Film Notes from Harvard Film Archive | The Hungry Wolves

The Hungry Wolves (Aç kurtlar)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Yilmaz Güney, Sevgi Can, Hayati Hamzaoglu
Turkey 1969, 35mm, b/w, 70 min. Turkish with English subtitles

Both hunter and hunted, a bandit (Güney) lives in a desolate snowscape, beautifully captured in stark black-and-white cinematography. Seemingly invincible, the bandit becomes increasingly desperate to protect his family from his enemies. The film’s emotive musical score recalls Ennio Morricone as surely as the film’s tale of revenge recalls Sergio Leone. Indeed, the stoic, tight-lipped determination of Güney’s bandit seems modeled after Clint Eastwood. Güney stages his lone figures in a landscape made almost abstract by the blinding white of the snow, giving the film a bleak poetry. The solitude of the hero of The Hungry Wolves will increasingly be seen in Güney’s future films as not so much heroic as doomed.