Radio Canada Interview | Sophie Perceval

Sophie Perceval and Erju Ackman

SP- Comment décririez-vous la place de Yilmaz Güney dans le cinéma turc aujourd'hui? dans le cinéma mondial?

EA- Aujourd'hui le cinéma turc est très différent. Malgré que les films de Yilmaz Güney sont daté il existe toujours l'influence idéologique de M. Güney a travers le cinéma turc. Son statut dans le monde du cinéma est tout simplement son émergence de la Turquie. Cet à dire, grâce a ses films la Turquie, elle aussi a gagnée sa voix. Ses films racontent des histoires qui auparavant étaient rarement exposées au monde. Cet avec son film Umut qui veut dire l'Espoir  Yilmaz Güney annonce une nouvelle direction. Il signifie un départ de ses films d'action vers une adaptation d'une Anatolie du néoréalisme, cet à dire avec un engagement social infusé avec des rythmes de vie turc. On peut comparé Ladri di Bicicletta de Sica avec Umut, puis-que les deux films ont catapulté les cinémas nationaux de leurs réalisateurs à l'échiquier mondiale. Ensuite c'est le film Yol, qui a propulsé M. Güney à devenir une réalisateur renommée mondiale. 

SP- Ses films sont très difficiles à trouver - y a-t-il des obstacles politiques à leur distribution?

EA- Quand M. Güney s'est échappé de la prison et a remporté un prix en France ses films sont devenus indisponibles au public turc. D'autres films de M. Guney ont été projetés en Europe pour financer des causes socialistes. Cette situation a changé au cours des dix dernières années. Aujourd'hui en Turquie il y a une plus grande détente générale de l'expression de soi et une discussion plus libre du problèmes kurdes. Ces films au programme sont des copies obtenues par le ministère de la Culture et du Tourisme du gouvernement Turque, et c'est la première fois que cette série consacrée à ses films sont en tournée aux Etats-Unis et au Canada a travers plusieurs lieu.

SP- Comment décririez-vous le style de Güney comme réalisateur? 

EA- Yilmaz Güney comme auteur de film nécessite une clarification. Puis-ce-qu'il était en prison durant les tournages de plusieurs film il à néanmoins réalisé les films à l'écart du tournage. Ceci a était accompli a l'aide des listed de plans très détaillés qui ont était communiqué a travers des modes clandestins.  Il a était autorisé de regarder les dailies afin demander des changement de prise, et participer au montage des scènes en prison. Bien que ses directeurs de substitution ont pu faire passer des aspects de leurs propres styles dans les films (on peut voir quelques différences assez marquées entre l'austérité de Suru et le mélodrame épique de Yol).

En ce qui concerne son style, M. Güney est devenu auteur de la midsixties, la création d'un cinéma qui a pris les éléments clés folklorique turc et kurde et les fusionner en un mélange hypnotique avec les film italien et les
westerns d'hollywood, le cinéma du Tiers-Monde, et le réalisme
social.

SP- Pouvez-vous nous parler du rôle de la musique dans ses films?

EA- Ses films d'action avait de la musique similaire à des spaghetti westerns mais avec Yol et désormais il utilisé un score composé pour la duration entière du film. Et ils avaient même une chanson thème pour le film Ami basée sur sa poésie. Il a été un grand succès dans les charts. Ses films réalistes ont utilisés de la musique folklorique régional ou rien du tout.


J'aimerais réciter si vous permetter un petit échantillon de sa poésie en langue
turque et essayer une traduction.

Bu en güzel, bu en sıcak duygudur arkadaş...
Ortak olmak her sevince, her derde kedere,
Ve yürümek ömürboyu,
Beraberce el ele...

C'est le plus beau, le plus chaleureux sentiment mon ami ...
Être ensemble pour la joie, et pour la tristesse du foi,
Et de marcher au long de la vie,
Ensemble, main dans la main ...

SP- Les crimes d'honneur sont très présents dans l'actualité canadienne (procès Shafia à Kingston, Ontario): l'oeuvre de Güney peut-elle nourrir une réflexion à ce sujet?

