Bes vakit (Times and Winds, Turkey 2006)

The Imam's family in Bes vakit

Bes vakit is the kind of film that brings out the best in some reviewers and rather than go through the same points, I’m tempted to point you towards Jonathan Romney in the Independent on Sunday. I’d go along with all of Romney’s points, but perhaps I can add some other ones as well.

At the beginning of the film, I had no expectations about how it would look, but I assumed that it would be similar to the work of Abbas Kiarostami or the Makhmalbafs (given that geographically and culturally they are perhaps the closest other major filmmakers). The first surprise then was to find that the film is a CinemaScope presentation. ‘Scope at 2.35:1 makes a big difference to the representation of landscape – and, importantly here, to the placing of figures in that landscape. The views of mountains, valleys and the distant sea necessarily become ‘panoramic’, stressing width not height, and characters are shown in medium shot or MCU they appear much more constrained than in 1.85:1 or 1.66:1 (the more familiar ratios for the neo-realists). Of course, it helps if the projectionist can get the anamorphic lens working properly – surprisingly, the print at London’s Renoir Cinema seemed out of focus at either side of the frame. Despite this, I enjoyed the views of the area.

There are familiar elements from the Iranian films (though I discovered that the location was on the most north-westerly coast of Turkey overlooking the Hellespont – i.e. closer to Europe than Iran), but I was reminded of a range of other films. The ‘distanced’ feel of some of the village scenes reminded me of Carlos Reygadas and Silent Light (2007), the Mexican film about a Mennonite community and the children in school reminded me of several European films and especially of some Spanish films set in isolated villages. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) sprang to mind. Bes vakit does not have the strong narrative sense of either of the other films mentioned here, but it does share a sense of ‘other worldliness’. Romney points to the recurring compositions of the children lying seemingly asleep in a variety of locations. I found these quite disturbing and one occasion I thought the character was dead (a boy is lying amongst what looks like the ruins of a house). The use of music (by an Estonian composer) adds to this feeling. It seems very portentous and undercuts any sense of rural calm.

The trailer gives a sense of how the film looks and sounds, though I think it overemphasises the scenes of violence by adults directed at children and suggests that the narrative threads are much clearer than they really are:

Overall, this seems to me an enjoyable and rather beautiful avant-garde film, more like an art installation than a straight narrative movie. I’ve still not quite worked out the meaning of a film which is divided into five sections relating to the prayer times in the village (which are then offered in reverse order, so that the film ends in the morning). There are narratives – mainly associated with themes of growing up, sexual awakening, identity within a family structure etc., but also the simple narratives of daily life, here bound up in ideas of collective responsibility. But the film doesn’t offer any coherent sociological explanation of how the village functions. There appears to be a jointly owned flock of sheep, but it wasn’t clear how the families made their livings beyond animal husbandry. The village isn’t really that remote (and the boys are sometimes dressed quite formally – more as they might be in cities?). But this is good for the sense of mystery that underpins the daily routine. I think it might be quite useful in raising discussions about film narrative.

24 Frames: books on regional cinemas (1)

The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, Gönül Dönmez-Colin (ed), Wallflower Press, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-9056-7410-7

‘24 Frames’ is a very welcome series from Wallflower Press that over the last few years has begun to introduce new audiences to films from ‘national and regional cinemas’ around the world. These are scholarly collections with 24 articles on individual films in each collection. The definition of a ‘regional cinema’ is always going to be arbitrary and the introduction to this collection by the editor turns the arbitrariness to the advantage of the book. On the one hand, the definition here of ‘North Africa and the Middle East’ includes three major film-producing countries, each of which deserves its own volume. On the other, there are good reasons, historical, political, cultural etc., why it is useful to group these cinemas. Commercially, the ‘region’ represents only a small part of the international film market, even though there are sizable local audiences and the potential for wider distribution. To illustrate the problem of definitions, the annual ‘World Film Market Trends’ publication, Focus (from the European Audio-Visual Observatory) includes all of Africa and the Middle East, but not Turkey. In this collection, Turkey is included, but not sub-Saharan Africa.

The Middle East is a highly problematic term that has arguably increased in usage with its importance as a concept in American foreign policy. The term was first popularised during the European colonial/imperial period, but then it referred primarily to Iraq and Persia/Iran. As a child, I remember the term the ‘Near East’. For the British, the ‘East’ began at Suez and the ‘Far East’ began at Singapore. India and Burma were the Raj. These are my memories of terms that lingered on after the Empire went. These terms at least had a (Eurocentric) logic that isn’t there in current usage. As Gönül Dönmez-Colin points out, the term ‘West Asia’ is sometimes used by Indian scholars and it does make more sense. Egypt and Turkey then conveniently straddle Asia and Africa/Europe respectively.

