young boy Ali (now played by Muhammed Zimbaoğlu) is instructed by his Uncle Muzaffer as to the virtues of donkeys and the habits of tortoises. This idea of ‘the making of a film’ as the basis of a film is, of course, not new. Indeed, it is something of a cinematic commonplace both in popular film (most famously in the Hollywood musical Singin’ in the Rain, 1952)  and in avant-garde auteur productions such as Jean Luc Godard’s 44

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). Moreover, every DVD box now contains the seemingly obligatory ‘the making of…’ among its special features on the otherwise redundant second disc. At every film set, every shoot, then, there must now be a second crew making this ‘making of…’ in what teeters on narcissistic self-preoccupation of the film industry or a potentially absurd infinite regression. Ceylan’s conceit here is more daring and distinctive: in its retrospective restaging of scenes from The Small Town as parts of a film shoot in Clouds of May, Ceylan deconstructs and destabilizes the first film. On the one hand, he undermines any naturalistic tendencies or pretensions, revealing The Small Town as an artificial composition, as a complex and confected representation; on the other, he dispels its sombre mood through comedy and playfulness.6 Indeed, Ceylan’s wry sense of humour is very much to the fore here. There are some perfectly contrived, exquisite ironies. For example, in filming the insufferable Muzaffer filming his family, Ceylan actually films his own family performing for the camera: after all, Emin, the ageing grandfather, is once again played by Emin Ceylan, his wife Fatma by Fatma Ceylan. And so we see Ceylan’s actual relatives playing as Muzaffer’s parents, now pretending (in ‘Muzaffer’s film’) to be ordinary elderly villagers, other people altogether. Moreover, as Muzaffer here takes the role of the filmmaker, the maker of The Small Town no less, he plays the role of / acts as the stand-in for Ceylan himself. Ceylan takes full advantage of this opportunity for some self-deprecating humour here, wittily presenting us with a decidedly unflattering vision of the film director as auteur. Manipulative, secretive, sly, instrumental, wholly self-absorbed and self-interested, Muzaffer is without doubt the least sympathetic of all the characters in the film. He has no scruples, for example, about exploiting the technical naïvety and goodwill of those he films, repeatedly promising his unwitting ‘actors’ that the camera is turned off when, in fact, he has left it running in the hope of some unguarded, naturalistic footage. At the same time, he has scant interest in the actual circumstances or narratives of his pressganged ‘performers’:  they are there simply to do as they are told, to read out his scripted stories even if these thereby overlay and obliterate more eloquent narratives, more authentic experiences and interesting lives. Impatient with others, indifferent to his surroundings, Muzaffer is 45

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan certainly no documentary filmmaker but then again The Small Town is no documentary. Both Clouds of May and The Small Town are fictional filmic fabrications, forms of cinematic enchantment that combine in their intertextual interplay to disenchant each other. The spell of each is broken by the other. And Ceylan’s genius is to give all this convoluted cinematic selfreferentiality one more twist: for when Muzaffer shows his parents some of the footage of his film, it is not The Small Town that we see, but Cocoon. We will return to this.

Muzaffer with a Movie Camera The principal protagonist in Clouds of May, Muzaffer, cosmopolitan resident of Istanbul and our latter-day man with a movie camera, has returned to, and then drives around, his provincial home town for the purpose of making a film. He is on the lookout for potential locations and for compliant locals who might serve as characters in his screenplay. For Muzaffer his home town is no longer home at all, the people he encounters are no longer treated as family members, neighbours or friends: they are possible actors and extras who occupy his set, people his scenes, enunciate his script. The locality has become a location. He has transformed his own town and its surroundings into an object of aesthetic contemplation and cinematic investigation, disregarding the actual everyday life of its inhabitants. He turns himself away from it at the same moment he turns his camera upon it. Muzaffer returns with the gaze not of the outsider as such, but rather of the native-becomestranger, of the self-consciously self-estranged. Perhaps the deliberate creation of this alienation of the filmmaker and concomitant objectification of places and others through the lens of the camera is the necessary and inevitable price that the auteur must pay. In any case, such surreptitious practices are not without their personal and ethical dilemmas, moral rather than aesthetic quandaries that beset Ceylan himself even if and as they seemingly fail to trouble Muzaffer. They are the very clouds that darken the May skies. Ceylan presents Muzaffer’s myopia through a series of awkward encounters and exchanges – with his father, with his old Uncle Pire (Pire 46

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May Dayı), with Saffet – in which the tone shifts from the merely laconic to the bitterly sardonic. These scenes warrant further discussion: Father and son:  On a number of occasions in Clouds of May we see Emin, the old father figure, walking his fields and groves entranced by the sights and sounds of Nature. Like Ceylan’s camera, he attends to the details of foliage, the patterns of sunlight, the movements of tall grasses in the breeze, and even the textures of the barks of different trees. This is where he, Emin, is at home. It belongs to him and him to it. At the end of the film, he will sit in the shade of his trees and find peace. But he is not sentimental about this place. Indeed, he has long had a hand in shaping and forming this landscape; it is second  – not pristine first  – Nature. But this mutual making and remaking of person and place ensures the bond between them is even stronger. True, his appreciation is an aesthetic one in part; but it is not an overly aestheticized one. For him, the rural environment is not picturesque but the locus of practical action and endeavour. The little patch of woodland and the fields around it are not the object of mere wistful contemplation, but of labour and toil, activity and engagement. Even now, as an old man, he regards the local terrain and topography as something to be worked, to be rendered productive. And so, in one particularly memorable scene, we find Emin, dressed in an old pair of shorts, out and about on the land, doing what needs to be done: clearing, cutting, spraying, watering and chopping wood. While his father gets on and gets his hands dirty, Muzaffer simply sits in a chair idling, his camera and script on a table. He has no physical connection, no living link with the land. It means nothing to him and so he does nothing. Inevitably, Muzaffer soon becomes bored, listless.7 When, out of a growing sense of guilt, he eventually stirs himself and offers to help chop the wood, he does not know the right technique for this seemingly simple task. Yes, he is an expert in cameras, lighting, sound recording, but he is also clueless as to handling an axe. Indeed, Muzaffer is wholly indifferent to the manual skills of the craftsman, of the humble artisan. The eye of the artist, the flair of the filmmaker – these are everything to him. His interest is only ever optical, never tactile. He has no grasp of this world. But Ceylan is too wise and wary to present Emin as the blessed incarnation and inhabitant of some kind of Gemeinschaft idyll here. Rural life 47

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan is not free of its trials and troubles. Indeed, Muzaffer’s later filming of the camp fire conversation is interrupted as Emin notices that his precious trees have been marked by the authorities for logging. This confirms the fear that has blighted his life: that the state land surveyors and forestry officials would come one day to reclassify his little patch of woodland as ‘forest’ and, confiscating the land itself, cut down his beloved trees. Emin’s passionate attachment to his land has been the source of endless worry and anxiety throughout the film, throughout his life; he is as tethered to the trees as the good-natured donkey in The Small Town. As for Muzaffer, there are no strings to make him fret, to make him frown. He is a free agent; free to come and go; free to be alone. Uncle and nephew I: Perhaps the most ridiculous – both absurd and inducing laughter – episode in Ceylan’s film is when Muzaffer and Saffet drive out into the surrounding hills to visit their ageing, ailing Uncle Pire. Rousing himself from his sickbed, the old man totters out to join Muzaffer on the makeshift terrace of his humble abode while Saffet searches for the camera and some batteries in the car. Poor old Uncle Pire tells Muzaffer that his wife has recently died and that life alone is proving hard for him. Fiddling impatiently with the fragments of nutshells on the table, Muzaffer offers no consolation, no sympathy at hearing such sad news. Such things happen. The two men sit and wait. Saffet continues to hunt around in the car for the equipment. They wait for him. And they wait. This wordless waiting is itself both excruciatingly embarrassing and achingly funny. Two men at a complete loss for words. When Saffet finally, mercifully, re-joins them, they, Muzaffer and Saffet, get down to business without further ado. They have called on Uncle Pire not to hear his pitiable tale of loss and suffering – this is no social call – but to give him an impromptu screen test, to see if he might be worthy of a role in the film. Muzaffer has his reasons to be hopeful: after all, when he was young Uncle Pire did perform in some local plays and theatricals. Saffet then proceeds to read out the words of the script while Pire does his best to repeat them. Repeat them with due expression and proper emotion, that is. Muzaffer is only interested in Uncle Pire insofar as he might be useful to him. As the whole thing descends into farce, he realises that the old man is simply not up to the mark and that he will have to use someone else. The visit is cut short. Muzaffer and 48

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May Saffet return to the car and head off back to the town leaving Uncle Pire to his loneliness and grief. What is significant here is that as Saffet reads out the script, we recognize the words and phrases as fragments of Emin’s wistful narration of his wartime sufferings from The Small Town. Father Emin, not Uncle Pire, will, it seems, have the final honour of speaking these lines. And these fictionalized memories and miseries take precedence for Muzaffer over the genuine misfortunes of the old, isolated widower. He is doubly insensitive: to the actual sorrows and solitude of his uncle, and to the actual stories of this locality and of these local people. He has not returned to listen to them, to learn anything from them; he has come with a shooting schedule and a finished script which they should perform, diligently, dutifully, gratefully. Muzaffer’s has no interest in the town, only in his film of it. The filmmaker imposes his vision, his narrative. He is the author, the authority. The director is dictatorial, despotic. Uncle and nephew II: While the scenes of Muzaffer with his father Emin and Uncle Pire hark back to The Small Town, those with Saffet look ahead to the final film of Ceylan’s Clouds quartet, Distant (Uzak). While Ceylan ensures that all these relationships are not lacking in nuance and subtlety, the interactions between these two – uncle and nephew? – are particularly ambivalent and ambiguous: Muzaffer clearly has some sympathy for his

Figure 2.4 The visit to Uncle Pire. Clouds of May (1999). 

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan young relative, stuck in the factory and stuck in the town, the very fate from which he himself has managed to escape. But even as they converse, Muzaffer allows the camera to roll: Saffet is still part of the film, not the filmmaking process. True, Saffet becomes a willing accomplice: fetching equipment, reading out lines from the script, doing his uncle’s bidding, but as the fireside scene is interrupted, Muzaffer is keen to downplay any job prospects in Istanbul even though Saffet has quit the factory harbouring precisely such high hopes. The young man is now surplus to requirements. With Sadık cast in the supporting role of one-man chorus, dutifully echoing his sentiments, Muzaffer paints a gloomy picture of the difficulties and costs of life in the big city. Urban living is not easy: it is expensive; decent jobs and affordable apartments are hard to come by; the metropolis is unwelcoming and forgiving. ‘Everyone in Istanbul is trying to escape somewhere else,’ Muzaffer insists, even though he himself doesn’t seem to be. All things considered, it is much better that Saffet stays at home. Better the devil one knows. At the very end of Kasaba, disregarding such ‘wise words’, Saffet is depicted, bag slung over his shoulder, leaving the town and walking off down the road towards an uncertain destination. And Distant too begins with a scene of departure: Saffet, now named Yusuf but still played by the ill-fated Mehmet Emin Toprak, makes his way slowly across the snowcovered fields in the pale early morning winter light leaving the stillsleeping town behind. Without a backward glance, he approaches the road in the foreground to await briefly the bus that will take him eventually to Istanbul. Saffet/Yusuf has clearly chosen to ignore the ‘advice’ of Muzaffer – now Mahmut – and now moves in to share the Istanbul apartment of his older relative. As we see in the next chapter, the coldness of the metropolitan snowscape will become a metaphor for the iciness of their relationship as Yusuf half-heartedly, vainly seeks for work and Mahmut broods over his own problems:  an uninspiring career (he has become a commercial photographer reduced to taking pictures for a ceramic tiling company); his failed marriage; and all his ultimately unfulfilled artistic aspirations. Cynical, pessimistic, he provides no help to Yusuf but instead berates him for his laziness and incompetence, just as the father in The Small Town did before. As we will see, Distant is not only a portrait of urban alienation but 50

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May also of a particular and peculiar masculine miscommunication and misadventure. Suffice to say, Yusuf is as bored and as miserable in Istanbul as Saffet is in the town. Indeed, Mahmut is not so very different: he is also bereft of any sense of belonging. Yusuf/Saffet and Muzaffer/Mahmut – these are all figures of the neither/nor, of neither here nor there. They are strangers everywhere, ‘spiritually shelterless’ as the Critical Theorist Siegfried Kracauer once observed of the modern metropolitan condition.8 They are afflicted with a double dose of homesickness: sick of being away from home; sick of being at home. Ceylan will offer them no cure, no panacea. They are figures of the uncanny for whom the heimlich will always remain unheimlich.

Cinematic Hide-and-Seek In Distant, the rueful figure of Mahmut spends his evenings at home watching porn on the TV, changing channels though as soon as the irritating Yusuf arrives back from his aimless wanderings, his fruitless flaneries, around Istanbul. On one such occasion, while Yusuf lingers in the room hoping for conversation, Mahmut pretends to watch a film, Stalker, by the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, switching back again to his preferred viewing as soon as his unwanted guest finally takes himself off to bed. The fleeting glimpses of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film on Mahmut’s television screen are not accidental. Indeed, they are doubly ironic: for our understanding of Mahmut, the would-be filmmaker and aesthete who secretly prefers pornography to the masterpieces of cinematic art; and because Tarkovsky is, in so many ways, Ceylan’s exemplary auteur. This returns us to Clouds of May. Commandeering their television and video player, Muzaffer shows his parents the footage that he has taken of them as ‘test shots’ for his film. The images that then appear on this screen within the screen are exquisite close-ups dwelling on the lined faces of the old couple; the images proceed, slowly and silently, except for the sombre Baroque music that plays in the background. What is the significance of this? Once again Ceylan is at his most ingenious and playful, teasing the viewer of his film with a double intertextual gesture. Firstly, it is evident that, contrary to what one has been led to expect hitherto, Muzaffer’s brief unedited images are certainly not from, or for, The Small Town. Their style 51

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and tone is very different; they are parts of another film, of another kind of film altogether. And this is indeed the case: as we suggested in the previous chapter, they are from, or at least they closely resemble, the images that constitute Cocoon. And so Clouds of May not only alludes to its immediate predecessor, The Small Town, but also to Ceylan’s very first film venture, the 18 minutes of screen time comprising his cinematic toy text from 1995. Secondly, the cinematic style on view, and above all the musical score which suffuses it with melancholy and solemnity, is immediately recognizable as characteristic of Tarkovsky’s films. What Muzaffer screens for his parents, these fragments of Cocoon masquerading as mere ‘test shots’, are finely wrought, beautifully composed images in the image of Tarkovsky’s pictures. In this additional convolution to what was already a complex game of cinematic hide-and-seek, Ceylan’s purpose appears to be two-fold. On the one hand, this is a momentary and genuine homage to Tarkovsky, to the bleak beauties of Nature – of landscape, of flora and fauna, of the human being, of the careworn faces of humble people – that are so eloquently captured in the great Russian’s exquisite and incomparable cinematic images. These are utopian images, intimations of filmic perfection. Ceylan is well known as a great admirer of Tarkovsky and indeed his own films have been compared to those of the Russian cinematic master. On the other hand, Ceylan is surely playing a little trick or joke on himself and on those film critics who are all too hasty in their zeal to make such comparisons. Yes, Cocoon may be Tarkovsky-like, a fond homage, but it is one done with a knowing smile, a sly wink of the eye. Ceylan is neither naïve nor imitative. He is not averse to puncturing the preciousness and pretensions of the high-flown cinematic aesthetics in Clouds of May: at one point the screen is completely filled by a field of sunflowers, dazzling in the sunlight, dancing in the breeze. It is an extraordinary, entrancing image. And then, emerging from among the gorgeous sunflowers, we see the figure of Sadık, struggling to do up his trousers. Responding to the call of nature, he has been defecating among the sunflowers. As we have seen in this chapter, one of the hallmarks of Ceylan’s films is his inimitable skill in effecting deft modulations of contrasting moods and moments, above all of the melancholic and the mischievous. He has 52

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Our Town: The Small Town and Clouds of May a particularly keen eye for discerning, and fondness for envisioning, the one within the other. And so it is important to recognize that Muzaffer and Saffet, Mahmut and Yusuf are not just figures of alienation and the inability to communicate – they are also comic double acts, straight-man and clown. Saffet’s prolonged fumbling in the car in search of the misplaced camera batteries extends and intensifies the unbearable time that Muzaffer must bear in the company of poor Uncle Pire. This is the depiction of duration as endurance, of the long suffering of characters, as cinematic Schadenfreude. There is much seriousness here, too. Ultimately in Clouds of May the question is posed as to the relationship between the filmmaker and the filmed, between cinematic subjects and objects.9 Is it a form of exchange or an act of exploitation, of mutuality or manipulation? What kind and degree of distance/distancing might be required or recommended? In his famous ‘Work of Art’ essay from 1935–6, Benjamin insisted that the film medium not only brings a new proximity to and penetration of the everyday world of people and things, a new haptic sense of closeness,10 but also for the first time potentially realizes the claim of everyone and anyone to be recorded and to appear on screen.11 Physical distance and professional privilege were to be abolished in the explosive ‘split second’ of the film camera on its flaneries. In their nepotistic casting, Ceylan’s early films certainly toy with this vision of a new popular accessibility to the realm of image-making. At the same time, they question and remain in tension with this promise of a newfound nearness. Muzaffer may be an ironic exemplar of the filmmaker, a satirical rather than serious self-portrait. But his dilemmas are not exclusively his own. One should not forget that Ceylan, too, has left his provincial home town for Istanbul; and he too has returned to make a film about this place. From this it seems that the filmmaker is condemned to that uncanny, unheimlich, neither/nor position, to a sense of enduring estrangement from the world, to being ‘spiritually shelterless’. His is a liminal, a threshold existence. His relationship to his hometown – to people, to places and to things – is now always and everywhere mediated by the intervention, the intercession of the camera, indeed of the whole apparatus and aesthetic conventions of cinema. Immediacy is impossible; authenticity is simply ingenuous. And if all this is so, then one is left to ask: do the pleasures and rewards of filmmaking 53

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan itself, of the cinematic craft, do these at least offset what has to be sacrificed? Do these aesthetic endeavours provide adequate compensation, promise sufficient consolation, for such never-ending nostalgia? Ceylan’s answer to this is perhaps to be found in his choice of title: yes, indeed, it may be cloudy, but at least it is still May.

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5

3 Distant: A Winter’s Tale

A sad tale’s best for winter. (The Winter’s Tale, Act I Scene 2)

Departures First light: as dawn breaks on a midwinter’s morning, a dark figure (Yusuf – Mehmet Emin Toprak in his last role1) is discerned wending his way steadily, silently, from a distant village across the snow-covered fields towards us. The camera is fixed on him; it is transfixed by him. Far off, there is the crowing of a rooster and the barking of dogs. The static camera remains on Yusuf as, cheap travel bag in his hand, he approaches in real time,2 slowly climbs the bank immediately in front of us and passes by. Only then does the camera move, panning slowly to the left to reveal that we are stationed on a country road that curves into the distant hillside. A light appears – the headlights of an approaching minibus of some kind. Yusuf steps out onto the tarmac and gestures. The bus draws near. We do not see him get on, we only hear it: as the titles come up, the bus slows and stops; the engine idles for a moment, and then there is the sound of the vehicle pulling away. And so, on this cold, crisp morning, Yusuf leaves behind his family, his home and the town he knows, and where he knows above all that he will never

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan find work now the local factory is shedding staff. He leaves on the local bus for a new life in Istanbul and elsewhere, with naïve hopes of a seafaring life of travel, adventure and money. But first he must actually find a job on board a ship. And while he is looking, he is to stay in the big city with his older cousin, Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir once again). A long day closes: another solitary, dark clad figure, but this time it is Mahmut. In the chill of a winter’s afternoon he is hunched on a park bench staring out across the Bosphorus with its ferries and boats passing in the distance. The camera presents him from behind, framed by the panorama of sea and shipping; from the side, with the gusty wind casting spray upon the waterfront; then finally from the front, zooming in slowly to focus as a close-up on Mahmut’s pensive but impassive face. He takes out and lights a cigarette, not one of his own – he claims to have just given up the habit – but rather one from a packet that Yusuf has left behind. He really should give up:  the smell of tobacco clearly bothers him. As he makes clear to Yusuf the moment he arrives, smoking in his apartment is restricted to the kitchen, and then later to the balcony. Indeed, only the previous day, he reprimanded his young cousin for smoking in the living room, for leaving ash on the carpet and the coffee table, for his childish messiness and poor personal hygiene. Mahmut has done his utmost to extinguish all trace of

Figure 3.1 Alone once more. Distant (2002). 

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale Yusuf ’s temporary stay.3 Indeed, he has done his best to excise from his life and his apartment any vestiges of his own existence, too, to exorcize the ghosts of his past love and failed marriage. He really should give up; he has already given up. Well, almost. Mahmut exhales the smoke from his cigarette and it is borne away by the icy wind. These wordless, wintry scenes introduce and conclude Ceylan’s ‘breakthrough’ film Distant, setting the seal upon its distinctive mood and aesthetic. Garlanded with numerous prestigious international awards,4 the fourth and final instalment in what we are terming here the ‘Clouds’ quartet, Distant is a film dedicated to the representation of the solitude and sadness of the city through stillness (of the camera, of the actors) and silence, that unendurable but unbreakable silence that separates two men who must share a small apartment together as unwelcome guest and inhospitable host. It transports the viewer from the rural locations and small town settings of the three earlier films to contemporary, snowbound Istanbul. In its motionlessness and monochromism, Distant constitutes both a melancholy cinematic study of metropolitan isolation and a darkly comic portrayal of masculinity as empathetic absence and communicative constipation, adding thereby the seductive but frozen urban environment as an inhospitable landscape of loneliness. Indeed, it is a veritable masterclass in the microphysics and micro-manipulations of ambience and atmosphere. The events which slowly, painfully unfold on screen – like Yusuf ’s early morning trudge across the fields to the bus stop – are characteristically straightforward and low-key, scarcely dramatic at all. Instead, the prolonged scenes of inaction and silence provide Ceylan with precious opportunities for the subtle representation of slight alterations in emotional and affectual states, for the sensitive evocation of loss and longing by means of almost imperceptible details and nuances, by finely calibrated expressions and gestures. On the surface, it is a simple tale: the curmudgeonly Mahmut – a photographer whose creative aspirations have come to nothing and who is now reduced to taking advertising shots for a ceramics factory to pay the bills – plays unwilling host to his young cousin, Yusuf, who has left his village with high hopes of finding work down at the docks and of starting a new life in the big city. This utterly futile quest for gainful employment leads the metropolitan newcomer to wander the wintry streets of the 57

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan city, taking in its sights and following women glimpsed en passant. Indeed, the breathtaking visual beauty of the cityscape captured by Ceylan’s cinematography contrasts with both Yusuf ’s forlorn search and Mahmut’s pathetic interiorized existence. As such, Distant becomes a disquisition upon, and an envisioning of, the sense of vision itself and, in particular, of urban optical possibilities and practices. Above all, as we will come to see, it is an elegy to wintry Istanbul witnessed through the eyes of the itinerant outsider. Distant is most certainly a cinematic treatise on the city and spectatorship; but that is not all. As we have already seen with respect to Clouds of May, Ceylan is adept in shifting mood and atmosphere seamlessly, effortlessly, back and forth between moments of quiet contemplation and scenes of scornful absurdity. Distant is also a sardonic study of the pathetic failings of masculinity and male relationships exemplified by the petty trials and tribulations of Mahmut and Yusuf.5 Despite, indeed because of, their enforced physical proximity, this odd couple fail to establish any kind of mutual understanding, rapport or even modus vivendi. And so the film unfolds as a comedy of embarrassing annoyances and irritations, as an anatomy of awkwardness. The two men share only their social ineptitude and sexual frustration.6 Yes, they are most certainly both metropolitan misfits; but it is equally clear that they are mismatched ones, too. With their personal aspirations thwarted, seeking only the other’s absence, they are disunited in their common alienation. This is a film, then, about the loneliness, forlornness and failure of two very different men, individuals who remain emotionally remote from one another, distant, no matter how close they are forced to be: on the one hand there is Mahmut, the cosmopolitan who has long since left his own small town roots behind him; who has managed to establish himself in Istanbul as a commercial photographer; who has lined the walls of his apartment with books and CDs; who seeks out jazz clubs and appreciates classical music, who watches Tarkovsky films late at night; who would be embarrassed if Yusuf found his porn videos; who discusses the fate of photography with his cronies; who surfs the net and smokes Marlboro Lights; who is divorced, morose, embittered, cynical, critical, intolerant, brooding. He is the emotionally illiterate modern metropolitan male par excellence. And 58

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale there is Yusuf, the ingénue, the innocent, a figure who is infuriating in his naïvety and optimism, hopelessly hopeful of his prospects; feebly he follows women in the street but is utterly tongue-tied like a gauche adolescent when they stand waiting close by and conversation might actually start; he chats easily and laughs heartily with the workers and crew down at the docks who disabuse him of his rose-tinted vision of life aboard ship, but he is reduced to bored silence by Mahmut’s sophisticated city colleagues with their erudition and aesthetics; he thinks of others, misses his family, buys a noisy, plastic action toy for his nephew, does the dirty work of disposing of the mouse that has tormented Mahmut; Yusuf is jovial, good-natured, artless, tasteless. He is not a complete fool:  he knows when a little lie is needed: he tries to kid Mahmut that there are indeed job prospects down at the docks when he knows and we know that no-one is hiring. But this is nothing compared to the cruel duplicity of Mahmut. Unable to find a silver pocket watch, he searches Yusuf ’s bag, interrogates him, and then, finding it elsewhere, says nothing, leaving the shadow of suspicion hanging over his poor protesting relative. Ceylan’s skill here is to ensure the divided sympathies and loyalties of the viewer. Yes, on the one hand, we may warm to the child-like charms of Yusuf, sympathize with him as an outsider adrift and alone in the city; but at the same time, on the other, we understand and empathize with the more adult irritations and anxieties of Mahmut, too. Perhaps Yusuf reminds Mahmut of that parochialism from which he himself escaped many years before. Perhaps Yusuf is as Mahmut once was, or feared or hoped he might be. Perhaps Mahmut’s visitor is too much like a ghost from his own past, the spectre of what was and what might have been long ago.7 After a few days, the novel sights and seductions of the city start to prove wearisome for Yusuf. His urban flaneries now are less to do with job-seeking and ever more a way of avoiding time with Mahmut. Not that Mahmut is doing much better: he is reduced to following, indeed spying on, his ex-wife (Nazan, Zuhal Gencer) and her new partner (Orhan) like some down-at-heel private investigator. Unlike Mahmut, they have lives to lead, they are going places: to the airport for flights to North America and a fresh start no less. And Yusuf, too, eventually realizes that there is nothing to keep him in Istanbul. Mahmut returns one 59

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan day to find the apartment empty. Without a word of goodbye, Yusuf has repacked his meagre possessions, hung up the front door key and gone. Perhaps his luck has changed and, against all the odds, he is now on board one of those ships that has just chugged its way across the waters of the Bosphorus in front of Mahmut as he sits alone on that park bench smoking, mulling over his life, brooding on his failures as the film draws to a close.8 More likely, though, Yusuf has swallowed his pride and simply headed home. We can imagine that he is now sitting once more on the bus that brought him to the city or perhaps stomping ruefully back across those frozen fields to that distant small town whence he came just a few days early, back to The Small Town. Perhaps he will there become Saffet once more and regale the family with bitter tales of the unforgiving city and of hard-hearted relations, all of them sitting in a wooded copse one future spring evening around the camp fire roasting maize. Perhaps that long scene in The Small Town – or is it Clouds of May? – is as much an envisioning of his future fate as of his past. Let us imagine for a moment: the events of Distant have occurred already, before that fireside scene in The Small Town, the one staged in Clouds of May, the one for which Cocoon is but a set of ‘test shots’.9 Here these four films become a set of cinematic Chinese boxes, nested – albeit imperfectly – one inside the other. They have a name: the Clouds quartet.

