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The Craft of Descent Thanos Anastopoulos, Balkan Survey (Greece), October 2006 Translated from Greek by Tina Sideris
In 1997, Nuri Bilge Ceylan directed his first feature film, The Small Town. (It was preceded by the short film Cocoon). In 1999 Clouds of May followed. In this film, Ceylan described the life of a family, the father and mother (who are played by the director's own parents) and some relatives, in a village not far from the city where a director (their son) is trying to shoot a film. A film with striking self-referential elements, as in all of Ceylan's films, in which subjects such as family, childhood, lost innocence, life in the countryside, the passage of time, the realization of loss and the omnipotence of nature determinedly return. The film that the son/director is shooting in Clouds of May resembles The Small Town. Many of the scenes of the first film reappear in the second, and at the same locations. One could characterize it as a kind of film/mirror. In a part of one of the film's scenes, the director's father watches a scene from Cocoon on television. One could see this as self-reference, narcissism, and a compulsion for repetitiveness. However, I believe that it would be preferable to speak in terms adopted from painting or music. These are variations on the same theme and concurrently, a change of perspective. Ceylan returns to the same themes as a painter who paints the same portrait again and again, the same landscape again and again. It is exactly this process that we see in Clouds of May. While it is a film that springs from the entrails of the previous one, is neither its copy nor its mirror, it is rather its echo, its reflection, its correction through a different perspective. This time Ceylan concentrates not only on the small details of everyday life, but also to what is usually carefully hidden while permeating the surface of the world. The film plunges into the substance of things, people and circumstances. The family is not only the subject but also a necessary condition of this work, and the relationships between its members, the need for communication and the difficulty of intimacy predominate, under the relentless passage of time and the indifferent gaze of nature. In his relationship with nature, Ceylan constantly carries with him a deep residue from his childhood, connected to a sense of lost innocence. In nature one finds oneself faced with all he has left behind and all that has been lost forever. The lighter in the hands of the small boy in the film, which he clicks on and off playing music, unites the traditional world with the modern one, creating a new mythology with humor. The threat of the contemporary world coming to destroy the traditional one is stressed through the employees of the Ministry of Agriculture who come to enforce a law to cut down tees, which the director's father has been trying to protect for years. The scene where the leading character's father rushes on his bicycle to overtake the employees who are driving to the forest to mark his beloved trees with red paint is extremely moving. And when he discovers the marks on the trees the viewer stands beside him, helpless, confronted with another Cherry Orchard which is being lost. The film is a hymn to descent. The lines on the face of the father and the knots on the trees speak in the same way about the relentless passage of time, about people and things we love and will one day lose. However, nature reflected in the water, the rustling of the wind, the sparks of the fire at night, are what fill the senses with meaning and convey the fullness of life, imparting an almost religious sense of the eternal. The film also speaks of sculpting in time: cinematic time. Having the shooting of a film as the subject accentuates this aspect. Because, what is the shooting of a film if not the attempt to imprint time on the lives of people and simultaneously one of the last illusions of immortality? In a world that is being lost, film imprints the last whispers, the last rustlings, the last tremors forever. Ceylan's entire work is centered on inevitable loss. All the heroes of his films end up wiser and more mature, and at the same time crushed by loss. Life and death coexist in Ceylan's films and his heroes flow between them like water in a brook. Life sweetly passes and we get old, the mother says to her small nephew, giving him an egg to hold in his pocket for forty days. A coming of age trial which will lead to patience and responsibility. It doesn't matter if the nephew lies and cheats in his selfish desire to win an insignificant prize. Who said that life is perfect or that people are only virtuous? Nor is it by chance that the director is a sensitive observer and also a person who has difficulty expressing his emotions. This hero, who reappears in every Ceylan film, although not a faithful self-portrait of the director, reveals his inner world, sometimes with delicate humor and other times with deep anguish. Clouds of May is, for Nuri Bilge Ceylan, what Andrey Rublyov was for Tarkovsky, the film through which he crystallizes his artistic beliefs. His spiritual and moral Credo. The film that determines his relationship with Man, Nature, Time and Creation. It is an absolute path which extends even to production techniques. (All his films are made using extremely few resources, amateur actors and a small crew, something which permits him absolute artistic independence.) A path from which he does not stray, walking it again and again in successive variations towards a deep understanding of himself and of the world. In a world where cinema is becoming a more and more impersonal industry, Ceylan remains a genuine craftsman, inviting us to share the deeper values of this world.
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