The Scraps of Time: Zeki Demirkubuz’s Cinema. Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz
The Scraps of Time: Zeki Demirkubuz’s Cinema
I have seen time,
It was working silently inside and outside of me,
A grave can only be dug this way,
Without lightning without axe,
A forest has tumbled this way!
I have seen time,
With how many gazes it has destroyed my dream,
And with how many thoughts!
I have seen time,
In the abyss of a moment that was like thunder.
The Scraps of Time (Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar)
In the 1990s, Turkish cinema met its first generation of independent filmmakers. To name just a few, Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviş Zaim, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan not only heralded a new approach to film production, they also inaugurated a novel understanding of filmmaking which immediately received considerable acclaim at international film festivals. The changing face of film production became noticeable too in mainstream productions that looked to incorporate characteristics of a more intellectual and artsy cinema into blockbusters. Not limited to but instigated by auteuristic approaches, cinema in Turkey witnessed a revitalization. Thanks to the emergence of film collectives (White Cinema, New Filmmakers), enthusiastic individuals (a young generation of filmmakers) and zealous sponsors (particularly commercial businesses, art foundations, international funds and minor state support) a remarkable production potential was seeded. Although very different in thematic, style and production conditions, Turkish cinema at large, rekindled notable domestic viewership. In this context however, independent directors stayed on the margins, maintaining a dialogue with a limited local audience, yet earning increasing respect. It would be misleading to say this new generation of filmmakers started a collective movement or a new wave. Rather, by ushering in a new auteur cinema, they paved the way for smaller budget films that tackle larger issues often neglected by Yeşilçam.
As much as it is a locale, Yeşilçam—which literally means green pine, the name of a street in downtown Istanbul where the majority of film production companies, film agencies and studios are located—was also a name given to a certain style of popular filmmaking comparable in some ways to Hollywood, especially classic Hollywood cinema. The zenith of Yeşilçam, during which well over 200 films were produced, lasted for two decades over the 1960s and 1970s. These years were marked by three military interventions: the first inaugurated a decade of artistic freedom after 1960; the second, in 1971, witnessed an increase of the limitations instigated in the previous decade, and the third, in 1980, the most reactionary, triggered a period of decline.
Interestingly, the demise of Yeşilçam also marked the end of “Turkish” cinema and its nationalistic identity claims. Though such a statement would still be debatable, not only in terms of the increasing number of films that are about the ethnic minorities of Turkey but also in terms of international co-productions and transnational cinemas, it has become more and more difficult to locate a cinema that is primarily and necessarily Turkish. Instead, a network of global cinematic presences has initiated a questioning of national identities and an understanding of cinema in Turkey based on a multiplicity of identities. In that sense, Zeki Demirkubuz’s cinema was born in a period of critical reflection, both cinematically and politically. Some directors chose to tell direct stories about the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état in a neo-liberalizing Turkey, while others opted to tell personal stories with recurrent themes of deception, betrayal and darkness in the search for a philosophical notion of hope. Zeki Demirkubuz, once a political prisoner himself, falls under the rubric of the latter.
Demirkubuz was born in 1964 and attended primary school in Isparta, a provincial town. He says that Isparta Gönen Teacher Training School was the first place he encountered political ideas. As the political situation changed so did the management of the school, from the leftist Republican People’s Party government to the right-wing National Front. He mentions Room 4 at the school, where disobedient children—not only the leftists but anyone who was disobedient—were tortured. His first encounter with torture was in that room, and he claims it was no different from what he went through in prison later, after the 1980 coup. In the teacher training school, Demirkubuz attended the boycotts, which resulted in his first imprisonment, lasting two days, as a secondary school student. His failure in classes combined with his leftist engagements eventually forced him to drop out. So he moved to Istanbul, and his affiliation with political organizations only grew stronger.