Time and Motion With all this in mind, Distant – Ceylan’s eminently spatio-temporal title – is typically suggestive and ambiguous:  on the one hand, it refers to the aesthetic space of observation and reflection, the gap between subjects and objects of the gaze, between the camera and what is captures. The film is, after all, a treasure trove of diverse forms and moments of urban spectatorship (the two men silently regarding each other; endlessly watching television; observing others in the street; staring blankly into the distance). And, on the other of course, it also identifies the estrangement of its two protagonists, its two antagonists one might say: the newcomer whose future prospects turn bleaker by the day, and the brooder haunted by past loves, by failed relationships, by forsaken ideals. The notion of ‘distance’ 60

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale that Ceylan opens up and out on screen is at once optical, physical, emotional and memorial. And so we now come to focus on three main aspects of Distant:  the contrast between movement and stillness (of bodies, of objects, of vehicles and vessels, of cameras); the differing work of moving and still images, that is to say, of film and photography – bearing in mind, of course, that Ceylan is a practitioner of both; and lastly, drawing directly on motifs from Benjamin and Kracauer, the concept of redemption. We contend that Ceylan’s own stunning cinematic images aesthetically redeem the Istanbul cityscape while it simultaneously remains a site of disillusionment and disenchantment for the unfortunate characters peopling the film. Yusuf ’s role as migrant worker, or rather migrant would-be worker, and his resigned acceptance of the ‘dirty jobs’ (pest killer, for instance), is highlighted by Ali Riza Taşkale in his insightful 2008 reading of the film.10 Taşkale takes as his point of departure Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time-image’ and suggests that Ceylan’s film is an exemplary instance of the transformation of cinematic representation from an emphasis upon action and linear narrative (the ‘movement-image’, characteristic of Hollywood films for example), to a preoccupation with notions of duration, reflection, thought and memory. Given the apparent stillness of figures, objects and of the camera itself for so much of the film, Taşkale’s line may seem persuasive in this, and indeed, in the unwound silver pocket watch for which Mahmut searches and which serves as a prop in his ‘still life’ photographs for the ceramics factory, Ceylan knowingly suggests a literal ‘time-image’, the depiction of time itself at a standstill. But our concern in this chapter is somewhat different:  not Deleuze, but rather the city writings of Walter Benjamin and the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer. For us, Distant is not preoccupied with stillness per se, but rather it is about the representation of the contrast between motion and the motionless. And, perhaps at its crudest, this contrast is embodied in, or exemplified by, the two protagonists themselves. Indeed, Yusuf and Mahmut correspond to those figures that Benjamin is careful to distinguish at the start of his 1929 essay ‘The Return of the Flaneur’, a review of his friend and colleague Franz Hessel’s seminal study Spazieren in Berlin. Benjamin writes: 61

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan The superficial pretext  – the exotic and the picturesque  – appeals only to the outsider. To depict a city as a native would calls for other deeper motives – the motives of one who journeys into the past, rather than to foreign parts. The account of a city given by a native will always have something in common with memoirs; it is no accident that the writer has spent his childhood there.11

This distinction between urban newcomer (Yusuf) and native (Mahmut) provides the key to our distinctive reading of Ceylan’s film. True, Mahmut the photographer is, strictly speaking, no native to the big city; he has not spent his childhood in Istanbul and is a migrant himself like Yusuf. Or so he claims.12 Nevertheless, what is clear is this: Mahmut has lived in the metropolis long enough to be familiar with its sights, its spectacle, its temptations and its disappointments and dangers. He is fully inoculated against, inured to, the charms, the beauties, the architectural attractions and aesthetics of the city. He has retreated from what the city has to offer, retreated into his overly orderly domestic space, where he takes photographs of commodities for a tile company, where he watches TV long into the night, where he surfs the net, where he has joyless, passionless sex with a woman with whom he cannot converse and whom he cannot even bring himself to acknowledge in public. Mahmut leads an interiorized existence, a still life; he himself has come to a standstill, and one wonders indeed if there is ‘still life’ in him at all. Oblivious of the city, bored of the city, even afraid of the city, Mahmut languishes at home and broods upon his unsuccessful career, his dissolved marriage and his troubled family relationships. As a photographer, as a husband, as a son, Mahmut has been a consistent failure. And so now he sits in his small apartment and tries to forget, tries to escape his memories through distraction. And to this end, he has surrounded himself with the all the latest communications technologies (TV, video, computer, phone, answer phone)13 even though he has no ability or willingness to communicate. These are distraction devices, amnesia media. And when he does venture out, we only ever see Mahmut alone: alone in a jazz café; alone by the Bosphorus; alone at the airport, surreptitiously watching as his ex-wife boards the plane for new life in Canada; or, alone behind the wheel of his little car, characteristically, a SmartCar, 62

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale that compact vehicle of contemporary metropolitanism (and one thinks: if there was a car designed for just one person, Mahmut would drive it). Mahmut is not going anywhere. While Yusuf wishes to sail off into the sunset, Mahmut is hopelessly marooned with his memories. It is as if he has already experienced shipwreck prior to any departure, becoming as much a lonely castaway stranded here in the big city as any island-bound Robinson Crusoe. Worse. At least Crusoe had a companion in Friday. As for Mahmut, even Yusuf deserts him in the end. But Distant is not exclusively a film about the static as such because it is not a film about Mahmut alone. Ceylan’s film highlights stillness by presenting other figures in motion, criss-crossing in and against the wintry background, circulating in the snowy streets, traversing the frozen landscape. While Mahmut, finding no reason to set foot outside, remains ensconced in front of the TV, Yusuf, the newcomer to the city, ventures out to explore Istanbul. He wanders the metropolis in search of work; he halfheartedly pursues women glimpsed in the street or at the shopping centre, tailing them temporarily until he loses sight of them, loses interest in them, spots something or someone else; he rides hither and thither on the tram, and the metro, peering out at the city through steamed up windows; he tramps about in the snow and the cold aimlessly wasting time when told to ‘get lost’ for a few hours so Mahmut can engage in some loveless lovemaking back in the apartment. What is important is this: it is not just Yusuf who goes off on these pointless perambulations and peregrinations around the cityscape. Yes, he is alone like Mahmut, but we the viewers of the film accompany him; that is to say the film camera follows him with the same curiosity with which he trails after women. Wherever Yusuf ventures – along the streets, through some parkland and gardens, past great monuments and historic mosques, over the waste ground, down to the water’s edge, along the shoreline, past an old rusting freighter, half stranded, half sunk (a veritable trompe l’oeil, a memorable image which reminds us of Mahmut), and over to the docks; or across the square, through the shopping mall, past the bookstore and down to the moonlit sea – wherever he goes, there we are bound to go, too, following in his snowy footsteps, tracking and tracing his every move. We keep our distance. We keep an eye on him. Ceylan keeps his camera on him. Yusuf is in perpetual motion, he 63

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan roams the cityscape and takes us with him along chilly paths, past forlorn marvels. Indeed, by means of his haphazard excursions and expeditions, in the course of these far-flung flaneries, Yusuf the newcomer paradoxically becomes our unwitting, intentionless pathfinder, our accidental tour guide to the city. And we, the viewers, come to see Istanbul not necessarily through his eyes as such, but certainly with eyes as unaccustomed as his.14

Photography and Film As we, the viewers, are treated to the spectacle of the snowbound city, we are led to wander and to wonder: how is it that Mahmut, with all his highbrow aesthetic sensibility and supposed creative sensitivity, how is it that he is no longer drawn to the astonishing beauty of this city? Did he once walk through Istanbul as Yusuf does now? And did he not, as a young photographer fresh from the provinces, take his camera with him to capture these fleeting moments, these ordinary and extraordinary edifices, this chiaroscuro of figures and shadows? And if he did, then where are his pictures of Istanbul now, the fruits of his former photographic flaneries? Why is it that, while Yusuf walks through the city and we, the spectators of Ceylan’s film, are treated to its visual wonders, Mahmut confines himself to his drab little apartment and his miserable studio? Perhaps, for Mahmut, photography and the photograph have simply become excruciating for him, too evocative of things past, too indicative of things present. For example, the framed family photographs he studies as his sister clears around at their sick mother’s apartment, these are mnemonic devices, tantalizingly tormenting, recalling happier times, his own wedding above all. Such photographs, unlike the media in his own apartment, provide documentation of, and permit no distraction from, the past.15 Such aides-mémoires scarcely help the process of forgetting. And this is not all. For Mahmut, photography itself has become a wholly debased, commercial activity. As a photographer he is an artist no more, he has given up all ambitions, all aspirations to artistic production. He photographs industrial commodities, not landscapes, cityscapes or even portraits. Every picture he takes is a small testament to his failure, a little image of defeat. ‘Photography is finished,’ he insists as if to console himself. 64

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale Well, perhaps it is if for the last ten years you have had to take pictures of tiles for a living.16 The watch may have stopped ticking but Mahmut has had to keep working. There is one particularly poignant episode in the film when one wonders if there is possibly still life in Mahmut and that Yusuf ’s visit, however unwanted, however exasperating, might yet prompt a renewed creativity, a renaissance. Inexplicably, unexpectedly, Mahmut takes Yusuf with him as ‘an assistant’ on an impromptu trip to Anatolia to take some pictures of mosques and the patterns on their interior walls (more tiles?). Having unloaded various pieces of equipment, the two men stare impatiently – one might say uncomprehendingly – at a gathering of worshippers, waiting for them to finish their prayers so that the serious business of photographing the murals can begin. Later, driving past a remote village in the mountains, Mahmut suddenly pulls over to the side of the road. Fleetingly, he imagines the picture he could take, the angle and composition of the shot: foreground, background, mountains, the road, flocks of sheep, the little village, the winter light, the shadows, the figures. Yes, what a picture this would make! And Yusuf is enthusiastic at this one and only sign of enthusiasm from his older relation. But Mahmut suddenly changes his mind. What’s the point? ‘Fuck it!’ he says, putting the car into gear and driving off. These sequences of course echo those scenes in Clouds of May when Muzaffer enlists Saffet as a helping hand in his filmmaking project. And the comparison is indeed illuminating: Ceylan’s image of Mahmut the photographer in Uzak is as negative as that of Muzaffer the cinematographer in his previous film. It seems as though Mahmut has long realized that photography is insufficient for capturing the drama of the landscape, let alone the dynamism and demands of the cityscape. Perhaps this is why he is so mournful; perhaps this is why he thinks photography is finished, dead. Mahmut is a photographer who has perhaps astutely recognized that, as Benjamin and Kracauer insisted many years ago, only the moving images of film are adequate for the penetration and depiction of the modern metropolis. Mahmut is condemned to remain a photographer, a man without a movie camera. This is the source of his melancholy, and this is why, despite so many years in the city, he has no images of Istanbul to show to Yusuf, to show us. 65

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Stillness and movement:  these are qualities not limited to the two protagonists in the film. They are, of course, different kinds of images, different media providing for contrasting representations and modes of spectatorship. And this is significant because, in our reading, Ceylan’s film is preoccupied not so much with duration and, pace Taşkale, the Deleuzian ‘time-image’, but rather with filmic/cinematic experience itself. Distant is less a film about photography as such, and more a fi lm about the complex relationship between moving and still images,17 or perhaps even film in distinction to photography. There are two main aspects to this. Firstly, in scene after scene Distant provides the viewer with endless and diverse images of the act of viewing itself. We, the film’s spectators, see Yusuf and we see him surveying the cityscape, seeing what he sees; we observe Yusuf as he stares at women in the street, as he hides behind trees and walls stealthily, stupidly spying on them; we watch Mahmut staring out of his window onto the city into which he is reluctant to venture; on the balcony, as the men smoke, we are treated to the spectacle of Mahmut staring at Yusuf staring into the distance; at night, Mahmut watches Yusuf go into his room before putting on his porn video, nervously keeping watch should he return, and when he does, switching back to the TV channel, some old comedy programme Yusuf then proceeds to watch, while Mahmut keeps glancing at him wishing him gone. As viewers of the film, we look at lookers, we look at what they are looking at; we look at the act of looking; we watch watchers, observe observers, stare at starers, look at the looks people give each other. Ceylan presents an exhaustive capturing, an encyclopaedic cataloguing of ways of seeing. This is not so much a ‘time-image’ as a ‘theory’ (from the Greek theorein, ‘to gaze upon’) of vision, of the image, of gazing, a theory of theory no less. Not so much a ‘time-image’ then as a pun and an imperative: watch at a standstill. As part of this silent choreography of gazes, glances and glimpses, one cinematographic device is of particular importance: the shot-reverse shot sequence. This is frequently used in relation to Yusuf. We see him standing in the snow, observing. And then the camera, apparently adopting his point of view, shows us what he is looking at, usually the young woman he has been following. We see Yusuf, and then we see as if through his 66

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale eyes. And this is significant in two ways. Firstly, Ceylan is attentive to the highly gendered character of looking; Yusuf is the very embodiment one might say of the predatory ‘male gaze’, of voyeurism, and the visual objectification of women as famously identified by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay from 1975.18 And Mahmut of course does this, too, characteristically in private, watching porn films. Distant is a film about men surreptitiously seeing, spying, about women being subject to scrutiny and surveillance. Secondly, the shot-reverse shot technique repeatedly establishes and then ruptures the process of identification between film character and film spectator. The camera (and film viewer) and character fleetingly share a viewpoint, a perspective, and then the camera turns on the character and we see him (Yusuf). This fluctuation between viewpoints, this continual identification and objectification might suggest the creation of a kind of ‘double optic’ on the cityscape. We see Istanbul sometimes through the eyes of Yusuf, and sometimes not through his eyes. Well, almost. What Ceylan does is slightly more complex than this. He plays with the shotreverse shot convention, plays with identification/objectification. The camera never really takes Yusuf ’s point of view, we never really see as if with his eyes. The camera always remains at one remove from the character. In the park, we see Yusuf hiding, we see a little way off the woman standing waiting, we see Yusuf still hiding, we see the woman still waiting. And these shots are from the same camera position, just a couple of metres in front of Yusuf. It is more like watching tennis from the position formerly occupied by the net-cord judge: Yusuf is closest to us, at the net, volleying; the woman is back on the baseline. Significantly, there is no sharing of perspective, no actual identification with characters, only that small but significant distance: we are separated from Yusuf by a couple of metres. It is just enough for Ceylan’s play of perspectives, for his dialectics of distance. This is a filmic disquisition on the film medium in another way, too. For cultural theorists like Benjamin and Kracauer, and others before them, there is a special relationship between the act of seeing/filming and the cityscape, between the movie camera/moving eye and the urban environment. Yes, one might understand Ceylan’s film as the depiction of the desolation and isolation of modern metropolitan life; and this would certainly 67

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Figure 3.2 Flanerie under snow. Distant (2002). 

be a not unreasonable reading as Taşkale’s essay shows.19 What strikes us, however, is the discrepancy, the disjuncture between the impoverished and diminished experiences of the two characters in the film and the extraordinary beauty of Istanbul to which the film pays homage. The leached out colours, the almost monochromatic rendering of the city under snow, provides for an exquisitely evocative and elegiac portrayal of the modern city.20 The city as the dismal site of desolation, disenchantment and disillusionment; the city as the sublime locus of intense and intoxicating aesthetic experience – this ambiguity and ambivalence in Ceylan’s film calls to mind Kracauer’s vision of the critical potential and redemptive significance of film as a medium and its ‘elective affinity’ with the modern metropolis. It is to this we now turn in conclusion.

Istanbul Redeemed In ‘Film in Our Time’, the rather remarkable Epilogue to Kracauer’s muchmaligned Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960/1997), the reader is presented with a desolate and dispiriting vision of the contemporary city deeply indebted to Simmel’s pioneering social psychological essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.21 Here, abstractness – of value (money) and of time (clock-time)  – has meant a privileging of quantity 68

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Distant: A Winter’s Tale over quality. Here, cold calculating intellect has taken precedence over the life of affect and the soul. Here, indifference to things has engendered a carelessness towards others, leaving us all beset by a profound sense of inner loneliness and alienation. Many years earlier, writing of the burgeoning white-collar workforce of Berlin, Kracauer described this modern metropolitan condition as being spiritually ‘shelterless’ (obdachlos).22 Yet this critical diagnosis of urban modernity, far from leading to cynicism and pessimism  – the response of Mahmut perhaps?  – provides the necessary context in which the radical and very real promise of the film medium takes shape. Kracauer contends that the film camera is uniquely able to penetrate the material world that surrounds us and present it to us either for the first time, or in a completely transformed light, or both. Film, he argues, enables us to see that which was previously invisible to us,23 and allows us to see once more, indeed, again and again, that which has simply faded into the background, that is to say, the unnoticed, unobserved backdrop, of our everyday, workaday lives. Film brings into focus and restores to us those vivid colours and vital qualities of our environment which we have come to neglect, which we have forgotten. In short: through the medium of film we see the physical world, the natural realm anew. In a key passage he claims: Film renders visible what we did not, or even could not, see before its advent. It effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical correspondences. We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual non-existence, by endeavouring to experience it through the camera. […] The cinema can be defined as a medium particularly equipped to promote the redemption of physical reality. Its imagery permits us for the first time to take away with us the objects and occurrences that comprise the flow of material life.24

And so Kracauer looks to film for the restoration of phenomena that have faded from view through the replenishment of what have become jaded, tired human faculties, through remembrance. Against the backdrop of our dulled metropolitan senses, his point is to stress the potential of the cinematic medium to bring about nothing less than the critical renaissance of human perception, appreciation and sensitivity with respect to the world around us. Not only do we find ourselves touched by, moved by, the world around 69

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan us once more, but we come to recognize our own proper place within it as ‘home’. Films, he claims: ‘help us not only to appreciate our given material environment but to extend it in all directions. They virtually make the world our home.’25 This spiritual ‘homecoming’ is certainly not to be understood as proposing some sentimental journey into the past, dubious dewy-eyed yearnings for some pre-industrial, pre-metropolitan idyll or Gemeinschaft. Rather, with film as our guide, we must set out upon cinematic outings and adventures that will so recuperate and reinvigorate our sense of who, what and where we are, of ourselves and our surroundings, our habitat, that we humans, for the first time, come to find our rightful place amid the phenomena of both first and second nature. Kracauer’s nostalgia, his homesickness such as it is, is not directed to rediscovering the wistful past, but to the practical construction of the future. ‘Home’ for those who find themselves ‘spiritually shelterless’: this, for Kracauer, is the ultimate, utopian promise of film. And this ultimately, for us, is the key to understanding the significance of Ceylan’s film. Kracauer’s vision of the relationship between cinema and the city illuminates the themes and images of Distant, and above all, explains the mismatch between the miseries endured by the characters and the marvels of the cityscape enjoyed by the filmgoer, between the ordinary lives on show and the extraordinary images used to show them. On the one hand, Ceylan the filmmaker clearly shares the bleak perception of modern metropolitan life, the kind of wearied and worried existence identified by Simmel, exemplified by Mahmut. Indeed, he embodies the soullessness, the spiritual emptiness, the sadness of cosmopolitanism. He is the contemporary individual par excellence; he is an urban everyman; he is one of us, our ‘companion in misfortune’ as Kracauer once put it in a 1922 essay dedicated to ‘Those Who Wait’.26 But on the other hand, there is also at the same time the astonishing attraction and enchantment of the metropolitan environment itself, never more so perhaps than when it is transformed into the spectral silence and stillness of a snowscape. Distant is remarkable in its presentation of so many exquisite images of the quiet, melancholy, haunting beauty of Istanbul. In portraying the sorrowful still lives of the city, Ceylan’s wonderful winter’s tale simultaneously redeems Istanbul, restores it for us as home, home for the homesick.

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4 Climates and the Problem of Nihilism: the Missing Season1

There was an earthquake but I couldn’t catch where – I wonder if it was here in Turkey. (İsa in Climates)

Is Turkey going to become an EU member? Or is it going to remain inbetween the West and the East, between secularism and fundamentalist Islam? Indeed, in its permanent suspension between the two horizons, being both attracted to and repelled by the West, life in today’s Turkey is perhaps a good metaphor for the global unsicherheit attached to liquid modernity in which there is nothing, no secure guide, that automatically leads the majority of people from one extreme to another, for example, from collapsing into nihilism to seeking out a meaningful life.2 Climates, a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2006), dramatizes the suspended lives of the two members of the Turkish petty bourgeoisie, İsa and Bahar, focusing on their fears and frustrations in the grip of nihilism. İsa is a university lecturer in art history with an interest in ancient architecture. He is in his late forties, but he is somewhat infantilized. Passive and indecisive, he is a person who cannot change his life and is unable even to finish his dissertation for an associate professorship. His weakness and taciturnity make him an egocentric and unlikeable character. He appears

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan inattentive, almost wilfully blind, towards others, including his partner Bahar. What seems most marked in his character is his cynical lack of values, his ‘casual attitude towards truth’.3 When Bahar asks him to tell the truth – ‘just one thing’ – at a crucial point in the film, he lies. Bahar is a TV art director. She acts in symmetry to İsa: when he hesitates, she is decisive; when he is decisive, she is not. In contrast to İsa, she is a passionate, more sensitive, and thus more vulnerable person. She knows what she wants and strives after certain values and yet also knows that her values and goals are not realizable. Whereas İsa exists in a world without values, she has values without a world. İsa is disorientated, Bahar is in despair. Their relationship is an impossible one, united in disunion, oscillating between hedonistic passivity and suicidal passions which drive them towards ruination. No wonder the film opens at the ancient Greek ruins in Kaş, South Turkey.

Summer In this opening shot, İsa is taking pictures of ruins, while Bahar watches him at a distance. Her face wears a series of different expressions, from affection to anxiety, and registers disillusionment, ressentiment, anger, regret and despair.4 İsa asks her if she is bored, though without sincerity, and receives an unconvincing ‘no’. A significant aspect of suspension is introduced: boredom. Boredom continues when they visit two friends, Arif and his wife Semra. The four sit at a table beneath a globe light. It is evening and crickets can be heard. Bahar is sullen and silent. İsa seems embarrassed by her in front of his friend. When Arif comments that İsa seems fed up, İsa gestures towards Bahar. Arif tries to ease the tension, but İsa turns angrily on Bahar: ‘Can’t we go anywhere without you making problems?’ She answers spitefully: ‘Don’t worry, they will enjoy our misery.’ İsa and Arif begin a trivial conversation to alleviate the situation. Bahar does not join in, but begins laughing at something that has amused her, unknown to the others. Dogs can be heard barking in the distance. The distance between İsa and Bahar is signalled as extremely difficult, if not impossible, to overcome, a relationship of sobs and fierce fighting; 72

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Figure 4.1 Beach scene (summer). Climates (2006). 

like so many of the other characters we have already discussed, they appear separate in togetherness and together in separateness. More important than İsa and Bahar’s individual identities, however, is the character of the paradoxical relation between them. Climates is a film obsessed with relations in an axiomatic sense, that is, as relations exterior to their terms.5 This emphasis becomes clearer in the following beach scene. This scene opens with a close-up of Bahar sleeping; in the distance İsa appears, coming from the sea. İsa kisses her and tells her he loves her and begins playfully to cover her with sand. Then we see him piling sand over her smiling face. She wakes up – it was a nightmare. İsa is in fact beside her reading. ‘What’s up? You’re covered in sweat.’ Bahar replies that she must have fallen asleep. She shouldn’t sleep in the sun, he tells her, it’s dangerous, and then returns to his book. The atmosphere between them is stifled and distant – when one looks at the other, the other is turned away. Bahar goes to sit closer to the shoreline; İsa remains with his book in the foreground. Bahar, in the middle distance, apparently watches a white-sailed boat cross the horizon. This boat is the third point of the triangle – symbolic of the ideal. İsa, absorbed in his book, is indifferent to it; Bahar only looks towards it. It should be an idyllic scene: the sun glistening on the sea, a perfectly blue sky. But this space is one of anxiety, a void, a liminal edge of exception 73

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and mutual exclusion. Uncannily, as in an Edward Hopper painting, loneliness emanates from the picture itself but also from the viewer’s reaction. Thus, in the picture, the scene and the off-scene, inside and outside, come to coincide. The off-scene object, the viewer’s own experience, the fear of loneliness, is incorporated in the scene. When İsa pulls away from his book it is to tell Bahar that they should go different ways. We see Bahar beside him – but even at this point he does not connect directly with her:  ‘but don’t misunderstand me … we’d still be friends … we’d still go out together … This would be better for you as well.’ Bahar replies resolutely that she doesn’t mind, they ‘don’t have to be friends’, adding that he need not worry about her. What is most interesting in this beach shot is the static camera, which does not show the scene from different angles. We do not see their faces and, most significantly, there is no attempt at depicting him, her and the boat alone. They are all parts of, and relate to one another in, the same socio-symbolic space. What matters here is not individual identities but the axiomatic relation between them, a space in which İsa (world without values), Bahar (values without a world) and the boat (idealism) are interlinked, and each nurtures and destroys the other in a disjunctive synthesis. İsa and Bahar are both nihilists in Nietzsche’s sense: ‘A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.’6 The first part of Nietzsche’s definition applies to Bahar’s position: her values are not realizable in this world, which she devalues as a world that ‘ought not to be’. Her will becomes a will to nothingness, to destruction. Her spiteful behaviour is a specific articulation of enjoyment that goes beyond the Freudian dialectic poles of ‘reality principle’ and ‘pleasure principle’. It lies in the transgression of this dialectic by which the renunciation of enjoyment produces a surplus enjoyment. She ‘enjoys’ by making herself ‘suffer for the pleasure of it’.7 In İsa’s case God is dead – ‘the world as it ought to be’ does not exist. Bahar’s negative nihilism is still a will, albeit a will to nothingness, which devalues this world in the name of higher values that belong to the other ‘true’ world. She ‘would rather will nothingness than not will at all’.8 If, instead, those ideals are themselves devalued while, at the same time, this world is preserved, we encounter İsa’s passive nihilism: ‘Here … only life 74

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Figure 4.2 Motorbike scene (summer). Climates (2006). 

remains, but it is still a depreciated life, which now continues in a world without values, stripped of meaning and purpose, sliding over further towards its nothingness.’9 If Bahar opposes essence to life, İsa turns life into appearance. Passive nihilism emerges when Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment turns against God – kills him – and puts himself in his place. He no longer believes in values that belong to a supra-sensual world superior to life. But this life remains a reactive life devoid of will. The passive nihilist is a hedonist trying to avoid suffering through the ‘narcotization’ of the will…10 Happiness is reduced to something that can only be experienced at the level of weakness and reaction, to what ‘appears essentially as narcotic, anesthetic, calm, peace, “sabbath” … in a word, as passive’.11 In its origin, that is, before it appears as radical or passive nihilism, nihilism is a feeling of powerlessness, an inability to accept this world as it is.12 Starting with monotheistic religions, this nihilism has created illusion after illusion that allows one to deny the existing world by juxtaposing it to a transcendent one and has tried to justify these illusions as reason, truth, supreme values and so on. In this sense, nihilism is originally a ‘philosophy of illusion’.13 Bahar’s and İsa’s (radical and passive) nihilisms are what follow when the illusion fades away – when God dies. Which is why Nietzsche also defines nihilism as the condition in which the ‘highest 75

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan values’ devalue themselves.14 We have a triangular relation: an originary idealistic or religious nihilism, a radical nihilism and passive nihilism. Hence the significance of the boat, signifying a transcendent Platonic idea of an escape from the given. The boat is where Bahar would like to be – for her ‘life is elsewhere’.15 She turns her back on İsa, who is impotent to take any action, and looks away to the boat. Next we see the couple on a motorbike returning from the beach to Kaş, along a quiet coastal road. The camera follows the couple some distance behind. The camera then closes in on their faces, finally to focus alone on Bahar’s face. The noise of the motorbike begins to fade out, and we are left with the claustrophobic, exaggerated sounds of the wind and the slow-motion blinking of Bahar’s eyes as she contemplates the side of İsa’s face. The scene is suspended out of real time. Bahar’s hands suddenly enter the frame and cover İsa’s eyes. His character’s blindness now becomes literal blindness. We return to the normal tempo and motorbike noise of real time as the vehicle skids and they fall off. A tussle follows. İsa tussles with Bahar and threatens her: ‘If you are so keen to die … Shall I throw you over!’ and makes as if to push her off the cliff into the sea. Bahar, frightened, walks off, leaving İsa to fix the motorbike. İsa shouts: ‘Come back!’ And again, in the background, we see a boat, but this time smaller, less utopian or idyllic and, most importantly, moving in the opposite direction to the first boat – suggesting that the ‘ideal’ is lost (God is dead). We meet them the following day at a bus terminal, where Bahar is about to return to Istanbul. İsa says ‘I will call you when you get back to Istanbul’. Bahar answers ‘Don’t call’.

Autumn We meet İsa in a rainy and rather depressing Istanbul with all its characteristics of a big city – impersonal relations, calculated distances, false intimacies and role playing. In a bookstore, he bumps into Serap, his ex, and Güven, her new partner. ‘How nice to see you together!’ Güven suggests they go for a drink, but İsa says he can’t, ‘but let’s be in touch’. ‘OK.’ ‘Don’t forget though.’ ‘You never call either.’ ‘Neither do you.’ It is as if they 76

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Climates and the Problem of Nihilism congratulate each other on their non-commitments: ‘We’re both as bad as each other.’ Later that night, knowing that Güven will be away on a business trip, İsa waits outside Serap’s apartment. She sees him stalking her. A dog is barking outside. She hesitates but leaves the door unlocked. With that same slow air of hesitation she switches on the light and sheds her coat. She appears to turn directly towards the camera and walk towards it, but then, as she enters the frame from the side, we realize that we have watched her looking at herself in a mirror. İsa opens the door and they look at each other. Conversation is minimal. As if automatically they are slipping back into an affair. Dogs continue to bark outside, a telephone rings. She laughs, he does not understand why, and we see a trace of anger on his face. He complains that the nuts are stale. She replies, ‘Don’t eat them then.’ He throws her a nut. One that he throws for himself falls on the floor and rolls by her foot. He goes to sit by her, picks up the nut, cleans it and tries to make her eat it. She refuses, he persists, and she knocks it out of his hand. He climbs on top of her, she appears to resist, he tears her clothes, she tries to pull away, hitting him. Reminiscent of Last Tango in Paris, this is a scene characterized by berserk, brutal sex. During intercourse, he picks up the nut from the floor and makes her eat it, that is, he realizes his desire,

Figure 4.3 Autumn in Istanbul. Climates (2006).

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan as the scene fades to the sound of a sewing machine. The scene cuts to İsa’s mother sewing his trousers. The hedonist’s utilitarianism: desire and need, the lover and the mother, coincide. Next time İsa meets Serap, however, the situation changes; even though Serap is willing for more, he opts out. What is most significant in the autumn scenes of Climates is İsa’s transformation. Ceylan says about this violent encounter that İsa ‘needs some violence to get rid of the violence inside him […] There is something he cannot handle in his soul, and in order to get rid of that he pushes himself into violence, hoping that with the violence another violence can go away.’16 But what is, in the first place, the source of that ‘other’ violence? Why is it that İsa, the passive nihilist, can only express his passion in the form of violence? Baudrillard’s analysis of contemporary nihilism is illuminating in this context. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, the power of which pours everything into indifference.17 The ‘transpolitical’ order of contemporary society is characterized by the disappearance of the real, of meaning, of the individual, of the social and so on.18 When everything becomes political, politics disappears; when everything becomes sexual, sex disappears; when everything is social, the social disappears; and, as is the case with pornography, extreme visibility leads to the loss of the invisible (seduction). One could argue that İsa desires seduction more than anything else. However, there is more to the scene with Serap than seduction. Whereas previous forms of nihilism addressed the destruction of the imaginary (e.g., moral, philosophical illusions) or the destruction of the symbolic order (e.g., meaning or ideology), today’s nihilism is often realized through simulation. Thus, for the contemporary passive nihilist, ‘the apocalypse is finished’.19 This is a good description of İsa in so far as his is a world without values, utopias, ideals, a melancholic world in ruins, his only object of fascination. In İsa’s case, therefore, the very proliferation of neutrality and indifference is itself a source of an affect, of a fascination: Now fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilist passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance.20

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Climates and the Problem of Nihilism Being a ‘passive nihilist’ does not necessarily make İsa a peaceful person. Rather, his passivity provokes a ‘fatal’ violence that is not ‘a clash between antagonistic passions, but the product of listless and indifferent forces’.21 When life is disenchanted, it becomes an object of perverse desire, invested in the hope that the real will return when the veil of the simulacrum is lifted from everyday existence. Hence his violent encounter with Serap can be read as an exercise in ‘fatal strategies’ rather than seduction, as a traumatic intervention of the ‘real’ into the symbolic with the aim of ‘purifying’ his soul. ‘Fatal strategies’ have the power to efface at least partially the power they are confronted with, threatening that order with a potential reversal. ‘Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political.’22 But where does this power originate? Fatal strategies are objective, that is, they are not subjective strategies based on purposeful, rational, desiring or causal acts. The object is, in this sense, what can escape desire (the order of the subject) and belongs to the order of fatality, which is precisely its power. Hence ‘there are only two things: there is desire, or there is destiny’.23 In this respect the dialogues between İsa and his colleague are especially instructive. For instance, his colleague tells İsa how his wife ‘became meek as a lamb’ when he ‘acted’ (when his wife demanded something, he ‘just left’). Yet, shortly after, we see the same man afraid of arriving home late, or going on holiday on his own for fear of being lonely. Scenes like these clearly contrast two strategies: İsa or his colleague’s subjective strategy; and Bahar’s which is objective in the most radical sense: that is, total, suicidal de-subjectivation. She prefers disappearance: after the motorbike ‘accident’, she walks away while İsa shouts after her, ‘come back’. Bahar’s behaviour is determined by a will to transcend, even destroy, a given situation, which is marked by her despair. The difference between a subjective ‘banal’ strategy and an objective strategy boils down for Baudrillard to this: ‘in the first the subject believes himself to be cleverer than the object; in the second, the object is always supposed to be cleverer, more cynical and more inspired than the subject’.24 Climates is a film about affects and a constant focus on intensities rather than well-defined emotions. We often see abrupt transitions between different moods that sustain a sense of suspense. Love and hatred are 79

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan inseparable, disgust mixes with longing, forgiveness borders on ressentiment, anger results in the laceration of souls. As different affections and moods constantly change we enter different ‘microclimates’.25 It is significant that Climates makes only minimal use of dialogue. Consequently, instead of expressing feelings through speech and conversation, Climates reveals them by creating cinematic atmospheres. The audience is invited to watch the film as if observing strangers in a café, trying to figure out what they are up to.26 In Climates some images do not have a clear meaning within the context of an action. They do not necessarily serve the purpose of carrying the narrative to an end by organizing the link between actions and reactions. Indeed, as one commentator put it, in Climates, ‘the time is out of joint, and […] vision breaks down the world and puts it back together, even though what the film shows seems to be all simple and immediately understandable things’.27 For instance in a single shot: implants of faraway sounds are grafted, such as the howl of a dog, the monotonous sound of a pigeon, or the unexpected flight of a bee in the nothingness of an archaeological site, or the ‘adventures’ of a [nut] on the floor, or the smokestack of a ship on the Bosporus or the sounds of a storm. Suddenly, a human gaze comes up from the corner of the frame, invading, inundating, almost in a close-up, which protractedly and inscrutably looks at the viewer/lens.28

Objects framed in these images magnify independent material existence, while, at the same time, there emerges an ambivalent, indefinite and contingent quality related to the image/object. And because such an image cannot be attached to a definite meaning, it gains a suspended quality which opens it up to different associations.29 Such images do not only ‘represent’ a narrative; rather, provoking a machinic, spiritual response from the audiences, they open the present to the virtual, being to becoming. Reality (the actual) no longer comes ‘before’ the image (the virtual); instead they coexist. The lives of the characters depicted in Climates are in this sense simultaneously actual and virtual. What makes the film interesting is therefore not only its ‘actualized’ structures, its narrative, but also its virtual potentialities, the sense produced at the level of impersonal, auto-poietic processes through which virtual intensities can gain resonance.30 80

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Winter In the third and final part (or season) of Climates we find İsa longing for some ‘decent weather’, preparing to go on holiday and looking at pictures of beaches. Bahar, meanwhile, has ‘disappeared’ after the break-up of their relationship, to a provincial city, Ağrı in East Turkey, where she is working on the production of a TV film, a revenge melodrama. Bahar’s distance turns her into an object of desire again. İsa changes his mind and decides to go to Ağrı. He arrives in a landscape of stark contrast to the previous seasons of sunny beach and rainy Istanbul. İsa buys Bahar a present, a music box, before we see Bahar again in a small café. When she notices İsa in the street, she goes out to him. Not for nothing is the setting reminiscent of a frontier town; the scene plays out in a way that subtly alludes to a showdown in a western movie. The former lovers stand several meters apart on the street, sizing each other up in stone-faced silence. The tension is practically palpable. Someone is about to get hurt.31

Bahar finds İsa’s little gift ‘nice’ but forgets it on the café table as she leaves, after replying to his ‘Will I  see you tonight?’ with ‘I guess not’. İsa feels abandoned. Next day İsa goes to Bahar’s workplace. He finds her in a van, crying, and tells her, ‘I’m a different person now – I’ve really changed, honestly.’ He suggests that she quit her job and return to Istanbul with him the next day. She keeps crying; he is passive, impotent, unable to say or do anything. And then again:  ‘I feel like I  am ready to start a new life, to leave Istanbul and move somewhere else. I feel ready to give up material things, earthly pleasures.’ They make no eye contact and are constantly interrupted by people entering the van. ‘I don’t want anything more for myself, I am done with all that. I know I can make you happy.’ Finally she looks at him and asks that he answer something honestly. ‘Ask me whatever you want,’ he tells her. ‘Did you see Serap again after we broke up?’ Unflinchingly he replies, ‘No, of course I didn’t.’ She considers him briefly but seems to be steeling herself for what comes next. She tells İsa that she is sorry but it is too late. He gets up to leave. As he closes the door behind him, he sees her laughing. 81

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Later the same day, İsa is in bed when there is a knock at his hotel room door. It is Bahar. She enters. Nothing is said. She sits and then lies on the bed, still in her coat; her presence feels awkward. They appear to embrace briefly. He smokes a cigarette. They are still fully clothed. She sleeps beside him. He looks bored, he checks his watch. The next morning, İsa is seated in the blue light of the window. Bahar awakes and they exchange good mornings. She joins him at the window. He reminds her that she forgot to take her music box: ‘I was going to give it to you in the van, but …’ he breaks off. She tells him happily of the beautiful dream she has had  – ‘I could fly’. Bahar narrates her dream in detail with a touching openness. He responds by asking her what time she needs to be on the set. Her mood changes. She looks disappointed and unhappy. ‘At nine,’ she responds, after studying him. ‘Let’s get going then, I’ll buy you a good breakfast. I can go from there to the airport.’ The camera moves from one to the other: it is clear that nothing has changed. As the scene fades, we hear the sound of a woman crying. The image cuts to a woman by a grave. It is snowing. A man with a gun comes up behind her. It is a scene from the melodrama that Bahar and her colleagues are filming. They have to cut the scene because it is disrupted by the sound of an aeroplane flying overhead. The sound grows louder as we focus in on Bahar, who looks up to see the faint image of the plane carrying İsa away through the falling snow. We are left with the image of a village under heavy falling snow and the sound of birds singing and dogs barking.

