OCTOBER 15-16, 20, 22-24,26-27
"It’s doubtful that any major filmmaker ever spent as long behind bars as Güney." TONY RAYNS, TIME OUT
“Güney was the most innovative, talented, influential, and internationally acclaimed director Turkey has ever produced. He became a source of inspiration of a generation of young directors.” YUSUF KAPLAN, THE OXFORD HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA
The remarkable life of Yilmaz Güney rivals any of his films for drama.
A master of startling imagery, vigorous storytelling, and political commitment, Güney (1937-84) is a legendary figure in Turkish cinema and undoubtedly the best-known and most controversial filmmaker the country has produced to date.
Born to Kurdish parents in rural southern Turkey, Güney studied both law and economics before becoming active in the cinema in the late 1950s as a screenwriter, assistant director, and actor for the prominent filmmaker (and fellow Kurd) Atif Yilmaz. A gruff, ruggedly handsome man with a charismatic screen presence, Güney was by the early 1960s a huge star in Turkey, playing tough guys and outlaws in the restless, brooding mode of his Hollywood heroes Cagney, Bogart, and Lancaster, and earning himself the nickname “The Ugly King.” During the same period, he was imprisoned for what proved to be the first of several times, receiving an 18-month sentence for the “communist” content of a story he had written.
Güney began making his own films just as a lasting socio-cultural and political unrest began to take hold in Turkey. His early films as a director were fascinating genre exercises with subtle political undertones, using the forms of revenge melodrama and crime film to explore the feudal conditions that still existed in Turkey’s rural regions. Hope (1970), a depiction of hopelessness amongst the urban poor, proved an artistic turning point, and drew comparisons to Italian neorealism. Its original mix of realist detail, expressionism, and even darkly absurdist humour brought Güney international recognition, but also incurred the wrath of Turkish censors. The director was arrested and imprisoned for a week in the unrest that followed the 1971 military coup. After a period of intense productivity that produced a series of impassioned films, he was again imprisoned in 1972, for allegedly harbouring anarchist fugitives. Held for 26 months without trial, he was released in 1974 as part of a general amnesty. Within months he was arrested again, for the murder of a right-wing judge, apparently during a restaurant brawl. He received a 24-year sentence, later commuted to 18 years. Details of the crime remain obscure and controversial; Güney always maintained his innocence despite incriminating evidence.
Behind bars once more, Güney devoted himself furiously to screenwriting, completing scripts and copious notes which he sent to his proxies and collaborators and which resulted in some of his most acclaimed work, including Yol (1982), his most famous film. In 1981, Güney escaped prison — by simply walking away — and fled to France. Given that incarceration had only seemed to ratify his near-legendary status in Turkey; Güney’s claim that the government wanted him to escape, so that they could exile him, seems plausible. He was present (although as a fugitive) at Cannes in 1982 whenYol won the Palme d’Or. He directed a final film in France in 1983 before dying of stomach cancer the next year.
Güney’s mature works merge political ideas with a strikingly original approach to the image and a penchant for poetry and allegory. Influenced by Italian neorealism, which serves as a basis for their visual style, his films veer into mythopoetic reverie fired by profound anger at the plight of the oppressed. They also display a fascination with the tension and contradiction between his nation’s rural peasantry and rapidly modernizing society. His singular status in Turkey and astonishing life story led the American critic J. Hoberman to once describe him as “something like Clint Eastwood, James Dean, and Che Guevara combined.” ADAPTED FROM HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to the Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism; Turkish Culture and Tourism Counselor's Office, Washington D.C.; Hüseyin Karabey, The Güney Foundation; Erju Ackman, Turkish Cinema Newsletter. All film prints supplied by the Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism - General Directorate of Copyright and Cinema / Telif Hakları ve Sinema Genel Müdürlüğü, Dr. Abdurrahman Çelik, General Director. Our program notes for this exhibition rely heavily on three main sources, all of which have been duly credited where appropriate: film notes prepared by Harvard Film Archive for its presentation of this retrospective earlier this year; “Yılmaz Güney” by Bilge Ebiri in issue 37 of Senses of Cinema; and “Yılmaz Güney” by Derek Elley in International Film Guide 1983.
