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Nuri Bilge Ceylan: An Introduction and InterviewAuthor(s): Rob WhiteSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 64-72Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/FQ.2011.65.2.64 .

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64 WINTER 2011

NURI BILGE CEYLAN:

AN INTRODUCTION AND INTERVIEW

ROB WHITE TALKS WITH THE TURKISH DIRECTOROF ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA

Nuri Bilge Ceylan was born in 1959 in Istanbul and grew upin the town of Yenice in the far west of Turkey. (A biographi-cal summary can be found at www.nuribilgeceylan.com.)Having graduated in electrical engineering prior to militaryservice, he studied film only in his thirties. Koza (Cocoon, 1995) was selected for the Cannes Film Festival competition,the first Turkish short ever to achieve this distinction. Ceylanhas been acclaimed at Cannes ever since: Distant (2002)won the Grand Prix in 2002 (and many prizes at other fes-tivals too), Climates (2006) the FIPRESCI prize, and Three

Monkeys (2008) the Best Director award. In his brief accep-tance speech in 2008, Ceylan said (in English): “I would liketo dedicate the prize to my lonely—and beautiful—country,which I love passionately.” This year he won the Grand Prixagain for Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

DISTANT

After two features about provincial life, Kasaba (The SmallTown, 1997, black-and-white) and Clouds of May (1999),Distant begins with cocks crowing at dawn as, in a long shot,a man trudges through snow. Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak),who wants to find work on a ship, is on his way to Istanbul tostay in (and mess up) the apartment–studio belonging to hisfastidious cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a commer-cial photographer with artistic ambitions. By contrast withthe expansive depiction of the outset of Yusuf’s journey thefirst shot of Mahmut is a gloomy close-up profile. A womanin a red jacket undresses on a bed across the room but she is

out of focus in the background, and when Mahmut gets upto join her the entire image is blurred. Such play with scale,focus, and minimal depth of field recurs in Ceylan’s films:a brief scene in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia in whichthe protagonist revives himself at the baths is initially all ablur: to exhausted eyes the environment looks indistinct—

the observer’s incapacity or unhappiness distances the world.Mahmut is “stuck in ruefulness,” to quote Anthony Lane(The New Yorker , March 22, 2004); his life has gone wrong.Interviewed by Geoff Andrew in 2003, Ceylan calls the char-acter “a melancholy man, who had lost his ideals through alack of motivation; who has plenty of opportunities to achievehis ideals but doesn’t have the urge to do so” (www.sensesof-cinema.com/2004/feature-articles/nuri_bilge_ceylan/). The

Film Quarterly , Vol. 65, No. 2, pps 64–72, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2011 by the Regents of t he University of California.All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’sRights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2011.65.2.64

Nuri Bilge CeylanCourtesy of Cinema Guild.

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FILM QUARTERLY 65

director frequently acknowledges Chekhov’s stories, andapathetic Mahmut resembles the rather more loquacious

Alyokhin in “About Love,” of whom it is said that he is “likea squirrel in a cage, showing no interest in ... anything thatcould have made his life more agreeable” (translated by

Ronald Wilks; Penguin, 2002, 94).The photographer’s predicament is encapsulated in

a much-discussed scene in which he watches the trolleysequence from Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Yusuf dozes, pre-sumably unused to Tarkovsky. When he goes to bed Mahmutputs on a porn tape which he watches indifferently. Writingabout this scene in the fall 2011 Paris Review, Geoff Dyerremarks that it “is probably the most deadpan sequence Ihave ever seen” (“Into the Zone,” 138–9), and he has a point.Ceylan’s account of Mahmut’s alienation here, given in a2009 interview with Geoff Andrew, is more downbeat: “in an

earlier scene, the photographer has a discussion with friends,and one friend criticises him for losing his ideals and theyblame him. So when he gets home, he tries to create a bond,to find his ideals again. That’s why he watches Tarkovsky. Andhe thinks that maybe he can regain his fire and enthusiasm.He doesn’t mind the other guy at all, but as a side-effect thecousin is bored of course. So when the other guy leaves to go tobed, the situation changes and something triggers in him andhe loses his enthusiasm again and he shifts to porn because

it’s easier. And he wants to get rid of the violence inside him-self. That’s why he switches to porn” (www.guardian.co.uk/ film/2009/feb/06/nuri-bilge-ceylan-interview-transcript). Theonly discernible trace of this burgeoning aggression, however,is Mahmut’s evident disaffection, the obvious fact that he is

so little engaged by his viewing choices—or anything else forthat matter, unless it is his obsessive tidying or perhaps therelated low-key power game that develops with Yusuf after thevisitor overstays his welcome.

