Yilmaz Guney Film Series

Bride of the Earth

(Seyyit Han)

Turkey 1968. Director: Yılmaz Güney
Cast: Yilmaz Güney, Nebahat Çehre, Hayati Hamzaoğlu, Nihat Ziyalan, Sami Tunç

When Yilmaz Güney made the transition from tough-guy leading man to director-actor in the 1960s, he continued to specialize in the violent genre films that had made him a huge star in Turkey. Bride of the Earth is “the first film that Güney acknowledged as a fully realized effort ... With Bride, Güney began to explore revenge melodramas and crime films to examine the often feudal conditions that yet existed in Turkey’s rural regions ... Bride stars the director himself as a man separated from his bride-to-be by the superstitions and feudal conditions of rural life. The film’s attention to poverty as a barrier to happiness and personal aspiration looks forward to Güney’s more overtly political work while demonstrating his eye for striking images, particularly in his dramatic use of landscape, as well as more baroque, almost Bosch-like touches” (Harvard Film Archive). “Two works stand out from this period: Bride of the Earth and The Hungry Wolves ... Bride, though still in essence a rural revenge drama, contains surprising moments of quiet lyricism that suggest Güney was becoming familiar with the cinema of Satyajit Ray and Roberto Rossellini” (Bilge Ebiri, Senses of Cinema). B&W, 35mm, in Turkish with English subtitles. 78 mins.