Uzak

24/03/2025

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  

It might seem like an idle question but perhaps we can turn it into an urgent one. What do we make of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan filming a fictional story in his own place? He is far from alone in doing so: Robert Altman used his Malibu beachside abode as one of the main locations in The Long Goodbye; John Cassavetes his home for Love Streams, and Abel Ferrara filmed many scenes in Tommaso at his apartment in Rome. In the DVD extras, Ceylan says 40 per cent of Uzak was autobiographical, but when someone usually speaks of the autobiographical it is of experiences rather than of places: a life lived in time rather than occupied in space. 

    However, many filmmakers find the personal in the spatial, filming in the cities of their childhoods, even the districts in which they have been brought up. It is common for a filmmaker to be associated with the city of their youth or become synonymous with one: Scorsese, Spike Lee and Woody Allen with New York; Almodovar with Madrid, Kaurismaki with Helsinki. Yet it might seem too personal to film in one’s very home. Yet Ceylan, who was born in Istanbul, and brought up in Çanakkale for a while, before returning with his family to Istanbul, isn't shy of confession. He moved to London for a few years and shoplifted during 1981’s Brixton riots. “(Guardian) I was working in Brixton and everybody was stealing things.” It might be the hallmark of a fine director: Godard stole from Cahiers du Cinema; Herzog nicked his first camera, and Truffaut was a teen petty thief.

    We see in Truffaut’s early work, for example, that delinquent, and when Herzog speaks of stealing a camera it doesn’t seem anomalous. But Ceylan appears so completely a director associated with Turkey, that we cannot easily imagine him involved in riots in the south of London. In his third feature, Uzak (Distant), Ceylan seems to want to capture his home city with a rippling expansion, with the apartment the core location while Istanbul and beyond are peripherally significant as a cousin of the central character Mahmut comes to visit and Mahmut feels obliged to house him. They have nothing in common and, though related, appear to come from a different socio-economic class. In one scene Mahmut berates Yusuf when the latter wonders if Mahmut can put in a good word for him at the tile factory where the photographer works, endlessly taking photos of tiling. When Mahmut says “I did everything for myself here”, as he reckons he is a self-made man in the city, we may wonder if he had advantages Yusuf hasn't and wouldn't be honest about those privileges. Mahmut is capable of lying for the sake of his pride, evident in a late scene when he asks accusingly if Yusuf has seen a silver watch. When he finds it while Yusuf looks concerned, he says nothing about discovering it in a drawer. We also see him at his sister’s place, a pleasant flat which indicates, like Mahmut’s, a middle-class lifestyle. Yusuf’s family is struggling: his father lost his job and then Yusuf was fired too, along with a thousand others. Pretty much the whole village. We also hear Yusuf later on the phone discussing the family’s need to borrow money. We might wonder if the pep talk Mahmut gives his cousin about making it on his own is quite so true, that his sanctimoniousness is a way of making his cousin feel bad; not about offering home truths, and when he does get the chance to be honest, when he finds the watch, he of course pretends he hasn't. If Mahmut can withhold this fact from his concerned cousin, leaving Yusuf feeling accused, why wouldn't he exaggerate how much he has struggled if that can make Yusuf feel bad too? Both the incident with the watch and the pep talk function similarly. They make Usuf feel terrible while Mahmut looks terrible in our eyes. We are inclined to see are class differences exploited rather than alleviated by Mahmut.

    It is the cousin we see first in the film, even if Uzak ends on Mahmut, yet if we believe Uzak as more about Mahmut than Yusuf it isn’t only that in the DVD extras Ceylan said that he wanted to make a film about the photographer, and only later thought to add Yusuf, it is also in the tone of the film, the atmosphere of angst that permeates it. Yusuf’s crises might be significant — he has no money, nowhere to live in Istanbul and yearns for female contact — but these are closer to neo-realist concerns. However, the film’s tone is closer to existential brooding and the form reflects it in camera movements which are elegant, often removed from action, and devoted to contemplation. Even that first shot when we see Yusuf is contained by a form that alludes to the film’s deliberate sense of inquiry. The shot is almost three minutes long and starts on a long shot as Yusuf leaves the village and makes his way to the main road, crossing a field covered in snow. The camera makes itself felt first by remaining fixed as Yusuf moves towards the highway, and remains evident as he leaves the frame to cross the road. A few seconds later, Ceylan slowly pans 180 degrees and then stops on the road, with Yusuf out of frame. A car approaches and Yusuf steps into the shot, and puts his hand out hoping for a lift. The film cuts before we find out if it stops, but as the opening credits come up we can still hear on the soundtrack the sounds from the scene we have witnessed, and the car idles for a moment and then takes off again, presumably with Yusuf inside. It is an opening scene that hasn’t yet told us anything about the character’s predicament but has informed us quite precisely of the director’s form.