The pain which afflicts Ceylan’s characters seems tobe basically inexpressible. The out-of-focus woman in redappears again later, sitting dejectedly in the bathroom, andthe image epitomizes a pervasive sadness which is perhapsbest understood in terms of an idea of emptiness. AsumanSuner in New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and

Memory (I. B. Tauris, 2010) quotes Gilles Deleuze’s idea of

characters “suffering … from their absence from themselves”before considering Yusuf, who finds no job and instead spendsmuch of his time shambolically and a little menacingly tryingto pick up women: “Now there is no longer another place togo to. His dream has already been realized, without givinghim what he had expected. He is emptied now, deprived notonly of a fulfilling life, but also of the anticipation of it” (96).This self-absence is intense in Distant’s penultimate scene,a variation on the earlier Tarkovsky-watching. Mahmut is

In the shadowsDistant . © NBC Ajans. DVD: Artificial Eye (U.K.).











66 WINTER 2011

in front of the TV but there is nothing on. The white-noiseflicker is as devoid of content as the lost look in his glazedeyes and the sound made by wind chimes just outside.Ceylan holds on his numb face and then cuts to a deliriousshot of the TV with a standing lamp next to it. Breathing andnondiegetic drone sounds build to to a high-pitched whine

as, in slow motion, the lamp falls. It is a highly stylized shotin a movie that mostly tends toward minimalism, but what isachieved by the artfulness is an erasure. Mahmut’s late-nighttorpor of consciousness is a condition of negation, vacancy;such altered mental states, somewhere between wakefulnessand oblivion, in which personality dwindles to a shadow,haunt Ceylan’s films.

CLIMATES AND THREE MONKEYS

The director has expressed reservations about the truismthat his country is a crossroads nation, mediating betweenEurope and Asia, especially when the idea is promoted as apositive aspect of Turkish intellectual life. Gönul Dönmez-Colin in Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging

(Reaktion Books, 2008) quotes a 2004 newspaper interviewin which Ceylan dismisses this supposed mediator role as a“consolation prize,” preferring instead an identification withartists of the underdeveloped world: “Imperialism has suc-ceeded in making the underdeveloped countries feel slightlyashamed of their culture. The influence is more obtrusiveon the third world intellectuals who have better possibilitiesto communicate with the West. Those who assimilate thepoint of view of the other see their own customs and tradi-

tions as extremities created by ignorance.” This remark shedslight on the malaise that afflicts Mahmut in Distant as wellas on the discontentedness and frustration of Isa, the maleprotagonist of Climates, an architecture professor with anunfinished dissertation. Dönmez-Colin claims that Distant

was the first Turkish film to skeptically portray an uncommit-ted breed of neoliberal intellectuals that “felt autonomous[yet] in practical life gave all their creativity to the service ofcapitalism” (200).

Mahmut’s carefully organized solitude may be debilitat-ing but it at least protects him from the painful intimacies

examined in Climates and Three Monkeys. The spouses inClimates, Isa and Bahar, are engrossingly played by the direc-tor himself and his wife Ebru Ceylan respectively. (Writingin the November 2006 Artforum, the only precedent thelate Robin Wood could think of was the casting of ClaudeChabrol and Stéphane Audran in Chabrol’s segment ofthe 1965 New Wave portmanteau film, Six in Paris.) Theirfictional marriage is falling apart. Near the beginning anextreme close-up shows Isa kissing his wife and saying “I love

you” before playfully scooping sand over her body while shelaughs gently. After an out-of-focus image of him the moodof the sequence changes: he covers her face with sand andshe cries out, waking from her daydream’s mix of romanticyearning and burial fear. Other sequences also involve afusion of love and brutality, including a notorious sex scene

between Isa and a friend in which they struggle and writheclumsily on the floor. Isa “hopes that a violence can be gotrid of by another violence,” explains Ceylan in the ArtificialEye DVD interview, but it brings the character no solace.Later Isa and Bahar have spaced-out breakup sex. More unfo-cused shots and close-ups combine to produce an effect ofdismemberment: temporarily reunited, the spouses’ faces arefragmented into shards.

