🇹🇷🎬 CEYLAN: ONCE UPON A TIME 

Those films related to ONCE UPON A TIME always reveal the director's view of history, which is the case with Ceylon. His concept of the homeland, his projection of the future, and his attitude toward human nature are all expressed in his films.

1 - Ceylan's view of history

Nuri Bilge Ceylan referenced Theodoros Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist (1988) and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) in the soundtracks of Distant (2002) and Climates (2006). At the time, Ceylan was an up-and-coming director who was happy to show his sense of humor, keeping his "playfulness" at its most naive.

This photo of Ceylan resembles Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975)

Could there be a more interesting connection between Ceylan's and Leone's work than the "fetching" of sound clips?

Any film with "Once upon a time" in its title will presumably be about something from the past, but Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) is not overtly chronological. Ceylan's "past" is more concerned with the characters' situations, which are historically universal in terms of drama. That is to say, although the Anatolians are involved in these events one day and one night, their words, actions, and inner situations could have happened in any past or future.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / If the people in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia had lived in the Western United States, how would they have reacted when the railroad came to their doorstep? No one might play the harmonica, but there would always be someone to gossip about; no one might take revenge, but someone might die because of some occasional emotion.

What is the "past"? I think the past is the legend outside of the official history. But the characters in the past are often anonymous individuals forgotten by history. Crudely speaking, the attitude towards the past is one's view of history. However, Ceylan's view of history is embodied in an interrogation that takes place in the present. So he concludes that people are all the same. This view of history is quite demoralizing, not romantic at all, but it has the pleasure of mourning.

2 - Ceylan's language of the lens

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia's prologue is an abstract telephoto shot, with only the high beams of cars flashing as people search for bodies blindly. Every time they stop, the peasants carry shovels and dig, always in the least visible part of the distance. In the foreground stand people who are allowed to talk, gossiping about the minutiae of life or complaining about the tedium of the procedure. Every excavation site is located near a spring, a brick spring pool flowing around the clock, being a vein of water in Anatolia.

By arranging to dig up corpses near each spring, Ceylan intends to express that civilization is always accompanied by unseen killings. The extreme abstraction of the high-beam light source illuminates the scene dimly and brightly, and the vacant hills and meadows are compressed into a stage set by the light.

In Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone wrapped these outsiders with a romanticized opera. He convinced the audience with the charm of his characters and contemplated the times and predestination, which also represented his historical view of Western America. In his story, the railroad represented an unstoppable civilization.

Once Upon a Time in the West / In the 1950s and 1960s, when the American Western was in decline, Leone created the miracle of the "Italian Western," and to some extent revived the "Western," which Andre Bazin called "the genre born at the same time as cinema."

There was also a group of abstract characters surrounding the railroad and the hostage benefits it held: prostitutes, robbers, lone wolves, thugs, capitalists, and ranchers. Those were also the people forgotten by history, but every word they spoke, every act they performed, was full of tragedy. Léonet did not emphasize causes beyond the individual, because there existed a grand theme of fatalism over the individual's actions. He was the idealist who feared the predestination of his time, the lovable Don Quixote.

Ceylan, on the other hand, does his best to simplify the actions of his characters, focusing on their situations, even their emotions, which are unpredictable and rapidly changing. Outside history, the capricious are truly living in Anatolia.

3 - The Chekhovian Awakening

Ceylan has repeatedly described himself as a "Chekhov devotee" in interviews. The tension of Chekhov's drama is not in the plot or the actions but in the "self-awareness" of the characters. They are trapped in the cocoon of their destiny and feel they should break out of it, but they cannot move in any way. This pattern of his is increasingly clear in his series of works.

The cousin in Distant (2002) is oblivious to his inferiority until the end, and the Stepford wife in Winter Sleep (2014) knows that she should have been independent long ago, but she can't escape her inertia of dependence on her husband. The writer of The Wild Pear Tree (2018) takes it a step further, stepping out as a writer and out of his hometown, but he's still coming back after his military service.

Distant / Distant is Ceylan's internationally acclaimed work. The English title "Distant" means not only geographically distant but also represents the alienation between people.

With its sense of space and wide shots, Ceylan employs an audiovisual approach, attempting to bring to life the natural environment that traps Chekhov's characters. It is a setting of extreme vastness and history, the Cappadocia landscape in Winter Sleep, the rural dry well in The Wild Pear Tree, the home woods in Clouds of May, and the hilly wilderness in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Ceylan gives its characters a more somber reality than the romanticism of Chekhov's work: the elementary school teacher in Winter Sleep, the father in The Wild Pear Tree, and the sheriff in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. On this level, Ceylan is less endearing than Chekhov.

The Wild Pear Tree / Ceylan's camera shows a very seductive homeland: the grass grows, and the earth is fragrant. The hometown is not useless, coarse, and ugly. Some familiar things and people love him.

In Ceylan's past, there are only specific people, and what they do does not matter at all. No suspense and no meaning. They are not committed to whetting the audience's appetite, and never fight to figure out who exactly is the winner. The prosecutor killed his wife but is still a prosecutor, the sheriff still has to prescribe drugs to his son, the murderer still has to die even if he is not guilty of being buried alive, the murderer's son and the wife of the deceased are still dependent on each other.

Their inexplicable behavior, only because of the emotions inspired by chance situations, together constitute the fragments of history, each person is a self-conscious prisoner, are the mud and sand in the torrent of history.