EA- Oui, je suis au courant de ce procès à Kingston. Un des personnages dans le film Yol rentre chez lui pour commettre un tel crime d'honneur. A travers ce personnage, M. Güney veut illustré l'atrocité de ce genre de crime. Une visionnement de ces scènes sont transformative. Il est intéressant de voir le traitement de ce sujet dans le film qui remonte maintenant à trente ans. 

Vene et voir les Films de Guney a TIFF Bell Lightbox a Toronto et la prochain mois a Ottawa.

Merci Sophie merci  Radio Canada pour cette opportunité

English Translation

Radio Canada Interview | Sophie Perceval


Sophie Perceval and Erju Ackman - How would you describe Yilmaz Güney's place in Turkish cinema today? in the world cinema?

Today Turkish cinema is very different. Although Yilmaz Güney's films are dated, there is still the ideological influence of Mr. Güney through Turkish cinema. His status in the world of cinema is simply his emergence from Turkey. That is to say, thanks to his films Turkey, she also won her voice. His films tell stories that were previously rarely exposed to the world. This with his film Umut which means Hope Yilmaz Güney announces a new direction. It means a departure from his action films towards an adaptation of Anatolia of neorealism, that is to say with a social commitment infused with Turkish life rhythms. One can compare Ladri di Bicicletta of Sica with Umut, since both films catapulted the national cinemas of their directors to the world stage. 

- His films are very hard to find - are there political obstacles to their distribution? 

When Mr. Güney escaped from prison and won a prize in France his films became unavailable to the Turkish public. Other films by Mr Guney have been screened in Europe to finance socialist causes. This situation has changed in the last ten years. Today in Turkey there is a greater general relaxation of self-expression and a freer discussion of Kurdish problems. These films on the program are copies obtained by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Turkish Government, and this is the first time this series devoted to his films are touring the United States and Canada through several venues.

- How would you describe Güney's style as a director? 

Yilmaz Güney as a film author needs clarification. Although he was in prison during the filming of several films he nevertheless made films away from the shoot. This was accomplished with the help of the very detailed plans that were communicated through clandestine fashions. He was allowed to watch the dailies to ask for a change of hold, and to participate in the editing of scenes in prison. Although his alternate directors have been able to pass aspects of their own styles into the movies (we can see some rather marked differences between Suru's austerity and Yol's epic melodrama). As for his style, Mr. Güney became author of the midsixties, cinema that took the key Turkish and Kurdish folk elements and merge them into a hypnotic mix with Italian film and  Hollywood westerns, Third World cinema, and 
social realism . 

- Can you tell us about the role of music in his films? 

His action films had music similar to spaghetti westerns but with Yol and now he used a composite score for the entire duration of the film. And they even had a theme song for the movie Friend based on his poetry. He was a big hit in the charts. His realistic films used regional folk music or nothing at all. I would like to recite if you allow a small sample of his poetry in Turkish and try a translation.

Bu en güzel, bu en sıcak duygudur arkadaş...
Ortak olmak her sevince, her derde kedere,
Ve yürümek ömürboyu,
Beraberce el ele...

 It's the most beautiful, the warmest feeling my friend ... To be together for joy, and for the sadness of faith, And walking throughout life, Together, hand in hand ... 

- Honor killings are very present in Canadian news (Shafia trial in Kingston, Ontario) : Can Güney's work feed a reflection on this?

Yes, I am aware of this lawsuit in Kingston. One of the characters in the movie Yol goes home to commit such a crime of honor. Through this character, Mr. Güney wants to illustrate the atrocity of this kind of crime. A viewing of these scenes are transformative. It is interesting to see the treatment of this subject in the film which is now thirty years old. Vene and see Guney Films at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and next month in Ottawa. Thank you Sophie thanks Radio Canada for this opportunity

TIFF Cinematheque celebrates Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Guney

By

Andrew Parker

– January 19, 2012 

Posted in: Movie News, Toronto

1

While the term “national cinema” seems to be a bit of a misnomer (isn’t all cinema, by nature, national?), few directors have been tied to a national cinematic identity as Turkish filmmaker, Yilmaz Guney. Once described by former Village Voice critic J. Hoberman as “something like Clint Eastwood, James Dean, and Che Guevara combined,” the Kurdish filmmaker few in the western world have become acquainted with gets his due with a retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox titled The Way Home: The Films of Turkish Master Yilmaz Guney.