“The point of view of the female partner, her feel-ings and her dilemmas, are felt through her silences”(166–67), writes Dönmez-Colin aptly about Climates inTurkish Cinema, and this statement accords with some-thing Ceylan says in the 2004 interview with Geoff Andrew:“The truth lies in what’s hidden, in what’s not told. Realitylies in the unspoken part of our lives. If you try to talkabout your problems, it’s not that convincing. People tryto protect themselves; everybody has something they wantto hide. They try to hide their weak side. When they tellyou a story, they make themselves the hero of that story.So without words is better, and it allows the spectator tobe more active.” In Three Monkeys (the title refers to theConfucian idea of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”),Ceylan develops this premise by shifting narrative focus and

viewpoint between characters. The film begins with a mantaking the fall for a hit-and-run death in return for paymentby Servet (Ercan Kesal), an Istanbul politician. While theman languishes in prison his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) vis-its the politician and the two of them become interestedin each other during an encounter that starts in his officeand proceeds in his car. The narrative focus then movesto Hacer’s son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Şungar) who returnshome unexpectedly to discover his mother and Servet inbed together. The adulterous couple is, however, not vis-ible (and nor do the partners see their observer): all we see

is a shot of Ismail’s eye framed by a keyhole, followed byhis indignant and then quietly furious reaction. (AsumanSuner discusses Ceylan’s representation of an “absent fieldof vision” as an allegory of historical denial in “A Lonelyand Beautiful Country: Reflecting on the state of oblivionin Turkey through Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys,”Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, March 2011.)

Hacer is moved to the edge of the story, partly blockedoff in favor of Ismail. It is the young man who subsequently







FILM QUARTERLY 67

endures the vision that shows us the anguish at the family’score. He is slumped feverishly on his bed. Wind blows thecurtains while a door creaks open. There is a little glissandoof chimes and then in the bright doorway a small blurredfigure steps forward like an alien emerging from the hatch of

a spaceship. The figure comes nearer. The whispered word“brother” is heard and we see Ismail’s sweaty face contortingin distress. He turns into his pillow and then looks back anda reverse shot shows a goblin-like little boy with water run-ning off his bruised-looking face. The apparition of Ismail’sdead sibling is the phantom inside the young man’s silenceand rage. Whereas the lamp-falling scene in Distant sug-gests the strange emptiness of a depleted or ruined mentalspace, the half-dream in Three Monkeys evokes particular

psychic content; it discloses a traumatic primal scene ratherthan the blankness of alienation. But the two sequencesconverge in depicting characters’ distressed remove fromthe world: their inaccessibility, their locked-away hurt.

According to Ceylan in the New Wave Films DVD edition

of Three Monkeys: “The characters in the film live in pain.In vain, they are looking to protect themselves, and to hidethe truth, to buy into their own lies.” His characters are bur-dened and isolated: “I wanted to give the impression thatthey were alone in the world,” something which is unmis-takably conveyed in a desolate late shot in which we see thedamaged family sitting together, each person in the samebedeviled, downcast posture of the woman in Mahmut’sbathroom.

Altered statesLeft: Climates. © 2006 CO Production, NBC Film, Pyramide Productions. DVD: Artificial Eye (U.K.).

Right: Three Monkeys. © 2008 Zeyno Film, NBC Film, Pyramide Productions, BIM Distribuzione. DVD: New Wave Films (U.K.).













68 WINTER 2011

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA

Ceylan is also a photographer. He achieves a painterly effectby printing his work using archival pigment ink on cotton ragpaper. The most recent series, viewable on his website, is For

My Father (2006–08) and perhaps even more so than his films,these portraits show the influence of Bergman and Tarkovsky.

Close-ups of an inscrutable face such as Sleepless Night(2008) are in the vein of Persona (1966), while the image ofEmin Ceylan (who also has roles in Cocoon, The Small Town,Clouds of May, and Climates) standing by a meager river in abarren gray-brown landscape in Before the Rain (2006) couldeasily be taken from Stalker . Even when they show automo-biles, motorbikes, and electrically powered trams, Ceylan’sphotographs often depict a wasteland world that seems farfrom modernity. Indeed one of the most modern elements ofthe Turkey Cinemascope series (2003–09) is the “widescreen”format itself (the aspect ratio varies, increasing to as much

as 3.5: 1). The bleakness borders on post-apocalyptic in thesepia-toned Dog Crossing the Road (2005): in front of distantsnowy mountains framed by rickety power lines, the animal(which again evokes Stalker ) seems a creature all alone.