With the 1980 coup, he was imprisoned for three years. During those years, he used his time to read and write. As he notes, he met the world of literature, writers like Balzac, Stendhal, and most importantly Dostoyevsky, his major influence, in prison. Once released, he started working as a street-peddler, wandering from one city to another, staying in hotels, reading, observing and writing stories. In time, he took the examination for external students for high school and attended the Istanbul University Department of Communications. There he met filmmaker Zeki Ökten and became his assistant director. Demirkubuz learned filmmaking under the tutelage of Ökten, a Yeşilçam master. Ökten’s cinema was a subtle amalgam of quotidian comedies and bitter social criticism. Ökten’s collaboration with Yılmaz Güney in the late 1970s coincided with the approaching nadir of Yeşilçam beginning in the mid-1980s and Ökten was thereby introduced to the independent process of making films. Demirkubuz, who witnessed the transitional period of his mentor, learned the rules of Yeşilçam while familiarizing himself with the means of independent productions with smaller budgets.
Demirkubuz’s oeuvre is quite experimental in terms of financing. After he kicked off with the relatively conventional production C Blok (Block-C, 1994), he turned posthaste to smaller crews and lower budgets with Masumiyet (Innocence, 1997). When he reached his sixth film Bekleme Odası (The Waiting Room, 2003), he mortgaged his apartment in order to raise funds and used it as the film’s location. He had friends work as the film’s tiny crew, and he cast himself and his wife, Nurhayat Kavrak, in the lead roles. Although he returned to a more substantial budget for his latest film Kader (Destiny, 2006), in various interviews he has mentioned that small budgets secured the artistic freedom he required.
In the space of freedom there is a tangible emphasis on the relationship between sentiments, femininity and masculinity, which he investigates mostly through impassioned, realistic dialogue that refers to the darkness enveloping a cinematic world drenched in cynicism. Thematic and stylistic motifs associated with Demirkubuz’s cinema are grounded in this darkness. And yet there remains a contradiction. Zeki Demirkubuz’s cinema is thematically centered on the question of faith. Regardless of the fact that Demirkubuz has been largely criticized for being too skeptical by film scholars and critics, in İtiraf (Confession, 2001) Harun pleads, “Have you ever met a man who doesn’t believe in anything? Even the most cruel of all has something to believe in.” Similarly, writer Rıza Kıraç has argued that hope is the lynchpin of the recurrent themes of darkness in Demirkubuz cinema. Kıraç notes “although darkness initially recalls evil, in order to shoot a dark scene, you have to light it up” (2002:51). This observation makes two important points: Demirkubuz’s films can be understood in terms of a search for a light of hope and that lighting up the darkness illuminates evil. It is this illumination that operates side by side with darkness in Demirkubuz’s cinema.
As such, Demirkubuz skillfully places larger philosophical issues into spaces associated with particular scraps of time—not essentialist but local, not all-encompassing but universal. Time is historical, as this essay suggests by looking at the era in which Zeki Demirkubuz made his films. His attention to post-1980 Turkey through his depiction of alienated individuals provides insights into a larger existential angst deeply embedded in, even innate, to Turkish society. Demirkubuz’s films throw back to Yeşilçam melodramas yet with stories imbued with Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Camus and Beckett. Time is also cinematic and his films have been compared to the work of Antonioni, Tarkovsky and Bresson. While hotel lobbies evoke the lumpen existence of the unemployed and idle (as in Innocence, Destiny and The Third Page), tightly packed apartment buildings evoke soulless spaces in a frozen temporality, all cast against the context of a purportedly modernizing Turkey. Ironically, the existential angst is vehicled to the audience through the use of an invisible sense of time. A good number of critical writings have reflected on the use of space in Demirkubuz films. The use of inside space—hotel lobbies, dense apartment buildings, corridors, doorways, waiting rooms, coffeehouses, prisons, mental hospitals—seems to be one of the main elements in his cinema that casts the claustrophobic mood in the films, and which exposes the sustained state of ennui or apathy in the characters’ inner worlds. Given that his cinematographic image is unique in its ability to represent the spatial and temporal coordinates of objects and events, one has to consider seriously the use and sense of time in his films.
