Guney at TIFF Lightbox | 180 magazine

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Presentation and QandA in Toronto

The Films of Yilmaz Guney at Doc Films Chicago

The Films of Yilmaz Guney at Doc Films Chicago
Doc Films
University of Chicago
Ida Noyes Hall 
1212 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637


Schedule below, more information forthcoming.
Saturday February 11, 1 pm: BRIDE OF THE EARTH (Yilmaz Guney, 1968) 35mm 78m
Saturday February 11, 5 pm: THE HUNGRY WOLVES (Yilmaz Guney, 1969) 35mm, 85m
Thursday February 16, 7 pm: THE HERD (Zeki Okten, 1979) 35mm, 129m
Saturday February 18, 1 pm: ELEGY (Yilmaz Guney, 1972) 35mm, 82m
Saturday February 18, 3 pm: THE FRIEND (Yilmaz Guney, 1974) 35mm, 105m
Thursday February 23, 7 pm: YOL (Yilmaz Guney, 1982) 35mm, 111m
Saturday February 25, 1 pm: HOPE (Yilmaz Guney, Serif Goren) 35mm, 100m
Saturday February 25, 3 pm: THE POOR (Yilmaz Guney, Atif Yilmaz,1975) 35mm, 72m
About Doc


Doc Films is on record with the Museum of Modern Art as the longest continuously running student film society in the nation, looking back on a more than 75 year old history.
A Short History of Doc


Doc Films was founded in December 1940 as the International House Documentary Film Group, though its antecedents stretch back to 1932. Initially the group focused on "the realist study of our time via nonfiction film," but the documentary alone could not sustain the organization; within a few years, the group's programs expanded to include fiction and experimental films, a mixture that it maintains to this day.


Past film series at Doc have showcased diverse artists, genres and national cinemas or tackled subjects like feminism and human rights. Doc routinely shows prints from some of the country's leading film archives.

TIFF | The Friend

Sunday February 5
06:30 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1974
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 100 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney


A prosperous architect has a crisis of conscience after reuniting with his crusading childhood friend in one of Yilmaz Güney’s finest late works, which evokes the European art cinema of Antonioni and Pasolini in its elliptical narrative and bold stylistic flourishes.


Notes


Considered one of Güney's finest late works, The Friend was made immediately after the director's release from prison in a general amnesty. In his final appearance as an actor, Güney plays Azem, a humble agronomist who is reunited with his childhood pal Cemil, a once idealistic man who has become a prosperous architect and settled into a bourgeois marriage. Visiting Cemil at his summer villa, Azem soon becomes disenchanted with his posh acquaintance, and tries to revive his principles by taking him to the impoverished Anatolian village in which they grew up, where existence has become no easier. Confronted with the dire lives of those he has scorned and left behind, Cemil comes to a drastic decision. Looking back to Antonioni and Pasolini in its evocation of European art cinema (the Variety critic compared it to Pasolini's Teorema) and forward to Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant, the uncharacteristically elliptical The Friend opened new territory for Güney as both director and actor, and though Güney wanted to dismantle his image as the "adventurous, fighting and swaggering tough guy," the film still proved a major hit in Turkey (though one religious critic condemned the bordello scenes as pornographic)

TIFF | The Hungry Wolves

Saturday February 4
07:00 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1969
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 88 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney


Yilmaz Güney directs and stars in this ferociously exciting “Turkish western” set in the blinding snows of the eastern mountains, where a laconic hired killer finds himself both hunter and hunted.


Notes


Beautifully shot in black and white that intensifies the blinding snowscape in which the film is set, the Leone-like Hungry Wolves stars Güney as Memed, a laconic fugitive who hunts bandits in the mountains of eastern Turkey. When a rich landowner hires Memed as a bounty killer to avenge his father's death, the hired gun finds himself both hunter and hunted, having to elude or kill the "hungry wolves" of the title. The harshness of the snowbound landscape is equalled by that of its people: one woman is informed to find another husband quickly as hers will soon be dead; another begs Memed to shoot her as he has so many others, but he refuses because she can't pay him for the job ("I don't fire a bullet for free," he informs the desperate peasant). With a stirring, Ennio Morricone-like music score, the tremendously exciting Hungry Wolves introduces the figure of the solitary or isolated man that would be a fixture of Güney's cinema.

TIFF | Bride of the Earth

Friday February 3
06:30 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1968
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 78 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney


A poor Anatolian man sets out to make his fortune so that he can marry his beloved, but her family has their eyes on a more profitable match with a rich landowner. Yilmaz Güney’s lyrical revenge drama echoes the masterful cinema of Satyajit Ray and Roberto Rossellini.