When we see another dog outside a ramshackle garage inthe prologue to Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the impres-sion of despoliation is somewhat less pronounced: a man whoin the next scene will prove to be a murder suspect feeds thecanine, but as thunder is heard in the darkness there is none-theless an ominous and anachronistic atmosphere. The longfilm that follows takes place in a region remote from any city,an old and windswept land. The urban travails of characterslike Mahmut and Isa are left behind and the narrative struc-ture is different from its predecessors: after the prologue therest of the action is confined to one night and the followingday. Although the aesthetic is recognizably Ceylan’s own, themodernist film language of the faces-in-fragments sequence inClimates is less conspicuous and the temporally compressedstory of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia relies much more thanthe previous three films do on long scenes of dialogue.

There are nearly eighty minutes of night at the start ofthe film as a group of public officials escort two prisoners insearch of their victim’s shallow grave. The main characters

are the reserved and intelligent Doctor Cemal (MuhammetUzuner), the confident and slightly vain Prosecutor Nusret(Taner Birsel) who likes to be compared to Clark Gable, andthe volatile Police Chief Naci (Yilmaz Erdoğ an) who doesnot disguise his contempt for the principal suspect, haggard-faced Kenan (Firat Taniș). It is a protracted, frustrating quest.In the darkness Kenan cannot get his bearings and the siteis only found when morning comes. While the suspectsineffectively search hillsides illuminated by headlights, the

officials have time to converse. The doctor discusses thedistrict with Arab (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), a policemanwho comes from the locality but dislikes it. Ceylan hereuses a technique familiar from the automobile conversationbetween the politician and Hacer in Three Monkeys: wordsare heard but the character to whom they apparently belong

has stopped speaking. It is a disassociating, isolating device.When Arab describes—or thinks aloud about—the lawless-ness of the territory, his face is so severe and withdrawn it ishard to integrate it with the rest of the scene. His expression isnot a sociable one. It is like we have momentarily been takento some other time or place of his solitude even though hiswords are still being addressed to the doctor. As Arab windsup, we cut to a shot of the back of the doctor’s head and hearhis weary, resigned words: “It’s raining on Igdebeli. Let it. It’sbeen raining for centuries, what difference does it make? …Well, as the poet said, ‘Still the years will pass and not a tracewill remain of me. Darkness and cold will enfold my wearysoul.’” The effect is uncanny, but we learn something aboutthe character’s somber frame of mind.

Three other encounters are significant. First there is a con-versation between the doctor and the prosecutor in which thelatter recounts an anecdote—a story he will return to—aboutthe “wife of a friend” who “said she’d die on a specific date fivemonths later” after the birth of her child, and did, though thedoctor rejects the other man’s supernatural explanation.

The second incident occurs after the doctor goes to thedespondent Kenan and offers him a cigarette. The policechief intervenes: “Hang on, doctor, don’t give it to him.”

Then he addresses Kenan: “What do you want with that ciga-rette, huh?” The doctor tries to answer for the prisoner, butthe chief cuts him off again: “If you want a cigarette, first youhave to earn it. Nothing comes for free anymore.” To cap it allhe belittles the medic: “Doctor, you don’t know these guys.They’re such bastards they’d rob you blind, the assholes. He’sseen you’re a pigeon. He’s plotting now as we speak.” (Whenthe doctor sits in the car next to Kenan afterwards, the suspectwhispers thanks to him.)

The prosecutorOnce Upon a Time in Anatolia. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.








FILM QUARTERLY 69

The third event takes place in the village where thegroup has a meal. Drinks are served by a beautiful teenager.The sight of her reduces Kenan to quiet sobs, and triggersOnce Upon a Time in Anatolia’s half-dream: with a look ofperplexity he sees in an hallucination the man he has killed.

After the corpse is stowed away in a car’s trunk at the end ofan often comic scene, the men return to town. Outside thecourthouse, the dead man’s son, standing with his dauntinglyimpassive mother, throws a stone at Kenan. Later the policechief tells the doctor that this event made the suspect weepbecause (Kenan claimed) the boy is in fact his own son.