Spring? This is of course a rather disappointing ending for the nihilism depicted in the film does not seem to provoke alternative actions or thoughts. Ceylan often quotes Anton Chekhov as his greatest inspiration, especially regarding the impossibility of bonding in nihilistic circumstances. It might therefore be useful to compare his film with the writer’s stories. For example, in one short story entitled Concerning Love – a story which the end of Climates also brings to mind  – Chekhov writes of Alyokhin’s love for Anna. Alyokhin is a character much like İsa, enclosed in his own set world, 82

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Climates and the Problem of Nihilism ‘like a squirrel in a cage’.32 They are in love with each other and there is a real possibility of them both attaining happiness together. But he is unable to take that necessary step towards her. Instead, through lack of will, he lets her go in the final scene of their relationship. Rather than invent an exit from his boring existence (his ‘cage’), he remains captive within his anaesthetized life. Yet, unlike Climates, where we are left without any hope of positive change, Concerning Love signals the possibility of another life. Chekhov is different in that his characters (and the reader) undergo a shift in thinking and come to regard their lives in a new light. Alyokhin confronts himself, his lack of will and his nihilistic inertia, and attempts a more active and creative thought: I understood that with love, if you start theorising about it, you must have a nobler, more meaningful starting point than mere happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue, as they are commonly understood.33

Alyokhin realizes that in order to attain real happiness it is necessary to go ‘beyond good and evil’, that is, to act. But for İsa, his nihilistic limitations prevent him from this Chekhovian leap from affection to thinking, from passivity to activity. İsa’s lack of will prevents him from such ‘understanding’, for it is only on the basis of will that the self can decide on its destiny, or change to overcome itself, or, to use the phrase Nietzsche borrows from Pindar, one can ‘become who one is’.34 In Nietzsche, ‘becoming what you are’ means becoming what you will yourself to be. Since the world of being is really a world of becoming, one must assume responsibility for oneself, which is also the definition of freedom. The only time İsa wills change is when he tells Bahar that he wants to change through asceticism, by ‘giving up earthly pleasures’ and becoming ‘another person’. This is what Kojève formulates as the Christian ideal:  ‘Become what thou are not.’35 Interestingly, ‘İsa’ means Jesus in Turkish. Throughout the film the idea of change is constantly linked to idealism (hence the indispensable image of the boat in Climates). ‘Becoming what you are’ is not related to a transcendent but to an immanent process of overcoming. Indeed, the capacity to overcome is 83

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan precisely what differentiates humans from animals. The animal is a closed ‘complete’ being in the sense that it cannot relate to the Open, to the virtual domain. It does not have the capacity to create new values: ‘their very specificity makes it impossible for them to overcome what they represent’.36 Climates makes frequent references to images (dogs, birds, bees), which (especially in the ‘rape’ scene) signal a close proximity of the human to the animal. Loneliness and boredom are two central themes in the film, which it could be illuminating to reflect upon. They are intimately linked to the characters’ incapacity to act and free themselves from a life that they do not want to live. It is also notable that the chronological dimension of Climates seems to depict an eternal ‘now’. And herein lies the characters’ proximity to animals: the man who becomes bored finds himself in the ‘closest proximity’ […] to animal captivation. Both are, in their most proper gesture, open to closedness; they are totally delivered over to something that obstinately refuses itself.37

This ‘proximity’ is also a potential of the human to distance itself from the animal, to overcome by relating to the Open.38 The human is human precisely because it can ‘non-relate’ itself to itself, to its environment, and affirm its will and ‘become who one is’. İsa and Bahar seem instead to be caught in the nihilist grid in a way reminiscent of ‘animal captivity’. It is astonishing that almost no review of Climates sees Bahar in a negative light; most focus on İsa’s narcissism and, ignoring her reactive nihilism and its intrinsic link to İsa’s cynicism, romanticize her.39 Bahar further reduces what İsa lacks – the will – to a will to nothingness. Seen through this prism, one could say that Climates fails to affect the three forms of nihilism sedimented in the film: idealist escapism (becoming what one is not), negative nihilism (spite, suicide) and passive nihilism (hedonism of ‘earthly pleasures’). After all, art can duplicate, defend and sediment old values or re-evaluate them to create new values. In the first case, art is for the sake of art; in the second, art is for life. In the first case, art remains content with the interplay of affects; in the other, it addresses will. In the first, art becomes an ersatz transcendence, art as a sign of the beyond, ‘a sensual symbol for the supra-sensual’ idealized world.40 In the 84

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Climates and the Problem of Nihilism latter, art becomes a perspective that can say ‘yes’ to life. In this respect Climates seems to establish only an aesthetic relation to the world, and as such one could claim that it is not only a film about nihilism, but also a nihilist film. However, one should not reduce a film to what it shows and what it says. Cinematic images have a power that goes beyond that. If the timeimages in Climates ‘disturb’ the constellation of the actual world through a shock, this shock gives birth to thinking. Deleuze calls this kind of automatic thought, which ‘arouses the thinker in you’ without being related to or caused by the representational aspects of a film, the ‘spiritual automaton’.41 When the time-image suspends or disturbs the actual world, there opens up a possibility for thought to re-achieve a sensory-motor unity. In other words, the most significant aspect of the time-image is not merely in revealing nihilism or the broken link between man and nature (which is done in Climates with novelty), but, through thought, re-establishing the link. Do the time-images in Climates stimulate thinking in this sense? Are the three nihilisms it depicts affected by them? To be sure, the film takes nihilism as given, without showing any exit crack, any line of flight, in the world it depicts. What it shows (the three seasons), however, invokes something now shown (the fourth season). This would correspond to Nietzsche’s ‘perfect nihilism’: this involves taking nihilism to its limits, rather than trying to oppose it with the illusion of transcendence, for instance religion, and instead creating immanent values. If the link between man and the world is broken, this link should become an object of belief. The link can only be reinstated by belief, that is, by creating new values that belong to this world. ‘Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.’42 From an immanent perspective, the existential background of values must be life. For without life, no history, morality or epistemology would be possible. In other words, any perspective (including the cinematic one) is not only about perceiving the given in pure contemplation, but an enlargement of the horizon, the overcoming of the narrowness inherent in the given. To see a phenomenon in a ‘broader’ perspective is to increase 85

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan one’s will to power, the will to live: ‘the more we can interpret, that is, find meaningful, the less narrow the world becomes’.43 For this reason the relevant question in relation to values concerns not their validity but their life conditions.44 This is also to say that the choice is not between value (Bahar) and non-value (İsa), but lies in the crucial question of the value of value, that is, the relation of a value to life, whether it increases the feeling of power and makes it possible to expand both materially and mentally or not.45 In this sense, will is the essence of life – it is ‘the ontological difference between life and death’.46 The significance of Climates is that interpretation – the ability to construct a perspective, to reestablish the link between man and nature  – requires a subjectivity that can evaluate as well as perceive things in a contemplative manner. Interpretation is an ability to find meaning.47 It is because they are not able or lack the willpower to give life meaning that İsa and Bahar say no to life in their different but equally life-negating ways. They either devalue this world (Bahar) or devalue values (İsa). The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema: it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.48

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5 Three Monkeys and the Oblivion of the Spectral Fourth

Three Monkeys (2008), Ceylan’s sixth film production, starts with a night sequence, a lone man driving his car along an unlit and isolated road. The road is winding, and beyond the traces of the rear lights the car is camouflaged in an unyielding darkness. As the camera shot lingers on the expressionless face of the driver, it becomes evident that he is tired. Navigating the twists and turns of the meandering lane, his heavy and sleep-inducing eyelids keep trying to close. As the car drives on, we see it slip further in to the distance; as the red tail-lights dim and disappear, the car turns a corner and manoeuvres out of sight. And then, out of the enveloping black silence, a distant sound of screeching tyres pierces the moment; the approaching headlights of another oncoming vehicle slowly discloses the scene. The rain-glistening road reveals the aftermath of an accident. A body, concealed under the crumpled dark heap of an overcoat, lies motionless in the road; the sleep-driving character from the first car has hit a pedestrian. To avoid detection, the guilty driver scurries away and hides behind the façade of his now-stationary vehicle; and in a cowardly crouch he watches as the concerned but wary witnesses note down the registration number of his vehicle and call the police. With this, the first driver, Servet – a cunning and ambitious politician – takes the decision to drive away and leave

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan the body. In the early hours of the morning, Servet calls Eyüp (his driver) at home and demands that they urgently meet up. With the serenity of a dawn-lit harbour as a backdrop, they meet, and a lighthouse intersperses the dialogue as it emits the pulsing red beacon of a warning. With the following dialogue, Servet sets in place an egoistic and self-interested chain of events that destructively implicate Eyüp and the lives and relationships of Eyüp’s family. [Servet] I just called the lawyer. He says they won’t suspect anything since you’re my driver. Six months’ maximum. A year at the most. At least you’ll get a lump sum when you’re out. You know I’d never ask you if I  wasn’t running in the elections. If anyone hears about the accident, on the eve of the elections, my political career will end right there. You know that. They’re just waiting to nail me, the bastards. Your son can get your salary every month. I’ll pay the lump sum in cash when you get out. How’s that? Let’s not get the banks involved. Just in case. OK? [Ey üp] OK. No problem. With this verbal transaction, the first two monkeys are revealed. The first is the morally and emotionally bankrupt Servet who ‘sees no evil’ in the illegal and devastating consequences of the road accident, or indeed the cowardly nature of his request for Eyüp to take responsibility for his actions. Complicit with this, Eyüp’s subsequent silence – in going to prison for the reckless actions of his egoistic and self-serving boss – belies the actions of a character who ‘speaks nothing’ about the ‘evil’ of the criminal and reprehensible situation. Whilst obviously aware of the difficulty and disruption that this arrangement will cause for his wife Hacer and son İsmail, Eyüp does not allow this to puncture the silence of his unspoken acquiescence. He leaves Hacer to look after the house and to supervise the evidently idle and apathetic İsmail.

Non-Place: Home as Shipwreck The family home is a precarious and breath-taking edifice of gravitydefying wonder:  the construction of the unusual building resembles the 88

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Three Monkeys and the Spectral Fourth jammed bow of a grounded ship, with its wider and upper ‘deck’ knobbing down to the narrowest part of a hull-type point. This, in turn, slices in to the terra firma of land, which seems to (just about) keep it upright, stable and afloat. Aloft the strange and shard-like shape, the family home forms the upper part of the ascending concentricity of dilapidated flats, as though in a stranded location of inescapable and stagnant concrete. The salvage is further buffered by an aggressive and inward-spiking fence, parallel to a sequence of railway tracks. And yet, in the distance, the limitless expanse of the ocean horizon beckons beyond the grounded wreckage: a cruel and permanent taunt. Situated on the top level of the decks, the family habitation serves the nostalgic function of the seafaring trope well. To quote Nietzsche: ‘On rope ladders I learned to climb to many a window […] to flicker like small flames atop tall masts; a small light, to be sure, and yet a great comfort for stranded sailors and shipwreck survivors!’1 The runaground characters, physically isolated from the freedom of the sea, can do nothing but play out the suffocating tragedy of their lives against the latent immensity of the horizon. Hans Blumenberg in Shipwreck with Spectator, sympathetic to this perception, proposes that a ‘perilous sea voyage […] includes coasts and islands, harbours and the high seas, reefs and storms, shallows and calms, sail and rudder, helmsmen and anchorages, compass and astronomical navigation, lighthouses and pilots’.2 Importantly, the grounded ship that is Eyüp’s flat, close by to the serenity of the harbour, and the unspecified

Figure 5.1 İsmail, the flat and the railway fence. Three Monkeys (2008). 

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan journeys of meandering ships, is a disruptive mark which suggests the ‘deceptive face of something that is deeply problematic’.3 Jammed in to the sediment of thwarted journeys, Eyüp and his family are subjected to a stagnancy, where ‘no one talks any more about voyages and courses, landings and harbours’.4 Becalmed on the life-parched and adventureless islands of their lives, a lethargy strangles the dynamism and freedom of life. Marc Augé corroborates the existential poetics of this view, and notes that those who know how to read the ‘resistance and weakness of the shore, of the nature of its rocks and its soil, of its faults and its fractures’5 can see that the ‘sea has an initiatory value’.6 In this sense, the tangible immediacy of the harbour, as it reaches out towards the distant ocean, murmurs with metaphysical echoes which elicit a deep yearning for and pull towards embarkation and freedom. Facing the inviting immensity of the sea, the harbour conceals a symbolic space of powerful intimacy; a place where memories can either be anchored and crafted or alternatively cast adrift in to the depths of oblivion. This again chimes with Nietzsche who in The Birth of Tragedy calls for us to gaze outwards, as the ocean ‘does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity.’7 The aquatic allegory hued with longing and thirst is further borne out by the narrative tactics of Hacer and İsmail’s names. Hacer as a name is a variation on Hagar, who, in Abrahamic theologies, was the slave of Abram’s wife, Sarai, who, in order to conceive a child for Abram, became his second wife (or concubine). As the biblical narrative goes, Hagar, pregnant with Abram’s child, challenges the authority of Sarai, and in the consequences of the aftermath abandons the tribe. An angel finds Hagar in the desert by a fountain, close to the region of Shur.8 As a result of the encounter, Hagar returns to Abram and Sarai, and, as prophesied, provides him with a son named Ishmael. A number of years later, as a result of Sarai’s jealousy of Ishmael – being the first-born son, and the rightful heir to Abraham’s inheritance – both Hagar and Ishmael are expelled from the tribe. Depleted of their meagre rations of bread and water, they wander the barrenness of the desert and call out to God for water. Within the narrative context of Three Monkeys, the stranded and precarious structure of the family flat 90

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Three Monkeys and the Spectral Fourth (or Shur) serves to shelter the family from a different type of desert, one that is ‘surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral’.9 In the fractured and disaggregated exile of their lives (a contemporary state that Augé would refer to as supermodernity) they ‘are always, and never, at home’.10 This transient form of non-place and human experience is lived out in ‘places and spaces, places and non-spaces [which] intertwine and tangle together. The possibility of non-place is never absent from any place. Place becomes a refuge to the habitué of non-places.’11 As such the physically disconnected and existentially stranded context of the vessel of their home is reminiscent of a shelter for shipwrecked survivors, marooned on an alien and inhospitable land.12 Further, the ruinous shell of their grounded abode, with its lack of connection to the immediate and surrounding location (throughout the film, there are no significant developments of community, human networks or productive relational connections), is also devoid of historical reference points or mutual legacies of human and cultural heritage. Meaningful traces of other human lives with roots or belonging are markedly absent; the home is therefore a space of mourning; bereft and obliterated, it harbours a dystopian ‘now’ and apocalyptic future. The architectural space of their domestic vessel is therefore a palimpsest ‘on which the scrambled game of identity and relations’13 are rewritten as on a shifting canvas. Another trope of isolation and separation within the film, which further emphasizes the environmental block between the stranded survivors and the freedom of the sea, is the disruptive slash of the train tracks. Here, the rigid trammelling of the tracks with the scheduled and predictable operation of the timetabled trains is a powerful juxtaposition to the skimming fluidity of the seafaring meander. Interestingly, İsmail makes a regular train journey to visit Eyüp in prison; indeed, as we observe and witness the first of İsmail’s prison visits, İsmail makes an initial move to transcend the imposition of separation between the ocean and stranded ship of home. As İsmail successfully scales the inward-spiking fence, his implied escape is headed off by an oncoming train. The train here is a powerful metaphor for the anchorage of his confined and mundane life. Confronted by this mechanized colossus of pre-assigned fate, İsmail shifts from the azimuth line of his ocean-facing 91

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Figure 5.2 The flat, the train and the ocean. Three Monkeys (2008). 

ascent, to the perpendicularity of a walk alongside (and the ultimate journey inside) the rumbling capsule. As de Certeau (1984) notes, once subjected to the confinement of the train carriage, nothing inside or outside really moves: The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car […] Everything has its place in a gridwork. Only a rationalized cell travels. A bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible the production of an order, a closed and autonomous insularity […] the iron rail whose straight line cuts through space and transforms the serene identities of the soil into the speed with which they slip away into the distance.14

Hear No Evil and the Spectre of Oblivion Desperate to get İsmail in to some form of work, Hacer reluctantly agrees to secure some money to purchase a car. She arranges to visit Servet in his office, to ask him to release a portion of the money promised to Eyüp on his release from prison. The stilted meeting is punctuated by a telephone call made to Hacer’s mobile. Somewhat humorously, it takes a considerable amount of time for her to locate the ringing phone in her handbag. In a narrative sense this is fortuitous, as it allows the prophetic lyrics of the ring-tone to play out, lyrics that offer the following warning: 92

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Three Monkeys and the Spectral Fourth I hope you love and aren’t loved back. I hope love hurts you like it hurts me. I hope you yearn and are never reunited, like I was never reunited. I hope your heart is made to melt, just like a candle. I hope despair is always at your door, waiting just like a slave. I hope your heart is stolen away, just like wares from a market stall.

As a result of being offered a lift home by Servet, Hacer is ultimately seduced by him, and the prophecy of ruin and despair, articulated by the lyrics from the song, remain unheard by Hacer. She gravitates towards the betrayal and inevitable shipwreck of the encounter. Indeed, the lyrical references to yearning, being a slave and despair are again suggestive of the biblical roots of Hacer’s name: Hagar the slave, the mother of Ishmael, exiled from the tribe of Abraham, denied the rightful inheritance for her son (Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s son, was born after Ismael, and yet Isaac received Abraham’s inheritance). Intriguingly, Three Monkeys atmospherically reveals the spectre of thwarted heritage in the form of a ghostly boyfigure. In İsmail’s apparition, maintaining the aquatic leitmotif, the boy is dripping with water. A brief one-word reference from İsmail identifies the spectral vision as a trace apparition of his brother. The young boy-spectre appears one more time, with the drape of an arm over Eyüp’s neck, as he rests on a bed in the flat after his release from prison (contemplating his suspicion that Hacer had an affair with Servet while he was locked away). The uncanny apparition of the brother (or the son) is never explicitly explored or discussed as part of the film’s narrative. The spectre of thwarted heritage, and the latency of redemption or restoration disrupts and provokes the unfolding story but is never given a cause, context or explanation. The Three Monkeys’ spectral apparition is therefore anacoluthic.15 In this sense the dead child  – as younger brother or lost son  – as spectralanacoluthon inserts an interruption or discontinuation in to the otherwise steady flow of image and dialogue. From this definition, the non-narrated anacoluthon, located on the threshold of the regular syntax of the film, represents a deviation, a rupture, a break and fragment of incompletion. Derrida defines the speculative nature of anacoluthon, emphasizing that it is ‘more than a figure of rhetoric, despite appearances, it signals in any case toward the beyond of rhetoric within rhetoric. Beyond grammar within grammar’.16 Linking the disruptive principles of anacoluthon to the spectre, 93

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Figure 5.3 Eyüp prior to the spectral visitation. Three Monkeys (2008). 

Derrida and Stiegler further note that the ‘spectre is first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood’.17 Similarly, de Certeau suggests that the uncanny space projected and provoked by spirits and spectres produces a ‘poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, or permitted meaning’.18 A spectre therefore consists of debris, a lingering remnant loaded with rich silences or wordless stories, ‘opaque acts […] articulated by lacunae’.19 As such, spectral meanings: do not speak any more than they see. This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed […] fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state.20

The anacoluthic and spectral image of the boy in Three Monkeys harbours the historical wreckage of a wordless hollow space, and the oblivion of memory. Here the past sleeps ‘in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber’.21 Further, Augé observes that the forgetfulness and silence of oblivion is necessary for both society and the individual as it is essential to forget in order to, at some point, remember 94

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Three Monkeys and the Spectral Fourth the incomplete character of the present. Thus ‘memory itself needs forgetfulness:  one must forget the recent past in order to find the ancient past again’.22 Thus memory and oblivion ‘in some way have the same relationship as life and death’.23 Where the forgetfulness of oblivion is associated with death, the defibrillation of memory is associated with birth and life. This ‘brings in turn conceptions of death into play (death as another life or death as inherent to life) that in turn command the roles given to memory and oblivion’.24 From the oblivion of forgetting, to the spectrality and shocking re-emergence of remembrance, the feeling that something is missing opens up, revealing a void that is imbued with the fleeting ache for restoration and fulfilment. Through the stifled and constricted burden of their confessional aches, İsmail and Eyüp – loaded with their spectral revelations – lumber through their lives with a nostalgic burden of incompleteness. Here we must also consider the importance of the astonishment before spectral appearances, which can irrupt out of the experience of the emptyspace. In this context Bloch25 makes a tentative connection to the beauty of the Harz Mountains in Germany. The Harz mountain range is the location of the Brocken mountain peak from whence the spectral apparition known as the Brocken Spectre derives its name. Bloch’s analytical flirtation with the evocation of the beautiful mystery and emptiness of the Brocken involves a sense of astonishment. This is well worth further elaboration and development, particularly in relation to the spectral apparition in Three Monkeys. The Brocken Spectre is a phenomenon traditionally associated with the study of atmospheric optics.26 As an optical effect, it appears in places of higher altitude. Brocken spectres only reveal themselves under specific atmospheric conditions, notably, when a low-lying sun flanks a hillwalker or mountain climber (on one side), complemented, on the opposing side, with a mist or fog-bank. When both altitude and climatic conditions are conducive, a Brocken-spectral optical effect may be produced. The effect itself consists of a bright, concentrically ringed glory, which surrounds the ‘shadow of the observer’s head’.27 Punctured through the centre of the glory, we find the projected empty-space of a dark and vacuous shadow, an emulatory emptiness, which mimics the particular shape of the climber’s human form. Significantly, the initial appearance of the spectral visitation in Three Monkeys closely resembles this depiction. 95

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan This particular atmospheric phenomenon has been embraced and creatively explored by writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Thomas De Quincey. This is due to the fact that the Brocken Spectre constitutes a potent symbol of an alienated subject.28 The Brockenspectral effect produces a human shadow that is created by but separated from nature. Further, the haunting apparition of the Brocken Spectre has a peculiar ability to reveal to its witnesses their ‘alienation’ who ‘rather than recognising [their] shadow as a projected Form of [their] own Being […] recoil from it as from a Spectre’.29 This is attributable to the metaphoric power of the idea (and also meditations on) the emptiness of the human-shadow; the spectral apparition articulates in some way an outward manifestation of something hidden or concealed within the human psyche.30 Thus the Spectre stands as a projected alien ‘in opposition to its creator’.31 However, the imaginative space which emerges from the shadow of the apparition has the potential to transform into a point of creative growth.32

The Shock of Remembrance We can also relate the anacoluthic spectrality of thwarted heritage and missed opportunity in Three Monkeys to Bloch’s work on the déjà vu. Here, the disorientating moment of an uncanny experience irrupts through a re-encounter with a place, image or person. The re-visitation emerges in such a way that it appears to contain the experiential roots of having been lived through before (already seen). However, the déjà vu in Bloch suggests that such fleeting and momentary experiences contain the undeciphered code of a utopian latency. The strange encounter is inevitably bordered by a sense of shock, as the occurrence interrupts and disrupts the stability and routine of everyday life. As a seemingly forgotten and fleeting fragment, the intensity of the resurfacing of its content ruptures through the temporal experience and routine of the present. A troubling event, it is as though an archived remembrance, of having lived a replicated moment in the same way at some point in the past re-emerges. However, for Bloch, the utopian déjà vu experience does not contain the replicative material of an already-seen and identically experienced ‘life’. Rather, for him, the déjà vu encounter is activated by ‘an inner state that has been touched upon 96

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Three Monkeys and the Spectral Fourth previously in an identical fashion, in much the same circumstances […] only the intention, not the content, of an experience occurs’.33 The apparition of the ghostly child operates as a cipher that shocks and reawakens the recognition of a disrupted fragment from the past, one which is littered with associations of aborted beginnings and stalled possibilities. As such, the latency associated with re-seeing the spectral apparition of the lost brother or son is shocking, because it reflects back to – witnesses an existential fall into – something that has been broken off, interrupted or overlooked. Bloch establishes a further distinction between the act of merely recollecting a memory, which he terms anamnesis, and a more active or futurepotent form of memory associated with an active recognition, which he terms anagnorisis. The notion of anamnesis is taken from the Platonic doctrine that all knowledge arises from the recollection of images and Forms already seen in the transcendental world before birth.34 It suggests that we have knowledge only because we previously knew and that the recollection of memorial matter unfolds as though everything has been already and previously Formed.35 Alternatively, anagnorisis, as a quite distinct and separate understanding, refers to the process of recognition. Bloch repurposes this Aristotelian notion to articulate the momentary shock and recognition of absence within the immediacy of the lived moment, a recognition tinged with the notion that something is missing (a something which needs to be creatively pursued). Unlike Platonic anamnesis, anagnoretic trace recollections are unfinished and contain subjective traces of possibility. Anagnorisis therefore takes account of the potential of the future as being loaded with unarticulated traces of alternative possibility; and, with this, the ability to move towards overcoming the past and transforming the future.36 Within the spectrum of different notions and concepts of oblivion, memory and recognition sketched out above, Three Monkeys develops a set of dominant themes that are quite anamnetic and Nietzschean in nature. In referring to the eternal return, Nietzsche writes, everything ‘becomes and recurs eternally – escape is impossible!’37 and ‘the mechanistic and the Platonic – are reconciled in the eternal recurrence’.38 In more detail, he clarifies: The world, even if it is no longer a god, is still supposed to be capable of the divine power of creation, the power of infinite

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan transformations; it is supposed to consciously prevent itself from returning to any of its old forms; it is supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of avoiding any repetition; to that end, it is supposed to control every one of its movements at every moment [but] […] the world, as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, […] the world [… lacks] the capacity for eternal novelty […] everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again.39

The Nietzschean proposition that the Platonic, anamnetic and eternal madeness of the world is ultimately replicative and inescapable, chimes with the dominant narrative and characteristics of the characters in Three Monkeys as they constantly oscillate between foreseeable and more-or-less predictable scenarios. Throughout the film there is the continual sense that the characters are trapped within cycles of repetitive and fatalistic actions. Thus Hacer continually returns to the futility of Servet’s affections, but more striking, and of particular note, is Eyüp’s approach to Bayram in the café, where he repeats the previous pattern of bribery and corruption (instigated by Servet) in an attempt to persuade Bayram to take responsibility for İsmail’s murder of Servet. However, with the more explicit triptych of see, speak and hear no evil, the spectrality of the past murmurs an unspoken message of the future. In some renderings of the proverb of the three monkeys, there is a fourth – albeit missing – element, the monkey that represents the action of ‘do no evil’. This is the missing fourth element within Three Monkeys. Plagued by repetition, and a seeming inability to act differently and so escape their fate, the characters each harbour at least the potential to choose to act, and so live differently. Indeed, there is a distinction between ‘doing’ and ‘seeing’40 and one of the difficulties associated with the Nietzschean notion of continuity and eternal return is that the ‘discontinuities of lived duration generally prohibit an integral regaining of what one has left’.41 In this sense, the spectre of the child inserts a trace of possibility into the film (however slight), which, in turn, suggests a latency of redemptive possibility.

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Three Monkeys and the Spectral Fourth Let us, in order to further articulate this trace of possibility, return to Bloch and his doctrine of the Not-Yet. In conversation with an old friend, Bloch set out the following philosophically loaded formula: ‘All great philosophers have been able to reduce their thought to one sentence […] What would your sentence be?’ Bloch puffed on his pipe for a moment and then said, ‘That’s a hard trap to get out of. If I answer, then I’m making myself out to be a great philosopher. But if I’m silent, then it will appear as though I have a great deal in mind but not much I can say. But I’ll play the brash one instead of the silent one and give you this sentence: S is not yet P.’42

With this, Bloch invokes the Aristotelian category of ‘Subject is Predicate’ (or ‘S is P’), meaning that ‘subject’ or Being is ultimately predicated, established, or completed. However, with the addition of his category of the NotYet, Bloch reformulates and challenges the assumptions inherent in this postulate. In order to appreciate the wider implications of Bloch’s challenge to the ‘S is P’ formula, we must also consider Bloch’s repurposed notion of Aristotle’s related concept of entelechy or creative matter. In The Metaphysics Aristotle postulates that ‘No one can believe that the same thing both is and is-not […] It is, then, not possible for opposites to be in the same subject at the same time’.43 However, Aristotle recognizes the need to account for change and transformation. Thus within the Aristotelian schema alterations can and do occur, but these ultimately are a result of transitions associated with non-essential features. Change is therefore a manifestation of superficial flux, which leaves the fundamental constitution of ‘subject’ unaffected. It is this Aristotelian aspect that ‘S is Not-Yet P’ challenges. For Bloch, the entirety of matter (whether subjective substance, or otherwise) is open to fundamental adaptations and changes. Matter is ‘not yet’ in the sense that what the final state of matter can be is undetermined.44 In this sense the formula ‘S is Not-Yet P’ fundamentally inverts the Aristotelian proposition ‘S is P’.45 For Bloch, contradictory states can indeed co-habit the same subjective life world. The foundation and matter of ‘subject’ both is and is Not-Yet. This means that the immediacy of Now, draped in the apparel of the past, is co-existent within and

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan dialectically coupled with the perpetual immanence of the future. With Bloch, therefore, matter, subject and the future boil down to a latent and mysterious puzzle, which anagnoretically contains the possibility of fresh developments, new knowledge and transformative actions. Thus Bloch’s anticipatory ontology of hope suggests that subjective and wider collective futures are far from settled. Rather, in order to arrive at new destinations, we have to embark and journey towards new possible ideas or ideals. Herein lies the crux of the spectral theme of Three Monkeys, that whilst the dominant and indeed living characters within the film present themselves as solidified and un-malleable subjectivities, tamed and encapsulated into a stranded vessel of fatalism, a latent and alternative possibility haunts them and lingers. The spectre of the Not-Yet, on the periphery of the apparent fate of Eyüp, Hacer and İsmail, harbours a latent seed of potential waiting to be invoked. As such, the powerful habits and expectations associated with socially and relationally constrained routines pause the pseudo-finite and enclosed recurrence of a pre-assigned and inescapable fate. Servet, Eyüp and Hacer – see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil – present and play out as anthropomorphic characters who embody Platonic and Nietzschean doctrines of recurrence and repetition. However, the creative and anagnoretic traces elicited by the spectre of thwarted childhood (the boy spectre), and İsmail’s stolen heritage at the hands of corrupt, self-interested and immoral ‘others’, suggest the hidden latency of restoration and possible redemption.

