In this context, the fairy tale name of the 2011 film, Once upon a Time in Anatolia strikes an odd note. Ceylan’s serious and philosophically dense film is, perhaps, the opposite of a fairy tale – although the premise of the movie, a group of men searching for a corpse in a wasteland at night, has a dream-like simplicity and resonance. Similarly, critics have labored, generally unsuccessfully in my view, to find connections between the movie and Sergio Leone’s films Once upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once upon a Time in America (1984), explorations of the pulp western and gangster film, respectively, as operatic epics. (And no one claims any connection to the Chinese kung fu and marital arts franchise Once upon a Time in China – there are five films with this name, as well as the Bollywood picture Once upon a Time in Mumbai and Robert Rodriguez’ Once upon a Time in Mexico.) Clearly, Ceylan means something by the reference, but what he means is unclear. Perhaps, the nature of a frontier and the desert, harkening back to the huge landscapes in Once upon a Time in the West, motivates the allusion – but the matter can be argued persuasively in various ways.
Ceylan
Nuri Bilge Ceylan ("Bill-jay Chay-lawn") was born in Istanbul in 1959. His father was an agricultural engineer employed by the Turkish government. Shortly after his birth, Ceylan’s father was transferred to the village of Yenice, a town in the Canakkalle district in Turkey. (Canakkalle is a province bounded by the Aegean Sea – it is where the Gallipoli peninsula and the ruins of Troy are located; Yenice is inland near mountains with scenic cliffs and gorges. The village is about four hours from Istanbul by bus ride.) Ceylan’s father seems to have been something like an agricultural extension agent. The future filmmaker lived in Yenice until reaching high school age. The small town didn’t have a high school and so the family moved back to Istanbul so that Ceylan could complete his education there. Ceylan has described his family’s life in Yenice (population 6500) as idyllic and say that this is where he learned about small towns and human nature.
Ceylan studied electrical engineering in college and graduated from an Istanbul university in 1985. While he was in school, Ceylan worked as a passport photographer; since his years in Yenice, the future film maker was interested in photography and exhibited some pictures, mostly landscapes, when he was in high school and college. Ceylan was not a good student and interrupted his education frequently to travel – he made a bike tour in Italy in 1982 and after college went to India and Nepal where he hiked in the mountains around Nepal. In 1987, Ceylan enlisted in the armed services for his compulsory military service. In the military, Ceylan apparently was involved in drama and making short films – in his biography on his web-page, Ceylan says that he decided to be film maker while serving in the army. After his service, Ceylan went to film school for a couple of years – but he was in a hurry to make movies (he was then 30 and the oldest student in the class) and so he dropped out to make films using an old Arriflex camera that he had purchased. His first feature films were about his boyhood in Yenice – Ceylan shot those films in the town and recruited local friends and family members to play parts in the movies. These films, The Small Town (1997) and Clouds of May (1999) were highly regarded in Turkey and Ceylan was able to wrangle a larger budget for his third movie, Distant (2002), the film that introduced him to international audiences. These three pictures are highly autobiographical and, in fact, feature Ceylan as an actor – Distant is about a young man enrolled in film school in Istanbul whose life is disrupted when a relative comes to visit him from the small town where both men previously lived.
On the strength of Distant (2002), Ceylan was able to produce more ambitious films; many of his more recent pictures are financed with significant amounts of European (mostly German) money. Climates (2006) stars Ceylan’s wife, Ebru, and concerns a marriage disintegrating on a vacation to a posh Black Sea resort. The Three Monkeys (2008) is an austere crime film, a sort of hommage to film noir. Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) won the Grand Prize at Cannes.
Ceylan’s recent film Winter Sleep (2014) also won the Grand Prize at Cannes. Winter Sleep is very long, 197 minutes, based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, and seems similar to Climates – it is about a marriage collapsing and has been compared favorably to works by Ingmar Bergman.
A critic once noted that on the evidence of the movies made by the Underground film maker Jonas Mekas, the climate in New York City features lots of snow. (In fact, it only rarely snows in New York City). Mekas liked images of the city blanketed in snow and so his movies are crammed with shots of snow falling and picturesquely snowy streets and parks. Ceylan is also fascinated with snow. Distant contains remarkable imagery of heavy, wet snow blanketing Istanbul and, apparently, Winter Sleep is also noteworthy for its snowy landscapes.
Ceylan continues to take photographs, using a wide format that seems to mimic the aspect ratio of his films. Pictures made during his student years show the handsome director brooding over barren landscapes; there are a number of nudes, the girls posed against the waters of the Black Sea. Ceylan has a web-site devoted to his photography. He has posted a moving series of pictures showing his elderly father, these images taken in Yenice. (In this respect, Ceylan is similar to Abbas Kiastorami, a director, who has also maintained a vigorous career as a still photographer.)
