Nuri Bilge Ceylan Research Articles

Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da Filmi Bağlamında Türk Toplum Yapısında Bürokrasi, İktidar ve Kadın Görünümü

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" explores social dynamics and authority relations around a murder investigation set deep in Anatolia. The movie offers a good example of reading Turkish social structure through themes such as authority, hierarchy, bureaucracy and female innocence. Throughout the film, Power and hierarchy in the Turkish social structure reveals the authority structures and authority relations in the village society, while at the same time criticizing the bureaucratic structure in the society through bureaucracy, obstacles and dysfunction in the investigation process. Instead of the usual bureaucratic structure, Turkish society's perspectives, views and understanding of bureaucracy, authority and hierarchy relations and the manifestations of these concepts in society are seen. At the same time, it emphasizes the innocence of women, the powerlessness of female characters and the obligation to conform to social norms, thus opening up for discussion gender roles and the position of women in society. It tries to explain the Turkish social structure's perspective on women in the context of concepts such as innocence and punishment, as well as in the context of women and gender roles. In a general context, the relationship between concepts such as dichotomies, power, authority, bureaucracy and the Turkish social structure is revealed. The quiet and isolated village life of Anatolia actually harbors the complexity of social dynamics and power relations. By reflecting this complexity, the film allows for a deeper understanding of Anatolian society. "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" is not just the story of a murder investigation, but rather a social and sociological portrait that examines the complexity of social structures and relations. Keywords- Authority Bureaucracy, Turkish Social Structure Woman

Ethics and Aesthetics in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cinema

Ethics and Aesthetics in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cinema

Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Provincial: A Semiotic Analysis on Film Posters

Bu çalışma, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’ın taşra tasvirinin film afişlerindeki yansımalarını incelemektedir. Film afişlerinde resmettiği taşrada; hangi anlam ögelerine başvurulduğunu ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu bağlamda Nuri Bilge Ceylan'ın taşra temalı filmlerinin afişleri incelenmiştir. Bu filmler şöyledir: Koza, Kasaba, Mayıs Sıkıntısı, Uzak, Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da, Kış Uykusu ve Ahlat Ağacı. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Türk sinemasında taşra temsilinin güncel ve en özgün örneklerini sergileyen yönetmenlerinden biri olarak gösterilmektedir. Filmlerinde anlatıya mutlak hâkimiyet sağlamayı tercih eden bir yönetmendir. Nitekim tüm filmlerinde senarist, kurgucu ve yönetmen koltuğuna da kendisi oturmaktadır. Aynı zamanda bir fotoğrafçı olan Nuri Bilge Ceylan’ın filmlerinde anlatıya gösterdiği titizliği, afişlerinde de gözlemlemek mümkündür. Film afişleri; bilgilendirici ve özetleyici olmakla beraber aynı zamanda sembolik ifadelere de sıklıkla yer veren bir görsel tasarım ürünüdür. Sembolik ifadelerin kullanılması, yananlamların da önem kazanmasına neden olur ve bunun neticesinde film afişleri anlam yüklü bir görsel dizgeye dönüşür. Bu durumu, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’ın taşrayı konu alan film afişlerinde de gözlemlemek mümkündür. Çalışma kapsamında incelenen film afişleri, göstergebilimsel bir yaklaşım ile incelenmiştir. Çalışmada incelenen afişler, önce anlam ögelerine ayrıştırılmıştır. Ardından anlam ögelerinin yananlam düzeyindeki karşılıkları ifade edilmiştir. Bu kavramlar, tablolar halinde paylaşılmıştır. Sonrasında tüm anlam ögeleri ve yananlamlar, bağlamsal yananlam başlığı altında bütüncül olarak değerlendirilmiştir. Sonuç olarak, Ceylan’ın taşra temalı film afişlerinde bir takım anlam ögelerine sıklıkla başvurduğu görülmüştür. Bunlar en başta ağaç, doğa ve mevsimlerdir. Afişlerde genellikle durgun ve karamsar bir hava hâkimdir. Bu karamsarlık; yüz ifadesi, kara bulutlar ve mevsim şartlarından da hissedilebilmektedir. Öte yandan sıklıkla kullanılan yol unsuru taşra üçlemesi olarak da bilinen Kasaba, Mayıs Sıkıntısı ve Uzak filmleri bağlamında anlamlı olarak değerlendirilmiştir.