   The film’s immediate post-credit shot is no less formally deliberate if antithetical. Ceylan focuses on a close-up of a face we can’t distinguish as it is turned away from the camera, while the person facing us on the bed across the room is out of focus. Usually, a director racks focus to bring the character out of the blur but Ceylan holds the focus as the man goes over to the bed and joins the blurriness as the couple looks like they are about to get amorous. A moment afterwards, we cut to a man outside, and then watch as a woman leaves the apartment building, as if in hasty surreptitious retreat. We don’t know if this is the blurred woman but we can infer it, and later in the film we will see her again, when she arrives with her partner at a bar, noticing Mahmut sitting nearby, and then once more when she comes to his apartment for a further assignation. It is a story never developed but the implications are there: here is a woman guiltily involved with a man that is doing her no favours. After the second encounter, we see her in the bathroom, distraught. 

   Ceylan’s focus seems to be an anomie over poverty. Though the cousin’s difficulties aren’t ignored, they never become neo-realistically present: in other words, the film doesn’t care for a form to capture its secondary character's desperation, instead emphasising one that prioritises its primary character’s lassitude. Even when we follow Yusuf in his search for work and love, the camera remains as distant as the title. When we see him going out into the snow to try and secure work on a ship, Ceylan makes much of the walk and little of the work. We watch Yusuf traipse through the park with Ceylan playing up the crunching of the snow, dogs barking, people laughing and a train rattling along. The director offers an acoustic density and plays up the visually attentive. Snow is a rare enough event in Istanbul for the director to revel in it but the framing is also pronounced. When Yusuf moves towards the harbour, Ceylan in close up shows an anchor large in the frame, with Yusuf a small figure in the distance. When he arrives at the port, we see him once again tiny. This isn’t a question of perspective, as we saw earlier in the shot with the anchor, but of scale. He stands next to a capsized ship. When he arrives at the harbour office, someone tells him he can’t just go on board and get a job; he has to contact the shipping agents at the beginning of the week. But this seems almost an afterthought: what matters in the scene is its form; not Yusuf's efforts.

    Thus the sequence has little of the pathos we expect from the neo-realistic: where the search for a home and a place of employment are central to the tone of Umberto D and Bicycle Thieves. Yet if this suggests a lack of empathy for Yusuf’s plight, Ceylan’s film indicates instead that the empathic has become more diffuse. It is more about alienation and passivity, as the city is less a hostile place that destroys people’s hopes, than an aloof one that creates weak connections. After Mahmut tells Yusuf he wants things easy, Yusuf says that the city has changed his cousin. Mahmut speaks of Yusuf having no pride, a point that the film’s second half has been slowly playing out as Mahmut is unable to tell his ex-wife that he still needs her when she tells him that she and her partner are emigrating to Canada. His pride stops him saying anything when they meet up, but it doesn’t stop him from going to the airport when she leaves and watches her exit the country. Nothing indicates his comment about pride has been of any use to him, and where is the pride in doing a job that offers little variety and no creativity?

       In a discussion at a friend’s place, one of the friends recalls how they took great efforts to get a better shot, and all Mahmut can say is that the friend is rambling and photography is dead. The friend says Mahmut had ambitions to make films like Tarkovsky’s (we see Mahmut watching Stalker and Mirror), but Mahmut practices the bad faith of a man who gives the impression of no choice. Times have changed he seems to propose, and with his ex he speaks of the abortion she had when they were together, which has made it difficult for her to have a child since. How can she know getting rid of the baby was the reason why she cannot now get pregnant, he wonders, as he says too that he didn’t want the child because they were about to get divorced. When he preaches to his cousin about responsibilities, we might wonder if he has evaded his. Perhaps he may have struggled to combine artistic integrity with parental demand, but there he is with neither art nor family. 

