Two Men by the Road, Ağrı (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2004).
“Landscape has no owner,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836. “You cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field.” In 1973, Raymond Williams would concur in The Country and the City, “A working country is hardly ever a landscape.” The anamorphic photographs in Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Inner Landscapes, a recent exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, challenged this notion. In the snowscape of Two Men by the Road, Ağrı (all works 2004 unless otherwise noted), a man in a button-down shirt, sweater vest, and open coat holds the center of the frame and stares down the camera, meeting the viewer’s eyes, while the man standing beside him, dressed just a bit more warmly, peeks at the camera from beneath a scarf wound around his head, its fringe flying in the wind. On the right side of the image, behind the pair, are rows of leafless trees, their uppermost branches vanishing in the Turkish mist, and on the left the icy road extends toward a faint outline of mountains on the horizon. The fence neatly hemming in the trees, however, as well as the power line poles that dot the road, remind us that this landscape, far from natural, has been forged by labor.
The photographs are monumental, measuring nearly eight feet across and more than three feet tall. Like Two Men by the Road, most feature a person or two in the foreground and a vast landscape (or sometimes a skyline) behind them. On the walls of an otherwise dark gallery, they were carefully illuminated, and you could get close enough to count the wrinkles on their subject’s faces. Across these photographs, we see harbors and cities, ruins and undeveloped land, train tracks and alleyways; they depict bikers, villagers, and children against the sweeping, often beautiful backdrop of Turkey, from Istanbul to Harran, on the Syrian border. The images impress, even astonish, yet the exhibition was entirely devoid of any informative or interpretive language dedicated to them. Instead, the supplemental texts analyze Ceylan’s feature films, all but two of which were projected onto the gallery walls, though only as 25-minute looping excerpts. The exhibition’s title links the artist’s spectacular landscape photography to the interiority of his cinema, and its introductory text “invites viewers to focus on subtle details in the landscapes and dialogues, which reveal the inner lives of his characters and their surroundings.” In this broad reading, Ceylan’s work is universal, his characters “everyday people grappling with loneliness, failed relationships, and suppressed emotions.” The “outer” landscapes, meanwhile, “mirror and shape his characters’ inner worlds” and “invite us to reflect on the essence of human existence,” resulting in “a deeply humanistic perspective in a world often divided into stark oppositions.”
By emphasizing universalist themes, Western museums and galleries tend to flatten the specific contexts of countries whose cultural traditions and social concerns are less familiar to their audiences. Such a narrow packaging of art is particularly unfortunate when it comes to Ceylan’s world, pervaded by specific national conflicts. Rather than simplistically connecting alienated psyches with desolate landscapes or impersonal cityscapes, his photographs and films alike dramatize landscapes as sites in which Turkish identity is staged and challenged.
Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008).
Three Monkeys (2008), Ceylan’s fifth feature, invites both universalist and politicized readings. After a wealthy politician, Servet (Ercan Kesal), kills a man in a car crash, he bribes his usual driver, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl), to “confess” and go to jail in his stead. Desperate to secure cash for his family and assured of a relatively short sentence, the driver agrees, but the bargain upends the balance of power between the social classes, which paves the way for further tragedy. A parable of class struggle is relevant across time and space, and Three Monkeys is also an exemplary demonstration of Ceylan’s keen photographic eye, particularly in the way he films Eyüp’s family’s apartment. He rarely repeats a camera setup, challenging us to mentally map the space as characters dodge and spy on one another. He also tends to precede scenes at the apartment with an exterior sequence that includes a character arriving back home, as if looking to call our attention to the time of day and how that alters the lighting in the interiors. With these changes in perspective and in light, Ceylan provides some of the finest imaging of domestic interiors since Yasujiro Ozu’s. A more hermeneutically inclined viewer might argue, in line with the exhibition’s positioning of the films, that this displaces the instability of character relations onto the architecture of the home.
If this were all that could be said of Three Monkeys—that it is a precise, elegantly lensed humanist drama—it would be an impressive film, but perhaps not a particularly noteworthy one. Thankfully, Ceylan’s photography urges us to consider more art-historical perspectives, such as landscape study, a particularly illuminating frame in which to view Ceylan’s work. In his anthology Landscape and Power, theorist and scholarW. J. T. Mitchell proffers close readings of art historians Ann Bermingham, John Barrell, Kenneth Clark, and Ernst Gombrich, and finds in their texts a common understanding in which “the ‘harmony’ sought in landscape is read as a compensation for and screening off of the actual violence perpetrated there.”1 At the start of Three Monkeys, there is a shot of a dark forested landscape pierced by the headlights of a passing car. Ceylan returns repeatedly to this visual motif, most memorably in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), and it serves as an apt metaphor for how his work excavates Turkey’s fraught past and contradictory present. Absent some human presence, a landscape can hardly be “seen” at all; the human presence, however, threatens the serenity of the picturesque. Indeed, the shot ends with a violence foreign to this idea of pristine beauty—so foreign, in fact, that Ceylan does not render it in images. Instead, there is a cut to black and the sudden braking and skidding of a vehicle, and then a crash. In the next shot, we see that one driver survived, but the other died instantly. Another car comes along, and the suggestion of violence beneath the idyll so shakes its occupants that they can hardly be bothered to stop.
