These elements of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s work comprise what could be called a “vertical” kind of filmmaking. Little may happen on the surface, but then these are not films driven by discrete events—a “horizontal” progression—but rather by the deepening of the human characters in relation to themselves, each other, and their environment. Protagonists are not swept up in an epic narrative, the Hollywood style: they are, instead, prime movers in a fairly basic plot, revealing with each subtle action, each tiny gesture, a truer picture of who they are. Apart from his recently-released Winter Sleep, 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is maybe Ceylan’s most masterful work yet, his strongest realization of this vertical sensibility. In it, a motley crew—a doctor, a prosecutor, district police, diggers, some gendarmerie, and a pair of suspected murderers—drive through the gorgeous landscapes of the Anatolian hillside, looking for a buried body. They find the dead man, file a report, and perform an autopsy. That’s about it, plotwise—but in characters and theme, it’s an acutely thoughtful, elliptical return to the idea of guilt. The man who at the beginning of the film has confessed to a murder is made more sympathetic as the film progresses, while the upright investigators around him move the opposite way, intensifying their own guilt by word and deed. The approach may seem slow, but it’s not in any way static. It is, simply, the way normal life feels. Like Tarkovsky, Ozu, Antonioni, Satyajit Ray, and others before him, Ceylan revels above all in the small, surprising, moments: apples rolling down a hill, water shimmering, candles wavering, inconsequential discussions about yogurt and lamb meat. These non-narrative stretches in a film may cultivate a kind of boredom. But they are, I suggest, a rich kind of boredom. On the one hand, however uneventful, you are watching beautiful observations of life unfold. Beyond that, though, these scenes carry a sense of eternal truth: what experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky calls “self-symbol.” Such “observation-images,” as Tarkovsky wrote, are “innocent of symbolism,” no self-confirmation of anyone’s genius in setting or solving a puzzle. They are just fixed moments from a life as actually lived, fleshing out a fuller understanding of the present in its infinite causes and consequences.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:28:07 +0000
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