Prison as Metaphor Is The Guiding Light of This Turkish Director’s Austere, Literary Vision

Olaf Möller. Prison as Metaphor Is the Guiding Light of This Turkish Director’s Austere, Literary Vision. Film Comment. March-April, 2003.

Turkey isn’t exactly a renowned hotbed of filmmaking talent. So when Zeki Demirkubuz had not just one but two films selected for the “Un Certain Regard” section at Cannes last year there was good reason to be curious. As it turned out, a major new auteur had arrived; five months later the Viennale ’02 confirmed this with the first complete retrospective of his work.

Demirkubuz’s oeuvre is a dense one: five films in eight years, steadily developing towards an ever clearer vision of the world, his images increasingly stripped of all overly expressive frills and pretensions. Each film circles around the same themes and obsessions, all of them variations on the same question: Is life driven by fate or by free will, and to what extent is the decision to let fate reveal itself actually a choice? Where does freedom come into it? It’s the kind of question someone who has served time as a political prisoner might ask. Demirkubuz, who was born in 1964, was jailed at the age of 17 for alleged communist ties. Judging from his films, the freedom he regained three years later seems merely relative. The title of his first film, C Blok (Block–C, 1994), suggests a prison movie but actually refers to part of a high-rise apartment complex in Istanbul’s Ataköy district, where Demirkubuz grew up. Yet each subsequent film is haunted by the metaphor of prison.

Demirkubuz says that he came to filmmaking more by chance than by design. After being released from prison, he needed a job and happened to find one in the film industry, not so surprising for somebody who studied communications. He became an assistant director, and worked often for the great Zeki Ökten. And yet, despite his admiration for Kurosawa, Ford and Bresson, Demirkubuz doesn’t regard cinema as the greatest of all art forms. For him it’s literature, above all Dostoyevsky, about whose work this agreeable but somewhat reclusive guy can talk for hours on end. Demirkubuz’s cinematic grammar has a distinctly literary feeling to it, his narratives broken up into precise chapters often beginning with the opening of a door from within a darkened interior (quite Bresson-ian, this door obsession). His scenes are beautifully paced, and his cuts change tempo like semicolons; certain recurring scenes, especially confessions and interrogations, often feel like parentheses within the films’ overall structure.