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6 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Ante Rem, Revenge, Hinterland and Detection

In the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, we are introduced to the dusk of an undisclosed evening; as we peer through the smeared border and time-laden grime of a dishevelled workshop window, the atmospheric warning of a storm rumbles in the distance. Inside, a communal scene of assumed friendship emerges. However, the masculine den of what, at first sight, appears to be a triadic brotherhood of camaraderie, is muffled in an air of intrigue. A  conversation is unfolding between the three men, but their words and the context of their communication is inaudible, and so any trace of meaning is missing. In a move that disrupts the enclave of the communal gathering, one of the party withdraws and exits the workshop. He strolls to the front of the paddock, towards a chained and barking dog. He throws some scraps of food to the tethered animal, and casts an indiscriminate glance skywards, towards the impending threat of the storm. Through the momentary transition of a darkened fugue, the narrative sequence then shifts to an unknown place in the not-too-distant future. In the new and unfamiliar scenario, we find one of the acquaintances of the stormfacing protagonist from the previous scene bruised, subdued and sitting on the back seat of a car. He is flanked by two officials, a Doctor (Cemal) and a police officer (İzzet). In the front of the car he is further accompanied by a

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan senior official, a Commissar (Naci), and the driver (Arab). The initial dialogue in this scene gives little away as Naci, Arab and İzzet engage in a surreal and humorous discussion and debate about the virtues of yogurt and buffalo milk. For such a dark film, both literally and thematically, comedic moments such as this, related to human banality, ego and masculinity, emerge unexpectedly throughout. The entourage disembarks at a seemingly nondescript location. It quickly transpires that the officials and the prisoner are embroiled in a search; they are a motley bunch of dispirited seekers attempting to detect the location of a murdered and buried victim. They have few clues to go on, other than the need to locate an area of disturbed ground, somewhere near a round tree, with a ploughed field and fountain nearby. In the enveloping blanket of the unforgiving night, they wander into the depth of the undulating landscape. Despite the Spartan puzzle of limited information, Bloch claims that the detective expedition is not so random after all, its quirky conscripts seek out traces and clues in their ‘hunt for evidence in narrative form’.1 Inevitably, the process of detection is centred upon some kind of human mystery, a latent secret lurking somewhere beyond the details and disclosures of the narrative. In this sense, there is much that is unnarrated in Anatolia, its mutating and shard-like themes revolve around the reemergence of events that happened ante rem. With Bloch, and as is the case with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, we are literally and allegorically confronted with oblique traces, darkness and absences, which hint and murmur from somewhere beyond the beginning of the story. These unnarrated fugues and disconcerting empty spaces stifle and hamper the ‘resolution of the case’.2 According to Bloch, the trope of the fact-stripped detective represents the facet of a key utopian cipher, a cultural hieroglyph of undisclosed revelation and latent possibility. As an uncanny rebus, its contagious intrigue evokes whispers and longings for resolution and, ultimately, redemption. Beyond the everydayness of its cultural guise, the potency of the detective theme harbours a metaphysical puzzle, one that spokes and splinters beyond the confines of its narrative artefact. It is the murmuring void revealed by the incompleteness of the mystery 102

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Figure 6.1 The storm facing protagonist. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). 

that ignites the human compulsion to detect. The underlying source of the disruptive mystery itself being an immemorial legacy of a primordial event; a fall3 that erupted in to the perpetuity of human heritage, leaving only the echo of a puzzle which harbours repercussions that ‘portend nothing good’.4 Whether in Ceylan’s Anatolia or indeed any other form of culture-based detective scenario, those who witness the resonating consequences of an event essentially lack the knowledge and specifics of the original fall. In the Anatolian hinterland of exile, homelessness and wilderness, narrative meanderings elicit nomadic echoes in limbo. The task of the detective therefore is to reveal, both literally and allegorically, the decomposing corpse of an abandoned ‘truth’.5 For Bloch this is not to suggest that the nihilistic groundlessness of Babelic homelessness is the universal and irredeemable human condition. The vacuum of origin also harbours a creative fecundity, a catalytic space which induces a procreative drive and hunger for aggregation and discovery. Within Anatolia the unnarrated fugues conveyed by darkness, wilderness and absence, which frame the unfolding story, are loaded with anacoluthic clues of latent redemption. Thus lost yesterdays and better tomorrows perpetually limp and linger beyond the masks and incomplete stories of Anatolia’s characters. Returning to the night scene of the prisoner and the car, and the exodus of the convoy in to the steppe, we discover, through Naci’s barked orders and aggression, that the hunched and defeated prisoner is called Kenan. 103

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Within the obliqueness of Anatolia’s narrative, the name Kenan might be a useful clue, one that is suggestive of a Biblical reference. Genesis 5:9 tells us that Kenan was the great grandson of Adam, with a direct genealogy to Cain and Abel (Kenan was the grandson of Seth, the younger brother of Cain, born after Abel’s murder). In a corroborative sense, Kenan’s name is suggestive of a consequential fall from a once-beautiful covenant; as the grandson of Seth, Kenan is rendered the ‘possessor’ of a fallen and destructive family heritage characterized by vengeance, loss and wandering – themes and motifs that appear throughout the scenes and characters of Anatolia. As the story in Genesis goes, Cain buries, through vengeful jealousy, his murdered brother out into the wilderness; and when God asks, ‘where is your brother’, Cain replies ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ Anatolian Kenan then, as the allegorical ancestors of his Biblical namesake suggest, is rendered a restless wanderer of the earth. With him, we are once again inserted into a Cainan-esque search for a body. As sometimes diligent, sometimes dilettante detectives, we scour the scenic and narrative terrain for hints and clues of the ante rem of the fall in the hope that the traces and clues will elicit some kind of revelation of the cause of the aftermath of the murderous event.

Wilderness: Unmasking the Sublime This is not to say that Anatolia is an explicitly utopian film. On the contrary, it is dark, challenging and, if anything, wrenchingly dystopian. The search for a murdered corpse in a wilderness, in the impenetrable dark of night, is testament enough to this. But the sublime qualities of the wilderness should not be overlooked. The wilderness is a space that contains and conceals a bifurcatory secret. Wilderness is a place ‘devoid of humanity’ but its emptiness is also a place where the lost or hidden aspects of humanity can be rediscovered.6 It is duplicitous in that its emptiness conceals an ‘annihilating, regenerating power […] a secularised version of God’.7 The fecundity, and regenerative power of the wilderness, harbours whispers of the divine.8 The Anatolian wilderness is, too, such a place; beyond the mystery of its barren concealment it contains traces and hints of secret lives. The narrative function of the night-enshrouded hinterland is to articulate 104

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ‘hallucinations of certain sinister-utopian possibilities of either our incognito self or of what our incognito awaits’.9 The darkness of the nightmare also hearkens to the other side, to the ‘fairy tales heard in it, the one day that shone more brightly, a presentiment of true existence that floats down […] from distant heavens, a primordially simple anticipation of Paradise, or the summons to it’.10 The dichotomy of the sublime hiddenness – the potential of a beautiful, enveloping Anatolian sunrise from the East – slumbers in the nightmare wilderness of the Anatolian steppe. The dark and sepia tinged dimension of the wilderness offers hints of the other side, to the ‘beyond’ of somewhere else, which is also suggested through the seemingly ironic fairy tale reference of the title ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’. This and several other themes and narrative mechanisms utilized in the film contain more than a passing resemblance to a key section taken from Anton Chekhov’s short story Home. One section is particularly apposite: Once upon a time, in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an old, very old emperor […] he lived in a glass palace which sparkled and glittered in the sun, like a great piece of clear ice. The palace, my boy, stood in a huge garden, in which there grew oranges, you know […] bergamots, cherries […] tulips, roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in it, and birds of different colours sang there […] Yes […] On the trees there hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang so sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them […] There were fountains in the garden […] Do you remember you saw a fountain at Auntie Sonya’s summer villa? Well, there were fountains just like that in the emperor’s garden, only ever so much bigger, and the jets of water reached to the top of the highest poplar.11

The schismatic sublimity of home/garden and wilderness is further borne out by the character of Cemal, the Doctor. Cemal, an exemplary Nietzschean modern man, is a morbid disciple of rational and rationalizing knowledge (in his case, medical knowledge). As an aspirant conqueror of illogicality, Cemal assumes himself to be ‘equipped with the highest powers of understanding […] in the service of science [… and] every other form of existence has to fight its way up alongside it’.12 However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Cemal is also attempting to deal with the 105

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan wounds of his own fall into a lifeless and spiritless wilderness. Memorial shadows and echoes of fallibility, of loss and regret puncture the seemingly emotionless demeanour of Cemal’s fragile armour. At another of the convoy’s disembarkation points, Cemal searches for a little privacy, and, in the night-cloaked ruggedness, wanders behind the shadowy recess of a rocky outcrop. As he urinates, a thunderclap and lightning bolt emits a sudden flash, and in the momentariness of its revelatory light, he is startled and confronted with an ancient face carved in to the rock. The bleakness of Cemal’s wilderness harbours another side, an uncanny and unnerving disruptiveness. The empty and barren landscape of his rational groundedness reveals something lurking, something that ‘mysteriously looks back’ at him.13 We also see throughout Cemal’s sputtering dialogue with Prosecutor Nusret (in relation to the woman who predicted her own death) that he sets out to ensnare other wanderers that have been cast adrift ‘within the smallest circle of solvable tasks’.14 For Cemal all cause and effect can be located and explained within the physical laws of science. There is no place for ethereality or irrational phenomenon. This is poignantly inferred as

Figure 6.2 Disembarkation on the Anatolian steppe. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). 

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia part of his opening conversation with Prosecutor Nusret. When Nusret asks him if he has any children, Cemal coldly retorts that he didn’t want children. Indeed, while it is never explicitly stated during the film, a smattering of loose suggestions hint that this may have been the cause of the demise of Cemal’s marriage (and his fall from a once upon a time happier life). This is further played out with his dialogue with Nusret, whose emergent need for mystery and hope is subjected to a steely and efficient deconstruction at the hands of Cemal, with his denomination of facts, evidence and medical proofs. However, through the intermittent insights and revelations of Cemal’s biographical and memory traces, which range across flashbacks, photographs and anecdotal divulgences, we see that he is far from being the totality of a cold and rational sceptic. As is the case with the other characters, he is also haunted by ‘the consequences of his own existence’.15 Despite his medical rationality, Cemal is evidently a man befallen by relational homelessness and an emptiness of life. The refracted manifestation of his own wilderness emits traces of loss and longing. He is another victim of ‘man’s sickness of man, of himself ’.

Ressentiment and Revenge: the Woman who Predicted her own Death Nietzsche asserts that the historical development of human social existence  has developed an injurious schism, which has manifested itself as an array of master and slave relationships. Masters exercise absolute control over a subdued and subordinated group. Outmanoeuvred and overwhelmed by the power and control wielded by the masters, the slaves find that they are incapable of living autonomous lives of self-affirming activity. As a way of dealing with the unforgiving oppression imposed on their lives, slaves develop a reactive and negative type of relationship. Nietzsche refers to this type of slave response as ressentiment. Ressentiment designates a type of behaviour where ‘reactive forces prevail over active forces. But they can only prevail in one way: by ceasing to be acted. Above all we must not define ressentiment in terms of the strength of a reaction […] the word ressentiment gives a definite clue:  reaction ceases to be acted in order to become something felt’.16 Ressentiment therefore refers to a kind of latent 107

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan obstruction or strategic non-conformity. Importantly, it is not an action of resigned conformity; ressentiment is, characteristically, a type of behaviour that creatively and surreptitiously exploits a key weakness inherent to the perpetuation of the master-slave relationship: the necessity of both parties to conform to performative expectation. Ressentiment as a concept is therefore suggestive of a type of reaction that momentarily empowers, and ultimately overturns, the futility of the slave. Through ressentiment old instincts – such as cruelty, risk, pain and destruction – find new and unpredictable possibilities. All of the main characters in Anatolia, Nusret, Cemal and Kenan, can be seen as slaves to their heritage. (Within this scheme, even Kenan’s prolonged silence and his offering false information to Naci can be seen as instances of ressentiment.) They are all pummelled by the consequences of actions and choices taken throughout their lives. However, they have all, at some point, also occupied the position of the master. One way or another they have exercised damaging and destructive power over those that have been vulnerable and close to them. Within the interweaving and oblique complexities of Anatolia’s characters, there is a particular and exemplary scenario of unfolding ressentiment, one that slowly bubbles and gradually surfaces – albeit in a fractured sense – throughout the film: the revenge of Prosecutor Nusret’s wife in the guise of the woman who predicted her own death. The story starts to emerge and unfold during chapter 7 of Anatolia (44 minutes into the film), when the entourage has disembarked yet again to search another potential site for the buried body. Stationary and looking down on to the participants of the search, Prosecutor Nusret and Cemal the Doctor engage in the following intriguing dialogue: [Nusret] There was a woman, the wife of a friend. One day, the woman said she’d die on a specific date five months later. And sure enough, when that day came around … the woman dropped dead. [Cemal] What do you mean? [Nusret] Exactly what I said. She said she’d have her baby and die five months later. And a few days after giving birth … she dropped dead … for no reason at all […]

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [Cemal] So what was the cause of the woman’s death? The gorgeous woman you were talking about. What was the cause of death? What did the doctors say? The evident intrigue of the unfolding revelation and discussion is suddenly distracted, and broken off as Commissar Naci starts verbally and physically to assault the prisoner Kenan, his anger and frustration growing due to the lack of meaningful information being offered to identify and secure the specific location of the body. The thread of this unusual dialogue, regarding the woman who predicted her own death, is not picked up again in the film until 40 minutes later, in chapter  12.17 Here, Cemal and Nusret are standing outside in the courtyard of Mukhtar’s home. This time it is Cemal who reinstitutes the dialogue, and asks: [Cemal] So why did you say that woman died? [Prosecutor] Which woman? [Cemal] The woman you described as gorgeous? Your friend’s wife […] [Nusret] There really was no cause. As I said, it was the most bizarre death. One day the guy said to his wife… ‘let’s sell the old banger by autumn and get a decent car instead’. The woman answered ‘do what you like… I won’t be here in the autumn anyway. I’ll be dead.’ The guy made nothing of it at first. He thought his wife was joking. But the woman said, ‘it’s no joke. I’m serious. I tell you, I’m going to die after having the baby,’ she said. The guy was annoyed, naturally […] Then came the day of the birth. It went quite normally and they had a healthy baby girl. Before long, the woman was at home lying in bed… and wanted to cuddle the baby. So they brought her the baby. The woman gave the baby a kiss and a cuddle and so on. And afterwards… she said, ‘I can die now.’ And sure enough, she died soon after right in front of everyone’s eyes. There you go, Doctor. Those are the facts. She died the very minute she said she would. Let’s see what sense you can make of them now. [Cemal] Well, was there an autopsy? [Nusret] Why? [Cemal] To get a clearer idea of the cause of death.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan [Nusret] You haven’t been listening. The cause of death was clear. Anyway, if there’d been anything suspicious, you think I’d have let it go? [Cemal] No one dies because they say they will. She must have poisoned herself or something. [Nusret] Poisoned herself? What gives you that idea, Doctor? If there was anything suspicious, wouldn’t we have acted? I’m a prosecutor. It’s my job to be suspicious. We’d have looked in to it, of course. But the doctors said a heart attack […] [Cemal] Some drugs can trigger a heart attack if taken in high doses. The dialogue is broken off once again as Mukhtar approaches the two men to ask them if they would like a drink of tea. Compounding this, the discursive moment is lost completely as Naci emerges from Mukhtar’s barn to update Prosecutor Nusret on the emerging details of Kenan’s confession (Kenan admitted to killing the victim as an act of vengeance for concealing the fact that he had a child). Against the backdrop or latency of the unfolding case of ressentiment, Cemal emerges here once again as the Nietzschean man of reason, pursuing the niggling facts of the curious and rationally unbelievable scenario. Exploring and dissecting the strange incident of the woman who seemingly predicted her own death, Cemal bombards Nusret with logic. But Nusret insists that the strange case, whilst mysterious, requires no further analysis or justification. With this, Nusret adopts the position of a man of intuition and grapples for some kind of defensive protection against the impending surfacing of a harmful revelation, conjuring a ‘stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit’.18 The two characters effectively play out the following Nietzschean typologies: one fearful of intuition, the other filled with scorn for abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former is unartistic. They both desire to rule over life; the one by his knowledge of how to cope with the chief calamities of life by providing for the future, by prudence and regularity, the other by being an ‘exuberant hero’ who does not see those calamities and who only acknowledges life as real when it is disguised as beauty and appearance.19

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia We have to wait for over another hour into the film for the resurfacing and conclusion to this lingering and intriguing dialogue. In chapter  20, Nusret and Cemal are seated in Cemal’s office, awaiting a phone call from the pathologist to inform them that the theatre is prepped and ready for the autopsy of the murdered body. This time it is Prosecutor Nusret who reinstates the dialogue, asking Cemal: [Nusret] That drug business. Remember you talked about certain drugs being able to cause a heart attack if taken in high doses? [Cemal] Yes, there are drugs like that. Why? [Nusret] What I don’t understand is this… why would the woman suddenly take the drugs for no good reason? [Cemal] Maybe there was a personal problem she couldn’t deal with. She wanted to kill herself and be spared. How do I know? [Nusret] Kill herself? What suddenly gives you that idea? […] [Cemal] I don’t know, just asking. [Nusret] True they had a few minor problems. But I mean… the kind you get in any family. Only… one day, she caught her husband with another woman. They didn’t make a thing of it. She forgave him right away. [Cemal] But women don’t easily forgive that sort of thing. [Nusret] She did, though. She really forgave him. They didn’t even mention it again. [Cemal] Well, there you go. The woman made up her mind to kill herself right back then. She waited until after the birth so as not to harm the baby. [Nusret] No, come on! I really don’t think so. For one thing, the guy did nothing really wrong. It was some ridiculous thing that happened when he was drunk. Nothing to write home about. You couldn’t even call it cheating. The woman must have thought the same because she forgave the guy right off. [Cemal] No one dies like that. There’s no such thing in medicine. [Nusret] Well. What sort of drugs are you talking? The kind sold over the counter? [Cemal] Sure. Digoxin, for example.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan [Nusret] Digoxin? [Cemal] It’s a heart drug. High doses cause a heart attack. There are others too. [Nusret] No, I know Digoxin. My father-in-law took it. Small yellow tablets? […] Look, Doctor… would a person… really kill themselves… to punish someone else? Would they do that, Doctor? [Cemal] Aren’t most suicides intended to punish someone else, Mr Prosecutor? [Nusret] Yes, aren’t they? Bravo. That’s what I thought. That’s it, of course. Let’s go. […] My wife… Women can sometimes be really ruthless, Doctor. Really. Very. This text obviously cannot record or relay the characters’ expressions, inflections and body language in the scene. But the viewer visually encounters Nusret’s tortured revelation and ultimate recognition that his wife killed herself, a vengeful and protractedly planned reaction, plotted and executed as a result of Nusret’s destructive behaviour and blasé attitude where his infidelity was concerned. Nusret’s insistence that ‘the woman’ somehow mysteriously predicted and succumbed to her own death, offered him a level of protection, a disinfected and limited account that served to cauterize the latent violence of such an extreme act of revenge. Cosseted from the crushing truth, Nusret was indifferent to the abstract and depersonalized knowledge of the death of his wife. It was sanitized and devoid of responsibility or consequence. However, throughout the unfolding discomfort of the dialogue, his realization manifests itself in conjunction with an increasing hostility and resistance to the emotional harm associated with the truth.20 Previously he was never sorry for the consequences of his indiscretion, revealing to Cemal that he hadn’t done anything wrong. ‘You couldn’t even call it cheating.’ Nusret is dominated by egoistic and narcissistic tendencies. We see another example of this through his feigned oratorical grandstanding and grandiosity of posture, as he dictates what is ultimately a technical exposition of the site of the crime scene. His sense of personal self-adoration also shows through with the conceited comparison of himself to Clark Gable. However, the more his wife’s reaction-as-ressentiment against him unfolds gradually and painfully, the more severely he suffers.

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia As we see, an undisclosed amount of time has elapsed between the death of Nusret’s wife and his eventual realization of the cause. But it is characteristic of ressentiment that it does not react.21 Indeed, it could not have been acted in the context of the film as the suicide occurred sometime prior to the realization. The subsequent and powerful consequences of this previously hidden truth produces a wound which renders Nusret impotent and unable to respond or resolve. The ressentiment of Nusret’s wife emerges as a sacrificial revolt, a tragic though triumphal act of revenge for the weak, ‘the revolt of the slaves and their victory as slaves’.22

Kenan, Cemal, Nusret… and Anatolia With Kenan, Cemal and Nusret we are initiated into a triptych scheme of vengeance, loss and regret. And yet, beautifully harboured and poignantly experienced by all of the male characters, in the middle of the film, is the revelation of a fourth aspect of forgotten possibility. A latent Anatolian moment that unwittingly and emotively descends upon the entourage. This is the moment when Cemile, Mukhtar’s beautiful daughter, brings tea to the men in the power-cut darkness of the night. The atmospheric setting for this scene is akin to a Platonic cave, as their shadows are cast on to the wall of the room by the light of a lamp carried by Cemile. The beacon of light emitted from Cemile’s lantern probes the souls and hearts of the men, with a speculum of radiation that proves ‘hotter than the light, duskier than the evening, more animated than the voices in the distance – [and] reverberates deep within, like a huge bell sounded in a storm’.23 Cemile is an angel, the message keeper of a sublime reminder, one which shocks the huddled and unsuspecting men to remember something. She is an unsullied host, who emanates a mystery of purity, a human cipher of pure and beautiful truth, sparking the possibility of a dormant and perpetual hope from some metaphysical place beyond the veil of the barren wilderness. The irruptive wounding and heal-enticing beauty of Cemile evokes painful recognitions of loss, incompleteness and lifelessness in the empty-space of the masculine wilderness. This powerful trope resonates with a story recounted by Bloch in Traces, entitled ‘Pippa Passes’.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Our friend sat in the tram car […] and across from him a girl, who he barely looked at, about whom he noticed only her peculiarly large pale blue eyes, noticed them dimly while talking to his companions. He had to notice, actually, for those eyes watched him steadfastly, not enticingly; rather, they were round and lonely, truly like stars […] Now chance came to his aid: the man dropped his ticket. He picked it up from the floor, thereby lightly brushing the girl’s knee  – truly so lightly and awkwardly, so inadvertently in that narrow space […] Soon the tram stopped, as the stars of her eyes rose again (or perhaps had never set); my friend stepped off with his companions while the girl observed, now with a truly mysterious expression, and the tram disappeared in the direction of the park. The man claimed not even to have watched the taillights, so uninteresting did the matter seem to him, and so calm did he feel. But no sooner was he seated at the table than there came, in the midst of the cafe, while he was still listening to light news […] a crash that almost buried him:  love exploded on a timed fuse. Illusion began to operate, and the girl within it became the beloved, the one just lost, and neglected, hopelessly gone, with whom an entire life sank. A beautiful, long life, never lived yet deeply familiar, which he recalled almost in a hallucination, and which lacked nothing but its tiny beginning.24

This irresistible jolt of ungroundable mystery hearkens to the powerful unknown of another ante rem, the fleeting recognition of an Edenic prefall. In Mukhtar’s shadow-filled room the somnambulistically hunched men each catch a fleeting glimpse of something that is paradisiacal and ecstatically powerful. Nietzsche notes that such unnervingly beautiful moments are ‘covered by a veil of beautiful possibilities, woven with threads of gold – promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, compassionate and seductive. Yes, life is a woman!’25 In this sense, Cemile, the female manifestation of the beautiful possibility, conjures a moment as a ‘saving sorceress with the power to heal […] repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live; these representations are the sublime, whereby the terrible is tamed’.26 Bloch suggests that such beautiful moments rupture the flat-line

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Figure 6.3 Mukhtar’s daughter, Cemile. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). 

routine and stagnation of everyday life; the fugue of repetitive habit helplessly subjected to a most peculiar rupture, ‘unprecedented in its suddenness, right through the middle of the lived now’.27 Such moments unleash themselves as powerful events, ‘as a kind of overpowering […] in a pointlike fashion’.28 In the uncomfortable abyss of thwarted opportunity, the unbearable moment of beauty resists the stability of a comfortable hiding place; ‘here is the metaphysical guiding panel for full existence and without hinterworld’.29 Cemile’s unbearable moment of mysterious and jolting beauty reveals the thread of a latent promise, a promise that is beyond all stagnations, and reveals the moment ‘as an unmistakable allusion to the immediate darkness of the Now’.30 Kenan, Cemal and Nusret harbour slow-running rivers of Lethe in the wilderness of the Janus-facing half-lives of their past. As ‘men’ they have abandoned and forgotten the buried Anatolian promise of love, beauty and hope. In the fleeting moment of frailty and beauty, the trace of a dormant life echoes from beyond the bleak dullness of the steppe. However, the darkness of their half-lived, half-formed legacies stay stunted in an oscillation of grounded isolation. The inner and sublime landscape of spiritual growth and metaphysical home remains elusive, and vengeance, loss and wilderness remain as historical harpoons, which continue to rip in to the psyches of the characters. As nomadic wanderers, Kenan, Cemal and Nusret remain imprisoned within the wounds of their past.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan The film ends with Cemal (the masculine counterpart to beauty) watching the autopsy, the bloody and medical disaggregation of the murdered body. As a slave to the damage of his stunted heritage, he must continue his search, in the wilderness, for the decomposing corpse of an abandoned truth.

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7 Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology

Yes! If one thinks about it, you know, looks into it and analyses all this hotchpotch, if you will allow me to call it so, it’s not life but more like a fire in a theatre! (Chekhov, The Wife)1

‘This isn’t a life’, complains one of the characters in Winter Sleep, ‘it’s a fire scene in a stage act’. For all the snow, ice and wind, which frame its spectacular scenes, Winter Sleep is a stunning study of fire. In its frame, all morality, all sociality and all economy are destined to disappear in an unforgiving spectacle of fire. Like Sartre’s play No Exit, staging the conversations of three damned souls in hell, Winter Sleep sends its three protagonists to hell, exposing them to a series of long, theatrical discussions through which they make life miserable for one another.2 This route to hell is paved with acknowledged inspiration from a Chekhov story, The Wife, which depicts the ‘simple and not strained, but cold, empty, and dreary’ relations between an estranged couple living under the same roof.3 In Winter Sleep, as in Chekhov’s story, the focus is on how the relationship is burned down and the characters hit the bottom. Indeed, the film’s success is grounded in its ability to portray volcanic eruptions underneath ice, to reveal the fire under the snow.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Tellingly, therefore, the setting is a post-volcanic landscape, Cappadocia, with its spectacular cone-shaped rock formations caused by the impact of wind and rain on lava, dwellings carved into hills and mountains, deserthot summers, icy winters… A Baudrillardian setting, so to speak, in which nature looks unnatural, rocks become signs and one is gradually dragged into ‘the whirlpool of time, into the remorseless eternity of a slow-motion catastrophe’.4 It is well known that early Christians used Cappadocia as a refuge. Now an international tourist paradise, it still offers a retreat from the discontents of modern life. The main protagonist, Aydın, is a greying former actor who has moved from Istanbul to Cappadocia after retiring. He runs a hotel, Hotel Othello, which he has inherited from his family together with other property he rents out. He is rich and powerful in comparison to the local peasants: ‘My kingdom may be small,’ he says at one point, ‘but at least I’m the king there.’ He likes giving the impression of being a benevolent landlord but does not hesitate to exercise his power to collect rents. At the same time he has intellectual ambitions (his name ‘aydın’ means enlightened in Turkish). He publishes articles in a local newspaper and is quick to tell everyone: ‘I’m writing a book, too … History of Turkish Theatre.’ We first meet Aydın on a cold, snowy day, wandering in the Cappadocian landscape. He enters his hotel and starts to chat with a customer. The

Figure 7.1 Aydın’s hotel in Cappadocia. Winter’s Sleep (2014). 

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology customer asks whether he keeps horses at his hotel. ‘No, no horses.’ ‘You don’t? I saw horses on your website.’ ‘True, there are lots of wild horses around here. I mean… it’s just to decorate the website.’ ‘I see.’ Embarrassed, Aydın orders the housekeeper to bring him a cup of coffee and walks to the window to look out. The camera approaches him from behind, focusing on his head, as if we were entering his mind. At this moment the title of the film appears on the screen. Winter Sleep is a film of and on ideas. It presents many philosophical ideas through conceptually dense, extravagantly analytical scenes. It is no exaggeration to say that it is ‘unabashed essay cinema’.5 Aydın is surrounded by other people, other ideas, and he gradually discovers that ‘Hell is – other people!’6 Indeed, most other characters in the film despise him – especially the two other main protagonists, the two women he lives with:  his middle-aged sister (Necla) and his young wife (Nihal). Necla, a recently divorced and grumpy woman, is a caring sister but slowly turns into a harsh critic of Aydın’s pretentiousness and intellectual mediocrity. Nihal is unhappy about her life, contemplating divorce. She finds refuge in charity work, for which she needs Aydın’s money, for which she in turn pays with her freedom. ‘Do you know how donating even a little of someone else’s money feels?’

Money, Debt and Symbolic Exchange Aydın must obtain a horse for the hotel. With the help of Hidayet, his righthand man, he finds a horse keeper who promises to catch a wild horse for him. Then they drive out to some of his tenants to collect rents. On the way Hidayet stops to buy things. Alone in the car, half bored, Aydın catches the angry gaze of a boy. He shrugs, unable to bestow any meaning in it. On moving again Aydın asks Hidayet: ‘Did the other one pay [the rent] after the warning?’ ‘No. Nothing. The lawyer says we could evict him in two months.’ ‘How? The law protects the tenants.’ ‘Well, Mr Aydın, there are actually lots of things to do.’ Hidayet is prepared to use force and violence to make the tenants pay up. Hereby the film confronts the viewer with the ‘banality of evil’.7 To be sure, one cannot say that Aydın is an evil person. But for evil to occur 119

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan you don’t need evil people. Herein lies Hidayet’s (and Aydın’s lawyers’) crucial function in the film: moral neutralization. Thanks to them Aydın can engage with the social world without recognizing his own active role in its production. In a capitalist society, after all, sociality is dominated by the logic of exchange and thus morality ceases to be a register for reflection. The capitalist concept of value is literally nihilistic. Money has a ‘capacity to reduce the highest as well as the lowest values equally to one value form and thereby to place them on the same level, regardless of their diverse kinds and amounts’.8 This nihilistic levelling runs even deeper than an indifference to the possibility of different evaluations. Ultimately, money makes difficult the ‘existence of values as such’.9 Capitalism is a world without values. It leaves no other bond between people than naked self-interest, drowning everything else in the ‘icy water’ of exchange value.10 Suddenly Aydın and Hidayet hear a noise:  the passenger window is shattered by a stone. Hidayet jumps out of the car to catch the boy who has thrown the stone. Trying to escape, the boy falls in the icy waters of the stream across the road. The boy – the same boy who was looking at Aydın angrily in the previous scene – turns out to be the son of a tenant. This scene is rich in symbolism. The cracked window is a sign of what is to come. Hence the name of the boy: İlyas, the Turkish equivalent of Elijah/Elias, meaning the messiah. To discuss the significance of this

Figure 7.2 The cracked window. Winter’s Sleep (2014). 