Influences
Traces of other films and other film makers mark Ceylan’s work in various ways. In my view, Ceylan’s work, although always engrossing and pictorially elegant, is often derivative. Critics have noted that the huge close-ups of craggy, male faces, many of them distinctive but not conventionally handsome, seems similar to the way that Sergio Leone constructs his films: instead of Jack Elam and Woody Strode, we are shown imposing close-ups of the police in the car, the sinister, but poetic countenance of the killer, the marred good looks of the prosecutor and doctor. The scene in which the men are entertained by Mukmar, the heavy-set and conniving headman of his tiny village, could be an episode in a cantina or frontier hostel in Once upon a Time in the West. The swarthy Turks with their exuberant moustaches resemble Leone’s Mexican brigands and cowboys. Similarly, the vision of the young girl by candle-light serving tea to the drowsy man may derive from the sequence at the end of Leone’s great Western in which Claudia Cardinale carries a bucket of water across a dusty wasteland to refresh the men working to build the transcontinental railroad.
In Ceylan’s Distant, a film about an urban film student and would-be director afflicted by visit from his country cousin, Ceylan explicitly announces his allegiance to Andrei Tarkovsky. In that semi-autobiographical film, the student torments his visitor by making him watch the Russian director’s Stalker. But when the bemused country cousin despairs of the slow-paced and difficult Russian film and goes to bed, the film student morosely shuts off Stalker and devotes his attention to watching a porno film. Climates, Ceylan’s study of decaying marriage, is clearly derived from similar films by Ingmar Bergman and uses the Swedish director’s characteristic cubist close-ups of the couple to demonstrate their disjunction. The Three Monkeys is a crime film but one that appears to me to be directed in the Mannerist style of Antonioni’s Blow Up or The Passenger.
The first half of Once upon a Time in Anatolia, the hunt for the corpse, clearly channels Abbas Kiastorami, with a tincture of a Wim Wenders road film like Im Lauf der Zeit. The shots of the vehicles creeping along sinuous gravel roads in a hilly country that looks something like South Dakota quote Kiastorami’s The Taste of Cherry, the Iranian director’s film about a man driving his Landrover through huge and barren mountains near Tehran looking for someone to help him commit suicide. And, of course, the black German shepherd dog guarding the haphazard grave of the murder victim cites the black dog wandering the Zone in Stalker.
Ceylan is guarded about acknowledging influences. He claims that the film has nothing to do with Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West. Rather, Ceylan asserts that the doctor involved in the real-life episode on which the movie is based reported that one of the cops muttered the words "once upon a time in Anatolia..." while driving the killer from place to place, a comment on the fact that the man seemed to be inventing "fairy tales" about the murder.
Production
Once upon a Time in Anatolia was shot about 50 miles east of Ankara is Kirikkale province. The film’s story derives from an actual episode recounted by one of the screenwriters, Ercan Kesel. Kesel is a medical doctor and he served as coroner in the small town of Keskin. The search for the corpse recounted in the film recalls an incident in which Kesel spent a night with the police and a murder suspect searching for the man’s victim. The tiny village of Kavurgali where the men stop for a pre-dawn meal is located in a remote part of Kirikkale. You-Tube video featuring the village shows the many fountains in the area depicted in the film.
After the script was outlined by Kesel, Ceylan and his wife added to the scenario. Ceylan added quotes from short stories and plays by Chekhov to the script. The actors featured in the film are well-known in Turkey. In fact, Yilmaz Erdogan, who plays Commissioner Naci, is a famous and much-beloved comedian in Turkey. He is Kurdish and has appeared in many Turkish TV shows.
Buried Alive
"By the turn of the 19th century, small towns had become charnel houses and the country that surrounded thm had become places of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings of men asking about jobs..."
Michael Lesy in Wisconsin Death Trip
In his famous compilation of Victorian photographs from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, Michael Lesy melodramatically asserts that by 1900 the small towns in rural Wisconsin had become "charnel houses," gloomy asylums for the dead and dying. Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip cites Hamlin Garland and village newspapers for the proposition that big cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis had robbed the small towns in Wisconsin of their vitality. Anyone who had ambition, good looks, or intelligence fled the stultifying life in rural villages for the bright lights and opportunities of the city. Small towns became places harboring only the elderly, the disabled, the mentally defective, the congenitally perverse, and the indolent. As the old men died, these villages were dominated by bitter, elderly widows. Progress stopped in its tracks and a once vibrant "settler culture" of yeoman farmers and small town merchants decayed into suicide, despair and madness. Sherwood Anderson’s short stories and Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street develops this theme as well, although less histrionically than Lesy’s horror-show of a book – actually his Phd thesis for a graduate degree in photography at the University of Wisconsin.
Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia could well be styled Turkish Death Trip. The film’s major themes seem designed to highlight distinctions between life in small Turkish villages and the country’s prosperous, urbane, and European-style big cities. Ceylan’s concerns seem oddly prosaic – the film dramatizes certain disturbing characteristics of rural life in the backwaters of Anatolia. The movie embodies a contrast between periphery, the desolate landscape where the film takes place, and an unseen center – Ceylan’s sophisticated Istanbul.
Ceylan has described Once Upon a Time... as being about "small town people". At Cannes, he said that "...small town people are a very different people from me. They show you a different part of life, you learn a lot from them. If you only live in the city, I think you’re missing out on something in life." Of course, Ceylan doesn’t exactly define what it is that you miss by living only in a big city. On the evidence of the film, the experience that you miss is an encounter with the mystery and melancholy of death. For Ceylan, as for Lesy, the small town is Pluto’s kingdom, a netherworld involved with death and dying.
The proposition that Ceylan equates small-town and rural life with death is self-evident. The first half of his film is devoted to a search in desolate and vacant country for a corpse. The second half of the film is dominated by a lengthy autopsy. The autopsy sequence is heralded by long ceremonious tracking shots following the Prosecutor and Doctor, two representative men, to the room where the operation will take place – these shots use time and motion to highlight the importance of an inquiry conducted with a corpse. The bleak-looking steppes were once prosperous places and filled with thriving cities – this is demonstrated by the shot when the urinating doctor sees a great stone face in ruins exposed in the side of the ravine. But, now, no one lives on these high, desolate prairies. The people have gone away. When the doctor looks to the distant hillside, he sees a train passing in the darkness, no doubt conveying people from one brightly lit city to another or, perhaps, transporting farmers and small-town merchants to airports where they will fly away to Germany or other places in Western Europe. The small villages lost in the Anatolian hinterland are literally dark – the power fails in them. Both the doctor and prosecutor imagine themselves fleeing the boondocks for the big city and people are always surprised to find men of substance still residing in provinces.
Small town life is a miserable web of gossip, intrigue, and interbred hatreds. The murder is apparently motivated by a small-town scandal. Everyone is related to everyone else and no one much likes their relatives. The small-town’s reaction to the murder is to form a lynch mob that clashes in a desultory way with the cops when the killer is removed from the police car. The film is guarded by Cerberus, a black dog. We see the black dog in one of the first shots in the film. Later, the same dog of the Underworld defends the pathetically inadequate grave that the killers have scraped in the dirt. One of the murderers seems to be mentally retarded. And the film’s central, and disturbing, metaphor is the notion of being buried alive – the victim of the murder dies with dirt in his lungs and trachea. Like the doctor, the prosecutor, and the other denizens of the film who are figuratively buried alive in the small and impoverished villages of the Turkish hinterlands, the victim of the murder has been literally interred living in the soil of the denuded steppe.
Like Lesy’s Black River Falls, all the vigorous men have left the villages in the territory. Mukmar observes that the people have gone to Germany and don’t ever think about the village until someone dies. The only time the expatriates return to small-town Turkey is "when a relative has died." This phenomenon causes the head man to suggest that it is more important to his village to have a properly functioning morgue than to possess reliable electrical power. (The village is literally a charnel-house.) The conversation with the village mayor is mirrored later in the hospital at Keskin. Clearly, the place is thronged with the sick and elderly – the small town is shown as literally diseased. The autopsy attendant complains about his inadequate kit and yearns for a power saw to cut through bones. Like Mukmar, the head man in the village, he believes resources should be devoted the death, that is, to establishing a better venue and equipment for performing autopsies. A bit of tissue splashes out of the dead man’s belly and adheres to the doctor’s face – he is marked with a piece of corpse as he contemplatively peers out the window into the schoolyard. Thoughout the film, Ceylan’s imagery of death is overt, pervasive, and overwhelming.
Deliberation on death invokes melancholy. Ceylan has described his disposition as intrinsically melancholy. He asserts that his art is based on melancholy, an experience of nostalgia for a past that no longer exists. For Ceylan, the small towns and the desolate steppes, places where once lavish kingdoms reigned – the Anatolian peninsula was once a wealthy and populous place, the home of Croesus, Midas, and the sophisticated Lydians – are inducements to a dream-like state of reverie, an opportunity to contemplate the sweetness and terror of death. Ceylan shows us that the Underworld, Pluto’s realm, is also a place of great and mysterious wealth and the source of the film maker’s inspiration. Ancient fountains mark the landscape drizzling water from great underground rivers and reservoirs into the arid land. There is water moving under the earth. And where there is death, there is also the promise of an afterlife, a sort of heaven. Mukmar serves the men a feast when they visit his village – he serves his visitors honey on the comb. As the young woman moves among the men by candlelight offering them honeyed tea, she seems a houri in Muslim paradise – one of the forty virgins promised to the faithful and ministering to the weary men in the hour before dawn. (A clock shows us that the visit to the village takes place around 4:30 am.) As the men open their eyes to receive the tea that she offers, each of them thinks, momentarily, that he has died and awakened in paradise.