The region does not have a single language culture. Although Arabic, English and French are used extensively, Turkish, Hebrew and Farsi are distinctive language cultures. Religion and ethnicity are also mixed, especially in the littoral that the French used to call the Levant, with Lebanon and Beirut in particular celebrating diversity. This cultural mixing has contributed to several distinctive modes of film culture, both in production and in distribution/exhibition. The latter means that whilst some films from the region have been widely available in European and American specialised cinema circuits, others (generally those more popular with local audiences) have struggled to be seen outside parts of the region. There is now the beginnings of a Turkish popular cinema in limited distribution in Germany and other parts of Europe for the Turkish diaspora and also the possibility of Arabic-language films on satellite, but again these are unlikely to be seen by ‘Western’ audiences.

The difficulties of distribution mean that I have only seen three of the 24 films discussed in the book (although I have access to a couple more that I will get to eventually). It’s difficult therefore to evaluate the coverage of the diversity of material presented here. I can’t criticise a book because I haven’t seen the films, but the availability of films is an issue in opening up study. You can just imagine the headache the editor must have had trying to commission authors and titles, trying to represent an historical perspective and a spread across national cinemas, popular cinema and specialised cinema. For the record, the book has entries on four films each from Egypt, Turkey and Iran, four from the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) and seven from what was the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine – several involving co-productions, often with France) with the last entry about an Iraqi film, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection, produced from Switzerland and Germany. The only films made before 1970 are Ghazal Al-Banat (Candy Floss) and Bab El-Hadid (Cairo Station), both from Egypt in 1949 and 1958 respectively, the first representing the Egyptian studio system, the second Egypt’s principal auteur, Youssef Chahine.

I have seen two of the films in the last couple of years, Silences of the Palace (Tunisia, 1994) and Uzak (Distant, Turkey, 2002), so I’ll focus on the analyses of these two. Viola Shafik’s essay (10 pp with references) on Silences of the Palace proved invaluable in working on the film for a recent course. The film did very well on the festival circuit winning prizes and it received distribution in Europe. It tells the story of a young woman growing up in the ‘women’s quarters’ in a Bey’s house (Beys were the aristocratic rulers in Tunisia, granted privileges by the French colonial administrators) in the 1950s. The story is told in flashback by the central character who has become a cabaret singer by the 1960s. Shafik begins with a commentary on the film’s critical reputation and she points out that although revered in the West as an ‘art film’, partly because it deals with the position of women in Islamic society, it is in fact a skilful re-interpretation of a classical melodrama. Shafik then notes that in 1995, the film was distributed widely in the West but, apart from within Tunisia itself, it was not sold to distributors elsewhere in the Arab world (i.e. unlike popular Egyptian melodramas). She goes on to explore the complex set of theoretical issues around ‘popular’ and ‘art cinema’, the denigration of Egyptian melodramas, the subtle transformation of the genre in Silences, the ‘moment’ of liberation from colonial rule as represented in national cinemas etc. By providing useful specific cultural knowledge as well as contextualising insights, Shafik makes possible a much richer reading of the film.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has ‘arrived’ in Europe and North America as an auteur, introduced outside the festival circuit by Uzak. In 2007, his position was firmly established by the critical reception to Iklimler. Uzak deals with the arrival in snowy Istanbul of a man from the rural hinterland. He comes to the apartment of his cousin, a photographer and very much the ‘metropolitan man’. The cousins have a very ‘distant’ relationship, exploration of which is the focus of the film. (The photographer is a typical character partly based on Ceylan himself.) S. Ruken Ozturk’s essay is just eight pages. Again, like Viola Shafik, she provides contextualising information about Ceylan’s earlier career, about the differences between Ceylan’s work and those of diaspora filmmakers such as Fatih Akin. She emphasises that Distant has been seen by far more cinemagoers in France (150,000) than in Turkey (60,000). What follows is again a rich reading of the film in terms of allegory and metaphor (Istanbul is a ‘distant place’ of 10 million souls caught somewhere between Turkey and Europe, the tale of the two cousins is played out in three scenes using a mousetrap – linked to the fable of the town mouse and country mouse) as well as in terms of a discourse of masculinity. I would have found this very useful after I’d first seen the film and again when I was teaching Iklimler.

If the rest of the entries are up to these two, I think that this will prove to be a valuable book. It has certainly encouraged me to think about hunting down more of these films on imported DVDs.