Notes


In this rural revenge drama, Güney plays Seyit Han, a poor man in love with a woman from his Anatolian village who returns his affection. Seyit Han postpones their marriage so that he can make his fortune elsewhere and return to the village to claim his "bride of the earth." During his prolonged absence, a rich landowner begins to woo the lonely woman, and her brother, intent upon making this propitious wedding happen, spreads the rumour that Seyit Han has died. Filled with striking images of entrapment — a man stuck in quicksand, a woman in a wicker cage — and landscapes of daisy-covered plains, Bride of the Earth powerfully explores the still feudalistic ways of rural Turkey, the superstitions and codes of honour that entrap women and thwart love. "Contains surprising moments of quiet lyricism that suggest Güney was becoming familiar with the cinema of Satyajit Ray and Roberto Rossellini" (Bilge Ebiri).

TIFF | Elegy

Thursday February 2
06:30 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1971
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 80 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney


Yilmaz Güney stars as one of a band of outlaws who fall into an ambush in a treacherous mountain landscape in this striking adventure drama, which has frequently been compared to the films of Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa.


Notes


Set against a forbidding, mountainous landscape prone to avalanches, Elegy is one of Güney's most powerful studies of rural poverty and oppression. Güney plays a smuggler, part of a band of outlaws, men as hard, desolate and inaccessible as the rocky border land they traverse. When the bandit falls into an ambush, his survival depends on a community-minded doctor who serves the villagers as best she can. As in many of his films including Hope and The Friend, Güney establishes a tension between those who act for the common good — here the modest, determined doctor — with those who are out only for themselves. Frequently compared to the films of Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, Elegy makes much of its treacherous landscape, and Güney, strikingly wrapped in white and brandishing a rifle, holds the screen with a performance that recalls both the flinty Clint Eastwood and the cyclonic Toshiro Mifune. "The most accomplished film of [Güney's] trilogy" (Gönül Dönmez-Colin).

TIFF | The Poor Ones

Sunday January 29
06:30 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1974
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 72 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney, Atif Yilmaz


Three convicts relate the causes for their imprisonment in Yilmaz Güney’s gripping drama, which had to be completed by a collaborator after Güney was himself imprisoned for harbouring anarchist students.


Notes


In this strong foreshadowing of Yol, three convicts, the "poor ones" of the title, are released on a snowy night into a world in which they are outcasts. Flashbacks reveal their unfortunate pasts and the reasons they landed in jail (which seems more a refuge from the harsh outside than anything else). Their stories, involving betrayal, prostitution, and murder, accumulate into an indictment of the rampant injustice in a country that does nothing to prevent the innocent from falling into crime. Güney plays Abuzer, marked for life by witnessing a murder as a child, but the film had to be rewritten and his role reduced after shooting was first begun when Güney was imprisoned for harbouring anarchist students. Completed by his collaborator Atif Yilmaz, The Poor Ones nevertheless falls among Güney's most committed and critical works

TIFF | Yol

Saturday January 28
06:30 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1982
Language: English
Runtime: 111 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Serif Gören
Yilmaz Güney’s masterpiece — a majestic story about five prisoners released for a week-long furlough whose individual odysseys unite to form a grand allegory for the state of modern Turkey — won the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival and became a worldwide cause célèbre.


Notes


"The latest masterpiece from Turkey's leading filmmaker, Yilmaz Güney" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice). Güney's most celebrated film, directed by proxy from prison (footage was smuggled to Switzerland and edited in Paris), Yol was rapturously received the world over and received countless prizes, including the Palme d'Or and the International Critics Prize at Cannes. (France granted Güney temporary exemption from extradition to attend the awards ceremony, where he had to be accompanied by an entourage of bodyguards to prevent kidnapping or assassination.) Following the fates of five prisoners given one-week furloughs from the island jail of Imrali, Güney fashions their individual, parallel odysseys into an encompassing metaphor for the state of Turkey, where freedom is scant, poverty and oppression rampant. Breaking one of many taboos in the film, Güney includes a Kurdish character who travels home to his village on the Syrian border, and has him speak the hitherto forbidden language of his people. Sweeping in every aspect — music, landscapes, performances — Yol makes most other films look puny by comparison. "It moves the spectator to tears. Greek tragedy is no less sentimental, no less moving" (Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail).


We are pleased to welcome Erju Ackman, film curator and organizer of the Yilmaz Güney retrospective, who will introduce our screening of Yol and place it in the context of Güney's life and career.

