"TURKEY CINEMASCOPE" LONDON EXHIBITION ( National Theatre, 22 January- 3 March 2007 )
Sue Steward, Evening Standard, 23 January 2007
"FILM-MAKERS SHARP EYE FOR CHARACTER" *****
Years behind a movie camera have left the award-winning Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan viewing the world through wide, horizontal frames.
On location trips for his latest film, Climates, he took a panoramic camera, but only in retrospect did he acknowledge the landscapes, city views and portraits as photographs not just reference pieces.
The overwhelmingly monochrome scenes were mostly shot at dusk, in snowy conditions.
Ceylan frequently distanced himself by standing on a mound overlooking a village where children herded sheep, or near a shepherd and his flock high above a temple ruin.
He possesses an exceptional sense of composition, and often shot where an arcing road gives views in two directions: Curved Street in Winter, Istanbul, opening onto a hill framed with old houses, and Baker Boy in Urfa, posed between the receding arms of a cobbled alley.
With the stirring portraits, it's as though Ceylan is in search of character actors: school-children, farmers, two sisters staring from their bleak farm yard, two men by the road, one frowning disapprovingly, the other with a twinkling smile.
In contrast, the winter scenes in Istanbul are about the exquisitely faded city. Ceylan exploits the blizzards in timeless pieces such as Trams in Beyoglu, where hunched-up pedestrians recall traditional Japanese painting.
The painterliness of Ceylan's photographs derives from his use of absorbent cotton-rag paper and archival pigment to add depth to detail. Vignettes from the bleak plains of Anatolia invite comparisons with Breughel: their white backgrounds and miniaturised, bundledup figures going about daily chores at dusk.
From his incidental beginning as a photographer, Ceylan is here revealed as a significant artist; and you leave burning with curiosity about his films.
........................................................................................................................................................
Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound, February 2007
"PAINTERLY PRECISION"
That Nuri Bilge Ceylan takes photographs is no surprise: both 'Uzak' and 'Climates' have photographers as protagonists and his films are notable for their visual precision and poetry. Moreover, if his cinema can be said to resemble anyone else's, it's that of Abbas Kiarostami, whom Ceylan admires and whose cinematic work is also complemented by photographs notable for their serene and mysterious beauty.
But as the Turkey Cinemascope' exhibition of Ceylan's photographs at the recent Thessaloniki film festival revealed, it would be wrong to push a Ceylan-Kiarostami parallel too far. True, as Kiarostami favours landscapes in rural Iran, so many of Ceylan's photographs depict villages, country roads and farms - often with Mount Ararat towering in the background. But there the resemblance ends. It's not just that Ceylan also takes pictures of cityscapes and people, but more crucially that the photographs in this exhibition, all shot with a digital panoramic camera, look so like paintings.
This distinctive quality is partly the result of Ceylan using archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper, then coating the prints with archival varnish: the colours and texture are extraordinarily rich. But the painterly impression also derives from his sense of composition: I thought of Turner, Lowry, even Ford Maddox Brown's The Last of England'. Ceylan claims he merely wanted to document his country while he was searching for film locations. Yet the pictorial balance of 'Curved Street in Winter' (left), the detail in 'Village in Cappadocia', the play of light in 'Country Road at Dusk', the striking sense of scale in 'Football Players near Mount Ararat' and the discreet compassion in portraits like Two Sisters' or The Shepherd' all betoken a major talent.
........................................................................................................................................................
Jason Spradlin, Vitruvian Mind, 22 January 2007
For those in London, I've seen clips of this and it's absolutely breathtaking. if you have time and interest I highly suggest checking out this show, as I'm sure the photo's are equally as impressive.
The multitalented Nuri Bilge Ceylan has had several incarnations, both in front of and behind the camera. This exhibition provides a deeper glimpse into his cinematic vision with a series of stunning wide-angle still photographs. All 25 images were snapped while the filmmaker scoured his native Turkey for locations for his award-winning film Climates. The "cinemascopes" feature bike-riding youngsters and sagacious shepherds, capturing the beauty of places as diverse as a snow-flecked Sultanahmet Square in Istanbul, the caves of Cappadocia, and the startling ruins at Aphrodisias.
........................................................................................................................................................
Mark Oliver, Guardian Unlimited journalist, 30 January 2007
The Turkish film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has taken some amazing photographs of Turkey while making his latest film, Climates. I saw some prints of the photos at the National Theatre in London. He has a great website, which has all of the ones from that exhibition ... and is very stylishly done.
An aside: while looking at the photographs it was quiet in the theatre hallways as the shows were ongoing and two of the theatre ushers - a man and a lover - were having a row in a corner. Where they lovers? As we walked around they moved to the other side ... which we then went to as we had not seen those photos and the guy actually complained to her that we were "following" them around! Lucky he was round a corner - I tell you - because I was up for fighting (he looked quite weedy and middle aged, naturally).
The photos made me want to see Ceylan's films; I am trying to get hold of a 2002 one called Uzak (Distant), which was the one he made before Climates. I also really want to visit Istanbul, and hope to do this sometime this year.
........................................................................................................................................................
Geoff Manaugh, BldgBlog, January 26, 2007
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a photographer and award-winning filmmaker.
His latest project, Turkey Cinemascope, is particularly striking; although most of the images are really a kind of richly contextualized human portraiture, there are at least a dozen urban and landscape shots worth seeing: wide-screen horizons; city streets bending round themselves in the snow; hill villages; rainy coasts.