24 Frames: The Cinema of Central Europe, Peter Hames (ed), Wallflower, London 2004, ISBN 1-904764-20-7

The ‘naming’ of regions is also an issue in this collection. For far too long, the four countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been viewed as generally ‘East European’ and up until 1989 as part of an Eastern bloc dominated by Soviet Communism. As a result, the films have been viewed through a prism of ideological awareness – judged by the extent to which they have confirmed or resisted Soviet hegemony. But before 1939 ‘Central Europe’ was something of a powerhouse of artistic achievement deriving in part from the nationalist struggles of artists within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the new nation states that followed the break-up of the Empire after 1918. In this conception, I would expect to include aspects of German and Austrian Cinema, but I’m sure they will be part of another volume (and in any case will have different kinds of concerns).

Peter Hames’ collection of essays covers the four countries and the films range from the 1930s to the mid 1990s with a perhaps understandable focus on the mid 1960s (the period of the Czechoslovak New Wave). Apart from some of the earliest films, most of the titles have been distributed in the UK and several are now available on DVD. These include films by well-known European auteurs such as Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958 and Man of Marble, 1977) and Krzyzstof Kieslowski (Dekalog, 1988).

In this case, I have seen many of the films discussed and I have used material in the book on an evening class covering Central European Cinema. I found it extremely useful and I’d recommend it.

Auf der anderen Seite (Germany/Turkey 2007)

At last a day off and the chance to watch some movies. In fact it started the night before when I saw Juno, but Friday was the day when I managed to see the new print of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and the new Fatih Akin, ‘On the other side‘.

I enjoyed The Conformist, especially because of the performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant and the sumptuous mise en scène. It is wonderful to return to the films of 1970 and to embrace a cinema that could mix a traditional story with a strong sense of atmosphere and no worries about narrative. But it is equally wonderful to watch a contemporary movie as riveting as the Fatih Akin.

As an aside, I was not impressed by the cinema showing the film. The Curzon Soho is supposedly the premiere UK art cinema, but it isn’t a patch on the Cubby Broccoli or Pictureville at Bradford. I really don’t like a cinema where you have to look up to the screen (the Prince Charles off Leicester Square is the worst offender – but I haven’t been there for a while, perhaps it has changed?). Which means that is even more impressive that Auf der anderen seite can so exert its power. I’m now seriously considering how I can get to Istanbul by train.

I found this film much less aggressive and ‘hard’ than Akin’s previous film Head On, but equally moving. I hadn’t expected the Tom Tykwer style coincidences to be so important and I loved the sequence in which characters in a car pass a train carrying other important characters – two narratives interconnecting without the protagonists’ knowledge. Great too, to have such an open ending. I just hope that the deal with Sky Box Office pays off and that more people get to see the film this way – I just worry that it won’t get seen in cinemas by more traditional arthouse audiences if the digital pay per view release cuts the number of film prints in distribution.

A useful review article on the film by Thomas Elsaesser is on the Film Comment website.

Gegen die Wand (Head-On, Germany/Turkey 2003)

The 'chorus' in Head-On

Director Fatih Akin (b. 1973) is one of the exciting new talents of German cinema. Growing up in a Turkish community in Hamburg he studied Visual Communications and started making short films in the mid 1990s, immediately attracting attention and prizes. Head-On, his fourth fiction feature, won the 2004 Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. There were some comments that perhaps the Berlin Festival was celebrating its own, but the power of the film is undeniable. This is not obviously an ‘art’ film. Akin’s previous features were rooted in the crime and comedy genres and Head-On has a broad appeal as a (in places quite brutal) ‘tragedy-comedy romance’.

The two central characters are both, like Akin, Turks living in Hamburg. Cahit is a 40 something man whose life has been destroyed by the death of his wife and Sibel is a young woman from a deeply conservative Turkish family who is desperate to escape and ‘live’ the life of a liberated young woman in Hamburg. They meet in a psychiatric ward after Cahit has driven his old car into a wall and Sibel has attempted suicide by slitting her wrists. Sibel pleads with Cahit to let her marry him so that she can escape her family. Eventually, he is persuaded to go through with the plan – but the outcome is perhaps not what was expected.