TIFF | The Herd

Friday January 27
06:30 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1978-79
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 120 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Zeki Okten

An Anatolian family undertakes a perilous journey to sell their flock of sheep in far-off Ankara in Yilmaz Güney’s stirring epic, winner of numerous international prizes and now recognized as a classic of world cinema.
Notes

A must. Winner of the British Film Institute award and the Golden Leopard (Grand Prize) at the Locarno Film Festival, The Herd has become a classic of world cinema. Ironically, though co-directed by Güney's collaborator Zeki Ökten, the film vies with Yol as Güney's best known and "most cinematically beautiful" (Festival of Festivals) work. (Güney wrote it in prison, and sources vary as to how much he was involved in its direction.) An austerely beautiful neorealist epic, The Herd portrays a Kurdish family from southern Anatolia who, embroiled in a blood feud with a neighbouring clan, are driven by their tyrannical patriarch to auction their flock of sheep in far-off Ankara. Encountering misfortune at every turn on their journey and corruption when they finally reach their destination, the family is engulfed and betrayed by a rapidly changing modern state. Stirring and poetic, The Herd "achieves with limited resources a kind of epic grandeur and pathos" (Adrian Turner). "Excellent" (The Guardian).

"Sürü:" Halkımızın İsyan Dolu Çığlığı

De­ğer­li ar­ka­daş­lar,

“Sürü” en il­kel ko­şul­lar­da, en zor şart­lar al­tın­da bi­le dev­rim­ci de­mok­rat bir si­ne­ma ada­mı­nın is­yan do­lu çığ­lı­ğı­nı ve iç­ten ağı­dı­nı siz­le­re ulaş­tı­rı­yor. Bu ses ezi­len hal­kı­mın onur­lu se­si­dir. Bu ses, her şe­ye rağ­men bas­kı­la­ra kar­şı di­re­ni­şin, ya­sak­la­ra, en­gel­le­me­le­re mey­dan oku­ma­nın yi­ğit se­si­dir.

Bu se­si hiç kim­se sus­tu­ra­maz. Çığ­lı­ğı­mız, de­mok­rat dün­ya ka­mu­oyu­nu, hal­kı­mın ve ezi­len dün­ya halk­la­rı­nın yüz yü­ze ol­du­ğu bas­kı­la­ra kar­şı has­sas ol­ma­sı­na çağ­rı­dır. Ül­kem fa­şist dik­ta­tör­lük al­tın­da­dır. Bas­kı­nın ve zul­mün de­mir ök­çe­li çiz­me­le­ri al­tın­da ezil­mek­te­dir.

Dün­ya­nın han­gi kö­şe­sin­de olur­sa ol­sun, halk­lar üze­rin­de an­ti de­mok­ra­tik bas­kı­lar var­sa, in­san hak­la­rı ayak­lar al­tın­day­sa, bu sa­de­ce o acı­la­rı ya­şa­yan halk­la­rın de­ğil ay­nı za­man­da dün­ya de­mok­rat­la­rı­nın da so­ru­nu­dur.

Kim ki ken­di dı­şın­da­ki bas­kı­la­ra ka­yıt­sız ve umur­sa­maz­dır, on­lar da bas­kı­la­rın ve zul­mün suç or­tak­la­rı­dır. Ar­tık ba­ğır­ma­nın za­ma­nı­dır. Ölüm ku­san mah­ke­me­le­ri, idam seh­pa­la­rı­nı, iş­ken­ce oda­la­rı­nı la­net­le­me­nin za­ma­nı­dır. Emek­çi­le­rin, de­mok­rat ay­dın­la­rın se­si­ni sün­gü­ler­le sus­tur­mak is­te­yen­le­re gür bir ses­le “DUR” de­me­nin za­ma­nı­dır. Onur­la ya­şa­ma­nın tek yo­lu bu­dur.

Fi­zi­ki ola­rak ara­nız­da ol­ama­ya­ca­ğım ama se­si­mi ve is­yan do­lu yü­re­ği­min çar­pın­tı­la­rı­nı du­ya­ca­ğı­nı­za ina­nı­yo­rum. Şi­van ve Be­ri­van hal­kı­mın acı­la­rı­nı si­ze ve İn­gi­liz hal­kı­na an­la­ta­cak­tır.

Bir gün hal­kım zul­mü ye­ne­cek­tir.

Bir gün hal­kım kol­la­rı­nı sa­ran pas­lı zin­cir­le­ri par­ça­la­ya­cak­tır.

Si­ze ve İn­gi­liz hal­kı­na sı­cak ve en iç­ten se­lam­la­rı­mı ile­ti­yo­rum.

