Zeki Demirkubuz: By the Light of the Dark

Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz has made six feature films to date: C Blok (Block C, 1994), Masumiyet (Innocence, 1997), Üçüncü Sayfa (The Third Page, 1999), and his “Tales of Darkness” trilogy: Yazgı (Fate, 2001), İtiraf (Confession, 2002), and Bekleme Odası (Waiting Room, 2004). They are bleak in theme and plain in style to the point of surliness, leavened only by a perverse streak of black humour. Perhaps the pre-credits sequence of Innocence captures these qualities. A nebbish little prisoner is called in to see the prison governor on the eve of his release. He has surprised the governor by petitioning to stay in jail forever. Yusuf explains that he has no friends or relatives on the outside and cannot imagine how he will survive: if the governor does not let him stay he will have to commit a crime so that he can return. The situation is more sad than funny. The entire four and a half minute scene is shot as a relentless exchange of 180-degree reverse shots. The prison governor remains in a long shot throughout. Yusuf is reframed from long to medium shot, and then to close-up. The only relief from the cinematic tennis match is provided by a sly door that will not stay closed, and a corresponding 90-degree cut to show it.

So, if Demirkubuz’s films are so dark, why do they make me feel so light? As an academic, I don’t get to talk about the pleasures of the cinema very often—at least, not my own pleasure. Other people’s pleasure is studied as reception or the formal structures of films and how they invoke pleasure. But ever since the turn towards quasi-scientific writing in Cinema Studies, my personal reaction has been off the agenda. And as a scholar of Chinese cinema, I’m not qualified to write about Turkish cinema as research. But I can write about it on a more personal level here, as film criticism.

Part of my sense of lightness watching a scene like the beginning of Innocence can be ascribed to an almost somatic response. When Demirkubuz persists with the exchange of 180-degree reverse shots, he builds up a tension that is then released with the 90-degree cut to the door. However, I think there is more to it than pure formal play. It also has something to do with the frank confrontation with a vision of life that holds out no prospect of progress or ultimate happiness. Yusuf has no illusions about what is waiting for him outside the prison, and as we find out after the credits sequence, he is right. To try and understand why such a seemingly sad situation makes me smile, this article will explore Demirkubuz’s films to date and then return to my own possibly surprising response.

Of course, a director’s personal connection to his films has become a consistent subject of discussion ever since auteurism took a hold in film criticism. In Demirkubuz’s case, articles never fail to mention that his leftist affiliations during the years of Turkey’s military regime led to three years of imprisonment when he was only seventeen years old. Perhaps this might explain why jail is a motif in his films. C Block is about the fears and fantasies of a middle-class housewife trapped in an unhappy marriage. But its title, which refers to the apartment block in which Tülay lives, sounds like a prison reference. Furthermore, much of her time is taken up with her maid and the janitor’s son. These characters are part servant, but also part prison guard. Demirkubuz avoids dissolves on Tülay’s face or other devices that would make it clear that what we see is her fantasy. But scenes of urgent sexual passion between the maid and the janitor’s son combined with scenes in which he also watches and pursues Tülay all resemble the mixture of fantasies and real experiences of persecution and lust so typical of prison dramas.

Innocence is not the only film to feature an actual scene between a prisoner and a prison governor. In Fate, which is adapted from Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, the protagonist Musa is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. When his innocence is established, he is taken in to meet the governor, and they have a lengthy philosophical exchange about his impassive response to the dramas of his life. It is shot in exactly the same rigid and drawn out manner as the scene in Innocence, down to the business with the door that will not stay closed.

Even when Demirkubuz’s put upon protagonists stay out of jail, criminality is never far away. When a wealthy but jealous husband discovers that his wife has indeed been cheating on him in Confession, his behaviour constitutes domestic violence to the point of attempted homicide. In Waiting Room Demirkubuz appears as himself, and one evening in his backyard he discovers a burglar—whom he then considers casting as Raskolnikov in his planned Turkish adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Isa, the “hero” in The Third Page is a bit part actor in television series and—like Musa in Fate—he is falsely accused of a crime. This time the crime is theft, and the thug who thinks Isa has stolen his money wants it back, or else. At his wits end, Isa plans suicide. But when his landlord interrupts him by knocking on the door and demanding back rent at the very moment Isa should be blowing his brains out, Isa kills him instead.