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology scene we must bear in mind the distinction between two senses of time, between the linear time of chronology and kairos, the time of the messianic event. Kairos is a ‘seized’ chronos.11 It is the moment of an untimely act, of intervening into time to change its course. And as such, there is a promise involved in kairos: the promise of the new. Importantly, however, this promise is an ‘absolutely undetermined messianic hope’, that is, its content is not determined by, or reducible to, religious experience.12 In this sense, the stone cast by İlyas is a stand-in for hope in the film.13 ‘Best get him home quick before he catches cold.’ So Aydın and Hidayet go to the boy’s home to demand the repair money for the passenger window as well as the rent. While Aydın sits in the car Hidayet knocks on the door. İlyas’s father, İsmail, opens the door. ‘Your kid fell in the water. We brought him back quick.’ ‘Where, how?’ ‘Near Issız. He slipped jumping the stream and got wet.’ ‘What was he doing there?’ ‘He was hiding, waiting for our car. He threw a stone and broke our window.’ İsmail calls his son. ‘Did you throw the stone, son?’ The boy nods. İsmail slaps him in the face. ‘Go now.’ Aydın is watching them from the car. ‘How’s that? Happy? Is that all right now? Feel better? A slap for a broken window. Is that enough for you two? Or should I call him back for some more?’ The sacrificial slapping here has no logic in the context of money exchange.14 If Aydın’s wealth is defined by money as an abstract equivalent, İsmail’s sacrifice is a reminder, or rather a rupture, with that economic rationality. In this sense Winter Sleep is making a crucial sociological point: there remain symbolic forces that are still operational within commodified social relations. At this moment Hamdi, İsmail’s younger brother who is also the imam (the local priest) of the village, arrives. ‘What’s all this, İsmail?’ ‘So they’re here to make us pay,’ İsmail says. Hidayet protests: ‘Did I say that? Didn’t I say we brought him home so he wouldn’t get sick?’ ‘Cut it out. You took our fridge and TV for a lousy rent. Isn’t that enough? Now you’re hassling a kid?’ The argument flares up, İsmail attacks Hidayet. Still watching at a distance, Aydın is frightened and calls Hidayet to the car. Before they leave, Hamdi comes to them. ‘Hidayet, I’m really sorry. I’m as shocked as you. I don’t know what to say.’ Then, looking at Aydın, he continues: ‘Well … the window’s broken and we’ll pay for it. We’ll pay the rent as soon we can, 121

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan too. We haven’t forgotten… But we’re having a hard time.’ Hidayet intervenes. ‘For God’s sake, Hamdi, drop that talk. We didn’t say anything for months.’ ‘OK, Hidayet, come on,’ says Aydın. Hamdi is eager to go on: ‘But sending a debt collector so suddenly, is that right? You could have talked to us first.’ ‘Come on, Hidayet,’ repeats Aydın, now visibly annoyed. Aydın and Hidayet leave. Hamdi is left behind, heading for his home: ‘Bastard. Son of a bitch.’ Notably, debt is an uneven relation: even though the relationship between the creditor and the debtor is a ‘contractual’ relationship, there is always an asymmetry of power involved in it.15 Money, then, is not merely a means of exchange but a significant component of practices that constitute power. In market exchange money functions merely as a measure of value. But in the form of capital it functions as a measure of the value of values. Hence the power of abstract capital (value producing more value) is not reducible to its market function, to exchange. In this sense, insofar as it is linked to credit (credos), one can say that capitalism (does not only level but also) creates beliefs and desires, forms a moral subjectivity. As such, debt becomes a factor of sociality. Debt is not only an ‘exceptional’ catastrophe but a dispositif, a technique that imposes a particular conduct, a model of truth and normality on sociality by defining power relations. Consequently, abstract money becomes a source of systemic violence that pushes everything into the ‘icy waters’ of its value form. This is the background against which the events unfold in Winter Sleep.

Vanity and Religion Back at home, Aydın is in his own room writing. Enter his sister Necla. ‘Are you writing your column?’ ‘I’m trying to.’ ‘By the way, I read last week’s. I liked it.’ ‘Which one do you mean?’ ‘Urban ugliness in Anatolia. Aesthetic deprivation and so on.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Bravo. How do you come up with interesting ideas every week?’ Aydın brings the topic to his tenant Hamdi. ‘If you saw how filthy it was, how messy.’ ‘Did you go in?’ ‘No, I mean the garden. They’ve ruined it.’ Which brings him to one of his favourite topics, religion: ‘First of all, you are a man of God. You should be a model to

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology your community. Shouldn’t you be neat and tidy?’ ‘Who is he? Do I know him?’ ‘No, you wouldn’t. […] Just a crooked, shabby guy.’ He continues: ‘I don’t know… Shouldn’t men of God be a model to the public? Especially in rural areas. Perhaps I should write about that next week?’ Necla is supportive but thinks he should write in a bigger paper. ‘I don’t agree with you, my dear Necla. On the contrary. Sometimes I receive letters…’ His sister interrupts him, the topic changes. Aydın gets another opportunity to hold forth on the same topic when his friend Suavi visits him. Aydın shows him a letter from a neighbouring village, written by a ‘great admirer’ of him, obviously a woman. The letter is asking for charitable donations to build a technical school for girls in a poor village. But just before listening to his friend’s opinion Aydın remembers that ‘Nihal loves charity like this. Should we call her as well?’ Nihal joins them, too. Suavi’s reaction to the letter is ‘don’t know’. Nihal’s is straightforward: ‘We’ve been collecting donations for this for a long time now. But it never attracted your attention. So I don’t understand your sudden charity.’ Aydın’s charity is rooted in his vanity. Hamdi lays it bare when he visits Aydın in order to apologize for both İlyas and İsmail’s behaviour. (İlyas ‘feels really bad about it. He wants to come over and kiss your hand for forgiveness’; İsmail ‘just came out of prison, he hasn’t sorted himself out yet. Nobody gives him a job.’) Aydın only responds to the smell of Hamdi’s feet:

Figure 7.3 Aydın and his sister Necla. Winter’s Sleep (2014). 

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan ‘Sorry, just a minute. It’s a bit stuffy in here. If you don’t mind… I’ll open a window.’ ‘So, Mr Aydın, if you could just step in to stop the eviction… We will sort something out as soon as possible. We really don’t want to lose the house.’ Here we see the limit of Aydın’s charity: ‘I mean… There’s Hidayet and the lawyers. You don’t need to come to me.’ Hamdi leaves. Aydın returns to his article on religion inspired by Hamdi: In a country with a 99% Muslim population, don’t the people deserve men of God who are cultivated, neat, whose very presence is reassuring? The weekly sermon prepared by our imams from their reading will be heard with pleasure and admiration and will elevate the people. Islam is a religion of civilization and high culture.

‘How’s that?’ Aydın asks Necla. ‘Fine.’ ‘It’s not too harsh?’ ‘No.’ ‘Nothing that might be misunderstood?’ ‘No. You don’t say anything about religion itself. You talk about the practices of those who apply it.’ ‘And I also say Islam is a religion of high culture. Of course. I don’t really care for these things. But you know it’s delicate. But the guy annoys me so much, I can’t stop myself writing. So he managed to become the subject of an article. With his shabbiness, slyness, vagueness…’ So what kind of an intellectual is Aydın? For him thinking is a matter of recognition. But ‘only values which are already current, only accepted values, give criteria of recognition’.16 One can recognize only what one has seen before. The new, on the other hand, always brings forth dispute. Intellectual thought always involves disagreement, which is, above all, a disagreement on consensus, on recognized values.17 The true target of intellectual thought, in other words, is not playing a given game, indulging in its officially recognized transgressions, but challenging the game itself. Such thought necessitates a process of separation, of dis-identification, visà-vis a given framework of the sensible with a view to opening up a space for what can be said, seen and thought otherwise.18 A critique of Aydın’s position along similar lines is articulated later in the film by Nejla, when, in an argument, she reveals to Aydın that ‘on a second reading’ she found his articles ‘harmless’. Aydın’s critique is only mediocre. ‘This soppy romanticism. This naive, unconvincing self-belief. 124

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology Takes no risks, for one thing. It looks like the writer adopts positive values accepted by all, just to endear himself.’ The same goes for Aydın’s article on religion. ‘You found a victim and you’re making the most of it. Stop harassing the poor man.’ In a country polarized by Islamic governance, experimenting with varieties of Islamic neo-liberalism and neo-liberal Islamism, Hamdi is too easy a target to articulate a critique of religion. But perhaps Aydın is looking for religion in the wrong place. In today’s world, after all, capitalism has become a religion and religion has become capitalism. Henceforth we should look for religion not in theological categories but in capitalism. Let us, to discuss this, revisit the essential link between capitalism and religion. Weber’s discussion of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is well-known in this context. Since capitalism is a world without value, an inherently nihilistic system, it is constantly in need of moral justification, which can only come to it from outside. This external source is the Protestant ethic, which originally provided capitalism with a religious basis, with a ‘spirit’, although, according to Weber, the pact between capitalism and Protestantism has later weakened to the point that ‘victorious capitalism … needs its support no longer’.19 Secularization brings with it disenchantment. Contra Weber, however, theology persists as an active force in modern economy for capitalism and Christianity are structurally linked together. What links them together is articulated in social theory through the notion of guilt or debt. Seen in this prism, capitalism has not only found support in religion but it emanates from religion.20 Capitalism is a cult religion which does not expiate but produces guilt.21 It is through the mechanism of guilt (debt, credit) that value begets surplus-value, a process that resembles a god’s self-generation out of nothing.22 This is the reason why, in Marx, the law of value functions as an abstract law that governs the relations of equivalence among commodities, as a transcendent moment within the immanent relations of equivalence. ‘Money is therefore the god among commodities.’23 The paradox here consists in the movement through which the abstract value becomes totally value-free:  abstract capital that seeks out further accumulation of capital whenever, wherever, by whatever means. Ultimately, therefore, the concept of (exchange) value can say nothing 125

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan on value. It is in this sense that the world of capitalism is essentially a world without value. However, this cynicism must not be mistaken as the absence of a religio-moral dimension in capitalist sociality. For such cynicism is often coupled with the sacralization of capital.24 Capitalism posits an infinite debt to capital; everything appears to emanate from and return to capital. Thus most people today can imagine the end of the world but not that of capitalism.25 Indeed, Spinoza had previously emphasized that money can appear as ‘cause’, that is, as God: money provides a short-cut to everything and therefore the multitude ‘can scarcely imagine any kind of pleasure unless it is accompanied with the idea of money as the cause’.26 Religion, Feuerbach had said, takes over the best qualities of humans and allocates them to God, affirming in God what is negated in man.27 Hence the paradox of religious alienation: the more God is glorified or valued, the more human life is depreciated and devalued. Marx repeats the same logic in his 1844 Manuscripts regarding capital as a source of economic alienation: the more wealth the workers produce in capitalism the poorer they become.28 Just as religion captures what is profane and sacralizes it through glorification, capitalism captures the commons and commodifies them for display in the spectacle. Not surprisingly, therefore, the glorification of capital parallels the glorification of God. In both cases, ‘glorification is… what produces glory’.29 And in both cases, what is at stake is human life, which is, originally, inoperative, that is, without a utilitarian purpose.30 The human is essentially a creature of play. What religion does is to capture this inoperativity and inscribe it in a religious sphere, to sacralize it, only to partially return it in the form of the ‘Sabbath’ when all ‘work’, all economy, ceases to exist and everything falls back upon inoperativity. What capitalism does is to capture the multitude’s inoperativity, its creative freedom, and inscribe it in a utilitarian sphere, only to partially return it as permitted freedom, as ‘holiday’, which is the main promise of work in capitalism: A post-governmental promise, in which work (hell) is replaced by play (paradise).

Not Resisting Evil Aydın is not the only one speculating on religion in the film. Necla, too, is immersed in the topic. In a conversation she asks Aydın what ‘not resisting 126

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology evil’ means to him. But Aydın’s ‘logical’ answer (remaining indifferent to evil) is not satisfactory to her. Next day she opens the same topic during their breakfast. I still feel… we’re fooling ourselves when we’re fighting evil. […] Instead of struggling against evil, why not do the exact opposite? Say you don’t want a painting to be stolen. It’s maybe better to hand it to the thief. Maybe it’s a better solution.

This is a clear reference to the Bible: ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’31 If someone does you evil, you must not respond in kind but put a distance to it; doing otherwise is participating in evil, which can only lead to its metastases. So Aydın’s vanity is confronted with Necla’s Christian ethics. Taken to its logical limits, Necla implies, ‘Resist not evil’ would lead to a sociality grounded in forgiveness. Not responded to in kind, the evildoers would potentially be ashamed and feel remorse. Unsurprisingly, however, Aydın is not capable of grasping the theological detail: ‘What a ridiculous idea! Should we allow mass murders because some killers could regret it? Even soaps don’t produce such nonsense.’ Certainly, Necla’s ethics are prone to problems. Why, after all, should one assume in social situations characterized by conflict that one’s opponents/enemies will refrain from using their force, from doing what they can do? Such an assumption (already ridiculed by Nietzsche in the image of a bird of prey that can stop preying on lambs) is itself a moralistic position for it essentially reduces power to something that can be separated from what it can do. In this perspective, Necla’s Christian ethics boils down to normative imagining, to idealism. Nihal intervenes with an interesting remark: ‘To be honest… I don’t quite grasp it. Where does this need come from? Why do you feel like this?’ Here Nihal points out the immoral core of Necla’s morality. There can be no inherently moral phenomenon but only a moral evaluation of certain phenomena as moral from a certain perspective; morality is necessarily a perspective that coincides with the moralist’s conditions of life and his judgments as to those conditions.32 The essence of Necla’s argument lies 127

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in its being a perspective. What drives her is an active force, a ‘need’, even though this force seems to be latent.33 Necla defends herself: ‘It’s not a need, just an idea.’ At this instant the discussion is interrupted for Hamdi comes once more, this time together with İlyas so that İlyas can apologize to Aydın properly. Aydın is irritated. They are served tea and cookies. Hamdi takes the lead: ‘Come on now, son, kiss Mr Aydin’s hand.’ But there is no response from the boy. ‘İlyas? Didn’t we say we’d go and do this without telling your dad? Don’t embarrass me in front of everyone. Come on, son. Kiss Mr Aydin’s hand.’ ‘Fine, then’, Aydın reluctantly stretches his hand. ‘İlyas, come on. Mr Aydın is waiting.’ The boy faints. This fainting/resisting is allegorized in the next scene through the taming of a wild horse (found for Aydın’s hotel). The following day Necla and Nihal have a conversation. Necla is worried that her ex-husband has become an alcoholic. ‘But he always drank a lot, didn’t he?’ ‘He did indeed, but… he’s been drinking much more since we separated.’ Then we realize why Necla ‘needs’ her philosophy of not resisting evil: ‘Sometimes… I can’t help thinking we’re worse off after splitting up. Him over there in that state, me here miserable… If I’d overlooked all the evil stuff Necdet did to me, if I hadn’t resisted, if I hadn’t divorced him, say. If I could have made him face his own evil side. I don’t know. I wonder what would’ve happened if I had acted differently.’ ‘You mean, if you hadn’t resisted all the bad things he did, he would’ve finally felt ashamed?’ ‘Yes. Yes. Exactly. You put it well.’ Nihal ascertains the idea that not resisting the evil may only make the other feel even more justified. This is the point at which Necla hits the bottom. First she picks a fight with Nihal. ‘The real reason I’d apologise to Necdet is maybe to get away from all of you and all of this. It’s pretty clear now.’ Then, in another conversation, she spitefully attacks Aydın’s mediocrity (‘this soppy romanticism…’). ‘I can’t believe how I left a place like Istanbul and agreed to come and live with you.’ Aydın can only say: ‘You’re bored because you sit around doing nothing. You’ve really let yourself go. You used to do translations. You stopped even that. Of course you’re bored.’ ‘Maybe I don’t know what to do. I’ve no passion to give me direction. But then, what do you do?’ After this scene Necla leaves for Istanbul. 128

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology The following scenes depict how Nihal and Aydın hit the bottom. Aydın accidentally learns that Nihal’s charity group is having a meeting. He insists on staying (he is jealous of the close relation between Nihal and Levent, a member of the group). But Nihal asks him to leave. ‘Listen to me, Aydın, please. We’ve lived in peace for two years, each to his own affairs. What’s suddenly changed? […] If we start fighting and quarrelling again like we used to, then it’s clear I can’t stay here.’ Aydın replies that he is going anyway; he has decided some time ago to go to Istanbul. He has but one question: ‘What have I done to you? Is it that you’re young, beautiful and would like to live your life? I’m much older than you and you hate me for that? Is that my guilt?’ ‘I always felt I’m older than you anyway. But you’re an unbearable man. You are selfish, spiteful, cynical. That’s what you’re guilty of.’ Finally, Nihal asks Aydın to let her alone in her charity activity. ‘Because this is my only consolation. I spent my entire youth fighting with you. Now, thanks to this work, I believe in myself again.’ Hidayet takes Aydın to the railway station. But lacking the determination, he cannot leave. Instead, he decides to visit Suavi.

Burning Money Before leaving, Aydın makes ‘a small donation’ to Nihal’s organization in a rather demonstrative way. Nihal decides to give this money to Hamdi’s family as a gift. Hamdi is surprised. ‘But this is a huge amount of money. How can I accept this? There’s enough to buy a house. What would people think?’ ‘Mr Hamdi. No one needs to know. This can stay between you and me.’ Nihal’s intention is to realize a purely ethical exchange, without the intervention of a third party, of the social. But unexpectedly, in the middle of their conversation, İsmail comes home. He is drunk. Hamdi explains to him: ‘Nihal was worried about İlyas. She came to wish him good health. That’s why she came.’ But İsmail sees the money on the table: ‘What’s this?’ She thought they might need it, Nihal explains. ‘What does Mr Aydın say about it?’ ‘He doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to know, either.’ İsmail counts the money. ‘But all this money… isn’t it a bit too much?’ Hamdi is both nervous and embarrassed. ‘I apologize. He’s surprised, too. İsmail, why not go and wash your face or something?’ ‘No 129

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan need.’ Hamdi goes out of the room to ask İsmail’s wife to make tea for the guest. Nihal and İsmail are alone. İsmail continues: Let’s see… if the math is right. Now if this amount is… for little İlyas who risked his life to mend his father’s broken pride. And if this is… for the self-sacrificing brother Hamdi who had to go hand-kissing because he looks after five people. And if this is for the drunkard father İsmail who got beaten up in front of his son disgracing himself and his family… There’s still some left. If that is for our heroine Mrs Nihal who tries to ease her conscience by doling out charity to those less fortunate than her… then this money is just enough. You got the sums right. A truly kind thought, but… you forgot something, Mrs Nihal. The person in front of you is a filthy drunkard incapable of appreciating all your kindness.

Nihal is annoyed by İsmail’s sarcasm but keeps herself under control, saying nothing, trying to endure the spectacle. İsmail stands up. He throws the money into the fire. Nihal is stunned, unable to say anything, as if she has seen the devil. There is a barely noticeable, bitter smile in İsmail’s face. İlyas is peeping through the door. His eyes meet his father’s. Next, we see Nihal driving back, crying loudly. We had seen her alone and desperate in her room after her discussion with Aydın, but now, as the meaning she ascribes to her charity is violently questioned, she hits the bottom. How to interpret the smile on İsmail’s face? One thing is sure: for İsmail everything around is a pile of pseudo-events, a farcical flow of empty, chronological time. Like ‘hell’ described by Benjamin: bare repetition, the eternal recurrence of the same non-events which produce no difference. The only radical act in a world experienced like this can be one that can work as an ‘emergency brake’.34 An event, in which ‘time stands still and has come to a stop’.35 Hence the horror in Nihal’s face when İsmail burns the money: she cannot grasp what is happening because she is preoccupied with causal, chronological relations between the past (debt) and the present (redeeming the family’s debt through charity). The time of İsmail’s act, however, is not chronological time. ‘Happiness’, for him, is a cheerful separation from bare repetition.36 130

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology But this scene, absolutely the most powerful one in the film, is skilfully left ambivalent so that it opens up for different lines of interpretation. The spectacle İsmail is staging immediately brings to mind the figure of the ‘abject hero’.37 The abject hero is a character that originated in the carnival, in Saturnalian dialogues, in which the roles of the master and the slave are reversed. Crucially, the structure of the dialogues has a deeply bitter and negative strand that has survived throughout modern times. In contemporary culture the abject hero remains a central figure who refuses to conform to the society that he despises. In this sense İsmail adopts the discourse of the abject hero, of the slave in the carnival. For the same reason he seems to have jumped out from Dostoevsky novels (recall the father in Brothers Karamazov who characteristically debases himself in order to debase others around him or the character who burns money in The Idiot). I am cynical, but the society around me is more cynical; I am bad, but you are worse. I am a ‘filthy drunkard’, but you are… One can perhaps go further pursuing another line of thought. The film indicates that Aydın, Necla and Nihal’s world is, for all their references to ‘telling the truth’, ‘facing the truth’ and so on, a disenchanted, reified world in which the illusion of truth has disappeared. They are people who can do without heaven and hell (although they do not stop talking about debt and guilt). It is as if the ‘real world’ which religion contrasts to the existing world – the world of appearances – is replaced with a notion of reality constituted on the basis of representation and meaning. But just as religion once turned into a fiction, Aydın’s, Necla’s and Nihal’s world, too, gradually reveals itself to be a fiction, a simulacrum suffocated in its own accumulation. The problem with such a world is demonstrated in Nihal’s unsuccessful attempt at symbolic exchange, at giving a gift. İsmail’s act indicates that a symbolic resolution is no longer possible: only an anomic violence can answer the world in which everything has disappeared into the ‘icy waters’. İsmail’s act, as such, signifies the ‘accursed share’, the devil’s share, which cannot be included within and thus challenges the reality principle of the discontented trio’s world. İsmail’s world is one that cannot be exchanged in their world, it has no equivalent in it. This is the reason why İsmail is ruthlessly sarcastic about Nihal’s ‘charity’ that threatens to turn ethics into a matter of accountancy. Along the same lines, the 131

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan consequence of burning money is to short-circuit the principle of equivalence regulating Aydın’s, Necla’s and Nihal’s – and at this point we can add Hamdi to the series – world, the illusion of which consists in denying its outside: symbolic exchange. And as Baudrillard insisted, a world in which symbolic exchange is not possible can only be destroyed symbolically. Concomitantly, all Aydın’s, Necla’s, Nihal’s and Hamdi’s efforts to make their world a meaningful place are annulled by İsmail’s single ‘nihilistic’ act: Behind the exchange of value and, in a sense, serving as an invisible counterpart to it […] behind the exchange of something, we have, then, always, the exchange of the nothing.38

The ‘nothing’, the void created by İsmail’s act, is effectively emancipation from existence as it is defined in the icy waters of the money economy. By the same token, the real catastrophe is not – as Nihal’s face indicates – throwing the money into fire, but living in a world in which this void is foreclosed, a world dominated by ‘rational’ exchange alone. In stark contrast to Necla’s attempt at ‘not resisting evil’, which is reducible to a ‘need’, İsmail is the only person in the film who truly can speak evil. What is crucial in this respect is to think of evil not as an objective existence, as part of ‘reality’, but as a form of negativity that diverts things from their positive, actual existence. In this prism ‘good and evil are reversible. Not only are they not opposed, they can change into each other, and the distinction between them is ultimately meaningless’.39 The confusion of good and evil is, precisely, the mark of evil. Following this, ‘to speak evil’ consists in an insight into the internal convulsion of given reality, into, for instance, the outgrowth of symbolic exchange as a challenge to the consensus on economic exchange. This is precisely the antagonistic dimension in İsmail’s act which is impossible to grasp for Nihal and the others. Without İsmail’s antagonistic, ‘evil’ intervention, we would be left at the mercy of the forces of the good (Aydın’s mediocrity, Necla’s Christianity, Nihal’s charity, Hamdi’s Islam). İsmail’s evil act, which is itself a spectacle, an illusion, to be sure, is ultimately what protects us from the good by pushing it towards excess. ‘On the symbolic plane, there is only one way to pay back, and that is the counter-gift.’40 If it is impossible 132

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology to give a counter-gift, which is the case for İsmail, then one can turn the refusal of the gift into a counter-gift. This is what İsmail does. And from the perspective of İlyas, his father’s act, which he watches from behind the half-closed door, is a Manichean gift, a symbol of a world in which everything is antagonistic. (It is well-known that the İsmaili sect in Islam was heavily influenced by Manicheanism and Gnosticism, the two forerunners of Messianism.)41 Seen in this light, Winter Sleep is a ‘fatal’ movie that plays at the collapse of meaning as well as its production. Baudrillard writes that ‘a theory can attempt to reconcile the real world with theory itself. And then there is a principle of antagonism – an absolutely irreconcilable, almost Manichean antagonism. You maintain a position of challenge, which is different from unreality’.42 Winter Sleep, too, masterfully demonstrates why ‘the real is what one must not consent to’.43 ‘What exists’, after all, ‘cannot be true’.44 If freedom is, at the most elementary level, to experiment with the link between what exists and what is possible, only in flight from the existing order of things there emerges a chance for a new sociality to transpire that is in excess of what already exists. Hence the pharmakon-like gift of Zarathustra: fire. But playing with fire always implies a potential for calamity as well. As an event that intervenes into the course of time to change it, any experiment with fire involves a radical contingency, an aporetic moment. Hence any leap into fire is potentially open to becoming self-destructive. Therefore it is justified to ask, as Ceylan himself does in an interview: Which one do you respect more? İsmail’s courage to throw the money into fire or Hamdi’s taking care of his family at the expense of losing his dignity? Which one is real sacrifice?45

It is impossible to draw an absolute line between productive and unproductive, creative and destructive acts. And since there can be no abstract solution for an aporia, this aporia, too, can only be lived out. At any rate, from the perspective of the existing reality, burning money is necessarily an excess that introduces an irrational, ‘impossible’ element into the given world.46 Indeed, İsmail’s act brings to mind Kant’s famous example to illuminate the weight of reason to control desire: Suppose someone asserts of his lustful appetite that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present, it is quite

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan irresistible. [Ask him]  – if a gallows were erected before the house where he finds this opportunity, in order that he should be hanged thereon immediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not then control his passion. We need not be long in doubt what he would reply.47

Here Kant assumes that, thanks to the deterrent, the gallows, the man will not act according to his desire. Nevertheless, there are conditions in which ‘it is not impossible for a man to sleep with a woman knowing full well that he is to be bumped off on his way out, by the gallows or anything else…’48 In ‘perversion’, for instance, passionate excesses move beyond the limits assigned to them by the moderate dialectic between transgression and the law, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and reach the register of the real, the place of drives, which ‘have nothing at all to do with something that may be satisfied by moderation’.49 On this account, İsmail’s is a ‘perverse’ act that relates to drive, to will, without justifying itself through reason, provided that ‘perversion’ here is not defined in relation to a pre-established norm, for example, as abnormality, following an already existing criterion. Rather, it signifies that which seeks to determine an impersonal, unconscious, virtual field, which is distinct from the actual, empirically existing phenomena or consciousness: the pervert is ‘someone who introduces desire into an entirely different system and makes it play, within this system, the role of an internal limit, a virtual centre or zero point’.50 As such, as a ‘perverse’ gesture, İsmail’s act introduces a virtual dimension into an actual situation – it is the ground zero of Winter Sleep.

Fooling About In Suavi’s place, which Aydın decides to visit instead of going to Istanbul, there emerges another verbal fight between Aydın and Levent (whom Aydın is jealous of). Levent quotes from Richard III: ‘Conscience is but a word that cowards use devised at first to keep the strong in awe. Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.’ Here Aydın is exposed as a nihilist in the Nietzschean sense, as a weak personality hiding behind morality

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology and conscience. He responds with another quote from Shakespeare: ‘Our infallible fate is to be deceived in everything we attempt. I make brilliant plans each morning… and fool about all day.’ This can be read as a reply to Levent. But it is tempting to read it as a confession as well. The morning after, Aydın returns to the hotel. He sees Nihal but his pride prevents him from telling her what he thinks. Instead, he rehearses:  ‘I didn’t go away. I  couldn’t. […] Please, don’t ask me to go either. […] I  know very well how terrible or impossible it would be to part from you. Just as I know that you do not love me anymore. I know we can’t go back to the old days. And there is no need to. Take me with you like a servant, like a slave. And let us continue our life, even if we do it your way. Forgive me.’ This is a finale that remains faithful to the ambivalent affective structure of the film: we cannot be certain, as Aydın’s facial expression indicates, whether Aydın’s thoughts are really decisions or momentary affects that can move in different directions, whether they will be really said to Nihal or remain as inner thoughts.51 At any rate, the scene demarcates the point at which Aydın hits the bottom, which is the unavoidable destiny of all the characters in the film. But hitting the bottom is a promise, too, a sign of liberation. Thus, when, in the final shot, we see Aydın for the last time, he is noticeably calm. He finally starts to write his book History of Turkish Theatre. Life goes on; Aydın might ‘fool about’ through yet another winter sleep. It is indeed as if Winter Sleep is more about the exceptional interval between two periods of normality. As if everything happens in the exception. The film’s focus on intellectual life vis-à-vis religion is particularly significant in this regard. Consider Necla’s double accusation directed against Aydın’s mediocrity: You know what your problem is? In order not to suffer, you prefer to fool yourself. Yes, that’s it. But one has to have the courage to face the truth. If you’re looking for something more real, you’ll have to be destructive when necessary, dear Aydın. But since you’re an actor, you forgot about being real, being yourself. You jump from one personality to another, just like a grasshopper.

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Necla couples this critique with another; referring to Aydın’s article on religion:  ‘I should ask what religion, faith, spirituality have to do with you. Have you ever set foot in a mosque? Have you ever prayed so that you can talk about it?’ To this Aydın replies: ‘Do I have to go to a mosque to write about religion?’ But this response does not stop Necla: ‘You keep saying the imam’s feet stink. What’s it to you? The man walked 10 km in this cold. And he had to enter the room with those feet.’ There is a lot going on here. It is of course true that Aydın lacks the courage to face the truth, which he himself indirectly admits in the final scene (the quote from Shakespeare). However, two things are essential to note. Firstly, insofar as ‘all the world is a stage’, the first part of the accusation is misdirected. Not only because there is a close relationship between theatre and sociality (recall the ground metaphors of social science such as ‘social actors’, ‘role playing’ and so on). More importantly, intellectual production itself is a theatrical activity in the sense that it involves dramatizing (actualizing) abstract (virtual) ideas. Just as every time an actor stages a play differently, thinking involves the creation of difference thorough repetition of ideas.52 Likewise, Winter Sleep – a theatrical film from beginning to end – effectively wears the mask of Chekhov (particularly his short stories The Wife and The Excellent People), repeats his themes, but producing a difference (especially by making use of ambivalence and suspense). Therefore, to return to Necla’s point, one can say that Aydın’s problem is not being an actor – on the contrary, he is too mediocre to have a sustained fidelity to any mask, to any idea. Secondly, and more problematical in a political context, Necla associates spirituality with monotheistic religions. Setting foot in mosque or church thus becomes a prerequisite both for truth-telling and for speaking about religion. Consequently, Aydın’s question is pertinent (does one have to go to a mosque to write about religion or speak about spirituality?). How can one answer this question, which the film skilfully leaves open for debate? To answer this question, and to conclude with it, it might be useful to revisit Foucault’s work on political spirituality. Crucially, the ‘spirituality’ at issue here is neither reducible to religion nor religious in its essence. It can be taken as a profane concept that refers to a set of practices that arise when a truth is obscure to the subject. In this sense spirituality is what 136

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Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology enables the subject to access truth and to criticize power. It is grounded therefore in truth-telling, in what the ancient Greeks called parrhesia.53 As such, parrhesia was a widespread philosophical practice and a form of ‘spiritual exercise’54 in ancient Greek culture. Consider the Cynic parrhesia, a politically radical, radically political version of parrhesia which the Cynics practised in public preaching and in personal encounters. The Cynic preaching was typically focused on issues such as freedom, the ascetic renunciation of luxury as a way of putting a distance to wealth and power, and the political criticism of public institutions. The basic Cynic idea is that a person is ‘nothing else but his relation to truth’, a relation which is always reflected in one’s style of life.55 Hence the famous image of Diogenes: the dog-like truth-teller living in a barrel, insisting that the most important thing in life is freedom of speech, parrhesia; a freedom which must be protected from the influence of wealth and power at any price: ‘for if I should be bribed too, there would be none left to rail upon thee’.56 It is in this sense that Aydın is not in a suitable position to engage with truth-telling. But what does this have to do with Necla’s rhetorical question (whether Aydın has ever prayed…)? Interestingly, Foucault mentions at a certain point the Cynics’ ‘resemblance to the early Christians’.57 Christians took over from the Cynics the practice of preaching, a form of truth-telling which involves the idea that truth must be told to everyone.58 Most importantly, the Cynic asceticism played a decisive role in early Christianity. The strategy here is obvious: Foucault is historicizing religion. Theology is a phase in history, not an absolute beginning. There is always already something else before that. However, the capturing of parrhesia by early Christianity, thereby the transfer of Greek-pagan competencies to monotheistic religions, did not take place without revision. There are significant differences between the two kinds of asceticism. While the Greek parrhesia assumes the possibility of a different (bettered) world, the Christian parrhesia is directed at a totally other, metaphysical world.59 And in contrast to the emphasis on freedom in the Greek parrhesia, Christianity aligned parrhesia with obedience. Truth was to appear now not as free speech but as ‘obedience to a god who is conceived of as a despot, a master for whom one is slave and servant’.60 137

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan But what is sacralized can be profaned. If parrhesia is captured by religion it can be re-appropriated. With Foucault, therefore, we can imagine a profaned form of political spirituality which is not reducible to revealed religion. The political horizon Winter Sleep depicts is rather silent in this regard.

