The Politics of a Stone in Winter Sleep
Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)
Film scholar Emre Çağlayan contends that the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan "display the most honest, powerful, poignant and accurate portrayal of contemporary Turkish society seen on screen for decades." Small-town life in contemporary Turkey's hollowed-out provincial landscape comprises the thematic preoccupation of Ceylan's early works—the short film Koza, A Small Town and Clouds of May all take place in Yenice, the small Anatolian village where he grew up. Ceylan's celebrated third feature Distant traces the migration of a rural young man to İstanbul after losing his factory job, only to arrive in a hostile and alienating city; Three Monkeys, which won Ceylan Best Director at Cannes, traces the cascading effects of hit-and-run accident in the web of corruption and deceit that follows.
Despite, or perhaps because of his sustained attention to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, Ceylan has been "severely criticized by Turkish scholars for his seemingly apathetic stance on the ongoing political controversies in Turkey," his films accused of making "no apparent statement on any specific national or historical issue."[1] Indeed, Ceylan's films are not overtly political—no grand political gestures occur, and his films eschew pontification and political drama. Yet a lack of direct commentary does not necessarily render Ceylan's oeuvre apolitical.
Ceylan's slow, contemplative films encourage engagement with a vanishing world, details of existence that might otherwise elude our grasp. In the wake of Turkey's fiscal privatization and the process of globalization which has resulted in a generation without income or opportunity, Ceylan's durational cinema offers a new form of agency, a mode of intervention in the accelerated pace of late-capitalist existence. Moreover, by immersing the spectator in a decelerated, sensory atmosphere, his films illuminates latent forms of violence in everyday life.
Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)
Set in the picturesque steppes of Cappadocia, Ceylan's seventh feature Winter Sleep commences with an instance of narrowly-avoided bodily harm. One afternoon Ilyas, a young boy, identifies Aydın, a hotelier and local landlord, sitting outside his school in an orange Land Rover. Ilyas waits for the car to pass on a nearby road, then hurls a rock at Aydın's window. The car swerves, nearly crashing; Aydın's consigliere Hidayet rights the vehicle then jumps out to catch the boy, who falls into a nearby stream. Returning the boy home, Hidayet explains to İsmail, his father, what has transpired; Aydın watches from a distance, observing the clutter strewn about the family's yard with clear disgust. İsmail asks his son if he threw the stone, then slaps him so that Hidayet and Aydın can see. "Are you happy now?" he growls.
The situation escalates when Hamdi, İsmail's brother and the local imam, returns from work. Hamdi restrains his fiery-tempered brother; Aydın calls Hidayet to leave. Hamdi later arrives at the hotel to beg forgiveness for Ilyas's transgression, and implores Aydın, the landlord, to stop their eviction. Aydın tells Hamdi that he has nothing to do with it—when the rent is late the lawyers initiate proceedings automatically—and not to come to him again. Meanwhile he pens a newspaper column stressing the importance of local imams' outward appearances, since Islam is a religion of civilization and high culture. Hamdi returns the next day with a new form of atonement—he has brought the boy, so he can kiss Aydın's hand. Aydın initially refuses, but Hamdi insists. When Aydın finally consents to this, Ilyas faints.
Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)
Rooted in the collision between Ilyas's stone and Aydın's window, and ricocheting across spaces of poverty and privilege in their shared Anatolian village, Winter Sleep's opening sequence reveals how entrenched power dynamics determine one's proximity to violence. Aydın's elevated class status manifests as physical distance—first as his imported off-road vehicle's tempered glass shields him from the stone, and second while he remains watching from the road as the young boy Ilyas is punished. Aydın's socioeconomic status also manifests as legal distance, allowing him to cower behind the mundane workings of the law when mercy is asked of him. Whereas Aydın's personal secretary Hidayet occupies a higher position compared to Hamdi and his family, he is frequently required to deal with their debts and the ensuing bouts of violence. In this sense Winter Sleep establishes a continuum of harm, with the vague violence of Aydın's inaction at one end and İsmail's perpetration of physical violence at the other.
The hurling of a stone at Winter Sleep's outset thus sets in motion a chain of events with escalating implications, resulting in strife within two households. Aydın's refusal to grant the family clemency causes Hidayet to take increasingly desperate measures, which further entrench Aydın's position. Cloaked in politesse, Aydın's rigid views invite both thinly-veiled derision from his sister Necla and unadorned resentment from his young wife, Nihal. An indelible scene of symbolic violence occurs when Nihal visits Hamdi and İsmail's home, seeking to make amends for her husband's callousness.
While Ilyas's act could thus be viewed as the spark, it could equally be seen as an effect, emanating from Aydın's inaction. Theorizing the origins of violence, Hannah Arendt explains that "causality, i.e. the factor of determination of a process of events in which always one event causes and can be explained by another, is probably an altogether alien and falsifying category in the realm of the historical and political sciences. Elements by themselves probably never cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they crystallize into fixed and definite forms. Then, and only then, can we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its own past, but it can never be deduced from it."[2] Acts of violence, in other words, do not occur in isolation and furthermore gain accumulative significance by entering into assemblages over time. In Winter Sleep, the significance of a thrown stone, like all political phenomena, can only be understood retroactively.
Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)
On June 17, 2013 at 6pm local time, the Turkish artist-choreographer Erdem Gündüz stood still in İstanbul's Taksim Square. Days before Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government had responded with disproportionate force to a sit-in being staged at the adjacent Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces in the city's Beyoğlu district, ejecting approximately fifty peaceful environmental demonstrators with tear-gas and water cannons. Gündüz intended to "stand silently in the square for a long period—several days, according to some sources; a full month, according to others."[3]
Around 2am the police began making arrests claiming that bystanders, perplexed by Gündüz's inaction, were impeding traffic. The hashtag 'duranadam' (standing-man) went viral on Twitter and within hours protestors throughout the country began adopting Gündüz's unique form of nonviolent protest. What began as a sit-in opposing urban redevelopment plans of İstanbul's Gezi Park morphed into a demonstration lasting several months, in which approximately three-and-a half million people partook in nearly 5,000 strikes and protests across Turkey, challenging the government's stance on press freedom, media censorship, election violations, threats to secularism and the Turkish role in Syria's civil war.
Less than a year later Nuri Bilge Ceylan accepted the Palme d'Or for Winter Sleep—only the second Turkish film in history to win the top prize at Cannes. Both prime minister Erdoğan and Turkey's then-president Abdullah Gül congratulated Ceylan on his achievement. "Ceylan responded by dedicating the prize to the Republic of Turkey's youth who 'lost their lives' in their demonstrations against Erdoğan in İstanbul's Gezi Park in 2013. The director did not mince his words: 'If it was Japan, the PM would resign. But not in Turkey.'"[4] The Gezi Park protests ultimately failed to generate new elections or enact sought-after reforms. Gündüz's "silence, inaction and nonparticipation," however, persisted in the public imagination as "powerful and necessary tactics of protest."[5]
Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2014)