All this sounds like full-on melodrama. In fact, the title of The Third Page refers to the kind of lurid story that would make the third page of a tabloid newspaper. Some other critics counter that Demirkubuz keeps all the dramatic elements of the narrative off-screen. For example, in Fate, we do not see Musa’s mother die, or his wife commit adultery, or the murders of which he is later accused. However, it is not always the case that Demirkubuz keeps such high drama off the screen. On his way to look up an old friend and try to find a job in Istanbul after his release, Yusuf in Innocence gets entangled with a mysterious couple who are staying at the same hotel. It seems the woman is a club singer who depends on patrons for money and the man is little more than a hanger-on, maybe even her pimp. When he gets insanely jealous (foreshadowing Confession) as she prepares to go off to meet one of her patrons, he threatens to shoot her in the lobby of the hotel. But the woman becomes angry and distraught, stalking up to him and challenging him to go ahead. Of course he does not. This leaves the femme fatale to ruin Yusuf’s life, much as the neighbour in The Third Page does to Isa in the next film.

However, I think it may be fair to say that such melodrama is more common in his earlier three films than the “Tales of Darkness” trilogy. The tendency to move away from such alluring exaggeration may be related to a tension between Demirkubuz’s own career moves and his personal background. As a graduate from Istanbul University, the references to Camus and Dostoevsky in the later films are not so surprising. But Demirkubuz trained in Turkey’s mainstream industry, known as Yeşilçam after the neighbourhood of Istanbul where it was centered. So, perhaps it is not so surprising that the plots of his early films read like Yeşilçam plots, even though he handles them with a mixture of distance and irony that produces an emotional flatness echoed in so many of his lead characters.

This flatness can be illustrated with another of Demirkubuz’s motifs: watching Yesilçam films and television dramas on television sets in living rooms and hotel lobbies. But perhaps we can sense what Demirkubuz thinks about the high drama of Yesilçam from the way his characters watch. While all hell breaks lose on screen, they watch—sometimes transfixed and sometimes distractedly. But they never react. In sharp contrast to the characters and stories on screen, they appear unmoved, literally and emotionally.

In Demirkubuz’s “Tales of Darkness” trilogy, this emotional detachment seems to mark a more generalized questioning of conventional expectations and values—as one might expect of a director who admires of Camus and Dostoevsky. Musa in Fate has—guess what?—a fatalistic attitude to life. He is not deeply upset when his mother dies, and refuses to pretend that he is. He goes along with the suggestion of a female colleague that they marry, but refuses to pretend he is in love with her, or to get jealous when she gets involved with a more romantic man. Demirkubuz’s own character in Waiting Room is equally uncommitted, perversely prompting his wife to walk out by falsely confirming her suspicions that he is having an affair, and then getting involved with his assistant. Finally, the husband in Confession is at the other extreme, being obsessed with his wife. But in this case it is the film itself that somehow maintains a calm distance from the marital histrionics, observing coolly.

This cool scepticism towards conventional values and refusal to prettify the world around him is certainly one of the things that draw me to Demirkubuz’s work. Apart from the narrative, this also appears in the style of the films. There is little camera movement and by and large the editing is straightforward. The lighting is understated, with no effort to dress up drab reality with eye-catching orchestrations of shadow or colour. The whole look is not just ordinary, but insists on being ordinary. It carefully avoids any softness, warmth, or otherwise aesthetically pleasing design that might give pleasure, and yet it pleases me.

How can we explain Demirkubuz’s motifs, themes, and obsessions? A certain amount of enigma surrounds this, because he does not offer any explanation of his characters’ behaviour. Why is the husband so very obsessed with his wife in Confession? Why is Musa so emotionless in Fate? Why is Yusuf drawn to the femme fatale in Innocence, especially when he has seen what involvement with her has done to her current partner? And why does the director Demirkubuz plays in Waiting Room lie to his wife so pointlessly and then not tell the truth when she walks out on him? There is no effort whatsoever to trace back a series of psychological or social causes in the films. In fact, given that convention would lead us to expect such a tracing and causes, this amount to a refusal to offer an explanation.

There are at least two ways of understanding this. First, Demirkubuz does not believe it is necessary to explain seemingly irrational behaviour that is sometimes cruel, sometimes self-punishing, sometimes obsessed, and sometimes almost autistic: he thinks this is just the way human beings are. This would certainly connect up with existentialist angst, Dostoevsky, and so on.