Uzak, or the unbearable lightness of the ordinary

The text explores the notion of urban atmosphere, its ordinary rhythm, and the debilitating effects that it might have on the bodies that breathe through it, by looking at Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third movie, and first international success, Uzak [2002]. In the first two sections, the theoretical background is laid out, both presenting a ‘tensional’ concept of atmosphere and proposing the employment of the notion of ‘ordinary’ as a way to explore how atmospheres unfold in everyday life. How can we attune to the fleeting consistency of the ordinary, however? The third section makes an argument for the capacity of cinema to do so, mainly drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Lauren Berlant. In the subsequent sections, Uzak is explored by showing how these themes are brought forward through the slow-paced aesthetics of the film.

On land, memory, and masculinity: unearthing silences around myths of Gallipoli in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Ahlat Ağacı (The Wild Pear Tree)

AbstractThis article offers a critical reading of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Ahlat Ağacı (The Wild Pear Tree) through an exploration and critique of the mythmaking and monumentalization surrounding the Gallipoli Battle and the multiple ways in which Ceylan’s film unsettles the foundational myths of the last century in Turkey. Ceylan’s scenes and characters are constructed in such a way that the male characters and particularly Sinan (the main character) refuse to succumb to hegemonic codes of masculinity. Through this cinematic refusal by an anti-hero (Sinan), the film addresses the crisis of hegemonic masculinities in their interconnectedness to militarism, nationalism, capitalism, and heteronormativity. Through Sinan’s quest for self-realization, the film signals not only the impotence and vanity of nationalist masculinities but also the caesuras and instabilities in national myths. As the last film of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s new Land of Ghosts trilogy, which started with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep, Ahlat Ağacı seems to close the cycle with a final scene that bespeaks the possibility of unearthing lost others of national mythmaking, bringing fertility and hope to the lands in which collective amnesia reigns supreme.

The disappearance of the working class hero in the New Independent Turkish Cinema: globalization and the politics of festivalism

ABSTRACT In the mid-1990s, a new cinema began to flourish in Turkey led by an intellectual, cosmopolitan and individualistic generation. Although the problems of income distribution were still very persistent in the society, these new filmmakers were no longer interested in the demands of the working class and the social problems arising from the economic structure, albeit between 1960 and 1980, a firm tradition of social realism had flourished in Turkey with the films of the social realists and Yılmaz Güney. This study aims at assessing why the working class hero and his socio-economic problems could not find a place in the New Independent Turkish Cinema that emerged in the 1990s. The oppressive policies and political bans of the coup period softened towards the 1990s. Despite the revival of trade unions and the easing of political bans since the 1990s, the intellectual directors of the period such as Derviş Zaim, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeşim Ustaoğlu and Zeki Demirkubuz focused only on existential, micro-political or identity-centered issues. In that context, besides the emphasis on individualism in line with the neoliberal policies implemented since the 1980 Coup period, the phenomenon of “festivalism” associated with “globalization” and “cultural capital” should also be examined. The festivals focused on urban consumers who were somewhat intellectual but not too radical to pose a threat to the socio-political structure. The festivals also created new channels of dependencies for the so-called “independent” directors eager to finance their films and bound to give multiple concessions.

PIONEERING EXPERIMENTAL PROTAGONISTS IN TURKISH CINEMA

From the discovery of filmmaking 127 years ago, narrative in cinema has developed stories in parallel with the two basic theories of cinematography, realistic film theory and formalist film theory, as well as with the contributions of experimental, feminist or other different approaches. The history of storytelling, dating to more than thousand years, is considered to culminate in a three-fold separation or three different types of telling stories: the Epos, Lyricos and Drama. The following will examine three pioneering films and their protagonists, Cabbar by Yılmaz Güney’s Umut, Zebercet by Ömer Kavur’s Anayurt Oteli and Mahmut by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak, shot with a realistic style, and to reveal how the directors shaped their lead character and what kind of an experience they offered to the audience through them. Hence, the presentation of the characters in the movies mentioned above will be examined considering their own cinematic language and form, through a cooperation with the screenwriter-director, who handled, their subject from an objective point of view, leaving the audience their own interpretation.

Oyuncu Seçiminin Film Yapısına Etkisi: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Sineması Örneği

