Robert A. Haller. Fate: Tales about Darkness. Five Films by Zeki Demirkubuz.

Fate: Tales About Darkness

The first film of a projected trilogy, Fate is loosely based on Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger and is presented with the same economical means of expression (both in production and aesthetic choices) as Demirkubuz’s earlier films.

Musa (Serdar Orcin) works in a customs office. He is a fatalist with little sense of initiative or self-interest. As the film develops, he is involved in some absurd deaths but declines to declare his innocence—feeling both a general guilt and the inevitability of fate.

Musa’s indifference, his anomie, sets him apart from most of us, yet it is an understandable response to the people who surround him, who lie, commit adultery, kill, and seek to take advantage of others.

Demirkubuz seems to use fixed camera positions to visualize Musa’s passive responses. As in The Third Page, scenes are shot in dark hallways. We look down one corridor as characters enter and exit our field of vision, stepping into and out of different doorways, wordlessly searching—all in a single, uninterrupted camera “take.”  Beyond the chronological duration of this shot there is its visual composition. In the hallway, the horizontal film frame is reshaped into a narrow vertical.  The “re-framing” of this and several scenes in Fate, and in Demirkubuz’s other films, is very effective in focusing our attention. In The Third Page, one shot is made from beneath a table, masking out much of the screen, a device often used by D.W. Griffith. This is not to suggest an homage to Griffith any more than the editing of Block C is an overt reference to Godard, but rather to say that Demirkubuz has learned from many filmmakers.

This brings up Luchino Visconti, who made his own film from the Camus novel, but not with the sly humor of Demirkubuz. His sense of the capricious nature of experience—the way events can suddenly turn upon themselves—is one factor in Fate’s success. And, again, we have the doors (of justice!) swinging open of their own volition.

Robert A. Haller. Five Films by Zeki Demirkubuz. 2003.