It becomes clear that this is above all the doctor’s story.The long night has taken its toll and he is pensive when helooks at old photos of himself and his ex-wife. He goes to thebaths and then, filmed in a high-angle shot, strolls aroundtown to the sound of birdsong. He speaks to some neighborsabout the murder before Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

culminates with the dead man’s autopsy. At the climax the

physician chooses not to record a crucial piece of informa-tion about the condition of the corpse and, after a moment’shesitation, the technician defers to his authority. This deci-sive assertion of moral autonomy is the act of a protagonistultimately unlike Mahmut or Isa. The line of reasoning thathas brought him to this point is obscure; whatever its exactcause, in that little provincial room of death there is a strangeand sudden moment of change like a lightning flash in thecold, rainy world that burdens Doctor Cemal’s mind.

The interview was conducted on October 17 during theLondon Film Festival (October 12–27). Thanks to Lizzie

Frith and Sue Porter for arranging the interview, and to BoraBalci for expert interpreting.

::

Rob White: You have said of the characters in Three Monkeys that they

“live in pain.” Is this the theme of your films?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: [Laughs] I don’t know. It changes, ofcourse, though some subjects were always important forme. There are primary themes but also I can go sideways

sometimes as well. But in each film I’m wondering about thehuman, what’s happening inside humans—what is the mean-ing of life. Things like that. Of course these are big questionsand maybe they never have answers. But I’m working aroundthese big questions. Above all my films are about the innerworld of people.

I wonder if an idea of suffering and isolation can make sense of several dif-

ferent cinematic techniques that you use repeatedly. There are, first, shots in which

there is almost no depth of field—only a figure in the foreground is in focus.

Yes, it’s one of the ways of showing the isolation of thesubject. Technically speaking, in order to achieve this witha digital camera you need a camera with a large chip [orsensor] size. The depth of field is directly dependent on thephysical size of the chip. Actually on my last two movies, Iused smaller-chip-size cameras, which were all that avail-able. But with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia the chip sizeof the camera, a Sony F35, was equivalent to 35mm filmand so such techniques are easier. To increase the effect,you can also adjust the aperture of the lens: generally we usethe widest possible aperture in order to increase this effect.Cinematographers like such a camera because it can get ridof the “video effect.” Most amateur video cameras have aninfinite amount of depth of field (because of the very smallchip sizes). So this effect is a way of getting as close as possi-ble to 35mm using a digital camera. But, yes, it’s a techniquethat emphasizes isolation.

Second: what about moments when speech is heard but the person on

screen is no longer seen to be speaking?

I wanted the audience to be unsure about whether the

characters is thinking or speaking. This allows me to indicatethe inner psychology of the character by showing somethingelse in the face of the character than what is being said. It’sa way of economizing in my films. But generally in the nextshot it’s clear whether this is thought or actual speech. I feelthat this method allows the audience to understand severalthings at the same time, especially if there is a contradictionbetween a character’s expression or thought and what’s said.So you’re told two things at the same time. And I believe theaudience is educated enough to understand such methods.Cinema has the liberty to use such methods and I trust the

audience. Third : the de lirious half-dreams in all your recent films .

In dreams at first you never think you’re in a dream. Youthink that it’s real. I want the audience to have the same sen-sation: to think that it’s happening in real life and then, atthe end of the dream, to understand. In that way I think it’smore effective. But also I see life like this; it happens to mea lot when I’m awake. I think this type of dream, which ismixed with real life, is more horrifying. So I don’t like to sepa-

ArabOnce Upon a Time in Anatolia. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.








70 WINTER 2011

rate dreams from life. I want to make them more connectedbecause dreams are part of the reality.I like to show the things that we hide, and that has to

involve anguish or stress. These dreams are the kinds ofdreams that we even hide from ourselves. They representthe character’s subconscious (which makes them very help-ful to me as a storytelling device). Generally there is a guiltyconscience behind it. In Three Monkeys, I wanted to showthat Ismail was there when his brother drowned in the sea.The boy is his drowned brother, wet and naked, coming outof the sea. Ismail has a guilty conscience: he was there andhe couldn’t protect his brother. So I showed this ghost as amanifestation of his guilt about the drowning.

Is her son’s drowning also the cause of Hacer’s pain?