Bu araştırma, sinemada yönetmenin oyuncu seçiminin bir filmin dilini ve anlatısını ne şekilde etkilediğini anlamayı amaçlamaktadır. Çalışmada, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’ın sineması ele alınmış olup, filmlerindeki diyalogların artış göstermesi, fotoğrafik imgelerden oluşan sinemasının dramatikleşmesi, film sürelerinin uzaması; oyuncu seçimi bağlamında tartışılmış, Model Oyunculuk ve Sistem Oyunculuk teorileri ışığında analiz edilmiştir. Nitel bir yapıya sahip olan bu vaka çalışmasında; kamera arkası görüntüleri ve oyuncuların durum ile ilgili söylemleri veri olarak toplanmış ve elde edilen veriler çerçevesinde bir inceleme gerçekleştirilmiştir. Amatör oyuncularla çalıştığı ilk dört filminden sonra, profesyonel oyuncularla çalıştığı gözlemlenen Ceylan’ın; hâlâ Model Oyunculuk anlayışından izler taşıdığı ifade edilebilir. Bununla birlikte oyuncuya göre senaryo düzenlemesi yapması, oyuncuya alan açıp filme etki etmesine izin veren bir noktada durmaktadır. Ceylan’ın oyuncu seçimlerinden hareketle, oyuncu seçimi ve oyuncunun kendisinin filmsel anlatıyı doğrudan etkilelediği görülmektedir. Gelecek araştırmalar oyuncu seçimiyle birlikte bunu takip eden oyuncu yönetiminin sinemada anlatıya ve dile ne gibi etkileri olduğuna dair ışık tutacaktır.

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

Wild Pear Trees, Patrimonial Legacies: Father-Son Relationship in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's The Wild Pear Tree

This article analyzes the father-son relationship in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film The Wild Pear Tree (2018), which tells the story of a son who desires a life as unlike his father’s narrow, provincial life as possible, only to find himself following in his father’s footsteps almost against his will. Drawing upon Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article examines the film as an oedipal drama that portrays the predicament of a son who grapples with an ineffectual, humiliated father that fails to embody the paternal function. It undertakes to show how the father-son conflict eventually culminates in the father’s transformation from an object of contempt into an identificatory ideal for his son, who becomes heir to a legacy of disillusionment and thwarted hopes.

Stalkers of Istanbul: Silence, Urban Space and Damaged Masculinity in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant

In their introduction to the 2004 anthology The Trouble with Men, editors Phil Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington write: “Gone is the hard body of the action film, or the scarred body of the lo...

Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Slow Cinema

Son yıllarda adları daha sık telaffuz edilen yavaş filmler, 2010’larla birlikte tanımlanmaya, sahip oldukları ortak özellikler belirlenmeye çalışılmıştır. Uzun çekimlerin yer aldığı, sabit kameranın baskın olduğu, genelde suskun karakterlere sahip yavaş filmler, bir film türü olmaktan çok bir tarz olarak özelikle festivallerde izleyicinin karşısına çıkmaktadır. Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang gibi yönetmenlerin filmlerinin ilk sıralara yazıldığı listede Nuri Bilge Ceylan’ın filmleri de yer almaktadır. Bu yazıda yavaş sinema tartışmalarından yola çıkarak yavaş sinemanın temel özelliklerini belirleyip, bu özellikler doğrultusunda Nuri Bilge Ceylan filmlerinin yavaş sinemaya ne oranda dâhil olduğu ele alınmaktadır.

What They See is What We Get in Film: Reality Tells the Fiction


 Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera's lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness.

The impossible possible narrative: the quest for truth in Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

ABSTRACT The paper explores how the film Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011) represents the difficulty of uncovering meaning and truth in a psychoanalytic process of coming to ‘know thyself’. The film is about a journey to resolve a murder mystery, a crime without reference, trace or known motivation. The protagonists’ aspiration for truth is met by a maze of empty signs, confronting them with distortion, disorientation and a variety of possible narratives. The clarification of facts leads to dead ends; solving one mystery only leads to another, opening more contradictory narratives, alternate memories and disputed spaces. The paper reflects on the possibility that the film’s non-discursive, poetic style can capture, beyond its mimetic aspects, a reality beholden to memory, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious. In containing both, by means of its poetic discourse, the film enables an expanded meditation on truth and meaning. It offers a resolution that emerges in the creation of a tale bound not only to facts, but to a general truth: a scheme above time, enabling reflectivity, a story to be told – ”Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”.

ON BOREDOM IN WINTER SLEEP

In this work, we focus on the film Winter Sleep (2014) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose works place special emphasis on various aspects of boredom. As one of the main figures in slow cinema, Ceylan, in this influential work of art, enable us to explore boredom through three main characters: Aydın (Haluk Bilginer), Nihal (Melisa Sözen) and Necla (Demet Akbağ). By taking a closer look at the film, we analyze both symbolism and the behavioral side of boredom as well as how the main characters, in our view, experience and represent distinct types of boredom. In this framework, we examine the issue of boredom and, sometimes, related despair as a result of social change. At the same time, this work partly concentrates on aspects of the socio-cultural structure of Turkey via the analysis of the main characters’ suffering.