In Innocence and Destiny, how much time do characters spend sitting around hotel lobbies and rooms? How much time does Bekir spend going back and forth between his family and Uğur? The likely answer is a lifetime, and yet we do not realize this through filmic devices that make us aware that time is passing. Scenes jump from one to the next (maybe months, maybe years have passed in between) and the director deserts us to another singular moment in time. We do not even know whether the characters are growing older, or if changes in their features are leftovers from the heavy burden of what they have endured.
Tülay, the protagonist of Block-C, wanders around the city on her own and spends time driving in her car. How much time does she spend wandering? Just a few days, or more? At the end of the movie, she comes back to the apartment building where her previous life took place. She returns to the same place to visit one last time in order to see what she has left behind. She is now a stranger to her own life and not surprisingly this is the first time she notices the sign on the building door: “Strangers—beggars and street-peddlers—are not allowed.”
Demirkubuz never chooses to underline the fact that time is actually passing. He is interested in ordinary life. As he constantly mentions in interviews, he is trying to create “a sense of life.” Unlike the master-narratives of history and therefore time, the time of daily life has a cyclic and repetitive structure. This repetitiveness triggers an anxious feeling as if “time were passing by very quickly,” yet boredom concomitantly stems from the patterns and routine activities that recur daily, as if time does not pass at all.
An anecdote told by Zeki Demirkubuz exemplifies the sense of ennui that generates and is reciprocally generated by the ordinariness of everyday life. During a summer holiday when Demirkubuz was in second or third grade, he had nothing to do and nobody was around so he visited his school, which then seemed deserted. He sat on a wall and watched: “The people and the vehicles were passing by from far away; they seemed as if they were only visions under the bright sunlight and for some reason their sounds were inaudible. Suddenly, two boys came. They looked just like me. They were holding a ball in their hands and they slowly, wearily, started playing with it. I remember the sound of that ball very clearly: pit-a-pat. And once in a while, they threw the ball to the basket. They played for a little while and soon were tired. They left the ball there and sat by the side of the wall. The ball continued rolling and stopped very slowly at the side of the building. It is impossible for me to describe how silent that moment was. I just sat there staring at the ball and the kids. Then I looked at the school building and felt a very strong and weird kind of pain. It grew stronger and stronger inside of me. I met with pain there, that day, for the first time in my life. I don’t remember suffering that much again in the rest of my life, like that day I did at the school-garden.” (2006:85)
The feeling that Demirkubuz describes here captures the mood of his films perfectly. The way he narrates this simple moment he experienced as a child is revealing of how he tells stories. Neither the years he spent in prison nor the years he worked in factories compel him to describe this causeless pain he encountered as a small child in this manner. Nevertheless, Demirkubuz does not tell autobiographical stories. His concern is “… not to imitate reality but to make reality felt, to create a feeling about life itself” (2006:98). To avoid referring to a particular reality, Demirkubuz opts out of setting a designated time for his films, but instead chooses to leave the stories in an unfolded present. Even in Destiny, the prequel to Innocence, he does not go back and imitate the 1980s where the story ought to be taking place, but carries his characters to the present. Thus are the characters encapsulated in time. To be more precise, they seem to exist within the indefinite limits of the moment. They do not move towards the future or look back to the past; they mingle in suspended time. He almost never uses flashbacks (except in Block-C where the character tells her story to a friend through the use of flashbacks), flashforwards, nor does he give the audience a point of reference as to when an ellipsis is to come in the story. Mostly, it becomes impossible to tell how much time has passed or if it has passed at all throughout the film. For instance, in The Waiting Room, the main character is half-alive across from the TV-set and the length of his relationships with different women over time is indistinguishable. Ahmet is in a near catatonic state, he cannot or does not wish to move or undertake action. The film is about his reluctance to live life. Thus, the character (and maybe the director as well) constantly sabotages his own life. Obviously he cannot controleverything that takes place around him, but he can manage to suspend it.