It could be something else also. It has been years ofcourse since the drowning, although it’s never forgotten. Butin a family, of course, it’s a very complex structure and therecould be many things. That shouldn’t be the only reason whythe couple has problems.

Would you say that the female character s’ stories are more unknowable

than the male—as with the woman in Mahmut’s bathroom?

The character in the bathroom in Distant is a marriedwoman who is having an affair with Mahmut. Actually we

see her in the bar with her husband, who is carrying shop-ping bags, while Mahmut is drinking beer. It’s the samewoman seen at the beginning, and afterwards she comes outof the apartment and the janitor watches her. (The janitors inIstanbul are the witnesses of everything!)

I would say that the women’s stories are there—if you canguess and fill in the gaps. The audience can empathize themthem if they like. They aren’t unfillable gaps. I understandthese women. I can explain even the smallest expression or

gesture. I have the answers in my mind. Take Hacer: she isnot in love with the politician. But she responds to his author-ity and power. When she gets into his luxurious car with itsleather seats, she feels the politician’s power. It’s quite dif-ficult for her to deny in terms of her emotions. She feels herexistence within this power because she hasn’t felt any suchpower in her life before. And I know that feeling very well. Iwould say, though, that it’s the same for the men in my films.It’s not an easy world in my films. Do you think that the situa-tion for her husband is easy? It’s not easy. This is a family in adifficult situation. I’m merciless to the men as well.

The woman in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is, how-ever, unknown. When I selected the actress the importantthing for me was that we shouldn’t understand her feelings.The situation she’s in is balanced on a razor’s edge, on theborderline, and there’s complete flexibility about how it’s tobe interpreted.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ’s setting seems disconnected from modernity.

We tried to create a timeless feeling. The original storywhich the film is based on is set in the 1980s. It was writtenby a doctor [Ercan Kesal, who also has a role in the film,having previously played the politician in Three Monkeys],who witnessed such an investigation at that time. But when

we went to the area, we saw that nothing had changed in theprovince since then. You feel sometimes that life is frozen.The basic roots of this life are always there and easily seen.So although the film is set in the present—we added mobilephones and things like that—we still needed this timelessfeeling because I wanted to deal in Once Upon a Time in

Anatolia with eternal properties of human nature. The crewof investigators is the same as in the original story, althoughwe rewrote all the details and the characters. We also took

Night-timeOnce Upon a Time in Anatolia. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.








FILM QUARTERLY 71

some injections from Chekhov, but I won’t say what theChekhov part is because I don’t want to harm the integrityof the film. Also I forget the exact details because I take thou-sands of ideas from different places and then try to integratethem; scriptwriting is a kind a collage really. Whatever youwrite, Chekhov wrote something about it: every aspect oflife, every kind of character. So if you have read all of theChekhov stories, you remember them when you write thescript and you like to inject it somewhere in the script. Hegives you ideas like thunder in the mind.

There are a couple of references to morgues and I wondered if a mortu-

ary is a metaphor for provincial life? Is this a dead place with no hope?

No—but death is always within life in the provincialareas, and we wanted to show that. People there don’t reallyisolate death and they don’t hide it like we do in the cit-ies. For the autopsy technician it’s normal, it’s his job. But,like everybody, he wants better things. I wanted to show thatdeath has different meanings. An autopsy technician doesn’tfeel pity for the body in front of him. It’s something he seesevery day. For somebody else, it’s something different, and itsurprises me sometimes when I see the point of view change.Everybody’s relationship with death is different but I like theattitude in the provinces and it influences me. They are

right: death is within life. And it should be. There should bemany rituals around death.

At the center of the film is the relationship between the prosecutor and

the doctor, but the balance between them changes. At the end of the film, it’s

the doctor who seems to have authority.

Life is like that. Sometimes you have the chance to seethe vulnerable side of somebody. And there is always vio-lence inside us, waiting for a suitable time. I think everybodyhas that. What guides the prosecutor is, again, a guilty con-

science. Deep inside him he knows his wife killed herself buthe wants to convince himself somehow that there could beanother explanation of her death. He wants to tell this storyto people he senses have some dark potential to change hismind. He uses this chance—once again: maybe he has donethis many times—to try to convince himself that anotherformulation can by magic rid him of his guilty conscience.But the doctor is too much of an analytical, rational personfor this. The result is just the opposite of what the prosecu-tor wanted and instead he has to face the reality. And (whoknows?) maybe it will be better for him like that.

