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).
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
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.
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
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, 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.
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