The situation is more evident in Fate. Musa, the negligent protagonist of that film, is a person who lives as if time were suspended. We recognize the repetitive nature of his life, both at home and at work, through a few scenes that repeat themselves one after the other. And even though at the very beginning of the film this cyclic pattern is disrupted by a major event, his mother’s death, Musa does not or cannot break the cycle. This particular incident brings about a major change in his life, but he remains reluctant to interfere with what is going on around him or what is happening to him. Near the end of Fate, we see Musa just before he is set free from prison. We learn the length of time he has spent in prison from the dialogue. The character’s apathy about what is happening to him, or what has happened to him, is transferred to us through the omission of the years he spent in prison.
Apart from Fate and The Waiting Room (in which characters try to suspend life itself), characters in Demirkubuz’s films, consciously or unconsciously try to break the vicious circle of time. Sometimes, the solution appears in the form of desire, as is the case in Block-C, The Third Page, Innocence and Destiny. Desire seems like an escape for these characters, a way to break the cycle in which they are trapped. This “strong feeling” that they come across creates a rupture in their lives which opens up a completely new possibility for them “to become,” “to be” or “to exist.” But as the stories unfold, this possibility becomes something that drags them into another cycle, to an uncontrolled situation in which they find themselves lost in time again. In Innocence and Destiny, all the characters become prisoners of their own desires. In The Third Page, a woman saves İsa’s life, yet like the others, in the end he returns to where he began: on the verge of loss. Whether desire helps or not, it is one of the ways the characters make sense of life, which provides evidence for them to feel they are alive even if it hurts. It is this leap of faith that leads to survival, even though all seven films end with a hint suggesting the beginning of another repetitive cycle.
While the main characters try to break away from this suspended time through their desires and struggles, secundary characters that surround them stand still: people wasting time in hotel lobbies in Innocence, hanging around coffeehouses in Destiny and Fate. These are the characters who are the real idlers. They differ from the principal protagonists in the fact that they seem to lack the existential angst or the ennui that drives the former to despair or to apathy. They are the lumpen. They sit around all day long, doing nothing, and yet they do not seem to question their “useless” existence. This uselessness either leaves them in a catatonic state in front of the TV, or drags them into causeless violence.
The suspended sense of time in Demirkubuz’s films, usually shatters in abrupt moments of violence, another important motif that sets the rhythm. In the opening sequence of The Third Page, İsa gets beaten by a mafioso for a very long period of time. The beating scene gets longer and longer as the mafioso continues to kick him while he is lying on the floor. Another lingering scene of male violence is choreographed in a style similar to a dance number. In that scene in Destiny, Zagor stabs Cevat and we witness the most intimate moment of the film, as they look each other in the eye for a very long time. In Confession, a scene of domestic violence is staged almost in real time. These scenes remind us of the relationship between time and violence. Violence renders time visible. Witnessing such an intimate interaction makes the moment tangible. As the poet Tanpınar writes, “the abyss of the moment is like thunder.” These moments are usually the moments when the characters start to actually communicate with each other. The explosions in films such as Confession, Innocence and Destiny, open up, surprisingly, a space for interaction. Men in coffeehouses or trashy nightclubs all of a sudden burst out; it is a tactile, sensual communication albeit a very violent one. The characters become aware of their existence and the existence of the others, piercing each other’s skin. They hurt each other physically in order to get over their constant existential pain, if they have any. They try to substantiate their existence to themselves and to others around them through the use of physical power, the masculine energy that has not/could not be transformed for other uses.
Chief among the harsh criticisms leveled at Demirkubuz is his use of the violence in the representation of masculinity in his films. The Waiting Room especially provoked this discussion, some going as far as to accuse Demirkubuz of misogyny. This condemnation has partly to do with the fact that Ahmet is played by the director himself. On a different view however, rolling back to Demirkubuz’s debut Block-C, then rolling forward to his most recent film, we can argue that men in all seven films are mostly impotent and incapable. Even in Block-C, the only Demirkubuz film with a female protagonist, the husband is incapable of showing love or affection. In Innocence and Destiny it is the burden of men’s world that pushes every man to become violent for the sake of being manly. Even when they do not want to, they are entitled to stab, kill, and have sex just to prove their manhood. From this perspective, when Yusuf begs not to be released from prison in the opening scene of Innocence, it is because he does not want to go back to the world where he has to perform being a man. On the other hand, Yusuf was sent to prison in the first place because he had shot his sister’s lover and due to the shock, his sister had lost her voice. Thus, the silence of a woman in a Demirkubuz film inevitably reminds us of the male violence once visited upon her. Another example is little Çilem, Uğur’s daughter. Çilem is mute because we learn that Uğur was severely beaten when she was pregnant. Seemingly in contrast with the mute women, stand the strong women: Uğur in Innocence and Destiny, Meryem in The Third Page, Nilgün in Confession, Sinem in Fate.These are the correspondences; the fatality that weighs on women is due to men’s violence, mirrored in their silence.
