Robert A. Haller. Block-C. Five Films by Zeki Demirkubuz. 2003. Review.
Block-C
The title of this film refers to one tower in an apartment complex, but while Demirkubuz often shows the building from multiple angles and has said that he had wanted to make a movie about architecture, Block C is about the life of Tulay, a restless woman whose movements are watched by Halit, the son of the building manager. The first person we see in the film is Halit, waiting outside the entrance to Block C. He is patiently sitting in a car, attentively observing the entrance to the apartment building.
Demirkubuz subtly but significantly sets this scene off balance by either tracking his camera to the left, or slowly moving the automobile to the right—we cannot tell which. This moment passes swiftly but sets the tone of the film and is significantly echoed by the last shot in the film. It is as if the ground is shifting beneath the characters, undermining them and our sense of them. They do seem to be rootless: Tulay roams the highways and coast of Istanbul, Halit watches her and sometimes follows, while her husband Aziz stands apart, demanding that Tulay tell him “what is going on.”
There are echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, especially in the almost voyeuristic conduct of Halit, and even Tulay, who comes upon Halit and her maid exuberantly making love early in the film. I say “almost voyeuristic” because just as the spying by Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window is transformed by his discovery of a murder, Halit’s watching of Tulay is also transformed as the film reaches its climax.
Demirkubuz’s use of sound is also worth noting. The film is punctuated by door buzzers, elevator chimes, and sounds that continue from one scene to the next and which are unrealistic in strict terms, but contribute to the atmosphere of unease (as with the knives in Hitchcock’s Blackmail).
Demirkubuz has structured the story so that many of the important encounters are repeated (sometimes by other characters). Tulay’s maid Asli imagines making love to Halit, then doing so with Tulay watching. Tulay makes love to Halit, but then the “reality” of this is called into question by the next sequence of Halit staggering naked through the apartment complex. There is a similar encounter between Aziz and Tulay. Each of these second encounters leads us to revise our understanding of the first and to question, as Aziz does, “what is going on.”
One last point about the form of the film: Demirkubuz skips forward with a rapid pace, cutting from day to night and back to day, eliding narrative that we do not need to see (like showing a movement from one location to another with fidelity to “reality”). Yet, we are soon led to wonder if something important is being left out of what has become a mysterious story surrounding Tulay.
Tulay follows two paths in the film: one to discover who she is apart from her husband, and the second to heal the wounds suffered sometime before the film begins. Both paths finally return to Halit, which is surprising because he initially seems a secondary character in the movie and only an observer. Likewise, Tulay also does not seem to be a central figure at the beginning of the film—indeed nobody seems central until more than a third of the film has played out; Demirkubuz wants us to share the uncertainty of his protagonists.
Tulay is portrayed with an impassive expression somewhat like Emmanuele Riva or Anna Karina in the 1960s films of Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. Her open face permits us to project our feelings and uncertainty onto her appearance and into her performance. Beneath her steady gaze one senses unspoken pain. The film is about coming to terms with that trauma.
Robert A. Haller. Block-C. Five Films by Zeki Demirkubuz. 2003.