Needless to say, these are infinitely more impressive when viewed in a larger format.
According to the Guardian, these photos "take as their subject the Turkish landscape, transformed into eerie, dream-like frescoes which one critic compared to the work of Pieter Brueghel."
........................................................................................................................................................
Jean, Typepad, 16 February 2007
"IN TURKEY AGAIN: NURI BILGE CEYLAN"
I saw his photos first, on exhibition in London to coincide with the opening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's new film, 'Climates'.
You'd think they would be filmic, and the panoramic format, as he acknowledges, is like cinemascope, but these are above all painterly. Horizons, pattern, predominantly black and white with thick daubs of colour: clouds, walls, people. Figures dwarfed by landscape. Silhouettes of men, women and children of a size with those of birds and animals. The tiny figures, often against snow, reminded me of Brueghul. In one photo of pigeons in a snowy Istanbul square the flock of birds in the foreground are the same size as the people in the distance, and a flying bird's outline magically fuses with that of a girl so that she has wings as well as dancing legs. Full of dark and full of light, both brooding and airy, such resonant and moving photographs.
And then, the next day, I went to see the film, a sensitive, subtle, beautiful film, set in Istanbul, by the sea, amidst ancient ruins, and in a town of Eastern Turkey in mid-winter (like walking into Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow). And a bleakly, brutally realistic depiction of the hurting, hating side of love, wherein the male protagonist, played by the director, takes photos - the photos in the exhibition, surely, for as he went about his work, on location, was when he took them. He takes photos instead of relating to his wife on holiday, instead of finishing his doctoral thesis. He poses a young taxi driver, his strong, young face against the landscape, a shot like several in the exhibition. The youngster, with eagerness that contrasts touchingly with his macho pose, asks for a copy to give to his girlfriend, writes his name and address on a post-it note, and in the next scene we see the photographer pull it from his pocket with his cigarettes at a cafe table, screw it up and toss it in the ashtray.
I left the cinema disturbed and upset, not from sentimental identification with the characters, who are not particularly sympathetic, but by the powerful portrayal of the pain and frailty and dishonesty of an intimate relationship, so like what I have known. An old-fashioned film, one London reviewer said, harking back to Italian neo-realism. Not the film I saw. I'd never seen anything at all like it. The actors include the director, his wife and his parents. Some scenes are surely improvised. And it's more often intimately harsh than intimately gentle. A powerful experience.
I went back to look again at the photos, and found them tainted. What was only overwhelmingly and intriguingly beautiful now seemed perhaps more contrived, more questionable. My discomfort, though, means they will surely linger with me longer than mere beauty would.
........................................................................................................................................................
Elizabeth, Verbal Privilege (Brooklyn), 26 February 2007
"LONGING (GERÇEKTEN MUHTEŞEM)"
A few weeks ago my mentor R. forwarded me an email with the subject line "gerçekten, muhteşem"--truly, magnificent--containing a link to Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkey Cinemascope. Ceylan, director of the films Uzak (Distant) and İklimler (Climates) shot these seventy photographs with a cinemascope camera from 2003-2006. I got no more work that afternoon, unraveled by the images familiar (İstanbul streets and waterways, snowbound in winter) and unknown (the vast open stretches of the Eastern borderlands, unfurling to the foothills of Ararat, one of the few parts of Turkey I've still never seen.) The six above are not even favorites, really, though I prize the picture of the Taksim-Tünel tram, steps from our flat (and echoing Ara Güler's iconic Beyoğlu winter shot)--how could I choose to leave out a schoolchild by the railway, or cormorants along the Bosphorus, or a rock-carved citadel-village in Cappadocia that I've walked to, on foot from the nearest town, three times since 2000?
I have been restless lately, longing fiercely to be traveling, most of all to go back to Turkey. There's always a little subterranean rumble of wishing to be in İstanbul, but in the last month it's grown louder, especially since Hrant Dink's death, and that weekend flooded with photographs of people marching in the streets. Much of the work I am doing lately is related to these matters (which has kept me from blogging too much about them). This last week in particular, these Eastern Anatolian landscapes have gained an aching resonance, peopled with ghosts from the books scattered across my desk. In a few days, I'll be meeting the new editor of Agos, and other brave people trying to carve out space for hope and change there.
Ceylan's photos arrived in my inbox the week before I headed to London, and I soon realized that the photographs were actually on exhibit at the National Theatre. After my meetings ended on Tuesday I went straight there, and spent five minutes standing still before the warmth of the tiny yellow-lit window in "Returning Home, Ardahan, 2004." The website barely does the photographs justice: they're each a meter long, and printed with ink and varnish on cotton-rag paper, which produces a strange, painterly effect.
Early that Friday morning, I went back to London to meet W. during his three-hour escape from the Jo'burg-Seattle Heathrow stopover, and as we sat in an Italian coffeehouse in Covent Garden, he said he'd been nearly in tears at those photos I'd forwarded him--if only he'd had time to stay for a real visit in London, and see them! I looked at him, across the remains of tea and cake, and said Well, I think the National opens at ten o'clock--and like that, we were alight, ransacking our rusty memories of the Tube map and calculating how long it would take to get to Embankment and walk across the bridge. So now the photos recall not only Türkiye günleri, but those stolen minutes of a long-awaited reunion, three of the happiest hours 2007 has brought me yet.
|