Alternatively, we can surmise that there are causes for the behaviour, but they are invisible and unknown because they are the result of trauma. Trauma is by definition the condition whereby injury manifests itself indirectly and no direct memory of the event itself can be accessed. This can be understood as the hidden psychology of Demirkubuz’s characters. But there is also the question of national allegory. Turkey’s difficult entry into modernity, forced to transform itself from Ottoman Empire into modern republic in a chequered history marked by military coups well into the 1980s, provides possible grounds for a reading of this as a national allegory.

These existentialist and trauma explanations, if I can call them that, are not mutually exclusive. The ideology of modernity represents itself as progressive—utopian, often. But the experience of modernity is one of violent transformation for most of those caught up in it. This is true—albeit in very different and unequal ways—whether they are the agents of modernity, like the British colonizers who travelled the globe, or those it is visited upon, like the English peasants forced off the land under enclosure to become factory and cannon fodder. This tension between ideology and experience can only make more likely the inability to connect to injury that is fundamental to the traumatic formation. The falling away of faith in modernity and the rise of existentialism in post-World War II Europe occurred during the same period and are certainly connected.

I am a child of the post-World War II era. My parents—one British and one German—grew up in the 1920s, and they hung on to the progressivist ideology of modernity. But growing up in the aftermath of revelations about Nazi Germany and the end of the British Empire, my own ability to generate faith in modernity has been severely compromised, to say the least. It has taken me many years to realize how fundamental this particular liminal moment has been to the formation of my character and interests. Only with the benefit of hindsight can I understand its direct connection to my choice of a PhD dissertation topic focused on another moment of loss of faith—the post-Cultural Revolution moment of the late 1970s, when Chinese filmmakers turned out one film after another debunking the high Maoist ideology of only a few years ago. No doubt Demirkubuz’s films are specifically Turkish. But if, as Lyotard tells us, loss of faith in grand narratives of progress is a hallmark of modernity, then maybe his films are also part of a broader postmodern condition that is more critical than ludic.

What remains for me to explain is why the dystopia, disillusion, and disengagement of Demirkubuz’s films, bordering on aphanasis, make me feel joy, rather than depression. I think the answer lies in the release from the straightjacket of modern ideology. If one does not believe in human progress and perfectibility or the possibility of absolute freedom or happiness, it is uplifting to have the weight of an ideology that insists on these qualities removed. Of course, I do not want to over-simplify by suggesting that modern ideology has disappeared or that in the case post-authoritarian societies like Turkey  (and China), new modern ideologies are not actively at work. But I have little doubt that films like Demirkubuz’s would never have made it through censorship in an authoritarian regime, for under such governments happiness and optimism is compulsory. This also helps me to understand why I respond so well to films like Demirkubuz’s and so badly to Hollywood with its happy endings and the culture of commercials and advertising, where a quick purchase solves all problems. In the end, it is about what rings true for me, and there is a joy in discovering someone else whose vision is not so different from mine.

I want to thank two of my former students, Özlem Köksal and İpek Tureli, who have brought Demirkubuz to my attention and helped me to see his films. I have also learnt a lot about Demirkubuz’s films from the discussion of C Block and trauma in Turkish cinema in Özlem’s Goldsmiths College MA thesis.
2 There is little written on Demirkubuz in English, but the most complete discussion I know of is: Gönül Dönmez-Colin, “New Turkish Cinema—Individual Tales of Common Concerns,” Asian Cinema 14:1 (2003): 138-145, see especially 140-43. Please forgive the footnotes. Some academic habits die hard. And besides, I figure you might want to read more.
3 The Albert Camus Society UK offers its perspective on the quality of the adaptation: “Fate by Zeki Demirkubuz,” http://www.camus-society.com/fate-demirkubuz-review.htm, downloaded 28 July 2006.
4 Dönmez-Colin details the Yesilçam references particularly well, pointing out for example that Innocence is not only a kind of road movie but also part of another genre particular to Yesilçam, the hotel movie.

Chris Berry. kader: Zeki Demirkubuz. Ed. S. Ruken Öztürk. Ankara: Dost, Ankara Sinema Derneği. 2006.