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Elegy | Lincoln Center

ELEGY
AĞIT | YILMAZ GÜNEY, 1971
TURKEY | FORMAT: 35MM | 80 MINUTES
Turkish cinema scholar Erju Ackman in person at the May 4 screening to discuss the work of Yılmaz Güney!


In this return to territory explored in earlier films such as Law of the Border, Yılmaz Güney—again working as director, writer and lead actor—offers a tale about smugglers working in southeastern Turkey. Çobanoǧlu is a former peasant who took to smuggling in order to survive, made notorious by his success in eluding capture. The locals compete with each other to give information on Çobanoǧlu to the authorities for a price, while the landowners aren’t above hiring him for some of their own dirty work. Yet through it all, Çobanoǧlu keeps his dignity, convinced there must be some way out of this vicious cycle of corruption. Once again, Güney creates a powerful portrait of a society feeding on itself, destroying its own possibilities for reform or improvement. The use of landscapes recalls the look and work of Peckinpah,  whose own, similarly themed The Wild Bunch had just been released.


SERIES: THE SPACE BETWEEN: A PANORAMA OF CINEMA IN TURKEY
VENUE: WALTER READE THEATER

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).

Film Notes from Harvard Film Archive | Elegy

Elegy (Agit)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Yilmaz Güney, Hayati Hamazaoglu, Bilal Inci
Turkey 1971, 35mm, color, 80 min. Turkish with English subtitles

Güney stars as one of four smugglers living and working in a rocky, desolate mountainous region. The macho braggadocio and violence of the men (reminiscent of The Wild Bunch) is contrasted with the quiet determination of a woman doctor who ministers to the impoverished villagers as best she can. Although the film is apparently a step back from the political neo-realism of Hope towards the rough lyricism of Bride of the Earth and The Hungry Wolves, Elegy ‘s narrative develops a dialectic between the anti-social behavior of the smugglers and the communitarian aspirations of the doctor. Güney skillfully draws on the allegorical potential of the landscape: the characters live under constant threat of avalanche. The film’s evocative cinematography makes use of the muted palette of the rocky landscape in a manner reminiscent of late Hollywood Western, from Ford to Peckinpah.