Guney at TIFF Lightbox | 180 magazine

Guney at TIFF Lightbox | 180 magazine (Download PDF)

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).