     Yusuf is younger than Mahmut, and if he seeks a job he no less yearns for human warmth. While Mahmut becomes voyeuristic as he watches his previous life disappear when his ex passes through security; Yusuf seeks affection with troublesome gaucheness. He becomes infatuated with a neighbour’s daughter and follows her across the city. She notices him just as she meets up with another man. He then follows another woman briefly and when sitting on a train invades her space with his thigh. But if his behaviour in this instance is more disagreeable, he is nevertheless a more agreeable character, someone who is without love and work through little fault of his own. The work Mahmut does and the relationships he finds himself in seem more self-determined.

  In this sense, Ceylan has made a film that is both neo-realistically aware of Yusuf’s difficulties and modernistically attuned to the alienated narratives of Antonioni, Wenders and Bertolucci, where characters are creatures of their own chaos as readily as societal flotsam. This combination works well for a 21st-century Turkey that is both modern in its mores and expectations, while still traditional, especially close to its eastern border. We should remember too that Istanbul is a city on two continents and this returns us to our original remarks about Mahmut’s flat, which is in Beyoglu, a cosmopolitan and bohemian part of the city and far removed from the village life Yusuf will have known. The flat itself rugs, antique furniture, framed pictures and photographs, and a study, looks like the sort of place an existential loner would live in, while the cousin can never be more than an intrusive presence in such an environment. “…The photographer is leading an intellectual life, along with his friends, and the values of intellectuals are different; their habits change a lot. Most people in Istanbul are not like this; they’re more normal, they’ve come from the country” Ceylan says. “But intellectuals’ habits are more problematic – especially when they earn money, they don’t need other people. So you don’t want anything from other people, and in return you don’t give anything to people.” (Senses of Cinema) The film ends as if for all Mahmut’s self-reliance there is a yearning there equal to Yusuf’s and perhaps no better understood, even if Mahmut happens to be intellectual; the other without much of an education. The film ends on a slow zoom into Mahmut looking like the typically brooding figure of modernist film: a long black coat, a grey scarf and a fag in his hand. It is an image Mahmut may have cultivated but seems to be doing him little good. It is an image of a self-made man of sorts but hardly one the filmmaker suggests anybody should wish to emulate even if it is one Ceylan has chosen to replicate in a Turkish context. A figure who may be close to his own personality or not, but who might just have invited such comparisons in letting the cameras into his home.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Uzak

It might seem like an idle question but perhaps we can turn it into an urgent one. What do we make of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan filming a fictional story in his own place? He is far from alone in doing so: Robert Altman used his Malibu beachside abode as one of the main locations in The Long Goodbye; John Cassavetes his home for Love Streams, and Abel Ferrara filmed many scenes in Tommaso at his apartment in Rome. In the DVD extras, Ceylan says 40 per cent of Uzak was autobiographical, but when someone usually speaks of the autobiographical it is of experiences rather than of places: a life lived in time rather than occupied in space. 

    However, many filmmakers find the personal in the spatial, filming in the cities of their childhoods, even the districts in which they have been brought up. It is common for a filmmaker to be associated with the city of their youth or become synonymous with one: Scorsese, Spike Lee and Woody Allen with New York; Almodovar with Madrid, Kaurismaki with Helsinki. Yet it might seem too personal to film in one’s very home. Yet Ceylan, who was born in Istanbul, and brought up in Çanakkale for a while, before returning with his family to Istanbul, isn't shy of confession. He moved to London for a few years and shoplifted during 1981’s Brixton riots. “(Guardian) I was working in Brixton and everybody was stealing things.” It might be the hallmark of a fine director: Godard stole from Cahiers du Cinema; Herzog nicked his first camera, and Truffaut was a teen petty thief.