When Demirkubuz thought he was ready (and free enough) to make a film himself, he started from scratch. He opened his own production house, Mavi Filmcilik Ltd., situating himself outside of Istanbul’s mainstream Yeşilçam Studios (Turkey’s equivalent to Hollywood, nonetheless a constant point of reference in his early work) and shot Block-C with a small crew and minuscule budget. Looking back, Demirkubuz reckons that there’s too much Yeşilçam in this first, astonishing effort: too much music, too many “filmic” (i.e., overtly expressive, self-serving) images, too many dramaturgical concessions to popular taste, among them several comic interludes, and a charming sex scene. (Though he’s never shot another of those, sex—especially of the illicit variety—is an important factor in all of his films.)
Block-C remains Demirkubuz’s only film in which the main character is a woman. Tülay lives a comfortable life of indifference with her husband, Selim, in one of Block-C’s apartments. Her maid, Aslı, enjoys the occasional roll in the hay with Halet, the janitor’s slow but observant son. One day Tülay comes home early and the sight of them going at it triggers something inside her. She starts to drift around Istanbul, looking for something, finding emptiness, obscene gestures, and men too timid to seduce her. Meanwhile Selim and Aslı watch TV: there’s always something interesting on, something that soothes the pain of being the maid, the husband—of being, period. The only thing that soothes Tülay, finally is Halet. Do things change? Yes. Do they really? No. The superficial “yes”: sociology cum psychoanalysis, the narratives of society, television but “no” is the essence of things, that which Demirkubuz’s art makes visible though its light (always cold, frozen, in winters of discontent), spatial configurations (people rarely look at each other and are united only in their mutual avoidance, like sleepwalking co-conspirators), rhythm (the flow of the editing carries a sense of destiny), not forgetting the actors’ unique presences, which etch themselves into the celluloid.
It took Demirkubuz three years to mount his next production, Masumiyet (Innocence, 1997), which in a weird way feels like a kind of mirror-sequel to Block-C. Its protagonist, Yusuf, is a variation on Halet: he’s not so much slow as emotionally stymied after serving ten years for killing his married sister’s lover. Yusuf doesn’t want to leave prison and threatens to commit murder so that he can go back inside; the warden tells him to fuck off. Needing a place to stay, he first visits his sister and her abusive husband, leading him to conclude that maybe he killed the wrong man. Back on the road, Yusuf encounters a strange couple: Uğur, a singer, and her boyfriend Bekir, plus their silent daughter. Uğur, as we learn in a trademark Demirkubuz confession scene, bathed in honey sunlight, is actually in love with a man who is in prison. Yusuf is only a bystander in the drama that unfolds, but he’s the one who picks up the pieces. It’s his condition, the tarnished innocence of someone who’s afraid to commit himself to life, that supplies the film’s strangely upbeat feel of tidy melodrama. This, again, is ironically reflected in the snippets of Yeşilçam films seen on those ever-present TV screens (in front of which the little girl is parked each evening): violent melodramas about protagonists chained to their destinies but lacking the depth to blossom as true characters. With its construction of multiple impossible triangles, Innocence is Demirkubuz’s most doom-laden film—although in its overall mood it’s possibly his most loose and uplifting.
Üçüncü Sayfa (The Third Page, 1999) which competed in Locarno that year, was Demirkubuz’s breakthrough, and ironically it’s his only real genre movie. It’s a masterpiece, like a less lurid Cornell Woolrich story spun from an anecdote found on page three of a Turkish daily—hence the film’s title. İsa, a soap-opera extra, is accused by his studio boss of having pocketed $50. The landlord pops up and wants his due, so İsa, in a fit of rage, shoots him dead. When the studio goons show up, İsa’s neighbor, Meryem, who has serious problems of her own in the form of an abusive husband, saves his ass and proposes a deal. The Third Page is intricately plotted and perfectly paced, full of outlandish setpieces reminiscent of the shoddiest daytime television intrigues. The film has a certain exuberance, a relaxed quality that offsets the film’s taut construction, and it gives Demirkubuz the opportunity to shoot the only comic scene in his entire oeuvre.

The first two installments of Demirkubuz’s “Tales of Darkness” trilogy feel like an emotional step backward, but cinematically they represent a bold move forward. Demirkubuz told me that “Tales of Darkness” could be the subtitle for all of his film, but I’m not so sure: Block-C, Innocence, and The Third Page certainly have their share of despair and bleak moments, but they also have cracks through which warmer feelings seep in. There are no cracks in Yazgı, (Fate, 2001) and İtiraf (Confession, 2001). Both are exercises in unrelenting miserabilism and hardcore existentialism with an ironic oriental-modernist twist. Fate is a literal adaptation of Camus’s The Stranger with a Dostoyevsky makeover—which seems fair, as Dostoyevsky was one of Camus’s major influences. Moreover, the dialogue between protagonist Meursault and the priest—here between Musa and the warden—seems closer in spirit to the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter in The Brothers Karamazov than to Camus. But in its assertion of the utter terror of freedom it’s something else: there’s a cockiness to Musa’s indifference that’s far from both Meursault and Stavrogin. There is nothing liberating about his choice to choose: Musa, who does not die in this version, is more or less an abyss. Just compare him to Halet and Yusuf and you’ll understand the difference between the “Tales of Darkness” and Demirkubuz’s earlier films. Confession goes one step further: husband Harun suspects his wife Nilgün of having an affair. He spies on her, confronts her about it, verbally tortures her worse than any jailer. Their love ends there, even if they seem to reconcile. In the end, there’s nothing left. Fate and Confession are like voids carved from marble, essays about structuring absences—visions of evil that make you long for and strive for goodness. In the end these films represent the possibility of salvation beyond God.

Olaf Möller. Film Comment. March-April, 2003.