Everybody has a life and a secret violence inside them.

Everybody has guilt at many things. When these feelingscome together nobody knows what can happen. Even withmyself, I don’t know how I will behave in certain situations.When I become violent, it’s always unexpected. It’s so sud-den. A feeling comes from somewhere and it takes over mywhole body.

The conversations between the doctor and the prosecu-tor were a good game and a good investigation for me intothe inner world of people. They had many dramatic sideeffects as well. For instance, the doctor feels humiliated bythe police chief in the cigarette scene and that also creates a

kind of violence hidden inside him.Incidentally, there are maybe some nuances here that

foreign people might not understand. Everybody—policechief, prosecutor—calls him just “doctor,” not “misterdoctor.” Whereas everybody says “mister prosecutor.” Wethought about this a lot. We don’t know the reason why.Maybe it’s because the prosecutor is a law-enforcement offi-cial and so people are respectful and afraid of him; there’ssome sort of feeling of fear toward the prosecutor. It’s true

The police chief (left) and Kenan (center)Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.








72 WINTER 2011

that the doctor is a public servant as well and they need him,but they’re not afraid of him. In small-town bureaucracy,there is a constant small amount of humiliation. My fatherwas a small-town official and I remember this. Everybodyis trying to humiliate each other. So I put some details ofhumiliation in the film, especially toward the doctor, to cre-ate a kind of potential in him which will emerge during theautopsy scene, which may affect his decision to lie.

Why does the doctor decide to lie?

I wanted to show that this man has a potential to change,even though actually he is the kind of person who is actually

dead inside. He has a nihilistic attitude; it’s hard for him tocreate meaning in life. He senses life is meaningless. But anihilistic person is also in a position to create his own mean-ing, not accepting any other meaning from outside himself.

At the end of the night, in the morning, I carefully tried toput that in the walking scenes in the town, which show thathe has the potential to change. He looks at the town like he’sseeing the details for the first time in his life. Meaning is cre-ated from zero—and at certain important moments I havemyself felt this happening. I look at the street where I liveevery day but most of the time I don’t see anything. Then

suddenly I’ll see the details, but generally it’s only after someimportant, changing event. So I wanted to show this potentialfor change in the character during the town scene: the birdsand the smoke and the shutters on the shop windows. Andalso the sounds, which are the same every day but sometimesyour ear selects different ones in these moments.

The decision the doctor makes benefits Kenan becauseif he doesn’t lie then maybe Kenan will get more time inprison. Maybe ten years not five. And so this is also a benefit

for the boy—if, that is, Kenan is the father. The possibility isgreat that he is the father, judging by what the police chiefsays about him crying in the car to the courthouse after thestone-throwing. But in small towns in Anatolia there arealways rumors and suspicions and it’s better not to trust thetales and gossip. The doctor takes Kenan’s side, but we reallydon’t know his real motivation. Someone may come up witha different formulation of what happens and I don’t reallywant to underline any one of them. Maybe he does it forthe woman. Maybe he just wants to get revenge on the otherbureaucrats because the police chief humiliated him in the

cigarette scene by saying to him that he is unspoiled, tooinnocent. So maybe it’s a response to the humiliation. Ormaybe it’s because Kenan said “thank you” after the cigarettething. We don’t know exactly what the motivation is but itcould be one of these. Even though I do have the answers,the audience should guess—should select whichever expla-nation is most suitable to themselves.

ROB WHITE is editor of Film Quarterly .

ABSTRACT An interview with Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan about his film Once

Upon a Time in Anatolia , which won the 2011 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.Ceylan discusses his cinematic technique as well as his charac ters’ “inner violence” andcomplex motivations.

KEYWORDS Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia , Turkish cinema, Distant ,Three Monkeys

CREDITS Once Upon a Time in Anatolia . Director, writer, editor: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Pro-ducer: Zeynep Özbatur Atakan. Writers: Ercan Kesal, Ebru Ceylan. Editor: Bora Gök-singöl. © 2011 Zeyno Film, Production2006 d.o.o.Sarajevo, 1000 Volt Post Produc-tion, Türkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu (TRT), Imaj, Fida Film, NBC Film. U.S.distributor: Cinema Guild.

The doctor restsOnce Upon a Time in Anatolia. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

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