Like several other European directors, Akin is a fan of Jim Jarmusch and of popular music. But Head-On is seemingly uncontrolled with outbursts of violence and almost slapstick humour. Yet it is also a highly intelligent film, both in terms of subject and plotting and in presentation. Cahit was born in Turkey but has lived long enough in Germany to have forgotten both the nuances of Turkish as a language and its cultural mores. Sibel was born in Germany, but her family’s attachment to Turkish culture means that to carry through her plan, Cahit must act like a conventional Turkish suitor. The scenes covering the proposal and the wedding milk the cross-cultural misunderstandings for the same kinds of easy laughs that characterised a British film like East is East (UK 1999). Although a big commercial hit, East is East had its disturbing moments and Head-On too, soon undermines easy laughter with much darker representations.

Questions of Turkish and German identity are to some extent indicated by use of language. British audiences may miss some of this if they don’t notice when characters switch from German to Turkish and vice versa. For instance, in one early scene when Cahit and Sibel are arguing violently on a late night bus about the possibility of a marriage, they are ejected by the bus driver, a Turkish man who calls them ‘godless dogs’ (in Turkish) after they have been arguing in German. In the second half of the film the action moves to Turkey and in order to communicate effectively with an important character who is a manager in a large Istanbul hotel, Cahit switches to English.

Amongst all the techniques derived from genre cinema, Akin also employs a typical Brechtian device in the form of a music ensemble, dressed formally and traditionally, on the shore of the Bosphorus where they perform a number of traditional songs. These form chapter markers, seemingly commenting on the narrative. Neither a wholly mainstream genre picture, nor a realist art film, Head-On works as both a strong entertainment and a commentary on the new Europe of crossing frontiers and forging new identities – or of rediscovering roots and identities. Perhaps not surprisingly, Head-On proved a popular success in both Germany and Turkey. Its festival success led to a wider distribution (including to the UK) than most of the other films made within or about Germany’s immigrant communities. Around 20 million of Germany’s 82 million population are officially ‘of foreign descent’, including 2.3 million Turks.

Roy Stafford (Adapted from evening class notes, first written in March 2007)

Iklimler (Climates) (Turkey/France 2006)

(These notes were for a course on New European Cinema)

So, why is a Turkish film included in a course on New European Cinema? There are two basic reasons. First is the status of Turkey, a country which in geographical terms has a foothold in the European continent, even if the main part of the country is in ‘Asia Minor’. In political terms, Turkey has already begun the process of bidding to become a member of the European Union and a sizeable Turkish diaspora already exists in Germany and other European countries. In this sense, Turkey is part of the ‘idea of Europe’. Secondly, the films made by Nuri Bilge Ceylan have been recognised as carrying on the tradition of ‘European Art Cinema’ established in the 1950s.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan (b. 1959, Istanbul)
With five films that he has written and directed since 1995, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is now established as a European auteur. His first film, Koza (Cocoon) a short feature (20 mins) gained a nomination at Cannes and subsequent films have often been recognised on the festival circuit with nominations and several prizes. Nominations for European Film Awards in 2000 and 2003 give a form of institutional kudos to the concept of Ceylan as a European filmmaker.

Ceylan began his artistic career as a photographer. This is evident in the stunning images that he achieves and he has continued to pursue a double career – a photographic exhibition has been showing in London alongside the release of Climates. Ceylan spent time in the Turkish Army, completed a degree in electrical engineering and studied filmmaking in London. His focus has been on very ‘personal’ stories and not so much on the issues in contemporary Turkish society (i.e. major issues such as the contesting claims of Islam and secular culture). He says that he finds it difficult to think ‘locally’ when modern communication allows him to be part of international culture. Inevitably, he has been deemed ‘Westernised’ by some commentators in Turkey.

European art cinema and the auteur
What exactly is art ‘cinema’? The first usage of the term appears to refer to films, especially in Europe in the early days of cinema, which adapted famous works of literature or great historical moments or which represented various aspects of high art on screen. The French production company Film d’art of 1908 typified this approach. In the 1920s, again especially in Europe, a movement of small film clubs (in the UK, ‘film societies’) began to promote screenings of films which were considered the work of film ‘artists’ such as the surrealist Luis Buñuel. By the 1930s the range of ‘film artists’ included high profile directors such as Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union, G. W. Pabst and Fritz Lang in Germany, René Clair in France etc. Some of these filmmakers went on to be absorbed into the mainstream of international cinema. The ‘artist’ tradition was maintained in various movements termed avant garde or experimental cinema or, in the UK today, ‘artists’ films’. In some cases ‘art cinema’ was associated in Europe with ideas of national cinema, so that the ‘neo-realists’ in Italy during the 1940s were seen as part of art cinema (whereas popular Italian melodramas were not).