The senselessness encrypted in that violence circles back to the existential questions that animate Demirkubuz’s work. In his trilogy titled “Tales of Darkness” composed of Fate, Confession and The Waiting Room, he openly interrogates actions leading to consequences without reason. Notions such as existence, love, betrayal, courtship, infidelity, solitude and creation might be characterized partially as a lament for the loss of a troubled past and partially as anxiety about a nebulous future. Demirkubuz says, “we cannot ask why or what for, because this is a situation in which we are left alone only with the consequences. Be as skeptical as you wish, question it as much as you can. And this is not only true for easily abstracted concepts such as existence and death. For instance, take human relationships, love, friendship… It is all the same. Consequences without reasons” (2006:99). According to him, the main characteristics of his films are a realist feeling and a religious essence. Self-reflexively, he carries this idea to The Waiting Room. One of the characters asks Ahmet, the director, if he thinks “cinema is a religious matter.” He does not answer. However in the extra-filmic world Demirkubuz has an answer to that question. By religious essence, he explains, “I don’t mean religion in the strictest sense of the word. For that reason, I am using the term ‘a religious essence.’ Unlike most people, I am not someone who can bond with religion. I am a skeptic and I don’t feel comfortable unless I ask questions. This is why, even though I have a strong desire to believe, I am aloof towards concepts such as religion and faith. Faith begins when one loses his power to interrogate. And this sense of helplessness creates a will to abandon oneself to a higher power and to put an end to this helplessness […] I may not be someone who tries to explain himself or life with religion, but the feeling that comes along with the fact that some of the answers are missing is enough for me to carry a feeling about this religious essence” (2006:100).
Religion is another philosophical category for Demirkubuz. What appears as contradictory in Demirkubuz’s cinema is key to understanding his films. Despite his lack of interest in religion itself, he dwells on its categories, such as faith, destiny and resignation, because he deems them the most essential qualities of human-ness. The commonsensical interpretation of the dialectic between skepticism and the need to believe is usually attributed to a universal existentialism. One can push this argument further. Although Demirkubuz refrains from naming a specific religion when describing what this “religious essence” may be, apart from recurring Christian motifs such as confession, redemption, and guilt, it is the threads of Islamic culture that envelop his stories. One category, which is crucial in combining this religious essence with existentialism, is destiny, the hidden power believed to control what will happen in the future. In an Islamic context this term has a significant role in regulating daily life, the notion of time and consequences of human action. Nevertheless, to resign oneself to one’s destiny or the hands of a higher power does not necessarily lead to renouncing the world; rather, it maintains hope for being able to change things. Finally, what appears as a fatal destiny also entails a hidden hope that goes beyond Demirkubuz’s auterial intentions. And therein lies the mastery of Demirkubuz: illuminating the darkness with hope breaks away the ordinariness of present time and offers hope for the future.
Zeynep Dadak-Senem Aytac. Mental Minefields: The Dark Tales of Zeki Demirkubuz. Eds. Zeynep Dadak and Enis Kostepen. New York: Altyazi, Arte East and Moon and Stars Project. 2007.
Works cited:
Arslan, Savaş. “Hollywood Alla Turca: A History of Popular Cinema in Turkey.” Ph.D.
Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005.
Kıraç, Rıza. “Zeki Demirkubuz Sineması’nda Kötülüğün Kısa Tarihi.” Altyazı 8, 2002.
Öztürk, Ruken (ed.), Kader, Ankara: Dost Kitabevi Yayınları , 2006.
