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