Like other great film makers, Ceylan works with the raw materials of space, time, and light. His film draws these elements into the foreground – this raw material is not incidental to his narrative but, in fact, key to Ceylan’s presentation of the mystery central to the film. In a fundamental way, all human beings are enveloped in elements of existence that we can’t control and that are beyond our rational understanding. Action unfolds in space – we don’t control the distances between places and Ceylan’s framing and narrative design highlights the arbitrary nature of space: the location of the corpse, for instance, has a legal significance and must be carefully defined, but, of course, the cadaver’s location is, more or less, haphazard – and on the Anatolian plain, every place looks like every place else. Nonetheless, dimensions are significant and the film attends to where things are located – the police complain about their distance from home and the time they spend on the road. And, of course, time is a coordinate of space – the time it takes to travel from one place to another is significant. Ceylan’s pacing is unhurried – indeed, at times painfully slow. His deployment of time in the first half of the film creates a sense of vastness and indirectly delineates the vast size of the Anatolian steppes. Events are highlighted by being embedded within long sequences that seem pointless, banter between the men that has no real narrative or thematic purpose – the appearance of the houri at the pre-dawn banquet has particular resonance because the scene appears at the center of the film and functions as a dividing point, a liminal or threshold moment between night and day, life and death, and this earthly existence and the promise of heaven. The epiphany of the girl’s arrival at the banquet seems more important because of the long quotidian sequence prior to her father summoning her to bring tea to the exhausted men. Similarly, the significance of the autopsy is highlighted by the length of the sequence and the fact that this part of the film is also inserted into a context of idle chatter punctuated by long tracking shots of the doctor and physician walking to operating room. Finally, Ceylan’s bravura lighting in the first hour of the film emphasizes that fact that no matter how powerful our artificial illumination, we are still dependant upon the sun and natural light, particularly when searching for something in a vast and barren landscape. A movie paints with light and Ceylan deploys the headlights of the caravan’s cars to illumine huge swaths of prairie – he uses the cars as if they were lights placed by a director on a set. In a real sense, a Manichean combat between light and darkness as the opposing terms in a moral universe motivates the imagery in the first half of the movie. Once the corpse has been found, the entire tenor of the film changes – we are now in a landscape devoted to analysis and rational understanding; accordingly, the light seems flatter, all-purpose, and cruelly dispassionate in what it reveals.
Ceylan’s master, AndreiTarkovsky often exploited the dual character of glass as both transparent (and translucent) and, also, reflective. In Anatolia’s opening, the camera approaches an opaque amber-colored surface – the camera’s focus is adjusted so that we don’t see through this scuffed and battered piece of glass. The glass first is posited as a barrier to our sight – what happens in small towns is opaque to outsiders, mysterious, something hidden from us. Then, the focal length of the lens is adjusted and we can see through the glass to the two murderers drinking with their victim. Ceylan’s opening shot establishes two perspective simultaneously true throughout the movie – we can’t know what is happening and, yet, we are also able to see some things of significance. The contrast between opacity and translucency is an emblem for the riddles, and the partial solutions to those riddles, that the film poses.
Finally, we must recall that one of Ceylan’s great themes is the mutual inability of men and women to understand one another. Damaged or failing marriages are central to a number of Ceylan’s films, including his most recent movie Winter Sleep. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, we are shown an exclusively male world, a fraternity of police and professional men estranged from women entirely. The sinister-looking widow with her dark skin and headscarf who appears in the film’s final half-hour is like a creature from another world. In fact, the two women shown in the movie are literally unearthly – the luminous houri with the tray of tea at the pre-dawn banquet and the distraught, desexualized widow. The men are indifferent to women – hence, perhaps, the temptation to suicide that seems to have affected the Prosecutor’s wife. Although Ceylan probably counts as a feminist in the world of Turkish film, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the women discussed obsessively by the men are almost entirely absent from the film. When the doctor and the prosecutor begin their autopsy, it seems as if they are doing something together that wholly excludes the woman – and, yet, she is the cause of the murder and, also, in some ways, it’s most poignant victim.
Quiz
3. Two men who are somehow similar are equated by way of a common term – the prosecutor and the dead man both look like _____________.
4. A storm is approaching when the dead man is found. What is the result of the storm?
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