Transcending universal themes of loyalty, guilt, and shame, Three Monkeys presents a portrait of two entangled but unequal Turkeys vainly vying for reconciliation. Eyüp’s family is working class and traditional: In his absence, his son, İsmail, fails his college entrance exam and begins to get into fights. Strapped for capital, Eyüp’s wife, Hacer, turns to Servet, the prelude to an affair. Servet represents the wealthy and powerful who are able to exploit the lower classes, and his actions are an indictment of the corruption inherent to the Western model of business and politics that generated his windfall. With just a taste of that lifestyle, however, Hacer is intoxicated, and she hopes to continue the affair even after Eyüp is freed, sending İsmail spiraling further. The end of the film finds not just two social classes locked in conflict, but two wholly incompatible visions of Turkey, sealed by Servet’s murder at İsmail’s hands. One has tried to usurp the other, and it ends with the destruction of both, a pessimistic portrait of a society permanently fractured across class and political lines by structural violence as much as by interpersonal violence.
Top: Two Sisters, Doğubeyazıt (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2004). Bottom: The Searchers (John Ford, 1956).
Mitchell further theorizes landscapes as sites where national identity is established, a pattern traced in Landscape and Power’s essays on visual representations of the Netherlands in the 1600s, England in the 1800s, the American West, and the Levant amid the Israel-Palestine conflict, among other examples. Landscape, Mitchell writes, “naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable. … Landscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus of the formation of identity.” Movement within the image, however, threatens not to “naturalize a cultural and social construction,” but to reveal it as an “artificial world,” constructed rather than “given and inevitable.” Though the anthology contains no essays on cinema, Mitchell acknowledges that “moving pictures of landscape” are, in a very real sense, the “subtext” of this thesis.2 The tension between cinema’s site-specificity and its global distribution makes it a particularly potent force for either establishing or contesting identity through landscape—think of the films of John Ford or, more recently, of Lisandro Alonso and Jia Zhangke. At the start of The Searchers (1956), we watch as a doorway slowly opens onto the open vistas of the American West. John Wayne makes his way from the background to the foreground, bringing with him the cultural baggage of all his previous western roles. The shot is self-conscious, even meta: An image of the landscape is unveiled, like the parting of a curtain over a movie screen, and Wayne’s arrival within the story doubles as movement within a landscape. At the end of the film, he walks out that same door, his exit from the movie a mirror image of his entrance. Though the drama is resolved, his disappearance into the distance asks us to question if the values he brought to the world we’ve seen on screen can endure after he leaves.
If we can think of a pristine landscape as an instrument in the formation of identity, we might, following Emerson and Williams, think of the presence of figures within them—be they laborers, children, bikers, or businessmen—as an obstacle to that formation. The presence of a figure forces us to think critically about the beauty of the land. Does that heavy snowstorm in Ceylan’s Returning Home, Anatolia, photogenic as it might be, not impede the traveler within it? Does that striking composition of Girl on the Railroad, Ödemiş not remind us, with its solitary figure and its muddy rivers, of the alienation and displacement that industrialization might bring? And can we view the world-weary faces of Brother and Sister, Harran amid the ruins of the ancient city—a prospective UNESCO World Heritage Site—without thinking of the refugees crossing the border mere miles from where the photograph was taken? Exactly who gets to inhabit whatever identity is being formed by the circulation of images of these ancient ruins and the beehive homes, which have turned Harran into a tourist hotspot?
For answers, we might turn to Ceylan’s Climates (2006). Near the end of the film, the protagonist, Bahar, played by Ceylan himself, flies to Ağrı, Turkey’s easternmost province and the site of Two Men by the Road, partly to take photographs for his dissertation and partly to manufacture a “chance” rendezvous with the former romantic partner he deserted at the start of the film. While engaged in the former, he asks an acquaintance to stand in front of the camera because “it would be nice to have someone in the picture for a change.” We watch in a long shot as they stage the scene, but then cut to the camera’s point of view as the man poses. Bahar’s final composition resembles Ceylan’s own photographs, with a man in the foreground against a mountainous landscape and, in this case, the Ishak Pasha Palace.
At the time of Climates’s production and for a few years after, the Ishak Pasha Palace appeared on Turkey’s 100-lira banknotes, giving this scene an instructive resonance with a crucial scene from Jia’s Still Life, released the same year. In Jia’s film, characters displaced by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam discuss how their very homes, marked now for destruction, are feted as symbols of national pride on the back of China’s banknotes—their lives and land are commodified while they remain destitute. The intersection of money and architecture in Ceylan’s film, however, highlights not the conflict between industrialization and cultural heritage, but the messiness of establishing Turkish identity.
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006).