Se­lam… Bin se­lam…


Kaynak: http://kutuphane.halkcephesi.net/Yilmaz%20Guney/index.html

TIFF | Hope

Thursday January 26
06:30 PM
Country: Turkey
Year: 1970
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 100 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney 


Yilmaz Güney directs and stars in this searing neorealist drama, often compared to the classic Bicycle Thieves and hailed as one of the best films in the history of Turkish cinema. 


Notes 


"Hope is generally accepted as one of the best ten films of the history of cinema in Turkey" proclaims authority Savas Arslan, and Gönül Dönmez-Colin concurs, calling it "a landmark in the history of Turkish cinema." Often compared to Bicycle Thieves, Güney's first international success stars the actor-director as Cabbar, an uneducated cart driver who wants a better life for his family, but rejects any call to political action by his co-workers. Instead, the hopeless dreamer drifts from one get-rich scheme to another, each more unlikely than the last. After an accident destroys his already meagre livelihood, Cabbar falls in with a mystical imam who leads him on a hunt for lost treasure. A searing social document, the ironically titled Hope reveals Güney's tonal daring (beginning in a neorealist vein, the film becomes increasingly absurdist and at times darkly comic) and formal inventiveness, opening with a lovely "city symphony," employing shots of the parched landscape as punctuation, and making effective use of silence and disjuncture of sound and image. The last image brilliantly captures the unfounded faith of a man who chooses solitary fortune-hunting over class solidarity. "Hope is] a magnificent achievement . . . [it] defines for the first time Güney's universe with startling clarity" (Derek Elley); "Generally considered [Güney's] first masterpiece" (Bilge Ebiri).

Yilmaz Güney in TIFF Toronto

Yilmaz Güney, Turkey’s greatest screen idol and most important director, gained notoriety as both an onscreen tough guy and an offscreen left-wing dissident, who spent half his life in prison under successive military regimes. This selection of some of his key films — many of which he directed by proxy from a jail cell — shines a light on a fascinating cinematic legacy still largely unknown in the West.

James Quandt on Güney

Notes


"More than a film star in the conventional sense, [Güney] became something of a popular myth, a figure in whose sufferings and ruthless quest for vengeance the poor and oppressed could see their lives and aspirations reflected." —Roy Armes


"We're all somehow his children." — Fatih Akin


"Even under the most difficult circumstances, in the periods of greatest repression there are ways of reaching the people through film. We must always seize even the smallest opportunities. If something concerns our people, they understand what is being said to them, even when it is expressed in a fictional form." — Yilmaz Güney


The most important director in the history of Turkish cinema, a legendary national idol long absent from North American screens because his widely acclaimed and greatly influential films have been unavailable, Yilmaz Güney (1931-84) won the Palme d'or at Cannes for Yol, a film he directed by proxy, one of many anomalies in a career frequently interrupted by political imprisonment. An inspiration to countless subsequent directors, including the Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head-On), who has spent the last years preparing a film about his self-declared hero, Güney drew on Italian neorealism to make his deeply humane and passionately committed works about the social reality of his country. His great appeal to widely diverse audiences — international art-house cinephiles and the Turkish masses, both the politically committed and indifferent — indicates the breadth of his achievement. This retrospective, organized by Erju Ackman in collaboration with the Güney Foundation and travelling to select film institutions in North America, offers the rarest opportunity to encounter the director called, when Yoldebuted at Cannes, "one of the most remarkable and important filmmakers in the world today" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).


Though Yilmaz Güney spent half his life in prison, incarcerated by successive Turkish military regimes for his leftist politics and support of Kurdish aspirations (his first spell in jail was due to a short story he wrote in high school), he managed to act in dozens of films, sometimes more than twenty in one year. Endeared to the Turkish everyman by playing underdogs who die taking revenge upon a world that has humiliated them, Güney became the most popular leading man in the history of Turkish cinema, widely known as "The Ugly King" for his rough-hewn handsomeness. (Reportedly, his face on a magazine cover can still incite frenzy almost three decades after his death.) As Jim Hoberman wrote from Cannes in 1982, when Yol took the festival by storm, "Güney's ability to combine mass popularity, sophisticated critical acclaim, and effective politics is perhaps unique in world cinema: it is almost as if Clint Eastwood, James Dean, Ingmar Bergman, and Stanley Kubrick were rolled up into a single, larger-than-life figure." That many of his films, including the celebrated Yol, were reviled and banned by Turkish authorities only enhanced Güney's folk legend in his country.