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Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics

Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each Prescribe to other, as each other’s leech. (Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act V, Scene IV)

What is immediately striking in Ceylan’s films is a powerful bipolarity, the almost constant but uneasy togetherness of two apparently antagonistic figures: passivity on the one hand and outbursts of violent acting out on the other. We meet these two poles sometimes within the same character, sometimes in the relationship between two different characters whose fates are interlinked in the form of a disjunctive synthesis, a synthesis whose binary poles are mutually exclusive but nevertheless presuppose each other and are interlocked within the same frame. Like the ‘relation’ between İsa and Bahar in Climates. This paradoxical union is, it seems to us, an image that captures the predicament of politics in the contemporary global society: a world characterized by false antagonisms between apparent enemies that feed upon each other ‘as each other’s leech’; a transpolitical order in which the only antagonism imaginable is one between the Right and the extreme Right, between the old establishments and neo-despotisms, between terror and 139

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan the war against terror, and so on. A world of reversals and emptying out, a simulacrum, in which McDonald’s can engage in anti-obesity campaigns, dictators can accuse their adversaries of being Fascists, private companies can take public responsibility… with the unavoidable result of a revamped, self-referential Orwellian language – ‘peace is war’ and ‘war is peace.’ What makes a film director political in such an obscene, off-scene world? The reader might remember that it is on the basis of this obscenity that Baudrillard, already in the 1980s, was asking: ‘Why does the World Trade Center have two towers’?1 The twin towers of the WTC were perfect parallelepipeds whose smooth surfaces merely mirrored each other, confirming the irrelevance of distinction and opposition in the ‘end’ of history. Cancelling out difference, upon which politics is based, the WTC was a symbol of transpolitics: an obscene system in which dialectical polarity no longer exists, a simulacrum, where acts disappear without consequences in indifferent signs and images.2 As a consequence, in transpolitics, we are not only deprived of the real – ours is not only a ‘post-truth’ age – but also of the fiction:  we can no longer imagine the possibility of seeing things differently in a world in which all fight and flight tend to be locked into a frame in which the adversaries are parasitic on each other under the sign of deadly antagonism. Ceylan’s films provide a concise description of this predicament. Navigating thresholds, searching for ambivalence and maintaining suspense, they do not offer an easy way out of the frame they depict. On the contrary, most of Ceylan’s characters seem abjectly passive and selfconscious regarding their inauthenticity. Thus they can never undertake tragic acts. Nor can they face the truth or demonstrate any fidelity. Indeed, if there is anything tragic in Ceylan’s passive nihilist characters, it is the lack of the tragic. This brings to mind other classic characters such as Hamlet. According to Schmitt, for instance, what makes Hamlet tragic is that he ‘cannot take the decision to act’.3 In Schmitt’s view, Hamlet is an apolitical figure par excellence, and thus paradigmatic of the modern political subjectivity. It is easy, along these lines, to see Ceylan’s passive characters as outright apolitical subjects. This, however, is possible only insofar as politics is reduced to decisionism (as Schmitt does). Yet, there are other ways to approach politics: Hamlet and Hamlet’s politics. Here is, 140

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Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics for instance, Nietzsche’s reading of Hamlet where Hamlet is compared to the Dionysian man: Both have for once penetrated to the true nature of things, – they have perceived, but it is irksome for them to act: for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things; the time is out of joint and they regard it as shameful or ridiculous that they should be required to set it right. Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion – it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches.4

To say that action requires illusion, fiction, is to say that politics requires art. Indeed, Hamlet becomes political in so far as he engages with illusion, which is precisely what he does in the famous ‘play within the play’ scene (Act III) where he invites actors to stage his father’s murder. For politics involves seeing and staging things differently. Its core is disagreement, which is, above all, a disagreement on consensus. ‘Consensus’, however, is not only the avoidance of conflict. At a deeper level, it is an agreement regarding the terms of disagreement.5 That is, it allows one to have different opinions, to disagree, criticize, even to engage in an ‘antagonistic’ war, but only in a given framework of sensibility, which is effectively justified each time permitted disagreements take place. The true target of dissensual politics, in turn, is this framework itself; not playing a given game, indulging in its permitted transgressions, but utterly changing the game itself. Politics in this sense is a process of separation, of dis-identification, vis-à-vis a given framework of the sensible. To politicize is to juxtapose sense to sense, to contrast another sensibility to the given distribution of the sensible.6 To open up a space for what can be said, seen and thought otherwise. What is truly political is, in short, a different way of seeing, a different way of staging the matters at hand, an intervention into a given order of the sensible.7 Precisely in this sense Ceylan’s cinema stages a conflict between different ways of seeing, between different regimes of sense. In so far as politics is viewed as a stage, insofar as there is an aesthetic dimension to it, Ceylan’s cinema is, contrary to its apolitical appearance, fundamentally political. However, it assumes no mimetic relationship between art and politics, between the movement from sense to sense and the political subject. 141

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Their relationship remains disjunctive, ambivalent and open-ended, without allowing itself to become formalized. The question that emerges in Ceylan’s films is whether there is an opening, an escape route from the deceptive dichotomy of passivity on the one hand and self-destructive outbursts of anger on the other. Ceylan is inspired by Nietzsche, but he does not want to follow Nietzsche’s ‘perfect nihilism’, a violently antagonistic attempt to move beyond this duality of passive nihilism versus radical nihilism. So, what we are left with instead is the possibility of condensing an affirmative moment either from passive nihilism, which one half of Ceylan’s protagonists incarnate (which is also the reason for their repulsiveness), or from radical nihilism, which the other half are fatally seduced by (which is in turn the origin of their seductiveness). One can either (like Agamben, for instance) try to distil a political subjectivity from passivity, or one can (like Žižek, for instance) attempt to construct a political subjectivity on the basis of the radical (nihilistic) act. How can passivity or anger, then, turn into a political asset, into a social, collective desire? Ceylan does not prescribe a teleological necessity in this respect, but he invokes, through the very staging of the libidinal economy of the false antagonisms, the possibility of an opening. There is, to be sure, no guarantee for such affirmative transformations, but the possibility of moving ‘from sense to sense’, which is politics par excellence, is there. However, apropos of the move from passivity and anger to politics, we must remember that there is no routine procedure for politics. If the political gesture consists in subtracting oneself from prevailing consensus, it is obvious that a certain form of passivity is necessary for such subtraction. Herein lies the universal attraction of characters such as Melville’s Bartleby, the passive clerk who answers his boss’s demands systematically by saying ‘I would prefer not to’.8 As he prefers ‘not to’, Bartleby appears as a figure of negation as to the given constellation of power and its commands. In his refusal of the orders, however, he does not merely negate something (e.g., by saying he does not want to do…) but affirms something else (he prefers not to do…) – that is, ‘opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation’.9 After all, any politics that is supported only by ‘negation’ is parasitic upon and thus legitimizes what it criticizes by participating in its framework. In contrast, Bartleby’s critique functions 142

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Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics as a ‘gesture of subtraction at its purest’, providing a political space through withdrawal.10 The test of passivity is this capacity to affirm as well as negating the given, consensual distribution of senses. Interestingly in this respect, only a few years after Distant and Climates, perhaps Ceylan’s most elaborate films on passivity, we have witnessed the transformation of passivity into a political factor in the Gezi Park protests in 2013. An inspiring, widely popular figure of the revolts was the ‘immobile man’: after Gezi Park was cleared by the police, one man (Erdem Gündüz, an artist) started to stand still in Taksim Square. Then others mimicked him. Soon the act was copied in different settings. The impact was disproportional. The Prime Minister himself felt obliged to articulate a Twitter comment on it: ‘we say: there is no stopping, continue moving; they say: the immobile man’.11 Mobility versus immobility. We mentioned before Benjamin’s reflections on modernity as a mobile hell and ‘revolution’ as the ‘emergency brake’ of history. Revolution, the radical political act, is an act of stopping, of cessation, of arrest. In this sense, the ever-new political problematic the ‘immobile man’ has re-articulated is the link between passivity, subtraction and politics. ‘Move along! There is nothing to see here!’ The police says that there is nothing to see on a road or street, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘movingalong’ into a space for the appearance of a subject:  i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in reconfiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.12

However, not all protagonists in Ceylan’s films are characterized by passivity – there is also the symmetrical figure of anger and explosion (like Bahar in Climates, like İsmail in Winter Sleep), in which case the problem is to move from anger to politics. Obviously, anger and political intervention are related, and anger can be conceived of as an impetus for social critique and politics.13 The problem of anger emerges only when it cannot articulate itself in terms of conflict, that is, when it cannot be translated into politics and thus only turns into spite and destruction. But anger 143

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan always has a chance, though not a guarantee, to become a social relation, to communicate while disagreeing. Thus, spiteful outbursts – destructive and self-destructive at once – are symptomatic if they are considered as part of an intensive, expansive subterranean current in contemporary society. When politics is foreclosed, spite becomes the only ‘political’ (re)action. What spite lacks is not only respect for, but also the capacity to antagonize, the other. It is interesting in this respect that in as much as the tragic dimension is lacking in Ceylan’s passive figures, we meet an excess of it in his other characters such as Bahar and İsmail who are, in many respects, Antigone-like characters. They all meddle with societal norms and conventions and thus constantly appear to be engaging in ‘foolish’ acts, for their true allegiance is to something other than the given opinions of the surrounding society. And so they deliberately sacrifice their position in the social order. There is, to be sure, a kind of sacrifice which mainly aims at securing one’s position within a given socio-symbolic order. In this case one sacrifices oneself for the good of a community and in return for this heroic act assumes or is granted a symbolic place in it. In contrast, Ceylan’s hateful, intoxicated characters desperately sacrifice this very place within the symbolic. Accepting their exclusion from the community, they undertake seemingly mad, suicidal acts.14 And yet, at the same time these characters remain part of the existing situation, without being able to create a new one. This is also why their tragic acts have to lead to real or symbolic destruction, disappearance. In this respect, Ceylan’s cinema forces one to re-think the necessity of inventing ways to redevelop the culture of agonism to prevent anger from becoming mere spite, which is also a question of grounding the ‘city’, politics, itself. The various landscapes of loneliness depicted in his films testify to the absence of such possibilities of transformation. But why are these figures the most, if not the only, sympathetic ones in Ceylan’s films? Why are we fascinated by their intoxication? And what is the political significance of this? Any radical politics, asserts Benjamin, must ‘win the energies of intoxication’.15 For reality to transcend itself, an experience of discharge is indispensable.16 Only a politics that can accommodate intoxication, a ‘poetic politics’, can go beyond the domain of pragmatic calculations.17 In other words, any true political intervention must 144

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Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics be able to ‘interweave’ the two dimensions of kairos, strategy and intoxication:  ‘Force of hate in Marx. Pugnacity of the working class. To interweave revolutionary destruction with the idea of Redemption (Nechaev. The Devils)’.18 What fascinates us in Ceylan’s intoxicated characters such as Bahar and İsmail is their single-mindedness, their possession, total absorption by a truth with no personal interest, their courage to cut off the social bond. They are frightening as instantiations of the ‘destructive character’ who has ‘no vision’ but is obsessed with one activity: ‘clearing away’.19 By the same token, Ceylan’s violent characters also restage the paradoxes of kairos:  strategy without intoxication is as useless as intoxication without strategy. Precisely, therefore, it is necessary to insist on ‘aporia rather than antinomy’.20 Both sides of kairos are vital in politics. What matters is to keep them in relation. And since this relation cannot be a dialectical relation, since a synthesis is impossible or will result in antinomy, the relationship must be thought of as a disjunctive synthesis. But, it is not enough, either, to say that this aporia must be maintained, for it will result in the infinite deferral of actualization; the aporia must be, can only be, overcome in praxis.

Eidetic Kalospectrality In this sense, we emphasize Ceylan’s aesthetic of sublime spectrality, his techniques of absence, wilderness and apparition reveal a kind of kalospectrality or beautiful possibility; remnant shards of a dark beauty that haunt and echo throughout Ceylan’s films. The penumbra of noncommunicative spectres (for example, in Three Monkeys) incite what Edmund Husserl would refer to as Eidetic reductions. Here, the notion of Eidos and the Eidetic equates to intuitive seeing, the human revelation of alternative possibility, and registers as a tendential response to the barrenness and political celibacy that has eaten into everyday life. Our Husserlean use of the term Eidos suggests that ontological anticipations can rupture through the skein of Ceylan’s established cinematic artefacts. Eidetic seeing is an active, expressive and interpretive process, which equates to the subjective realm of thought and imagination. Seeing in an Eidetic sense consists 145

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan of expressive intuition, intuitive synchronicities that infuse Ceylan’s films in ways that ‘implies not the slightest positioning of any individual factual existence; pure eidetic truths contain not the slightest assertion about matters of fact’.21 Eidetic events, as trace-moments or revelations, are akin to pregnant seeing; as such, it is ‘an intuition of an essentially peculiar and novel sort in contrast to the sorts of intuition which belong to objectivities of other categories’.22 The ‘other’ categories or objectives relate to the very different sphere of matters of fact; for Husserl, spatiotemporal facts and the generation of concrete propositions associated with empiricized objectivity, are important ‘for the furtherance of certain types of knowledge. But… the phenomenological nature of Eidetic knowledge is something fundamentally different; [a] subjective intuition of hazy and possible knowledge’.23 The apparitional notion of this subjectively refracted and creative experience of intuition, operates ‘to draw out an infinity of thoughts and experiences, so that, every experiential multiplicity, no matter how extensive, still leaves open more precise and novel determinations’.24 Eidetic particularizations of intuitive and revelatory essences can be encountered and articulated by many subjects in transformed and unique ways. The Eidetic dark beauty of Ceylan’s themes and kalospectral Forms lead towards the potential of otherwise hidden and revelatory possibilities. To conjoin Eidos with the Greek term Elpis (or hope) further serves to uncover a distinction between hope and expectation. As recounted by Hesiod in Works and Days, Elpis was one of the elements contained inside Pandora’s box or jar. Pandora (which means ‘All-Gifts’), a beautiful woman co-created by the gods, was to be offered as a gift to dwell among humans. Endowed with her array of gifts, she was offered to Epimetheus (‘After-Thought’), the hasty brother of Prometheus (or ‘Fore-Thought’). Prometheus had previously warned Epimetheus never to accept gifts from Zeus; and yet, despite the warnings, Epimetheus accepted Pandora as a gift. Once accepted, she opened her sealed jar, and in doing so unleashed a host of evils and misfortunes sent to punish and plague the mortal humans. As Pandora moves to reseal the jar, one thing remains inside:  Elpis. One suggestion is that the Pandora myth presents Hope as something detained or delayed in the jar, and serves as a symbol of potential for better times. However, other, more pessimistic, interpretations suggest that Elpis is 146

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Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics something that should be seen as the worst of all of the evils; a cruel human facet, which perpetuates suffering and serves only to prolong unrealistic dreams and aspirations.25 We subscribe here to the former interpretation, where hope against adversity means maintaining optimism and, along with this, trust and faith in the overriding possibility of human creativity and endeavour. The liberatory nuances of eidetic and expectant hope belie a potential for a renewed zeal, the intoxicating immediacy and creative vibrancy of Now-time. Ceylan’s Eidetic images of transgression recognize, albeit in different ways, the dynamic incompleteness of subjectivity and of wider human existence; with the hieroglyphs and ciphers inherent to his films, we are reminded of the potential to be active and expectant participants in a process of creative hope and becoming. Eidetic intuitions need to be reawoken, to revive the expressive impulse of Epimetheus and resuscitate Pandora to bestow the last and most powerful of her gifts. The burgeoning and unwieldy potential of the future is littered with the ante rem of the unknown of Eidetic knowledge; with the release of Elpis a transgressive beauty can take creative flight beyond the chaotic traces of subjective timeworlds. The future is Not-Yet made or guaranteed and, as such, it contains an openness which can be influenced and shaped in new and transformed ways. Therefore Hope, the Eidetic hunger for hope, and each successive irruption that either dwells or emanates from within the traces of Ceylan’s films thus contain an undisclosed code of potential transformation. This is indeed the stuff of hope, and, in some respects, a militant optimism or ‘faith’ in the redemptive unmadeness of possible futures. The stuff of hope, the stuff of cynicism; forms of nihilism and the possibilities of redemption; the pathetic passivity of the living and the uncanny interventions of the dead; the endurance of repetition and boredom and the shattering of linear time by sudden violence, like a stone-struck window: Ceylan’s cinema is a kaleidoscope of co-existing contradictions and conundrums, of fragments which refuse to settle into a final intelligible, legible pattern. Significantly, notwithstanding all these tensions and paradoxes, and amidst all the anxiety, boredom and resignation exhibited by their central characters, Ceylan’s films are always imbued with a pervasive and persistent mood: melancholy. His films are cinematic 147

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The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan sorrowscapes: Trauerkino. Significant, too, is that these onscreen elegies always play out on a micrological level/scale both spatially (locality) and socially (in social interaction). From the windblown fields and forests of the countryside to the snow-covered rocky outcrops of distant Cappadocia; from the great wilderness of the Anatolian steppe to the icy streets of wintry Istanbul: Ceylan’s global visions are invariably rooted in, grounded in, the most meticulous details – visual, atmospheric, auditory, haptic – of the local. Locality is here time and again configured not as safe haven but rather as the strangely familiar, as the uncanny, as contrasting landscapes of loneliness for strangers, exiles, outsiders, insiders who have become outsiders, insiders who seek only the outside. Indeed, however grand and erudite his philosophical themes and concepts – Benjaminian, Nietzschean, Blochian – Ceylan develops and delivers them in the context of the unfolding of everyday lives and events, the petty mundane business of day-to-day familial and interpersonal existence. These films unearth the extraordinary in the small-change encounters, exchanges and experiences of characters leading unremarkable lives, lives more, not less, ordinary. And this returns us, above all, to his early films which unmistakably set the distinctive tone and technique of his cinematic works: for in the ‘Clouds quartet’ we see how the seemingly simple depiction of humble, humdrum lives can at the same time constitute the most inventive and intense dissections of and disquisitions upon the making of meaning (narrative) and the making of images (film, photography), in other words, upon the complex and contested relationship between life and its representation, upon the work of art itself. Intricately interleaving a cinema of quiet reflection and incisive cinematic reflexivity, Ceylan proves himself, time and again, to be a most artful artist. With eight minimalist masterpieces to his name, Ceylan more than justifies his place among the most profound and poetic filmmakers of our time. As sociologists, as cultural theorists, but most of all as cinephiles, we look forward to the films he is still to make, to the Not-Yet of his inimitable cinematic imagination and global vision.

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Notes Introduction 1. Tellingly, it seems his works have made least impression in his native country. Writing of Distant, S. Ruken Özturk bluntly states that ‘Turkish audiences have not taken much notice of of Ceylan’s films’ (in Dönmez-Colin, G. (Ed.) (2007) The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. London: Wallflower Press, p. 247). 2. Some valuable exceptions are: Akbulut, H. (2005) Nuri Bilge Ceylan Sinemasını Okumak: Anlatı, Zaman, Mekân. İstanbul: Bağlam; Öztürk, S.R. (2007) ‘Uzak/ Distant’ in G.D. Colin (Ed.) The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. London: Wallflower Press, pp. 247–55; and Arslan, U.T. (2012) ‘Bozkırdaki Labirent: Manzaradan Lekeye’ in U.T. Arslan (Ed.) Bir Kapıdan Gireceksin: Türkiye Sinemasi Üzerine Denemeler. Istanbul: Metis. Ceylan’s films are an important part of Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s (2008) thematically arranged study Turkish Cinema. Identity, Distance and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books. 3. Kracauer, S. (1947/2004) From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 5. 4. See, for example, Asuman Suner’s (2010) New Turkish Cinema. Belonging, Identity and Memory. London: I.B.Tauris, pp. 77–112. 5. Deleuze, G.  (1986) Cinema 1.  The Movement-Image. London:  The Athlone Press, p. 155. 6. Deleuze, G.  (1989) Cinema 2.  The Time-Image. London:  The Athlone Press, p. 41. 7. For another discussion of the time-image in Ceylan’s cinema see:  Suner, A.  (2009) New Turkish Cinema:  Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London: I.B.Tauris. 8. Ceylan in Film Fresh (2007) ‘Climates’, Film Fresh International Film Club, Selection No. 4, www.filmfresh.com/?blog/602. 9. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 4. 10. Ceylan in Dawson, T. (2007) ‘The Changing Man’, interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The List, www.list.co.uk/article/1603-interview-nuri-bilge-ceylan/ 11. Colebrook, C.  (2002) Understanding Deleuze. Australia:  Allen & Unwin, p. 167.

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Notes to Pages 7–11 12. Ranciere, J. (2006) Film Fables. Oxford: Berg, p. 4. 13. Quoted in Aytaç, S., Göl, B. and Yücel, F. (2014) Nuri Bilge Ceylan’la Kış Uykusu Üzerine (interview with N.B. Ceylan), www.altyazi.net/soylesiler/ nuri-bilge-ceylanla-kis-uykusu-uzerine/ (our translation). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. (our translation). 16. In Badiou’s words, we demonstrate ‘how a particular film lets us travel with a particular idea’ (Badiou, A. (2013) Cinema. London: Polity, p. 98). 17. Richter, Gerhard (2007) Thought-Images. Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 18. Benjamin, W. (1996) Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 457. 19. See Richter, Thought-Images, pp. 8–9. For Benjamin’s own account of Klee’s picture, see Benjamin, W. (2003) Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 392–3. 20. In Uzak, Yusuf ’s childish merriment as his battery-operated toy soldier crawls noisily across the floor of Mahmut’s apartment is an exemplary instance of how an object can reveal so much about two contrasting characters. 21. Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 1, p. 472. 22. Kracauer, Siegfried (1987) Strassen in Berlin und anderswo. Berlin:  Das Arsenal, p. 52. 23. Benjamin, W. (2003) Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 304. 24. Ibid., pp. 304–305. 25. Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4, p. 396. 26. See, for example, Benjamin, W. (1999a) The Arcades Project. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 473. 27. See, for example, Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4, p. 396. 28. As we will see in Chapter  2, the opening of Kasaba offers us an excellent example of this when a dishevelled man (played by Ceylan regular Muzaffer Özdemir) slips on the icy street and falls down, much to the amusement of a group of onlooking children. The camera then dwells on his face as his pathetic attempt to share in their fun gives way to a recognition that he is simply the butt of their jokes. We realize that this is assuredly not the first time he has been the fall guy for the Schadenfreude of others in the small town. Indeed, we sense that a whole biography replete with petty cruelties and innumerable indignities is captured momentarily in this image, An entire past life – and a future fate – as local laughing stock are thus encapsulated in the contemplation of a single countenance. In a rather different vein, Sarinah Masukor uses this notion of concentration/concatenation of the manifold into a particular image when she

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Notes to Pages 11–15

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

writes: ‘The best way to introduce Nuri Bilge Ceylan to those not yet acquainted with his work is through one of his images’ (in Atakav, E. (Ed.) (2013) Directory of World Cinema: Turkey. Bristol: Intellect Press, p. 22). Interestingly, she also chooses a shot from Kasaba:  of Saffet at the fairground smoking a cigarette while those on one of the rides spin around high above his head. Hudson, W.  (1982) The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan, p. 20. Geoghegan, V. (1996) Ernst Bloch. London and New York: Routledge. Richard Roberts (1990) produces a particularly effective analysis and explanation of what is meant by the hieroglyphic nature of Bloch’s philosophy and conceptual mechanisms. (Roberts, Richard (1990) ‘The Prolegomena to Hope: Thinking Means Venturing Beyond’ in R.H. Roberts and L.S. Cunningham (Ed.) Hope and its Hieroglyph: A Critical Decipherment of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (Vol. American Academy of Religion: Studies in Religion No. 57, pp. 27–48.)) The term hieroglyph (in reference to Bloch’s philosophy) refers to the shifting and incomplete or open nature of all kinds of cultural material, which require a continuation and renewal of context, application and re-interpretation. This is one of the main Expressionistic characteristics of Bloch’s philosophical formula. Bloch also usefully illustrates in the following quote how cultural and memory traces also serve as subjective hieroglyphic prompts – which require further and continual reinterpretation: ‘Every feature, every device is suitable for this: a vase from those days at the window, between the tassels of the curtain – and the adult finds it easy to connect to his childhood horror, childhood dawning with the riddles of the kitsch […] full of dreams, jumbles and rumours; today’s memory simply further interprets what has been. The form in which [we] after-dreamed, copied, mixed and replaced past times comes together into a hieroglyph’ (Bloch, 1991, p. 346). Bloch, E. (1986) The Principle of Hope (Vol. 1). (S. Knight and P. Plaice, Trans.) London: Blackwell, p. xxxii. Korstvedt, B.M. (2010) Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch’s Musical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 36–7. Ibid., p. 53. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, pp. 2–3. Indeed, Bloch offers his own work as a hieroglyphic trace-cipher; as Frederic Jameson notes, Bloch’s work radiates ‘a peculiar inner warmth and power, spells and the key to spells, themselves patiently waiting for their own ultimate moment of decipherment’ (Jameson, F. (1971) ‘A Marxist Hermeneutic III: Ernst Bloch and the Future’ in F. Jameson, Marxism and Form: TwentiethCentury Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 158–9).

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Notes to Pages 15–24 37. Bloch, Ernst (1977) ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, New German Critique, Spring, issue 11, p. 31; Bloch, Ernst (1976) ‘Dialectics and Hope’, New German Critique, Fall, issue 9, pp. 6–8; Kellner, Douglas and O’Hara, Harry (1976) ‘Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch’, New German Critique, Fall, issue 9, pp. 21–5. 38. See Jack Zipe’s comments in The Utopian Function of Art & Literature. 39. The Turkish word Sɪkɪntɪsɪ actually translates as ‘boredom’. The Anglophone title Clouds of May provides us with the ‘Clouds quartet’ which seems to us an eminently preferable nomenclature to the ‘boredom quartet’! 40. See Suner, Asuman (2010) New Turkish Cinema. Belonging, Identity and Memory. London: I.B.Tauris, p. 79. 41. See Dönmez-Colin, Gönül (2008) Turkish Cinema. Identity, Distance and Longing, London: Reaktion Books, p. 190. 42. The Small Town won the Caligari Award at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival. 43. By insisting here on the inclusion and significance of Koza, we thus go beyond the conventional recognition of what Hasan Akbulut terms Ceylan’s ‘provincial trilogy’ (in Atakav, E.  (Ed.) (2013) Directory of World Cinema:  Turkey. Bristol: Intellect Press, p. 158) and Ruken Özturk’s not unjustified claim that Ceylan presents us with ‘a trilogy, which could be viewed as one long film’ (in Dönmez-Colin (Ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, p. 251). See also Suner, New Turkish Cinema, p. 79. What we propose here is a quartet of interlaced films, the ‘Clouds quartet’. 44. Given the strong continuities of Ceylan’s filmmaking, Masukor rather contentiously claims that his adoption of digital technologies in 2006 ‘has had an enormous impact on his style. His digital films feel freer than his celluloid ones, as if the new medium inspired him to take risks’ (in Atakav (Ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Turkey, p. 22) with more experimental use of editing, sound and palette.

1 The Origin of Imagines: Unravelling Cocoon 1. As Masukor notes: ‘Ceylan has continued to work with a small crew and frequently includes his family and friends in both on- and off-screen roles’ (in Atakav, E.  (Ed.) (2013) Directory of World Cinema:  Turkey. Bristol:  Intellect Press, p. 22). For more on Ceylan’s cinematic ‘minimalism’ see Suner, A. (2010) New Turkish Cinema. Belonging, Identity and Memory. London:  I.B.Tauris, p. 78. Dönmez-Colin (2008) points out that Kasaba was made on a budget of just $15,000 (Turkish Cinema Identity, Distance and Longing, London: Reaktion Books, p. 190). 2. Remarkably, Asuman Suner (2010) acknowledges no such complexities, ambiguities and equivocations. She asserts that Koza: ‘is about an old couple

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3.

4. 5.

6.

in their seventies […] who live separate lives because of a painful experience in their past. The film describes a day they spend together in the hope of healing the pain of the past, although it does not turn out to achieve what they had expected’ (New Turkish Cinema, p.  79). Suner is not necessarily wrong as such, indeed what we propose is certainly not incongruent with her view, but this is also the most limited and limiting reading of the film imaginable. First published in January 1928, Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was originally written as his Habilitationsschrift, a thesis which, if it had been passed, would have led to a position in the German academic system. Benjamin withdrew his text from formal consideration when it was greeted with incomprehension by those appointed to examine it. It was translated into English by John Osborne and published in 1985 under the slightly misleading title The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Verso, London. Benjamin, W.  (1985) The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London:  Verso, p. 175. This vision of the allegorical language of Trauerspiel draws upon Benjamin’s early writings imbued with theological themes and motifs from Judaic mysticism, most notably his 1916 treatise ‘On Language As Such and on Human Language’. In this intricate and enigmatic text, the Fall is given a linguistic inflection such that the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is at one and the same time the end of Adam’s perfect naming of God’s Creation, of Nature. Benjamin writes: ‘After the Fall, which, in making language mediate, laid the foundation for its multiplicity, linguistic confusion could be only a step away. […] Signs must become confused where things are entangled. The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was enslavement, the plan for the Tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic confusion with it’ (Benjamin, W. (1996) Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913–1926. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 72). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 224–5. This key passage reiterates one found in Benjamin’s 1916 essay. There he states: ‘Lament […] is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language. It contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even where there is only a rustling of plants, there is always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns. Yet the inversion of this proposition leads even further into the essence of nature; the sadness of nature makes her mute. In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. […] Things have no

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7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

proper names except in God. For in his creative word, God called them into being, calling them by their proper names. In the language of men, however, they are overnamed. There is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately described as “overnaming”  – the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness’ (Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 1, p. 73). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 209. See, for example, Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 177–8. See, for example, his 1928 reviews ‘Old Toys’, ‘The Cultural History of Toys’ and ‘Toys and Play’ in Benjamin, W. (1999b) Selected Writings Volume 2 1927– 1934. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 98–102, 113–16 and 117– 21 respectively. He notes:  ‘Not until the nineteenth century did toymaking become the provenance of a branch industry of its own. The particular style and beauty of toys of the older kind can be understood only if we realize that toys used to be a by-product of the many handicrafts that were all subject to the rules and regulations of the guilds’ (Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 2, pp. 113–14). In his insightful study of Benjamin’s various radio scripts for children, Jeffrey Mehlman makes precisely this point with respect to Benjamin himself. In these various broadcasts one finds Benjamin’s concepts and motifs in highly compressed, often allegorical, form. Experiments in miniature, such works are not just ‘toy texts’ but rather ‘theoretical toys’ (Mehlman, J. (1993) Walter Benjamin for Children. And Essay on His Radio Years. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 4–5). In his exploration of the allegorical poetics of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin memorably describes Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic short story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ as ‘something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd’ (Benjamin, W. (2003) Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 27).

2 Our Town: Homesickness in The Small Town and Clouds of May 1. Another autobiographical allusion:  Ceylan himself qualified as an engineer before turning to photography and film.

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Notes to Pages 38–53 2. Akbulut makes much of the unfortunate tortoise, seeing it as ‘a metaphor of home and belonging throughout the film’ and (citing his own earlier work from 2006)  as ‘a sign where the themes of leaving and staying intersect’ (in Atakav, E.  (Ed.) (2013) Directory of World Cinema:  Turkey. Bristol:  Intellect Press, p. 177). 3. As previously noted, Masukor presents one of these fairground scenes with Saffet as an encapsulation of, and entry point into appreciating, Ceylan’s entire film aesthetic (in Atakav (Ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Turkey, p. 22). 4. Akbulut in Atakav (Ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Turkey, p. 177. 5. ‘A good example of this,’ Akbulut observes, ‘can be seen in the camera movement focusing on the sounds and images of water dripping from the socks of İsmail who is late for school. The scene is shot in real time and we are expected to take in images and sounds offered at a slow pace’ (in Atakav (Ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Turkey, p. 177). 6. See Akbulut, H. (2005) Nuri Bilge Ceylan Sinemasını Okumak: Anlatı, Zaman, Mekân. İstanbul: Bağlam, pp. 116–18. 7. Once again one is reminded here of Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study. In his discussion of Panofsky and Saxl’s insightful reading of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving ‘Melencolia I’ (Benjamin, W.  (1985) The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso, pp. 148–55), Benjamin attends to how the implements of daily use, of the viva activa, have been cast carelessly aside by the saturnine seated figure who has withdrawn completely into the realm of thought, the viva contemplativa. 8. Kracauer, S.  (1998) The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso, p. 88. 9. Akbulut rightly recognizes both this cinematic reflexivity and the unflattering portrait of the ‘artist’ that emerges:  ‘The film is actually on the practice of film-making and implies a self-reflective style. Ceylan relates the process of film-making, by imposing himself or his alter-ego in the film. Art gives the permission to walk into other people’s lives, turn them into an object of art, order them about and get rid of them when it is done’ (in Atakav (Ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Turkey, p. 156). See also Akbulut, Nuri Bilge Ceylan Sinemasını Okumak, p. 96. 10. Benjamin famously emphasizes the film camera’s penetration and disclosure of the everyday world by means of an extended analogy: while the painter is comparable to the magician or shaman who maintains a distance from the patient he seeks to cure, the camera operator is like the surgeon who must cut into and enter the sick body. See Benjamin, W. (2002) Selected Writings Volume 3 1935–1938. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, pp. 115–16. 11. In his ‘Work of Art’ essay Benjamin observes: ‘Any person today can lay claim to being filmed’ (Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 3, p. 114).

