h. nazan ışık—
27 October 2014—
It has been a good year for the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His last movie Kış uykusu /Winter Sleep was this year’s Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival and he also won the FIPRESCI award at Cannes, The film is also selected as Turkey’s entry for the Best Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards.
And now the Museum Modern of art (MoMA) gives Nuri Bilge Ceylan who is a great photographer and one of the most respected names in world cinema, a full retrospective. The exhibition opens with the New York premiere of Kis uykusu (Winter Sleep) (2014), and shows all seven features and one short film he has made.
A scene from Kış uykusu/Winter Sleep. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Credit Adopt Films.
This is how MoMA introduces the series: “Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become a contemporary master with an attentive, concentrated, slow-burn style all his own. Using a mix of professional and amateur performers (sometimes including his wife and writing partner, Ebru Ceylan), the filmmaker constructs a world of both breathtaking physical immediacy and philosophical distance. An accomplished photographer, Ceylan seems to coax his films organically from their settings, using mood, widescreen framing, and a contemplative pace to draw the viewer into his world—which can be as lonely as it is beautiful.”
Kış uykusu (Winter Sleep)
2014. Turkey. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 196 min.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan. With Haluk Bilginer, Demet Akbağ, Melisa Sözen. Winner of the Palme d’Or of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Ceylan’s most recent film. Aydın (Bilginer) a former actor who now bloviates in the local newspaper, Aydın’s supreme self-confidence blinds him to the resentment of those he takes to be his natural subjects—not just the villagers, but his wife and sister, who live with him in his mountain redoubt. Focusing on the seemingly unbridgeable divisions between classes and generations, Ceylan develops his themes of guilt, responsibility, faith, and spirituality into a family drama with deep implications. In Turkish; English subtitles. 196 min.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014. 7:00 p.m., Theater 2. T2
(Introduced by Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)
- Turkey/Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 157 min.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Ercan Kesal. With Muhammet Uzuner, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Taner Birsel. Ceylan a search through the countryside surrounding a small Anatolian village for a missing body. The killer has confessed, but was too drunk to remember where the murder took place; as the quest continues through the night, the local doctor and coroner (Uzuner), the police commissioner (Erdoğan), and the lead prosecutor (Birsel) find their conversation circling back to a single significant topic: the notion that the sins of the parents are paid for by their children. Ceylan’s expressive use of landscape here achieves new heights, as he meticulously documents the haunting atmosphere that envelops the isolated town and its tortured inhabitants. In Turkish; English subtitles. 157 min.
Thursday, October 30 2014. 4:00 p.m., Theater 2. T2
(Introduced by Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Saturday, November 1. 2014. 7:30 p.m.. Theatre 2. T2
İklimler (Climates)
- Turkey/France. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 101 min.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan as Isa and Ebru Ceylan (his real life wife) as Bahar in Climates (İklimler) 2006. Directed by NuriBilge Ceylan. Credit Zeitgeist Films.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Nazan Kırılmış, Mehmet Eryılmaz. A master of widescreen composition, Ceylan smoothly conjugates vast, craggy landscapes and all-too-intimate domestic interiors in this study of a toxic but stubbornly persistent relationship. Ceylan and his wife, Ebru Ceylan, offer unsparing portrayals of the central couple, a desiccated, massively self-involved Istanbul academic and his possessively romantic partner, an art director for a turgid television series. Ceylan employs extended silences and achingly empty spaces to evoke the contradictory feelings that bind the pair in a permanent dance of rupture and reunion. In Turkish; English subtitles. 101 min.
Thursday, October 30, 2014. 7:30 p.m., Theatre 2. T2
(Introduced by Mehmet Eryılmaz)
Wednesday, November 5. 2014. 4:p.m., Theatre 3. T3
Üç maymun (Three Monkeys)
- Turkey/France/Italy. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 109 min.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Ercan Kesal. With Yavuz Bingöl, Hatice Aslan, Ahmet Rıfat Sungar. The usually unruffled surface of Ceylan’s films is here disturbed by some spectacularly melodramatic plot elements borrowed from the Turkish popular cinema. A conniving politician (co-screenwriter Kesal) pays his salt-of-the-earth driver (Bingöl) to take the rap for a hit-and-run accident, then takes advantage of the chauffeur’s absence to conduct an affair with his wife (Aslan). Brooding on the sidelines is the couple’s unemployed, alienated teenage son (Sungar). In Turkish; English subtitles. 109 min.
Friday, October 31. 2014. 4:00 p.m. T2
Sunday, November 2. 2014. 2:00 p.m., T2
Uzak (Distant)
- Turkey. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 110 min.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Cemil Kavukçu. With Muzaffer Özdemir, Mehmet Emin Toprak. Ceylan’s cinema of loneliness achieved international recognition with this, his third feature, which won the Grand Jury Prize and an acting award for its two leading performers at the Cannes Film Festival. Mahmut (Özdemir) is a cosmopolitan photographer who lives in a permanent funk in fashionable Istanbul; when an awkward country cousin, Yusuf (Toprak), turns up on his doorstep, seeking a place to crash while he conducts a futile search for employment, Mahmut is both grateful for the companionship and resentful of the intrusion. The men may share the space of Ceylan’s meticulously composed frames, but their lives move inexorably in different directions, toward different solitudes. In Turkish; English subtitles. 110 min.
Friday, October 31, 2014. 7:30 p.m., T2
Tuesday, November 4, 2014. 7:30 p.m.., T2
Kasaba (The Small Town)
1997. Turkey. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Emin Ceylan. 82 min.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Emin Ceylan. With Cihat Bütün, Emin Ceylan, Fatma Ceylan, Havva Sağlam. Drawn from a story by Ceylan’s sister, Emine, and based on events from the director’s childhood, Kasaba captures four seasons in a Turkish village. Shot by Ceylan in a soft light, the film drifts through a series of sketches amplified by lyrical touches, climaxing in an extended sequence that finds three generations (the grandparents are played by Ceylan’s own mother and father) gathered around a fire on a summer night, eating roast corn and exchanging observations on life and change. Ceylan’s feature debut, Kasaba reveals his debt to Anton Chekhov in its rueful, sympathetic portrait of provincial life. 82 min.
Koza (Cocoon)
- Turkey. 20 min.Ceylan’s ambitious first short film, also featuring his parents. 20 min.
Saturday, November 1, 2014. 4:00 p.m., T2
Wednesday, November 5, 2014. 7:30 p.m., T3
Mayıs sıkıntısı (Clouds of May)
- Turkey. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 130 min.
Screenplay by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With Emin Ceylan, Mazaffer Özdemir, Fatma Ceylan, Sadık Incesu. Ceylan’s second film—in some ways a “making of” his first—tells the story of a filmmaker (Mazaffer Özdemir) who returns to the village of his childhood to scout locations for a new project. But a new element emerges with the figure of Sadık (Sadık Incesu), an aimless young man who sees the filmmaker as his ticket to escape the provinces for the bright lights of Istanbul. Immersed in the sounds and textures of its rural environment and filmed with an unforced attentiveness, Clouds of May establishes the tension between documentary and drama that drives much of Ceylan’s later work. 130 min.
Sunday, November 2, 2014. 4:30 p.m., Theatre 2
Tuesday, November 4, 2014. 4:00 p.m., T3
Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, and Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, Department of Film.