After 1945, the concept of ‘art cinema’ began to change, partly because of developments in film criticism and film culture, partly because of the continued domination of international markets by Hollywood. Art cinema in this later sense is often seen as a phenomenon of the twenty years from 1950-70. In a formal sense, art films were seen as defined by being ‘not Hollywood’ in terms of characters, narrative and the general approach to realism. The work of Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini etc. was often seen as primarily concerned with the inner worlds of characters represented by fragmented narratives. Such films were more difficult to follow in terms of the direct narrative pleasures of Hollywood. They were also more ‘open’ about the social problems encountered by characters, about their sexuality and spirituality. Such films appealed to a minority audience, but one which was significant in numbers in many European film cultures. Although this notion of art cinema was in the 1950s a mainly European development, the 1950s pantheon included Japanese directors such as Kurosawa Akira and Mizoguchi Kenji and the Bengali director Satyajit Ray.

The second driving force behind art cinema was the notion of the ‘personal vision’ of the auteur director as promoted by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif in France in the mid-1950s. The critics turned filmmakers of Cahiers such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer themselves became feted by art cinema audiences. Successfully arguing against the so called ‘quality films’ in France of the 1950s – the carefully scripted literary adaptations, studio-bound films with starry casts, the auteur directors made (at least initially) smaller films on lower budgets, deriving energy from varied sources including the street, political and social issues, their own lives, pulp fiction etc.

Since 1970, the decline in audiences for cinema (i.e. films in the theatrical market) and changes in Hollywood filmmaking (the rise of American independent cinema) have seen the gradual disappearance of European art cinema as a consistent force. It is still possible to identify auteurist cinema (especially in France, where state subsidy encourages young filmmakers) but art cinemas are now ‘specialised cinemas’ showing a much greater variety of films and those resembling the art cinema of Bergman and Antonioni are much more rare.

Ceylan and art cinema
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films are, for many audiences, reminiscent of the 1950s films. They focus on characters not unlike Ceylan himself (indeed they are often played by his friends and relatives – even if he maintains that they are not autobiographical). The narratives are minimalist by Hollywood standards. This is how the story of Climates is outlined on Ceylan’s website:

Man was made to be happy for simple reasons and unhappy for even simpler ones – just as he is born for simple reasons and dies for even simpler ones . . . Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.
<http://www.nbcfilm.com>

The interest in the film comes from the ways in which the two characters are presented within an emotional landscape and how that is represented using cinematography, sound and editing. There are rather different pleasures on offer from either Hollywood narratives or those we have seen on the course so far in films like Mar Adentro or Drømmen.

Here is an astute critic/reviewer commenting on Climates after its screening at the New York Film Festival in October 2006:

Nuri Bilge Ceylan elegantly channels the spirit and self-reflexivity of Atom Egoyan’s Calendar and Roberto Rossellini’s seminal Voyage in Italy (that in turn, paved the way for Michelangelo Antonioni’s psychological landscape films) to create an equally sublime, serenely composed, and understatedly bittersweet chronicle of the dissolution of a relationship through the austerity and desolation of the landscape in his latest film Climates. As the film begins, a middle-aged university instructor and doctoral candidate named Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), en route to a summer holiday in the idyllic Aegean coast with his younger lover, a television art director named Bahar (Ebru Ceylan), deliberatively shoots a series of photographs of ancient ruins for possible use in a class lecture, oblivious to his traveling companion’s noticeable discomfort and tedium over his latest distractive side trip . . . Charting the indefinable trajectory of Isa’s restlessness, alienation, and melancholy through the climatic and geographic changes that reflect the interiority of Isa’s unrequited – and indefinable – longing, Climates exquisitely (and indelibly) maps a spare, elegiac, and achingly intimate meditation on the ephemeral seasons of the human heart. (‘Acquarello’ on the Strictly Film School website at <http://filmref.com/journal/archives/2006_journal/new_york_film_festival/>

This is clearly a highly specialised cineaste’s reading of the film and it is followed by an exchange of comments posted on the same website:

I can see the skeleton of the Voyage to Italy archetype constructing the whole narration here . . . There is something of the modernism of Bergman/Antonioni without the speech-drive, thus a non-intellectualized existentialism, a more visceral (yet mutic) incarnation of individual solitude within the couple. (HarryTuttle)

I agree with you on the non-intellectualized existentialism . . . it’s essentially going back to a more literary text of Sartre and Camus’ novels where it was all about the minutiae and the observation rather than the explication of it. (Acquarello)

We’ll attempt to explore these ideas about existentialism and landscape in our discussion next week.

The work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan is discussed by Nick James in Sight & Sound, February 2007

Roy Stafford 25/2/07