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3 Distant: A Winter’s Tale 1. Tragically, Toprak was killed in a car accident shortly after the completion of filming. 2. It actually takes him some 70 seconds to reach the camera position but seems much longer. 3. As Benjamin reminds us: ‘To dwell means to leave traces’ (Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 3, p. 39. 4. Distant won the following awards:  Best Actor (shared between Muzaffer Özdemir and the late Mehmet Emin Toprak) and Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival 2003; Best Film, Best Director and International Critics’ Prize at the Istanbul Film Festival 2003; Silver Hugo and Jury Prize at the Chicago Film Festival 2003. 5. In her discussion of gender and sexuality in Turkish cinema, Dönmez-Colin (2008) critically points out not only that ‘The films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan focus on men’, but also that in Distant ‘women are represented as wife, mistress, sister and mother, the traditional roles that Turkish cinema has attributed to women’ (Dönmez-Colin, G.  (2008) Turkish Cinema. Identity, Distance and Longing, London: Reaktion Books, p. 165). 6. Özturk astutely observes:  ‘The two male characters exhibit several opposing traits, but they have one common attitude:  their relationships with women exhibit not only a lack of communication but also a certain crisis of masculinity, and no matter how much distance Mahmut puts between Yusuf and himself, they look like the two faces of the same man’ (in Dönmez-Colin, G. (Ed.) (2007) The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. London:  Wallflower Press, p. 252) 7. In another key example of Ceylan’s construction of Denkbilder, Özturk provides an insightful reading of the architecture of one particular scene here: standing in the doorway, absurd toy in hand, Yusauf ’s image ‘seen through the mirror behind Mahmut, is blurred and outside the frame of his cousin, who stands on the left and in front of the frame. The unclear image on the right, from a distance, looks like Mahmut in his youth; the Mahmut he gave up. The distance between Mahmut and the unclear image in the mirror signifies the distance between him and his ideals, his past and his youth, which is embodied by Yusuf ’ (in Dönmez-Colin (Ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, p. 250). 8. As Asuman Suner (2010) points out, Ceylan (in an interview from 2004 with Jason Wood) regards this final scene  – another exemplary Denkbild  – as a moment of self-reflection and potential change for Mahmut (in New Turkish Cinema. Belonging, Identity and Memory. London:  I.B.Tauris, p.  88). In

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

keeping with such optimism, Özturk concludes her essay on Uzak with the following: ‘Mahmut will be reconciled with his past. When he met Yusuf he remembered his youth and the ideals he wanted to forget. That is why he was angry and nervous. However, at the end of the film, while smoking one of Yusuf ’s cheap cigarettes, he confronts himself. The last shot in the film implies the beginning of a change in him’ (in Dönmez-Colin (Ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, p. 255). Dönmez-Colin reiterates such a reading in her 2008 Turkish Cinema. Identity, Distance and Longing (p. 8): ‘The disillusioned artist/intellectual has a moment of reflection on a bench facing the Anatolian coat and perhaps begins to see the point of view of the provincial, his suppressed “other”.’ Perhaps is the key word here. At the same time, the mere fact that Mahmut now smokes a cigarette from Yusuf of the kind he once overtly and contemptuously rejected could also be read simply as further evidence of his continuing hypocrisy and duplicity. The concluding scene of Uzak is far from conclusive. For the notion of redemption in this film we look to the work of the exquisite cinematic images of the Istanbul cityscape rather than such speculations on Mahmut’s ultimate sea-change. It is no coincidence then that, as Özturk notes: ‘A poster of Koza […] hangs on the wall of Mahmut’s house’ (in Dönmez-Colin (Ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, p. 251). Taşkale, A. R. (2008) ‘Distant’, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 12, No. 3, July. Benjamin, W. (1999b) Selected Writings Volume 2 1927–1934. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 262. There is some doubt here. Mahmut regales Yusuf with the hard life he endured when he first came to Istanbul and his struggle to establish himself in the metropolis. Yet Mahmut’s family (mother, sister) all seem to live reasonably close by, certainly not in some distant provincial town like Yusuf ’s family. Perhaps they followed Mahmut to the city. Or perhaps Mahmut is simply lying again. Mahmut’s mother leaving a message on the answer phone is the first speech heard in the film. The answer phone itself serves Mahmut as a means of avoiding talking to anyone. Given that the camera pursues Yusuf, and Yusuf follows the women he encounters, one could argue that it is actually these women in the film that lead the viewer around the city. They are our true guides, with Yusuf as only in the role of intermediary; they are our ad hoc Ariadnes of Istanbul. One should not forget of course that, as Roland Barthes famously observes in Camera Lucida, the noeme or essence of the Photograph is that it attests to that which has been, to the ça a été. Barthes, R.  (1993) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage.

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Notes to Pages 65–69 16. Tiles are not necessarily without interest:  small, two-dimensional surfaces bearing colours, shapes, figures and decorations, as forms of representation they are not wholly dissimilar to photographs. Indeed, as tesserae, they can be parts of a mosaic, a totality composed of seemingly insignificant fragments. It is as if Mahmut has lost sight of the pattern, the wider picture, and now is left to play ruefully with the, in themselves, meaningless pieces. 17. Masukor (in Atakav, E.  (Ed.) (2013) Directory of World Cinema:  Turkey. Bristol: Intellect Press, p. 22) is one of several commentators who point to the ‘distinctly photographic’ qualities of Ceylan’s film image; and, indeed, there is much truth in the reverse proposition: Ceylan’s photographs are not readily distinguishable from his film stills. In our invocation of the Benjaminian notion of the dialectical image as the fleeting interruption or cessation of motion, the film ‘still’ takes on particular significance for us in Ceylan’s oeuvre. 18. See Mulvey, Laura (2003) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Amelia Jones (Ed.) The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London:  Routledge. For a further discussion of this point see Özturk in Dönmez-Colin (Ed.), The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, pp. 253–4. 19. Suner (2010) echoes such a reading and writes: ‘Distant does not show typical urban images with busy districts and crowded streets, but quite peculiar renderings of the city, emphasizing solitariness and void. Caught in the rare white of a snowstorm, Istanbul appears barren and deserted in the film’ (New Turkish Cinema, p. 96). 20. Ceylan’s highly aestheticized depiction of the Istanbul cityscape seems wholly congruent with the writer Orhan Pamuk’s literary portrait of the ‘black-andwhite’ city of collective memory, hüzün, and the many extraordinary monochrome photographs, so many of them wintry scenes, which crowd the pages of his evocative memoirs. See Pamuk, Orhan (2005) Istanbul. Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber. 21. See Simmel, Georg (1903) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in D. Levine (Ed.) (1971) Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 324–39. 22. Kracauer, S.  (1998) The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso, p. 88. 23. Benjamin of course makes a similar point in the ‘Work of Art’ essay when he suggests the camera’s distinctive capacity to capture – through close-up, enlargement, slow motion and/or time-lapse – what he terms the ‘optical unconscious’: those things that we see, but which are too small, too large, too fast or too slow to be perceptible, to be noticed by the unaided human eye. 24. Kracauer, S. (1960/1997) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 300.

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Notes to Pages 70–79 25. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 304. 26. Kracauer, S. (1995) The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 129.

4 Climates and the Problem of Nihilism: the Missing Season 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Diken, B.  (2008) ‘Climates of Nihilism’, Third Text, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 719–32. 2. See Bauman, Z.  (1999) In Search of Politics. Cambridge:  Polity Press and Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. London: Polity. 3. French, P. (2007) ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ The Observer, 11 February. 4. Wood, R (2006) ‘Climates and Other Disasters’, ARTFORUM (New York), www.nbcfilm.com/iklimler/press_artforum.php. 5. See Deleuze, G. (2006) Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975– 1995. New York: Semiotex(e), p. 271. 6. Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage, p. 318. 7. Nietzsche, F. (1996) On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. London: Oxford University Press, p. 68. 8. Ibid., p. 136. 9. Deleuze, G.  (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy. (Hugh Tomlinson, Trans.) London: Athlone Press, p. 148. 10. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 23. 11. Ibid., pp. 23–4. 12. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 12. 13. Hass, Jørgen (1982) Illusionens Filosofi: Studier i Nietzsches firsermanuskripter. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, p. 16. 14. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 9. 15. See Kundera, M. (1996) Life is Elsewhere. London: Faber and Faber. 16. Ceylan quoted in Milk, J. (2007) ‘On Relationships’, interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Little White Lies, Issue 9, Dec 2006/Jan 2007, www.nbcfilm.com/iklimler/press_littlewhitelies.php. 17. Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 159 and 163. 18. Baudrillard, J. (1990) Fatal Strategies. Paris: Semiotext(e)/Pluto, pp. 7 and 50. 19. Ibid., p. 160. 20. Ibid. 21. Baudrillard, J. (1993a) The Transparency of Evil. London: Verso, p. 76. 22. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 163.

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Notes to Pages 79–86 23. Baudrillard, J.  (1993b) Baudrillard Live. Selected Interviews. (M. Gane, Ed.) London: Routledge, p. 52. 24. Ibid., p. 39. 25. Morris, W. (2007) ‘Climates/Iklimler: Movie Review. “Climates” Measures Love’s Degrees’, Boston Globe, www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movi e&id=9649. 26. See the director’s remarks on this in Tuttle, H.  (2007) ‘Nuri Bilge Ceylan Interview (Climates)’, notes on radio broadcast: L’avventura on France Culture with Laure Adler, 25 January. 27. Fujiwara, C. (2007) ‘Mood Music’, The Phoenix, http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid30780.aspx. 28. Haritos, D. (2006) ‘The Barometer of Affect’, Balkan Survey, www.nbcfilm. com/iklimler/press_dimitrisharitos.php. 29. Suner, A. (2005) Hayalet Ev. Yeni Türk Sinemasinda Aidiyet, Kimlik ve Bellek. Istanbul: Metis, p. 125. 30. See Deleuze, G. (1990) Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 19, 187. 31. Kirkegaard, J.V. (2006) ‘Turkish Tragedy – and Some Delight’, Fipresci, www. fipresci.org/festivals/archive/2006/oslo/oslo_06_climates.htm. 32. Chekhov, A.  (1982) ‘Concerning Love’, in The Kiss and Other Stories. London: Penguin, pp. 145–53. The reference here is to p. 153. 33. Ibid. 34. See Nietzsche, F. (1979) Ecce Homo. London: Penguin, pp. 64–8. 35. See Rosen, S.  (1995) The Mask of Enlightenment. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. London: Cambridge University Press, p. 12. 36. Ibid., p. 26. 37. Agamben, G.  (2004) The Open. Man and Animal. Stanford CA:  Stanford University Press, p. 65. 38. See ibid. 39. See, for instance, Wood, ‘Climates and Other Disasters’ and Morris, ‘Climates’. 40. Hass, Illusionens filosofi, p. 118. 41. Deleuze, G.  (1989) Cinema 2.  The Time-Image. London:  The Athlone Press, p. 156. 42. Ibid., p. 172. 43. Hass, Illusionens filosofi, p. 50. 44. Ibid., p. 44. 45. Ibid., p. 66. 46. Ibid., p. 50. 47. See ibid., p. 197. 48. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 171.

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Notes to Pages 89–94

5 Three Monkeys and the Oblivion of the Spectral Fourth 1. Nietzsche, F. (2006b) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 156. 2. Blumenberg, H. (1997) Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, p. 7. 3. Ibid., p. 10. 4. Ibid., pp. 73–4. 5. Augé, M. (2004) Oblivion. Minneapolis MN: Minneapolis University Press, p. 20. 6. Ibid., p. 90. 7. Nietzsche, F. (2007a) The Birth of Tragedy & Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 223. 8. For the biblical story surrounding Abram, Sarai and Hagar see Genesis 15–17 and 21. Interestingly, Moses could find no water in the desert wilderness of Shur (see Exodus 15:22); Shur can be translated as an enclosure, a wall or a ‘part’. 9. Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, p. 78. 10. Ibid., p. 19. 11. Ibid., p. 107. 12. See also: Suner, A. (2011) ‘A Lonely and Beautiful Country: Reflecting Upon the State of Oblivion in Turkey Through Buri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1. 13. Ibid., p. 79. 14. De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley CA: University of California Press; pp. 111–12. 15. A literal translation of an-akolouthos suggests ‘not following’ or disruption in relation to an otherwise patterned sequence of communication, which serves to fracture the synthesis of the whole. 16. Derrida, J.  (2002) Without Alibi. Stanford CA:  Stanford University Press, p. 167. Many thanks to Nathaniel J. P. Barron for affording access to his unpublished PhD thesis: ‘Language in Ernst Bloch’s Materialism: A Reading of Anacoluthon’, and in so doing expanding my understanding of anacoluthon. 17. Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002) Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Cambridge: Polity, p. 115. 18. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 105. 19. Ibid., p. 107. 20. Ibid., p. 105. 21. Ibid., p. 108.

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Notes to Pages 95–99 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Augé, Oblivion, p. 3. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Bloch, E. (1998) ‘Excavation of the Brocken’, in Literary Essays by E. Bloch. (W. Hamacher and D.E. Wellbery (Eds); A. Joron and others, Trans.) Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Naylor, J. (2002) Out of the Blue: A 24-hour Skywatcher’s Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–46; Lynch, D.K. and Livingston, W. (2001) Colour and Light in Nature, 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 11. See also Tape, Walter (1994) Atmospheric Halos. Antarctic Research Series, Vol. 64. Washington DC: American Geophysical Union; Tape, Walter and Moilanen, Jarmo (2006) Atmospheric Halos and the Search for Angle X. Washington DC: American Geophysical Union. Talman, C.F. (1913, March) ‘The Language of Meteorology.’ (J.M. Cattell, Ed.) The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXXII, pp. 272–9; p. 275. Wright, C. J. (1980) ‘The “Spectre” of Science. The Study of Optical Phenomena and the Romantic Imagination’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 43, pp. 186–200. Gaston, S.  (2004) ‘Romanticism and the Spectres of Disinterest,’ European Romantic Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 17, 113–29. See Prickett, S.  (1970) Coleridge and Wordsworth:  The Poetry of Growth. Cambridge: At The University Press. Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. 23. Ibid., p. 39. Bloch, E. (1998) Literary Essays. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 201–202. Hudson, W.  (1982) The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan, p. 78. Landmann, M. (1975) ‘Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula 1968’, Telos, 25. Luz, E. (1993) ‘Utopia and Return: On the Structure of Utopian Thinking and its Relation to Jewish-Christian Tradition’, The Journal of Religion, p. 364. Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, p. 545. Ibid., p. 546. Ibid., p. 548. Augé, Non-Places, p. 80. Augé, Oblivion, p. 71. Bloch, E.  (1970a) Man on His Own:  Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. (E.B. Ashton, Trans.) New York: Herder & Herder, p. 9. Aristotle (2004) The Metaphysics. (H. Lawson-Tancred, Trans.) London: Penguin, p. 88.

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Notes to Pages 99–105 44. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, p. 137 45. Kolakowski suggests that for Bloch, matter is ‘not a mere mechanical lump but – in accordance with the implicit sense of Aristotle’s definition – it is both being- according- to- possibility (kata to dynaton, i.e., that which determines every historical phenomenon in accordance with the conditions and with historical materialism) and also being- in-possibility (dynamei on, i.e., the correlative of that which is objectively and really possible or, ontically speaking, the possibility-substrate of the dialectical process’ (Kolakowski 1978, 439. This is further supported by Thompson, who notes that ‘It is the merging of Aristotle’s dynamei on – or what might be possible in the future – with kata to dynaton – or what is possible at the moment – in which all things, including both the human species and matter itself, will be changed in to something which cannot yet be determined’ (Thompson 2009, xviii).

6 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Ante Rem, Revenge, Hinterland and Detection 1. Bloch, E. (1993) The Utopian Function of Art & Literature. (J.Z. Mecklenberg, Trans.) Cambridge MA: MIT, p. 246. 2. Ibid., p. 255. 3. In German, the noun der Fall means not only ‘fall’ but also ‘occasion’ and ‘instance’. It also means ‘case’. 4. Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art & Literature, p. 258. 5. Ibid., p. 259. 6. Geoghegan, V.  (2013) ‘An Anti-Humanist Utopia’ in P.  Thompson and S. Zizek (Eds) The Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (pp. 37–60). Durham NC: Duke University Press, p. 55. 7. Ibid., p. 56. 8. Ibid. On this point Geoghegan refers to Terry Eagleton’s Holy Terror. 9. Bloch, E. (2006) Traces. (A. A. Nassar, Trans.) Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press, p. 99. 10. Ibid., p. 100. 11. See Chekhov, A.  (2014) Home:  A Short Story. Tonalpress.com. There are a number of striking similarities that are worthy of brief mention here:  The Once Upon a Time aspect of the Chekhovian excerpt frames it as a reveric and other-worldly context, thus establishing its juxtaposition as an alternative and different world. It is of particular interest, in the context of the Anatolian wilderness, that Chekhov’s short story is entitled Home. Again, this suggests a utopian opposite to the homelessness of the hinterland. Of additional note is the notion of the trees being adorned with little glass bells, which ‘ring sweetly

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Notes to Pages 105–115

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

in the wind’. There are a number of occurrences throughout Anatolia – particularly during windswept moments – that a shrill and non-locatable tinkling can be heard in the ether of the night (for example see the lingering pan across the windswept trees between 46 minutes and 11 seconds and 47 minutes and 15 seconds of the film). This strange and disconcerting noise frequently reappears but is not explicitly referred to and remains undefined, as though it is intruding from another place (undoubtedly, a brave editorial move by Ceylan). Anatolia also has the poignant symbolism of the driver Arab (meaning nomad) clumsily picking fruit from a wild-growing fruit tree, which results in rotten apples rolling down the hill to further putrefy in the steam. Finally, low lying fountains make regular appearances throughout the film at each of the search locations. Nietzsche, F. (2007a) The Birth of Tragedy & Other Writings. (R. Geuss, R. Speirs, Eds; R. Speirs, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 85. Geoghegan, ‘An Anti-Humanist Utopia’, 56. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy & Other Writings, p. 84. Ibid., p. 87. Deleuze, G.  (2006a) Nietzsche and Philosophy. (H. Tomlinson, Trans.) New York: Columbia University Press, p. 111. For an elaborate analysis of the film language in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia:  Umut Tümay Arslan (2012) ‘Bozkirdaki Labirent:  Manzaradan Lekeye’ in Umut Tümay Arslan (Ed.) Bir Kapidan Gireceksin: Türkiye Sinemasi Üzerine Denemeler. Istanbul: Metis. Nietzsche, F. (2007b) The Gay Science. (B. Williams (Ed.); J. Nauckhoff and A. Del Caro, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 153. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 143. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 115. Ibid., p. 117. Nietzsche, F.  (2006a) ‘On Moods’ (1864), in F.  Nietzsche, K.  Ansell-Pearson and D. Long (Eds) The Nietzsche Reader (pp. 21–3). Oxford: Blackwell, p. 23. See Bloch, Traces, pp.  59–61. Furthermore, it is significant that the title of this short story is taken from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’ (in Bells and Pomegranates [1841]); where, a young ‘innocent’ girl ethereally wanders through the streets in Asolo (Italy). Singing, as she goes, she reminds the ‘troubled’ residents of the redemptive virtues of love and kindness. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 193. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy & Other Writings, p. 40. Bloch, E.  (1998) Literary Essays. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, pp. 189–90.

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Notes to Pages 115–125 28. Ibid., p. 190. 29. Bloch, E.  (1986) The Principle of Hope (Vols 1–3). (S. Knight and P.  Plaice, Trans.) London: Blackwell, p. 1016. 30. Ibid., p. 290.

7 Winter Sleep: Disappearance as Social Topology 1. Chekhov, A. (2000) The Wife, www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1261/. 2. See Arianrhood, B. (2014) ‘From Shakespeare to Sartre: Excellence’, www. imdb.com/title/tt2758880/reviews. 3. See Chekhov, The Wife. 4. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings. London: Polity, p. 3. 5. Lodge, G. (2014) ‘The Palme D’or Favorite is a Bloated Disappointment from the Turkish Auteur’, www.hitfix.com/in-contention/review-nuri-bilge-ceylandrifts-off-in-talky-trying-winter-sleep#CfRu1gxv3Tb0M2xj.99. 6. Sartre, J. P. (1944) No Exit, www.vanderbilt.edu/olli/class-materials/Jean-Paul_ Sartre.pdf. 7. Arendt, H. (1992) Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin. 8. Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge, p. 255. 9. Ibid. 10. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. 11. See Agamben, G.  (2005) The Time That Remains. Stanford CA:  Stanford University Press, p. 69. 12. Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx. London: Routledge, p. 81. 13. See also Seyirci (2014) ‘A masterpiece from one of the greatest film makers of our time’, www.imdb.com/title/tt2758880/reviews-5. 14. See Baudrillard, J. (1975) The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos, p. 42. 15. Nietzsche, F. (1996) On the Genealogy of Morals. London: Oxford University Press, p. 45. 16. Deleuze, G.  (1983) Nietzsche & Philosophy. New  York:  Columbia University Press, p. 81. 17. See Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus. New York: Continuum, p. 144. 18. Ibid., p. 212. 19. Weber, M. (2003) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Dover, pp. 181–2. 20. Benjamin, W. (1996) ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Eds) Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 288–91.

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Notes to Pages 125–134 21. Ibid., pp. 288–9. 22. Hamacher, W.  (2002) ‘Guilt History. Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” ’, Diacritics, Vol. 32, Nos 3–4, pp. 81–106. The reference is to p. 92. 23. Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse. London: Penguin, p. 221. 24. See Deleuze, G.  and Guattari, F.  (1983) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 225. 25. See Žižek, S. (2009a) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, p. 78. 26. Spinoza, B. (1993) Ethics. London: Everyman, p. 192. 27. Feuerbach, L. (1989) The Essence of Christianity. New York: Prometheus, p. 27. 28. Marx, K.  (2007) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New  York: Dover, p. 119. 29. Agamben, G.  (2011) The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 216, 227. 30. Ibid., pp. 245–6. 31. Matthew 5:38 and 39. 32. See Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage, pp. 148–9. 33. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 67, 119. 34. See Benjamin, W. (1999c) Illuminations. London: Pimlico, pp. 252–4. 35. Ibid., p. 254. 36. See Agamben, G. (1999a) Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, p. 154. 37. Bernstein, M. A. (1992) Bitter Carnival. Ressentiment and the Abject Hero. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. 38. Baudrillard, J. (2001) Impossible Exchange. London: Verso, p. 7. 39. Ibid., p. 94. 40. Baudrillard, J. (2005) The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. London: Berg, p. 171. 41. See Gibson, A. (2012) Intermittancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 112–25. 42. Baudrillard, J. (1987) Forget Foucault. Paris: Semiotex(e), pp. 124–5. 43. Ibid., p. 69. 44. Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge, pp. 122–3. 45. Ceylan quoted in Aytaç, S., Göl, B. and Yücel, F. (2014) ‘Nuri Bilge Ceylan’la Kış Uykusu Üzerine. I. II. III’, interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Winter Sleep, www. altyazi.net/soylesiler/nuri-bilge-ceylanla-kis-uykusu-uzerine/ (our translation). 46. Compare Žižek, S. (1992) Enjoy Your Symptom! London: Routledge, p. 44. 47. Kant, I. (2004) Critique of Practical Reason. New York: Dover, p. 30. 48. Lacan, J.  (1992) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Book VII. London: Routledge, p. 109.

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Notes to Pages 134–142 49. Ibid., p. 110. 50. Deleuze, G.  (1990) Logic of Sense. New  York:  Columbia University Press, p. 304. 51. Ceylan in Aytaç, Göl and Yücel, ‘Nuri Bilge Ceylan’la Kış Uykusu Üzerine. I. II. III’. 52. See Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference & Repetition. London: The Athlone Press. 53. Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotex(e), p. 19. 54. Ibid., p. 165. 55. Ibid., pp. 117, 120. 56. Shakespeare, W. (1970) Timon of Athens. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London: Spring Books, pp. 660–83. The reference is to p. 665. 57. Foucault, Fearless Speech, p. 116. 58. Ibid., p. 120. 59. Bernauer, J. (2004) ‘Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’, in J. Bernauer and J. Carrette (Eds) Michel Foucault and Theology. The Politics of Religious Experience. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 77– 98. The reference is to p. 85. 60. Ibid.

Conclusion: Ceylan’s Aesthetic Politics 1. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings. London: Polity, p. 43. 2. Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 16, 32. 3. Schmitt, C (2009) Hamlet or Hecuba. The Intrusion of Time into the Play. New York: Telos Press publishing, p. 9. 4. Nietzsche, F. (1995) The Birth of Tragedy. Mineola: Dover, p. 23. 5. Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus. New York: Continuum, p. 144. 6. Ibid., p. 212. 7. This is why, for instance, Marx starts his critique of political economy by demonstrating that it is obsessed with one sense of equality, the question of distribution in a given world, and juxtaposes to this sense another sense, equality as an egalitarian maxim. Thus the difference between ‘interpreting’ and ‘changing’ the world is ultimately grounded in the difference between the two senses of equality (See Marx, K. (1998) Thesis on Feuerbach, included in Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1998) The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books, p. 569). 8. See Deleuze, G. (1998) Essays Critical and Clinical. London: Verso, pp. 70–87; Baudrillard, J. (2005) The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. London: Berg, p.  90; Agamben, G.  (1993) The Coming Community. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 35–8 and Agamben, G. (1999b) The Man

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Notes to Pages 142–147

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

Without Content. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 243–74; Žižek, S. (2008) Violence. London: Profile Books, pp. 182–3. Žižek, S. (2009b) The Parallax View. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, pp. 381–2. Ibid., p. 382. Erdoğan, T. (2013) ‘Biz ne diyoruz; Durmak yok yola devam. Onlar ne diyor; Duran adam!’, https://twitter.com/RT_Erdogan/status/348058441094406144. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 37. See Schmidt, Om Vreden, p 9. As such, one could say, they are subjects of anxiety. Anxiety is basically the excess of the real over the socio-symbolic; an excess through which the subject forces a given situation by exposing it to the real. See Badiou, A. (2009) Theory of the Subject. New York: Continuum, p. 146. Benjamin, W.  (1979a) ‘Surrealism’, in One-Way Street. London:  Verso, pp. 225–39, p. 236. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 237. Benjamin quoted in Löwy, M (1993) On Changing the World. New Jersey: Humanities Press, p. 153. Benjamin, W. (1979b) ‘The Destructive Character’, in One-Way Street. London: Verso, pp. 157–9, here quoted pp. 157–8. Derrida, J. (1993) Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 16. Husserl, E.  (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. (F. Kirsten, Trans.) Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers; p. 11. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. xx. Ibid., pp. 8–9. Post, D. (2006) ‘A Hope for Hope: The Role of Hope in Education’, Philosophy of Education.

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Bibliography Erdoğan, T. (2013) ‘Biz ne diyoruz; Durmak yok yola devam. Onlar ne diyor; Duran adam!’ https://twitter.com/RT_Erdogan/status/348058441094406144. Feuerbach, L. (1989) The Essence of Christianity. New York: Prometheus. Filmbrain (2006) ‘A Review of Climates’, www.filmbrain.com/filmbrain/2006/11/ stormy_weather.html. Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotex(e). French, P. (2007) ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ The Observer, 11 February. Fujiwara, C. (2007) ‘Mood Music’, The Phoenix, http://thephoenix.com/article_ ektid30780.aspx. Geoghegan, V.  (2013) ‘An Anti-Humanist Utopia’, in P.  Thompson and S.  Zizek (Eds) The Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (pp. 37– 60). Durham NC: Duke University Press. Gibson, A. (2012) Intermittancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hamacher, W. (2002) ‘Guilt History. Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” ’, Diacritics Vol. 32, Nos 3–4, pp. 81–106. Haritos, D. (2006) ‘The Barometer of Affect’, Balkan Survey, www.nbcfilm.com/ iklimler/press_dimitrisharitos.php. Hass, J.  (1982) Illusionens filosofi. Studier i Nietzsches firser manuskripter. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag. Hudson, W. (1982) The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan. Husserl, E.  (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy:  First Book. Leider:  Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Jafaar, A. (2007) ‘Snow Better Blues,’ Sight & Sound, Vol. 17, Issue 2, February, www. nbcfilm.com/iklimler/press_sightandsoundinterview.php. Jameson, F. (1971) ‘A Marxist Hermeneutic III: Ernst Bloch and the Future’, in F. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (pp. 116–56). Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Kant, I. (2004) Critique of Practical Reason. New York: Dover. Kirkegaard, J. V. (2006) ‘Turkish Tragedy – and Some Delight,’ Fipresci, www. fipresci.org/festivals/archive/2006/oslo/oslo_06_climates.htm. Kolakowski, L. (1978) ‘Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a Future Gnosis’, in L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth & Dissolution (P.S. Falla, Trans., Vol. III The Breakdown, pp. 421–49). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Korstvedt, B.M. (2010) Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch’s Musical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kracauer, S. (1960/1997) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— (1987) Strassen in Berlin und anderswo. Berlin: Das Arsenal Verlag. ——— (1995) The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bibliography ——— (1998) The Salaried Masses. Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso. ——— (2004) From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Kundera, M. (1996) Life is Elsewhere. London: Faber & Faber. Lacan, J.  (1992) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Book VII. London: Routledge. Landmann, M. (1975) ‘Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korcula 1968’, Telos, 25. Leclerc, I.  (1958) Whitehead’s Metaphysics:  An Introductory Exposition. London: Unwin Brothers Ltd. Levine, D. (Ed.) (1971) Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Lodge, G. (2014) ‘The Palme D’or Favorite is a Bloated Disappointment from the Turkish Auteur’, www.hitfix.com/in-contention/review-nuri-bilge-ceylandrifts-off-in-talky-trying-winter-sleep#CfRu1gxv3Tb0M2xj.99. Löwy, M. (1993) On Changing the World. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Luz, E. (1993) ‘Utopia and Return: On the Structure of Utopian Thinking and its Relation to Jewish-Christian Tradition’, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 73, No. 3. Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse. London: Penguin. ——— (1998) Thesis on Feuerbach. Included in Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1998) The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books. ——— (2007) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Dover. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party, www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm. Mehlman, J. (1993) Walter Benjamin for Children. And Essay on His Radio Years. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Mieszkowski, J.  (2009) ‘Who’s Afraid of Anacoluthon?’ Modern Language Notes, Vol. 24, No. 3, 648–65. Milk, J. (2007) ‘On Relationships’, interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Little White Lies, Issue 9, Dec 2006/Jan 2007, www.nbcfilm.com/iklimler/press_littlewhitelies.php. Morris, W. (2007) ‘Climates/Iklimler: Movie Review. “Climates” Measures Love’s Degrees’, Boston Globe, www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=9649. Mulvey, Laura (2003) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Amelia Jones (Ed.) The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. (1960) Joyful Wisdom. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishers Co. ——— (1968) The Will to Power. (W. Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.) New York: Vintage Books. ——— (1979) Ecce Homo. London: Penguin. ——— (1995) The Birth of Tragedy. Mineola: Dover.

