Truth and Melancholia in Anatolia: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Preview)
by Stuart Liebman

When Winter Sleep won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, its director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (pronounced Noo-rih Bil-geh Jay-lahn), had been no stranger to the famous film mecca’s audiences for a decade. Already in 2003, his third feature, Distant, won the Grand Prix, Cannes’s second greatest honor, and his two leading men also shared the award for Best Performance by a Male Actor. In 2006, Ceylan was awarded his second FIPRESCI Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics for Climates, the first film he made on HD Video and in which he starred with his wife, Ebru. (His Clouds of May had won that award for the first time in 2000.) By 2008, having surpassed Yilmaz Güney as the best-known film director Turkey had ever produced, his stature was further confirmed by the Cannes jury when he garnered the Prize for Best Director of his intense family drama Three Monkeys. This recognition proved to be but a steppingstone toward a second Grand Prix for his magnificent Once Upon a Time in Anatolia in 2011, which in turn presaged his capstone achievement three years later. Ceylan had become a rare sort of wunderkind at Cannes, but over the same decade European critics had begun to publish rave reviews, and juries at other prestigious festivals, from Dublin through Karlovy Vary to Talinn, had also bestowed upon his distinguished body of work a huge haul of prizes—around one hundred in all.  

Art-cinema venues and critics in the United States came somewhat late to this international party. Despite the pioneering support of the Chicago Film Festival, which showed a couple of Ceylan’s earliest films, American screenings of these first ventures were spotty, at best. That changed in 2004 when New York City’s venerable Film Forum programmed Distant, the first of his later, larger scaled, increasingly ambitious features that had been acquired for distribution in the U.S. by Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films. Bookings at other art cinemas and film festivals across the country picked up speed and Ceylan’s work gained wider distribution. Respectful and eventually enthusiastic critical notices echoing those of their European counterparts followed.

Still, positive critical encomia and art-cinema movie houses that exhibit challenging films by unfamiliar directors do not move the popularity needle very much for American moviegoers. While some of Ceylan’s titles did appear on DVD and were eventually picked up by streaming services, stateside audiences for his films, even those devoted to art cinema, have remained disappointing compared to works by legendary stalwarts—say, Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, or Ozu, among others, whom Ceylan himself so admires. His films are simply not widely appreciated here. Hollywood apparently does not. Case in point: the Academy Awards committee charged with selecting candidates for the Best Foreign Language Film shortlist have never nominated any of his films for an Oscar. Indeed, that august group snubbed what is arguably Ceylan’s paramount achievement, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, in the year it was eligible. Nevertheless, his subtly demanding oeuvre is as distinctive in its thematic concerns and formal strategies, and certainly comparable in quality to the achievements by Ceylan’s more celebrated contemporary peers such as Iran’s Asghar Farhadi, a two-time Oscar winner. Ceylan has simply not received the recognition his work deserves.

Thankfully, an excellent new Blu-ray edition of all the films—one short and eight features—that Ceylan has made to date offers veteran cinephiles and hopefully a broader national audience an opportunity to experience in a more accessible, intimate home setting one of the finest bodies of world cinema produced over the last quarter century. The box set is also loaded with illuminating extras, including interviews with the very thoughtful and articulate director. Another striking part of the package are several revealing “behind the scenes” documentaries. They illustrate how exactingly Ceylan guides his actors’ line readings, gestures, and movements, especially in key scenes, as well as how intensively he works with his production teams to organize set designs, lighting, and cinematography.  

Apart from this edition but recommended for those who will be motivated to explore Ceylan’s artistic imagination and sources in greater depth is a 2018 monograph—The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan: The Global Vision of a Turkish Filmmaker—jointly written by British academics Bülent Diken, Graeme Gilloch, and Craig Hammond. Recently reissued in paperback, the book offers interpretations of what the authors deem to be the “philosophical” implications of Ceylan’s cinema based on ideas derived from a theoretical panorama ranging from the Frankfurt School through French postmodernism. They also provide a series of compelling—if at times gnomically formulated—readings of all the films except for The Wild Pear Tree (2018), which was released after the book went to press.

In the 1990s, Ceylan was a working photographer. I first encountered his photographs fifteen years ago at a superb exhibition at London’s National Film Theatre before I had seen any of his films. Most impressive were the expansive provincial landscapes and village views taken at different times of year, but all revealed his uncanny ability to isolate revealing perspectives on his subjects from carefully calibrated angles and distances. In adapted form, he carried over this skill when he decided to try his hand at making works in the related but different medium of cinema. He was, in fact, almost entirely self-taught as a filmmaker; he briefly attended film school in Turkey, but left, preferring to learn by making his own mistakes. From 1995 on, he threw himself into project after project. Scrutiny of the credits for his first half-dozen films discloses an astonishing fact: Ceylan performed virtually all of the major filmmaking functions, often many at once. Working with a small team of collaborators, family, and friends, he scripted, directed, shot, and edited as well as produced most of his early works. This high level of multitasking almost certainly was required by the extremely modest, at least in part self-financed budgets he had at his disposal at the beginning of his career. His extraordinary efforts to acquire a broad range of professional and technical skills have, in any case, clearly earned substantial artistic dividends. Ceylan’s mastery over and determination to control so many dimensions of the filmmaking process allowed him to devise a constellation of working methods, themes, and stylistic choices that define his stature as a significant cinematic auteur…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1