While the series (running Thursday, January 26 through Sunday, February 5) focuses on his directorial and writing efforts, Guney was actually quite the matinee idol before stepping behind the camera. One of the biggest Kurdish stars in history, he has over 100 acting, producing, writing, and directing credits to his name, despite spending a great deal of his life in prison and dying from stomach cancer before he was even fifty years old.

While most of his acting output was in oaters often derided by Turkish film scholars as populist pieces of junk, Guney gained more notoriety and infamy in his home country as a writer and filmmaker. It was dangerous to be a Kurd in Guney’s world, especially an outspoken one. Kurds weren’t able to publish written works, own their own broadcasting systems, or even speak their own language. The idea of a writer, director, and actor attempting to impart his own ethnic background onto national cinema was something that often landed Guney is jail and branded as a seditionist and a Communist.
His first feature, the almost verite styled Hope (Thursday, January 26 at 6:30 p.m.) utilizes real locations and non-actors to tell the story of a driver and family man named Cabbar as he struggles with his own identity in an allegedly prosperous economy that seems to have no place for him. Rightfully positioned as a masterwork of Turkish cinema, this is a rare chance to see it on the big screen, as this and the seven other films selected for the programme are extremely hard to find since the Turkish government long suppressed and destroyed the films involving Guney in a bid to deny his impact on his culture.

With the films Bride of the Earth (Friday, February 3 at 6:30 p.m.), its sequel Elegy (Thursday, February 2 at 6:30 p.m.), and The Hungry Wolves (Saturday, February 4 at 7 p.m.), Hoberman’s Eastwood comparison comes into full light with these counterpart tales of a soulful smuggler told in the same vein of the John Ford and John Huston dramas that Guney modeled his own films on.
His two best known and most critically acclaimed works happened towards the end of his career and were actually directed via proxies because of his own imprisonment during the pre-production of The Poor Ones (Sunday, January 29 at 6:30 p.m.). The Herd (Friday, January 27 at 6:30 p.m.) was overseen by Zeki Okten and functions as a melodrama about an arranged marriage originally designed to bring two warring tribes together that ends up causing a bigger rift.
Guney would make his biggest splash on the international stage with the Serif Goren directed Yol (Saturday, January 28 at 6:30 p.m.), a semi-autobiographical work that shared the 1982 Palme d’Or at Cannes with Costa Gavras’ Missing. This story of five prisoners released from a penitentiary on temporary personal leave is a strikingly political look at how Guney’s own country had become a prison unto itself. The film caused such a stir in Turkey that it had to be smuggled out of the country to be edited in Europe. Guney escaped from prison to attend the Cannes award ceremony, after which he would disappear to create one final film in France before his death in 1984. Yol remained unseen in his native Turkey until February 12, 1999.

While some of the films haven’t particularly aged well in terms of content, they remain important historical documents on a culture rarely glimpsed on screen. The rarity of these films makes it highly unlikely that they might ever be shown again in Canada, let alone Toronto. For World Cinema completists, it’s a can’t miss proposition.
For other films, showtimes, and tickets, please visit tiff.net.
Top image: A scene from Yol. Courtesy TIFF.

About Andrew Parker

Andrew Parker writes for numerous blogs and publications, including Notes From the Toronto Underground and his more personal pop-culture blog, I Can't Get Laid in This Town. He is also the curator of the Defending the Indefensible series of films at the Toronto Underground Cinema.

Turkuaz TV Guney Announcement | TIFF Toronto

Yilmaz Guney Tiff Ozel 2012 from Turkuaz TV on Vimeo.

Guney at TIFF Lightbox | 180 magazine

Guney at TIFF Lightbox | 180 magazine (Download PDF)

Presentation and QandA in Toronto

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