The Republic of Turkey declared independence in 1919, repelling Greek, Armenian, French, and British forces before abolishing the Sultanate, marking the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, it has seen border crises and/or territorial disputes with Greece, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Within its borders, it has been caught between the (often conflicting) secularist and nationalist aspirations of its first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the country’s historical links to Islam. The Hagia Sophia, one of the world’s architectural wonders, is singular in part because it has been, at different points in history, both a mosque and a church. The Time Regulation Institute, the best-known work of Turkish modernist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, satirizes the psychic disorientation that Turkey’s adoption of Western timekeeping practices inflicted on its populace, especially its rural residents. Everywhere in Turkey’s art and architecture, one sees the nation’s attempts to define and redefine itself and reconcile its Islamic, imperial past with its more secular, ostensibly democratic present. It’s no surprise, then, that this same drama plays out in Ceylan’s work. At the beginning of Climates, the protagonist takes pictures of the Temple of Artemis, one of Hellenic society’s largest and oldest Ionic temples, which is now found within Turkey’s borders in the ancient city of Sardis, south of Istanbul.
The Ishak Pasha Palace, located in the city of Doğubayazıt, broke ground in 1685 and was completed a full century later. Although it is one of the few surviving Ottoman palaces, its architecture borrows heavily from other regional traditions. The stone blocks of the gates, the octagonal tomb, and the decorative muqarnas are typical of Seljuk art. The arabesques that adorn the palace’s interiors betray a Persian and—for some scholars, at least—even Armenian influence, while the six types of Anatolian stone used in its construction make it look at home amongst the mountains. Its tripartite division, interior baths, and harem, meanwhile, give it a distinctly Ottoman character, though the palace also holds an important place in Kurdish heritage. Its construction was occasioned by a Kurdish Besyan dynasty, and it served as the Kurdish headquarters during the Ararat rebellion, which left the palace walls riddled with bullet holes.
Mitchell’s work on landscape is again instructive. He posits architecture as an extension of landscape: “Landscape is itself a physical and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound and silence, light and darkness, etc.) in which cultural meanings and values are encoded, whether they are put there by the physical transformation of a place in landscape gardening and architecture, or found in a place formed, as we say, ‘by nature.’”3 Mitchell turns to Palestine for an illustration. In his analysis of Jean Mohr’s 1979 photographs of the West Bank, which were published alongside Edward Said’s searing evocation of displacement and nationhood in After the Last Sky, he calls our attention to contrasts in the architecture to highlight a contradiction: “No one ‘owns’ this landscape in the sense of having clear, unquestionable title to it—contestation and struggle are inscribed indelibly on it,” he writes. “At the same time, “everyone ‘owns’ (or ought to own) this landscape in the sense that everyone must acknowledge or ‘own up’ to some responsibility for it, some complicity in it.”4 Mitchell’s recent work continues to engage with what he calls the “one-state condition” of the Levant, and he is careful to avoid equivocating on the Palestinian Question. In one of Mohr’s photographs, an Israeli condominium in the foreground looks down upon an Arab village in the distant valley, and Mitchell describes the “colonial gaze” as a fact embedded, via architecture, in the landscape. With that same care, we might apply a similar analysis to Doğubayazıt, once the capital of the short-lived Republic of Ararat, whose landscape is now marked by a reminder of another stateless nation’s struggle for sovereignty.
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2004).
In laying bare the cinematic device in Climates—by staging the shot like one of his own photographs, by casting himself as the photographer working on a dissertation—Ceylan sneaks these contradictions to the forefront of the film. One might interpret the presence of a minor character in the foreground as an attempt to emphasize the claim Turks have to ownership of this contested land. The fact that the photographer declines to send his subject a copy of the photograph, as he had promised, speaks not only to his selfishness but also to the futility of “owning” this landscape. Or, instead, it could be an implicit recognition of the paradoxes within the photograph itself: an attempt to “claim” land via a Turkish man’s presence is unraveled by the complex history of the visible background—or, in Mitchell’s formulation, a refusal to “own up” to the bullet holes that tarnish the Ishak Pasha Palace.
It is unfortunate that these connections likely went unnoticed by most exhibition visitors, who had to settle for helpful but broad declarations. Ceylan’s work, the exhibition text explains, “is inextricably tied to contemporary Turkish history and its contrasts—between city and countryside, secularism and religion. ... Many [characters] are rural migrants seeking better lives in the city, only to find urban alienation and indifference. [The films] show city dwellers ... struggling with the rigid traditions and narrow-minded norms that hold sway in the countryside.” All true, and a useful point of orientation, but artists deserve better than to have their work, informed by their distinct cultural background, stripped of its specificity by vague appeals to universalism, humanism, or comparison to canonical masters (critics have been quick to liken Ceylan to Antonioni and Tarkovsky). Ceylan in particular, as one of a dwindling number of filmmakers still working in a mid-century modernist tradition, remains overdue for the diligent English-language scholarship his predecessors have received. Hopefully, Inner Landscapes will travel beyond Amsterdam, and hopefully, it will be accompanied by more extensive notes.
- W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 7. ↩
- Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power, 2. ↩
- Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 14. ↩
- Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 29. ↩