Like one of his great inspirations, Roberto Rossellini, and the other Italian auteur to whom he has been frequently compared, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Güney was a figure rife with contradiction and ambiguity. Both "Ugly King" and handsome prince, Güney had the brooding good looks of Gian Maria Volonté but employed them to contrary ends in a series of swaggering roughneck roles. A cinephile since childhood, when he saw films brought to his village by itinerant projectionists, Güney admired such actors as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Eddie Constantine, and Jean Gabin, whose gallery of tough guys, romantic outsiders, and doomed pariahs would inform Güney's own filmic persona. Brawling, gun-loving, and volatile both on screen and off, Güney would, as a director, refashion the pulpy popular films he first played in, their titles often brandishing blood or bullets, into revenge dramas or "Turkish westerns" of uncommon beauty, formal sophistication, and political urgency. Inspired by the lyricism and social commitment of Italian neorealism and then by the allusiveness of European art cinema, Güney remade his nation's expectations of movies, paving the way for the New Turkish Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Semih Kaplanoglu and Yesim Ustaoglu.


Many details about Güney's life and career bristle with paradox and uncertainty. His politics were revolutionary, but his work, much as it reveals economic injustice, dwells more on the trapped and helpless, people driven by poverty to crime or madness rather than insurrection. A Marxist dedicated to the poor and outcast, with whom he forged a strong bond of identification, Güney also enjoyed a reputation as a high-living playboy; passionately concerned with the subjugation of women in the macho, sometimes neo-feudal culture of his homeland, addressing their plight in film after film, he was also capable of cruelty towards them in his everyday life. Though his films were often identified with the cause of Kurdish nationalism, Güney's own Kurdish heritage is somewhat disputed and his attitude towards the movement seemed to veer between outright support and a curious reticence; as critic Bilge Ebiri notes, "[Güney's] statements on the movement during his lifetime were often contradictory, even after he fled Turkey. It's more likely that he identified with the movement somewhat not because of any kind of ethnic solidarity, but because he recognised in it the aura of the oppressed." This has led to what Ebiri calls an "intriguing turf war" between "Kurdish nationalists [who] see in him one of their own, a countryman who was never allowed to express his true ethnicity until the very end of his life[, and t]he intellectual Left[, which] sees in him the makings of a true political auteur, a cross between Satyajit Ray and Gillo Pontecorvo."


The issue of authorship is a particularly complex one with Güney, however, as his frequent incarcerations — capped by a nineteen-year sentence in 1974 for allegedly shooting and killing a right-wing judge who insulted him in a café, though some have speculated that this was a trumped-up charge — often obliged him to direct by proxy, collaborating with other filmmakers and having them realize his precisely detailed scripts and storyboards, sometimes screening the rushes and even editing footage in jail. (One wonders if Güney saw Rossellini's great, unsettling comedy Dov'è la libertà?, an ironic tale of a man who comes to prefer prison to the iniquity of life outside.) Unsurprisingly for a man who spent so much time behind bars, incarceration became a controlling metaphor in Güney's cinema, in such films as The Poor Ones (its filming interrupted when the director was jailed for harbouring anarchist students) and, most markedly, in Yol, in which five men are given week-long furloughs from an island prison only to find themselves still shackled by their country's archaic, oppressive ways of thinking and being. Güney's last film, set in a Turkish prison but shot in Paris after he escaped from prison and fled Turkey in 1981, tellingly took its title from immurement: The Wall.


That the list of directors to whom Güney has been compared includes auteurs as diverse as Griffith, Eisenstein, De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Leone, Peckinpah, Wajda, Kurosawa and Godard might suggest incoherence or pastiche, but instead indicates his remarkably omnivorous sensibility. In particular, many critics have noted the parallels between Güney and Pasolini, each from a spurned minority, influenced by Italian neorealism, and passionately concerned with the downtrodden, each addressing the tension between tradition and modernity in a rapidly changing country, each drawn to modes of myth, allegory, and melodrama to portray the beauty and despair of their respective homelands. (Güney's final film The Wall — which Ebiri dubs "a chamber of horrors" — has been equated to Pasolini's own last testament, Salò.) The comparison soon falters however, the directors' differences — sexual, stylistic, intellectual, ideological — more marked than their similarities. In his seemingly irreconcilable allegiances to Marx, Freud and Christ, to both the peasant past and the urban subproletarian present, Pasolini transcended all orthodoxies and affiliations, his "divided self" embodying the tensions and fissures in postwar Italian culture. Güney too was aware of his country as a contradiction unto itself, where the disenfranchised often conspired in their own repression, but his alienation was of a different sort and order than Pasolini's. Dying in exile in France at age forty-seven, he remained to his early end the "Ugly King," dissident hero to the Turkish masses and recalcitrant master to international cinephiles. — James Quandt