GLACIAL CONTEMPLATIONS The Meditative Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films are long, slow, minimalist, ponderous, ruminative and, ultimately, existential – airy art movies delivering nary an explosion in theme, plot or pyrotechnics. Across eight features – from The Small Town (1997) to The Wild Pear Tree (2018) – for which the 59-year-old Turkish filmmaker has won the Palme d’Or, the Grand Prix and Best Director at Cannes, he’s rolled film on all manner of frosty silences, flirting with cinematic tedium as he explores isolation in society and environment. He’s endlessly stared at his characters in the hope of tapping into their interiors (gazing at the landscape of the face, Ceylan reasons, is ‘the only way to get to the truth because, most of the time, the words we say are not true’ ). Action is scant in his films, and so, sometimes, is drama. In his early pictures, there was no score (‘music kills things,’ he spits ) and dialogue was almost non-existent, the director preferring to imply things via specific sound design – ‘if you can tell something with the sound, you don’t have to show it,’ he reasons; Ceylan, with a dexterous touch, ‘put[s] in the sounds that should be heard’ (recurring favourites: distant thunderstorms, barking dogs, howling jackals on the horizon). Putting it poetically, Ceylan ‘works in the subliminal space’, says cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki, the director hoping to get at the ‘metaphysical dimension’ of life, attempting to ‘understand the dark side of [his] soul’. But, in black-and-white prose, descriptions of his films take on a harder, more unforgiving edge; even Ceylan’s Wikipedia page posits that his movies chronicle ‘the monotony of human lives, and the details of everyday life’.
Over 188 achingly philosophical minutes, The Wild Pear Tree enshrines Ceylan’s auteurist reputation for slow-moving narratives and frosty minimalism. Even his most accessible work, Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), spans 157 minutes – a policier in which the search for a dead body on the frigid steppes of central Turkey effectively leads nowhere, let alone to a place of crowd-pleasing cinematic justice. Ceylan followed it up with the 196-minute Winter Sleep (2014), in which a rural landlord sits around his snowbound hotel, self-importantly pontificating. The latter won the Palme