Portret młodego pisarza oraz nawiązania do twórczości Antona Czechowa w Dzikiej gruszy Nuriego Bilge Ceylana

Domalewski Adam, Portret młodego pisarza oraz nawiązania do twórczości Antona Czechowa w Dzikiej gruszy Nuriego Bilge Ceylana [Portrait of a Young Writer and References to European Literature in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 343–355. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.18.
 The article focuses on topics related to literature, especially to the works of Anton Chekhov, in the latest film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan The Wild Pear Tree. Its main character, Sinan, is a young writer, while the film is set in the province of Çanakkale, where ancient Troy was located. The analysis of the picture shows that the director refers to the historicity of the myth of the Trojan War with distrust. Instead, Ceylan portrays a local community immersed in intellectual stagnation and creates his hero as an extremely unlikeable misanthropist, to whom literature cannot bring fulfillment. The character of his father, Idris, introduces another ancient motif to the film – the figure of Sisyphus. The relationship between father and son, which deepens in the finale, brings an unexpected note of optimism to the picture, which in its dramaturgy resembles Anton Chekhov’s literary worlds.

Old Concepts, New Contents: The City, Cinema and the Stranger

This study is a cinematic portrait not of the real, but essentially of the updated İstanbul. In the case of the strangers of cinematic İstanbul, the most strategic, useful, as well as the most difficult step for updating the city’s image is to shift the axis from its centres, touristic places, familiar characters, common values and usual events to its corners, secondary places and characters, minimalist conditions, ambivalent values and current changes. For this purpose this study analyzes five films as sociological testimonies without touching upon their details but by focusing on their references: Politiki Kouzina/Bir Tutam Baharat/A Touch of Spice (Tassos Boulmetis, 2003), Köprüdekiler/Men on the Bridge (Aslı Özge, 2009), Kaç Para Kaç/A Run for Money (Reha Erdem, 1999), Uzak/Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002), and 11’e 10 Kala/10 to 11 (Pelin Esmer, 2009). These films, which constitute the framework of this research, are breaking points of modern İstanbul’s social and urban history and of changing form of strangers.

Apocalypse at Painting to Cinema: The end of Western Civilization and Hegemony

As we know, the European-American Western civilization and authority has started to form with the Greek civilization, and strengthened itself through the advent of monotheistic religions. After the Renaissance era and industrial revolutions, the transition from feudalism to industrialization and then to capitalism, made Europe a center of the world. Yet, today, the center has been shifted to the line of Europe-America. In the art of painting, the concept of apocalypse is as old as the first paintings that depict the narrations about human existence. Yet, we can see this concept in an intensified way in the film arts. Finding its inspiration from the social world we live in, film art has been deeply affected by the social class struggles, income inequality, cold war period followed by two major wars, and environmental disasters. By analyzing examples from the history of art and directors from film arts (such as Tarkovsky, Iñárritu, Lars von Trier, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan) who use metaphorical sceneries in dystopian /utopian contents, this article will focus on decoding the signification of the concept of apocalypse throughout the history of humanity.

Presentation of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his Cinema in the Turkish Media

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the most famous Turkish film director with numerous international prizes. However, Ceylan’s presentation by the Turkish media is far from emphasizing his success, talent, creativity, style, technique, and cinematography. He often falls victim to undeserved and superficial criticism of “would be” critics who openly confess they did not watch Ceylan’s movies. He is sometimes portrayed as a political figure and critic of the present day Turkish politics and system. This article focuses on how two mainstream Turkish newspapers, columnists and microbloggers portrayed and reacted to Ceylan and his cinema after his film Winter Sleep won the top prize (the Golden Palm) at Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and the reasons behind this portrayal.

European co-productions and film style: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

ABSTRACTThe increasing numbers of co-productions triggered a change in post-1990s Turkish cinema. Countries improved their production conditions and inspired each other artistically while co-producing films together. In this way, the increase in the number of co-produced films in countries with unstable film industries resulted in developments in film production practices, technical quality and financial possibilities, and improved international connections and international film releases and distributions.In the post-1990s cinema in Turkey, some changes can be observed in filmmaking processes of co-produced films. The best example is the change in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s filmography over the years. His early films such as The Small Town (Kasaba, 1997), Clouds of May (Mayıs Sıkıntısı, 1999) and Distant (Uzak, 2002) are entirely national productions made under the label of NBC Film. He started to work with a producer and became involved in co-productions with his fourth feature Climates (İklimler, 2006). These co-productions not only required a larger cast and crew, they also resulted in changes in his film language and style. Ceylan’s successive films with more complex storylines reveal a distinct change in both the stories and the style of film production he employed.