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Bibliography ——— (1996) On the Genealogy of Morals. London: Oxford University Press. ——— (2006) ‘On Moods’ (1864), in F. Nietzsche, K. Ansell-Pearson and D. Long (Eds) The Nietzsche Reader (pp. 21–3). Oxford: Blackwell. ——— (2006) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (A. Del Caro, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2007) The Birth of Tragedy & Other Writings. (R. Geuss, R.  Speirs, Eds; R. Speirs, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2007) The Gay Science. (B. Williams (Ed.), J. Nauckhoff and A. Del Caro, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Öztürk, S. R (2007) ‘Uzak / Distant’, in G. D. Colin (Ed.) The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. London: Wallflower Press, pp. 247–55. Pamuk, Orhan (2005) Istanbul. Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber. Post, D. (2006) ‘A Hope for Hope: The Role of Hope in Education’, Philosophy of Education. Ranciere, J. (2006) Film Fables. Oxford: Berg. ——— (2010) Dissensus. New York: Continuum. Richter, Gerhard (2007) Thought-Images. Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Rosen, S.  (1995) The Mask of Enlightenment. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. London: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.P. (1944) No Exit, www.vanderbilt.edu/olli/class-materials/Jean-Paul_ Sartre.pdf. Schmidt, L.-H. (2006) Om Vreden. Copenhagen: Danmarks Paedagogiske Forlag. Schmitt, C (2009) Hamlet or Hecuba. The Intrusion of Time into the Play. New York: Telos Press. Seyirci (2014) ‘A masterpiece from one of the greatest film makers of our time’, www.imdb.com/title/tt2758880/reviews-5. Shakespeare, W.  (1970) Timon of Athens. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London: Spring Books, pp. 660–83. Simmel, G. (1978) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Spinoza, B. (1993) Ethics. London: Everyman. Suner, A.  (2005) Hayalet Ev. Yeni Türk Sinemasinda Aidiyet, Kimlik ve Bellek. Istanbul: Metis. ——— (2010) New Turkish Cinema. Belonging, Identity and Memory. London: I.B.Tauris. ——— (2011) ‘A Lonely and Beautiful Country:  Reflecting Upon the State of Oblivion in Turkey Through Buri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1. Taşkale, Ali Riza (2008) ‘Distant’, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 12, No. 3, July.

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Bibliography Thompson, P (2009) ‘Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope’ in Bloch, E. (2009) Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom (J. T. Swann, Trans), London: Verso, pp. xi–xxx. Tuttle, H. (2006) ‘Climates’, Screenville, http://screenville.blogspot.com/2006/10/ climates-2006ceylan.html. ——— (2007) ‘Nuri Bilge Ceylan interview (Climates)’, notes on radio broadcast: L’avventura on France Culture with Laure Adler, 25 January. Weber, M. (2003) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Dover. Weissberg, L.  (1992) ‘Philosophy and the Fairy Tale:  Ernst Bloch as Narrator’, New German Critique, No. 55. Wood, R. (2006) ‘Climates and Other Disasters’, ARTFORUM (New York), www. nbcfilm.com/iklimler/press_artforum.php. Žižek, S. (1992) Enjoy Your Symptom! London: Routledge ——— (2008) Violence. London: Profile Books. ——— (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso. ——— (2009) The Parallax View. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

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Index abject hero, 131 Abrahamic theologies, 90, 93, 161n.8 absence aesthetic politics, 144, 145 Bloch, 97, 102 Cocoon, 32, 36 Distant, 57, 58 as key theme, 1, 4, 12 Small Town, The, 43 Adorno, Theodor, 9 aesthetic politics, 139–48 Agamben, Giorgio, 142 Akbulut, Hasan, 152n.43, 155n.2, 155n.5, 155n.9 alienation Clouds of May, 18, 46 Cocoon, 34 Distant, 50, 58, 69 Three Monkeys, 96 Winter Sleep, 126 Alioğlu, Sercihan, 37 allegory, 20, 25, 29, 90, 93 allusions, 21, 29, 115 Altintaş, Latif, 38 anacoluthon, 93, 94, 96, 103 anagnorisis, 97, 100 anamnesis, 97, 98 Angelus Novus (Klee), 10 anger, 6, 72, 77, 80, 109, 142–4 animals, 84 antagonism, 133, 139, 140

ante rem, 21, 102, 104, 114, 147 Antigone, 144 anxiety, 72, 73, 147, 168n.14 aporia, 133, 145 apparitions, 20, 32, 93–6, 97, 145 aquatic allegory, 90, 93 Aristotle, 97, 99, 163n.45 art, 10, 12, 13, 84–5, 141 asceticism, 83, 137 astonishment, 11, 95 Augé, Marc, 90, 91, 94 auteurs, 2, 3, 23, 44, 45, 46, 51 authenticity, 53, 140 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 27, 30, 35 Badiou, Alain, 150n.16 Baroque music, 29, 30, 34, 51 Barthes, Roland, 157n.15 Bartleby (Melville), 142 Baudelaire, Charles, 154n.12 Baudrillard, Jean, 78, 79, 132, 133, 140 beauty, 10, 22, 110, 113–16, 145, 146 belief, 85, 86, 122, 124 Benjamin, Walter cameras, 155n.10, 158n.23 cityscape, 61–2 dialectical image, 3, 11 Einbahnstrasse, 10 epic theatre, 11 film medium, 65, 67 Frankfurt School, 9

177

178

Index Benjamin, Walter (cont.) hell, 130, 143 on Klee, 10 music, 30 natural history, 32 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The, 25, 153n.3, 153n.6, 155n.7 radical politics, 144 ‘Return of the Flaneur, The’, 61–2 thought-image, 5, 9, 10, 11 toys, 35, 154n.10, 154n.11 Trauerspiel (mourning drama), 29, 30, 153n.3, 153n.5, 155n.7 ‘Work of Art’, 53, 158n.23 Bible, 104, 127 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 90 Bloch, Ernst anamnesis, 97 cultural surplus, 13 déjà vu, 96–7 detective theme, 102, 103 Frankfurt School, 9 hieroglyphs, 11, 12, 14–16, 102, 151n.31, 151n.36 image as trace, 5, 14–15, 16 Not-Yet, 12, 99–100 ‘Pippa Passes’, 113–14 spectres, 95 Spirit of Utopia, The, 13 Traces, 113 utopian framework, 12 Blumenberg, Hans, 89 Bodner, Hatice, 44 boredom Climates, 72, 84 Cocoon, 34 hope, 147

Small Town, The, 17, 38, 39, 41, 42 Winter Sleep, 128 Brecht, Bertolt, 11 Brocken Spectre, 95–6 Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 131 Browning, Robert, 164n.24 Butun, Cihat, 38 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 157n.15 camerawork, static, 19, 24, 33, 40, 55, 74 capitalism, 21–2, 120, 122, 125, 126 Cappadocia, 118, 148 Ceylan, Emin, 24, 25, 35, 37 Ceylan, Emine, 17 Ceylan, Fatma, 24, 26, 35, 37, 45 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge aesthetic politics, 139–48 auteurs, 2–3, 23, 45, 46 awards, 18, 21, 152n.42, 156n.4 Climates, 71–86 Clouds of May (Mayɪs Sɪkɪntɪsɪ), 44–54 Cocoon (Koza), 23–36 Distant (Uzak), 55–70 family as actors, 24, 34, 35, 44, 53 film chronology, 17–22 image as puzzle, 11–14 image as trace, 14–17 interweaving of ‘Clouds quartet’, 34–5, 43–6, 48–52, 60 key themes, 1–5 movement-image, 7–8 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 101–16 Small Town, The (Kasaba), 37–44 and Tarkovsky, 18, 34, 51, 52, 58

178

179

Index thought-image, 8–11 Three Monkeys, 87–100 time-image, 5–7 Winter Sleep, 117–38 charity, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132 Chekhov, Anton Concerning Love, 82–3 Excellent People, The, 136 Home, 105, 163n.11 movement-image, 7, 8 ‘On the Road’, 8 Wife, The, 117, 136 child spectres, 31–2, 42–4, 93–8, 100, 145 childhood absence, 4 Cocoon, 26, 31–2, 35 image as trace, 16 play, 35 Small Town, The, 17, 38, 42–4 Three Monkeys, 20 Christianity, 21, 83, 125, 127, 132, 137 cinema cinematic rebus, 28 Distant, 51, 66, 69–70 film medium, 69–70 movement-image, 7–8 and photography, 66 thought-image, 8–11 time-image, 5–7, 85 ciphers, 12–14, 21, 97, 102, 147 cityscape Climates, 76 Distant, 18, 57–60, 61–4, 65, 66, 67–8, 70 sociology of city, 2 time and space, 4 Climates (2006), 71–86

absence, 4 autumn, 76–80 figures, 73, 75, 77 film chronology, 19 overview, 1, 71–2 spring, 82–6 summer, 72–6 time and space, 4 winter, 81–2 Clouds of May (Mayɪs Sɪkɪntɪsɪ, 1999), 44–54 absence, 4 Ceylan family as actors, 2 cinematic hide-and-seek, 51–4 figure, 49 film chronology, 17 filmmaking process, 34, 35, 44–51, 65 interweaving of ‘Clouds quartet’, 34–5, 43–6, 51–2, 60 movement-image, 7 Small Town, The, 34, 35 time and space, 4 ‘Clouds quartet’, 24, 34–5, 43–6, 48–52, 57, 60, 148 Cocoon (Koza, 1995), 23–36 absence, 4 figures, 27, 31 film chronology, 17, 18 imagines, 33–5 interweaving of ‘Clouds quartet’, 43, 44, 46, 52, 60 meanings, 25–9 origins, 23–5 play (Spiel), 35–6 sorrow (Trauer), 29–33 as ‘test film’, 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 96

179

180

Index comedy, 18, 45, 48, 53, 58, 102 Concerning Love (Chekhov), 82–3 conscience, 130, 134, 135 consensus, 124, 132, 141, 142 Corn Fields (Emine Ceylan), 17 credit, 122, 125 cultural ciphers, 12 cultural surplus, 13, 14, 15 culture, 12–16 cynicism, 147 Cynics, 137 Dayɪ, Pire, 46–7 de Certeau, Michel, 92, 94 De Quincey, Thomas, 96 death Climates, 86 Cocoon, 24, 25, 32–3, 36 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 108–9, 111–13 Small Town, The, 42–3 sorrow (Trauer), 32, 33 spectres, 31–2, 42–4, 93–8, 100, 145 Three Monkeys, 95 debt, 21, 121, 122, 125, 130, 131 déjà vu, 96 Deleuze, Gilles, 5–6, 61, 66, 85 Denkbild see thought-image departures, 55–60 Derrida, Jacques, 93, 94 desire, 77, 78, 79, 81, 133–4 detective theme, 20, 21, 102–4 dialectical image, 3, 11 dialogue absence of, 27, 28 Climates, 79, 80 Cocoon, 24, 27, 28, 34 dialectics of, 6

Distant, 18–19 meaning of, 15 minimal use of, 6, 18–19, 24, 34, 80 movement-image, 7, 8 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 102, 106, 107, 108–10, 111–12 rich use of, 3, 7 Saturnalian, 131 Small Town, The, 3 Three Monkeys, 88, 93 Winter Sleep, 3, 130, 131 Diogenes, 137 disagreement, 124, 141 disappearance, 78, 79, 81, 117, 131, 140, 144 disillusionment, 4, 61, 68, 72 dislocation, 2, 4, 18, 40 distance, 18, 53, 60–1, 67 Distant (Uzak, 2002), 55–70 absence, 4 cinema and city, 68–70 Cocoon, 24 departures, 50–1, 55–60 figures, 56, 68 interweaving of ‘Clouds quartet’, 49, 60 overview, 1, 18 photography and film, 64–8 and Tarkovsky, 51 time and motion, 60–4 time and space, 4 Dönmez-Colin, G, 156n.5, 157n.8 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 8, 131 economic alienation, 126 economic exchange, 21, 132 Eidetic images, 145–7 Eidos, 145

180

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Index 1844 Manuscripts (Marx), 126 Einbahnstrasse (Benjamin), 10 Elpis (hope), 146, 147 ennui, 4, 17, 42 entelechy (creative matter), 99 epic theatre, 11 equality, 167n.7 escapism, 19, 84 estrangement, 5, 14, 17, 53, 60 eternal return, 97–8 ethics, 21, 127, 131 evil Elpis (hope), 146–7 ethics and morality, 21, 119–20, 126–9, 132 see/speak/hear no evil, 20, 88, 98, 100 Three Monkeys, 20, 88, 98, 100 Winter Sleep, 21, 119–20, 126–9, 132 Excellent People, The (Chekhov), 136 exchange, 21, 119–22, 125, 131–2 Expressionistic readings, 11, 15, 16, 151n.31 fairy tales, 105 faith, 136, 147 fall, 29, 97, 103, 104, 153n.5, 163n.3 fascination, 78 fatal strategies, 79 fatalism, 100 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 126 ‘Film in Our Time’ (Kracauer), 68 film medium Distant, 19, 61, 64–8 image as puzzle, 11–14 image as trace, 14–17 Kracauer on, 69–70 meaning-making, 86, 148 movement-image, 7–8, 61

and photography, 19, 61, 64–8, 158n.17 thought-image, 8–11 time-image, 5–7 filmmaking processes Clouds of May, 44–5, 46–50, 51, 53 Cocoon, 24, 34 Distant, 19, 61, 64–8 filmmaker and filmed, 53 intertextuality, 51 meaning-making, 24 and photography, 19, 61, 64–8, 158n.17 self-referentiality, 34, 44–5 fire, 117, 130, 133 flaneries, 51, 53, 59, 64 forgetfulness, 94–5 forgiveness, 6, 80, 123, 127 Foucault, Michel, 136, 137, 138 Frankfurt School, 9 freedom, 83, 90, 126, 133, 137 future, 12–13, 16–17, 70, 91, 98, 100 gaze, 60, 66, 67, 80 Gencer, Zuhal, 59 gender, 67, 156n.5 Geoghegan, V., 12 Gezi Park protests, 143 ghost figures see spectres glorification, 126 Gnosticism, 133 God, 29, 74, 75, 76, 104, 126, 154n.6 Godard, Jean Luc, 44 grief, 36, 49 guilt, 21, 47, 125, 129, 131 Gündüz, Erdem, 143 Hagar, 90, 93 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 140–1

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Index happiness, 42, 75, 83, 130 Harz Mountains, 95 hedonism, 19, 75, 78, 84 hell, 117, 119, 126, 130, 131, 143 Hesiod, 146 Hessel, Franz, 61 hieroglyphs Bloch, 11, 12, 14–16, 102, 151n.31, 151n.36 Eidetic images, 147 hieroglyphic ciphers, 12, 14 image as puzzle, 12, 14, 25 image as trace, 14–16 Kracauer, 5, 10 spatial hieroglyphs, 5, 10, 11 thought-image, 10–11 Vexierbilder, 10, 11, 25 home, as shipwreck, 88–92 Home (Chekhov), 105, 163n.11 homecoming, 70 homelessness, 4, 103, 107, 163n.11 homesickness Clouds of May, 44–6 Distant, 51, 70 Kracauer, 51, 70 Small Town, The, 37, 40, 42 spiritual shelterlessness, 51, 70 hope, 100, 115, 121, 146, 147 Hopper, Edward, 74 Hudson, Wayne, 12, 14 human-shadow, 96 humans, and animals, 84, 85 humour, 18, 45, 48, 53, 58, 102 Husserl, Edmund, 145, 146 idealism, 74, 76, 83, 84, 127 idealistic nihilism, 76 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 131

illusion, 75, 78, 85, 114, 131, 132, 141 images animals, 84 Climates, 80, 84 Cocoon, 33–5 Distant, 66 image as puzzle, 5, 11–14, 25, 28 image as trace, 5, 14–17 imagines, 33–5 meaning-making, 80, 148 movement-image, 5, 6, 7–8, 61 moving and still, 61, 65, 66 thought-image, 5, 8–11, 156n.7 time-image, 5–7, 61, 66, 85 imaginary, the, 78 imagines, 33–5 imagoes, 33 immobile man, 143 inertia, 4, 18, 83 insects, 33 intellectual thought, 124, 135 intertextuality, 43–4, 45, 46, 51–2 intimacy, 2, 18, 19, 90 intoxication, 144, 145 intuition, 110, 145, 146, 147 Islam, 21, 71, 124, 125, 132, 133 isolation, 2, 18, 39, 57, 67, 91, 115 Istanbul aesthetic politics, 148 Climates, 19, 76 Distant, 18, 50–1, 57–8, 61, 63–4, 67–8, 70 kairos, 121, 145 kalospectrality, 145, 146 Kant, Immanuel, 133–4 Kasaba (1997) see Small Town, The Klee, Paul, 10

182

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Index knowledge, 13, 97, 105, 146 Kojève, Alexandre, 83 Kolakowski, L., 163n.45 Korstvedt, B.M., 13 Koza (1995) see Cocoon Kracauer, Siegfried film and cityscape, 61, 65, 67, 68–70 ‘Film in Our Time’, 68 Frankfurt School, 9 image as puzzle, 5 spatial hieroglyphs, 5, 10 spiritual shelterlessness, 51, 53, 69, 70 Theory of Film, 68 ‘Those Who Wait’, 70 thought-image, 9, 10 lamentation, 30, 153n.6 landscape, 5, 18, 34, 47, 52, 65 language, 8, 29–30, 36 Last Tango in Paris (1972), 77 literature, 3, 5, 7, 8 loneliness aesthetic politics, 144, 148 Climates, 74, 84 Clouds of May, 49 Distant, 57, 58, 69 as key theme, 2, 3, 12, 15, 34 metropolitan modernity, 69 longing Climates, 80, 81, 90 Cocoon, 34 Distant, 57 as key theme, 6, 12, 15 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 107 Small Town, The, 40, 42 loss Cocoon, 32, 36

Distant, 57 as key theme, 4, 14, 15, 16, 20 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 104, 106, 107, 113, 115 love Bloch, 114 Chekhov, 82–3 Climates, 79, 83, 86 Cocoon, 25, 32 Distant, 57, 60 as key theme, 4, 6, 10 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 115 Three Monkeys, 93 Winter Sleep, 135 lust, 133–4 male gaze, 19, 67 ‘Man of the Crowd, The’ (Poe), 154n.12 Manicheanism, 133 Marx, Karl, 125, 126, 145, 167n.7 masculinity, 18, 50, 57, 58, 113, 116 master-slave relationship, 107, 131, 137 Masukor, Sarinah, 150n.28, 152n.1, 152n.44, 155n.3, 158n.17 matter, and subject, 99, 100 Mayɪs Sɪkɪntɪsɪ (1999) see Clouds of May meaninglessness, 25 meanings Benjamin on, 29–30 Climates, 75, 78, 80, 86 Cocoon, 24–5, 28, 29–30, 36 dialogue, 15 filmmaking, 6, 7, 8, 24–5, 28, 148 image as puzzle, 12 image as trace, 15, 16 images, 80, 148 nihilism, 75, 78, 132

183

184

Index meanings (cont.) spectral, 94 thought-image, 10–11 Winter Sleep, 131–3 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 154n.11 melancholy Clouds of May, 18, 52 Cocoon, 17, 25, 30, 31, 32, 36 Distant, 57, 65, 70 as key theme, 4, 147 music, 30, 52 muteness, 30, 154n.6 Small Town, The, 40, 42 sorrow (Trauer), 30, 31, 32 Melville, Herman, 142 memory Cocoon, 24, 31 Distant, 61, 64 image as trace, 16 Three Monkeys, 94–5, 97 Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), 45 Messianism, 133 Metaphysics, The (Aristotle), 99 ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ (Simmel), 2, 68 metropolitan modernity Benjamin, 143 Distant, 57, 58, 62–3, 67–70 as key theme, 2, 5, 9 spiritual shelterlessness, 51, 69 supermodernity, 91 migration, 4, 21, 61, 62 modernity see metropolitan modernity money, 21, 120, 121, 125, 126, 129–33 monochrome images, 24, 40, 57, 68, 158n.20 morality, 85, 117, 120, 127, 134

motion, 34, 61, 63, 158n.17 mournfulness, 4, 30 mourning Cocoon, 17, 24, 25, 30, 31, 32 as key theme, 15 sorrow (Trauer), 30, 31, 32 Three Monkeys, 91 Trauerspiel (mourning drama), 25, 29, 30, 36, 153n.5, 155n.7 movement-image (narrative flow), 5, 6, 7–8, 61, 65, 66 Mulvey, Laura, 67 music Bach and Baroque, 27, 30, 35, 51 Ceylan techniques, 7, 19, 35 Clouds of May, 51, 52 Cocoon, 27, 30, 34, 35 muteness of Nature, 25, 29–30, 36 naming, 29–30, 153n.5, 154n.6 narrative Ceylan techniques, 14, 21, 34 detective theme, 102, 103, 104 image as trace, 14–15, 16 meaning-making, 80, 148 movement-image, 5, 6, 7–8, 61 thought-image, 8, 9 natural history, 24, 25, 32–3, 36 natural sound, 34 nature Climates, 85, 86 Clouds of May, 47, 52 Cocoon, 25, 26–7, 29–30, 32 and man, 85, 86, 96 muteness, 25, 29–30, 36 Naturgeschichte (‘natural history’), 24, 25, 32–3, 36

184

185

Index Odd Couple, The (1968), 18 ‘On the Road’ (Chekhov), 8 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), 101–16 detective theme, 102 dialogue, 108–10, 111–12 figures, 103, 106, 115 movement-image, 7 overview, 1, 20, 101–4 possibility and promise, 113–16 ressentiment and revenge, 107–13 time and space, 4 wilderness and sublime, 104–7 Open, the, 84 optical unconscious, 158n.23 optics, 58, 66, 80, 95 optimism, 59, 147 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin), 25, 153n.3, 153n.6, 155n.7 Other, the, 5 outsiders, 2, 5, 46, 58, 59, 148 Özdemir, Muzaffer, 34, 41, 44, 56, 150n.28, 156n.4 Özturk, S. Ruken, 149n.1, 152n.43, 153n.2, 156n.6, 156n.7, 157n.8, 157n.9

negative nihilism, 74, 84 New Turkish Cinema, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich aesthetic politics, 142, 148 beautiful possibility, 114 Birth of Tragedy, The, 90 Climates, 19, 74, 75, 83, 85 eternal return, 97–8 ethics, 127 on Hamlet, 141 nihilism, 19, 74, 75, 85, 134, 142 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 107, 110, 114 ressentiment, 75, 107, 110 seafaring trope, 89, 90 Three Monkeys, 89, 90, 97–8, 100 will, 83 Winter Sleep, 127, 134 nihilism aesthetic politics, 142, 147 Climates, 19, 71, 74–6, 78, 79, 82–5 Nietzsche, 19, 74, 75, 85, 134, 142 passive, 19, 74–6, 78–9, 84, 140, 142 perfect, 19, 85, 142 radical, 19, 75, 76, 142 Winter Sleep, 120, 125, 132, 134 No Exit (Sartre), 117 non-place, 88–92 nostalgia, 4, 21, 31, 40, 54, 70 Not-Yet, 12–13, 16, 99–100, 147, 148 Not-Yet-Conscious (noch-nicht-bewusst), 13 obdachlos (spiritual shelterlessness), 51, 53, 69, 70 objectification of women, 67 oblivion, 90, 94, 95, 97

Pamuk, Orhan, 158n.20 Pandora’s box, 146, 147 paradoxes, 1–3, 6, 125, 126, 145, 147 parrhesia, 137, 138 passive nihilism, 19, 74–6, 78–9, 84, 140, 142 passivity, 72, 79, 83, 139, 142, 143, 147 perfect nihilism, 19, 85, 142

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186

Index perversion, 79, 134 photography Barthes, 157n.15 Cocoon, 25–6, 28, 32, 34 Distant, 19, 58, 61–2, 64–8 and filmmaking, 19, 61, 64–8, 148, 158n.17 Pindar, 83 ‘Pippa Passes’ (Bloch), 113–14 ‘Pippa Passes’ (Browning), 164n.24 place, 47, 90, 91 Platonic doctrine, 97, 98, 100, 113 play (Spiel), 25, 28, 35–6, 126 pleasure principle, 74, 134 Poe, Edgar Allan, 154n.12 point of view, 19, 66, 67 political economy, 167n.7 political spirituality, 136, 138 political subjectivity, 140–2 politics, 78, 79, 136–8, 139–45 pornography, 51, 66, 67, 78 possibility aesthetic politics, 142, 145, 147 anagnorisis, 97 Bloch, 13–16, 99, 100, 102, 163n.45 Chekhov, 83 as key theme, 4, 13–16, 20–1 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 21, 102, 113–14 parrhesia, 137 Three Monkeys, 20, 97–100 power aesthetic politics, 142 beautiful possibility, 114–15 cinematic images, 85 Climates, 75, 78, 79, 85, 86 debt and wealth, 122, 137

freedom, 7 master-slave relationship, 107–8 Nietzsche, 97, 127 nihilism, 75, 78, 79 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 104, 107–8, 114–15 powerlessness, 75 ressentiment, 107–8 will to power, 86 Winter Sleep, 122, 127, 137 powerlessness, 75 preaching, 137 Protestantism, 125 Proust, Marcel, 10 puzzle, image as, 5, 11–14, 25, 28 quietude, 34, 40, 41 radical nihilism, 19, 75, 76, 142 reason, 75, 78, 110, 133–4 rebus, 5, 10, 15, 25, 28, 102 recognition, 17, 97, 112–14, 124 recollection, 37, 97 redemption aesthetic politics, 145, 147 Cocoon, 36 Distant, 61, 68–9, 157n.8 image as trace, 15 Kracauer, 61, 68–9 Not-Yet, 12 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 102, 103 Three Monkeys, 93, 98, 100 relations, 73, 74 relationships, 1–2, 3, 6, 58, 117 religion and capitalism, 21–2, 125–6

186

187

Index Christianity, 21–2, 83, 125, 127, 132, 137 Climates, 75–6, 85 and evil, 126–7 Islam, 21, 71, 124, 125, 132, 133 nihilism, 75–6, 85 parrhesia, 137–8 political spirituality, 136, 138 and vanity, 122–6 Winter Sleep, 21, 121, 122–7, 131, 135–8 remembrance, 69, 95, 96–100 repetition, 98, 100, 130, 136, 147 ressentiment Climates, 72, 75, 80 definition, 107–8 Nietzsche, 75, 107, 110 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 107–8, 110, 112–13 time-image, 6 ‘Return of the Flaneur, The’ (Benjamin), 61–2 revenge, 104, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115 revolution, 94, 143, 145 rhetoric, 93 Richard III (Shakespeare), 134 Richter, Gerhard, 9, 10 Roberts, Richard, 151n.31 rural experience, 2, 4, 31, 39, 47–8 sadness, 25, 30, 32, 36, 57, 70, 153n.6 Saglam, Havva, 38 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 117 Saturnalian dialogues, 131 Schmitt, C., 140 science, 105, 106 scopophilia, 19

sea images, 56, 73, 89–93, 98 secularization, 71, 104, 125 seduction, 78, 79 see/speak/hear no evil, 20, 88, 98, 100 seeing, ways of aesthetic politics, 140, 141, 145–6 Distant, 66–7, 69 and doing, 98 film camera, 69 as key theme, 3 self-referentiality, 34–5, 46, 140, 155n.9 sensory-motor link, 6, 85 separation, 18, 91, 124, 141 sexual relationships, 2, 19, 58, 62, 77, 78 shadow, 34, 64–5, 95–6, 113–14 Shakespeare, William, 21, 134, 135, 136, 139, 140–1 shelterlessness, spiritual, 51, 53, 69, 70 Shipwreck with Spectator (Blumenberg), 89 shock, 9, 85, 96, 97, 113 shot-reverse shot technique, 66, 67 Shur, 90, 91, 161n.8 silence Cocoon, 27, 29–30, 34 Distant, 57, 59, 70 as key theme, 3 muteness of Nature, 25, 29–30, 36 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 21, 108 Small Town, The, 40, 41 Three Monkeys, 88, 94 Simmel, Georg, 2, 68, 70 simulacrum and simulation, 78, 79, 131, 140 Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 44

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18

Index slaves, 93, 107–8, 113, 116, 131, 135, 137 Small Town, The (Kasaba, 1997) absence, 4 Chekhov, 7 Clouds of May, 34, 35, 44–6, 48, 49, 52 Cocoon, 34, 35 Distant, 50, 60 figures, 38, 41, 43 homesickness, 37, 40, 42 interweaving of ‘Clouds quartet’, 34–5, 43–6, 48–52, 60 overview, 17–18, 37–40 sadness amidst snow, 40–4 silence and dialogue, 3 snowscapes, 40, 50, 68, 70, 81, 117 sorrow (Trauer), 17, 25, 29–33, 36, 148 soundscapes, 6–7, 26–7, 30, 34, 47, 80 space, 4, 6, 74, 143 spatial hieroglyphs, 5, 10, 11 Spazieren in Berlin (Hessel), 61 spectatorship, 17, 19, 25, 28, 58, 60, 66–7 spectrality, 93, 95, 98, 100, 145 spectres Cocoon, 31–2 Distant, 59 Eidos, 145 Small Town, The, 42–4 Three Monkeys, 93–8, 100, 145 Spiel (play), 25, 28, 35–6, 126 Spielzeuge (playthings), 35 Spinoza, Baruch, 126 Spirit of Utopia, The (Bloch), 13 spiritual automation, 85 spiritual shelterlessness, 51, 53, 69, 70 spirituality, 136–7, 138

Stalker (1979), 18, 51 static camerawork, 19, 24, 33, 40, 55, 74 Stiegler, Bernard, 94 still/moving images, 61, 65, 66 stillness Cocoon, 24 Distant, 57, 61, 62, 63, 66, 70 as key theme, 4 Small Town, The, 41 strangers, 2, 5, 51, 148 subject, and matter, 99, 100 subjectivity, 86, 100, 122, 140–2, 147 sublime, the, 68, 104–5, 113–15 Suner, Asuman, 156n.8, 158n.19 supermodernity, 91 surplus-value, 125 symbolic exchange, 119–22, 131, 132 tableau images, 3, 11 Taksim Square, 143 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 18, 34, 51, 52, 58 Taşkale, Ali Riza, 61, 66, 68 theatre, 3, 11, 21, 136 theology, 125 Theory of Film (Kracauer), 68 Thompson, P., 163n.45 ‘Those Who Wait’ (Kracauer), 70 thought, 61, 85, 124, 136 thought-image (Denkbild), 5, 8–11, 156n.7 Three Monkeys (2008), 87–100 Cocoon, 32 dialogue, 88 Eidos, 145 figures, 89, 92, 94 home as shipwreck, 88–92 image as trace, 16 lost children, 4, 32

188

189

Index overview, 1, 20, 87–8 shock of remembrance, 96–100 spectre of oblivion, 92–6 time Climates, 80, 85 Cocoon, 34, 36 Distant, 60–4, 66 linear time and kairos, 121, 147 and motion, 60–4 Small Town, The, 40–2 and space, 4 time-image, 5–7, 61, 66, 85 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 139 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 2 tools (Werkzeuge), 35 Toprak, Mehmet Emin, 38, 50, 55, 156n.1, 156n.4 Toprak, Turgut, 26 toys, 25, 35, 36, 154n.10, 154n.11 traces and ciphers, 12–14, 21, 151n.36 Eidetic events, 146 image as trace, 5, 14–17 of possibility, 97, 98, 99 Traces (Bloch), 113 tragic, lack of, 140, 144 transpolitics, 140 Trauer (sorrow), 17, 25, 29–33, 36, 148 Trauerbilder (sorrowful images), 25, 36 Trauerspiel (mourning drama), 25, 29, 30, 36, 153n.5, 155n.7 Trauerspielerei (sorrowful playfulness), 25, 36 Trauerspielzeug (sorrowful plaything or toy), 25, 36 truth aesthetic politics, 140 Climates, 72, 75

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 103, 112, 113, 116 thought-image, 10 Winter Sleep, 122, 131, 135, 136–7 Turkey, 17, 71 uncanny (unheimlich) aesthetic politics, 147, 148 Clouds of May, 53 déjà vu, 96 Distant, 51 filmmaking, 53 image as trace, 15 Three Monkeys, 93–4, 96 urban experience, 2, 50–1, 58, 60–2, 67–9 utopian framework, 12–14, 52, 70, 96, 102 Uzak (2002) see Distant value and values Climates, 19, 72, 74–6, 78, 84–6 Winter Sleep, 120, 122, 124–6, 132 vanity, 123, 127 vengeance, 104, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115 Vexierbilder see hieroglyphs viewing process, 24, 66 viewpoint, 19, 66, 67 violence, 77, 78, 79, 112, 131 virtual domain, 80, 84 vision (optics), 58, 66, 80, 95, 158n.23 voyeurism, 19, 67 wealth, 126, 137 Weber, Max, 125 Wife, The (Chekhov), 117, 136 Wilder, Billy, 18 wilderness, 104–7, 113, 115, 116

189

190

Index will, 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, 134 will to power, 86 Winter Sleep (2014), 117–38 absence, 4 anger and explosion, 143 burning money, 129–34 dialogue, 130 figures, 118, 120 money, debt and exchange, 119–22 movement-image, 7 not resisting evil, 126–9 overview, 1, 21, 117–19 silence and dialogue, 3

time and space, 4 truth-telling, 134–8 vanity and religion, 122–6 women, objectification of, 67 Wordsworth, William, 96 work, 126 ‘Work of Art’ (Benjamin), 53, 158n.23 Works and Days (Hesiod), 146 World Trade Center (WTC), 140 Zimbaoğlu, Muhammed, 44 Žižek, Slavoj, 142

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