    We see in Truffaut’s early work, for example, that delinquent, and when Herzog speaks of stealing a camera it doesn’t seem anomalous. But Ceylan appears so completely a director associated with Turkey, that we cannot easily imagine him involved in riots in the south of London. In his third feature, Uzak (Distant), Ceylan seems to want to capture his home city with a rippling expansion, with the apartment the core location while Istanbul and beyond are peripherally significant as a cousin of the central character Mahmut comes to visit and Mahmut feels obliged to house him. They have nothing in common and, though related, appear to come from a different socio-economic class. In one scene Mahmut berates Yusuf when the latter wonders if Mahmut can put in a good word for him at the tile factory where the photographer works, endlessly taking photos of tiling. When Mahmut says “I did everything for myself here”, as he reckons he is a self-made man in the city, we may wonder if he had advantages Yusuf hasn't and wouldn't be honest about those privileges. Mahmut is capable of lying for the sake of his pride, evident in a late scene when he asks accusingly if Yusuf has seen a silver watch. When he finds it while Yusuf looks concerned, he says nothing about discovering it in a drawer. We also see him at his sister’s place, a pleasant flat which indicates, like Mahmut’s, a middle-class lifestyle. Yusuf’s family is struggling: his father lost his job and then Yusuf was fired too, along with a thousand others. Pretty much the whole village. We also hear Yusuf later on the phone discussing the family’s need to borrow money. We might wonder if the pep talk Mahmut gives his cousin about making it on his own is quite so true, that his sanctimoniousness is a way of making his cousin feel bad; not about offering home truths, and when he does get the chance to be honest, when he finds the watch, he of course pretends he hasn't. If Mahmut can withhold this fact from his concerned cousin, leaving Yusuf feeling accused, why wouldn't he exaggerate how much he has struggled if that can make Yusuf feel bad too? Both the incident with the watch and the pep talk function similarly. They make Usuf feel terrible while Mahmut looks terrible in our eyes. We are inclined to see are class differences exploited rather than alleviated by Mahmut.

    It is the cousin we see first in the film, even if Uzak ends on Mahmut, yet if we believe Uzak as more about Mahmut than Yusuf it isn’t only that in the DVD extras Ceylan said that he wanted to make a film about the photographer, and only later thought to add Yusuf, it is also in the tone of the film, the atmosphere of angst that permeates it. Yusuf’s crises might be significant — he has no money, nowhere to live in Istanbul and yearns for female contact — but these are closer to neo-realist concerns. However, the film’s tone is closer to existential brooding and the form reflects it in camera movements which are elegant, often removed from action, and devoted to contemplation. Even that first shot when we see Yusuf is contained by a form that alludes to the film’s deliberate sense of inquiry. The shot is almost three minutes long and starts on a long shot as Yusuf leaves the village and makes his way to the main road, crossing a field covered in snow. The camera makes itself felt first by remaining fixed as Yusuf moves towards the highway, and remains evident as he leaves the frame to cross the road. A few seconds later, Ceylan slowly pans 180 degrees and then stops on the road, with Yusuf out of frame. A car approaches and Yusuf steps into the shot, and puts his hand out hoping for a lift. The film cuts before we find out if it stops, but as the opening credits come up we can still hear on the soundtrack the sounds from the scene we have witnessed, and the car idles for a moment and then takes off again, presumably with Yusuf inside. It is an opening scene that hasn’t yet told us anything about the character’s predicament but has informed us quite precisely of the director’s form.

   The film’s immediate post-credit shot is no less formally deliberate if antithetical. Ceylan focuses on a close-up of a face we can’t distinguish as it is turned away from the camera, while the person facing us on the bed across the room is out of focus. Usually, a director racks focus to bring the character out of the blur but Ceylan holds the focus as the man goes over to the bed and joins the blurriness as the couple looks like they are about to get amorous. A moment afterwards, we cut to a man outside, and then watch as a woman leaves the apartment building, as if in hasty surreptitious retreat. We don’t know if this is the blurred woman but we can infer it, and later in the film we will see her again, when she arrives with her partner at a bar, noticing Mahmut sitting nearby, and then once more when she comes to his apartment for a further assignation. It is a story never developed but the implications are there: here is a woman guiltily involved with a man that is doing her no favours. After the second encounter, we see her in the bathroom, distraught. 

   Ceylan’s focus seems to be an anomie over poverty. Though the cousin’s difficulties aren’t ignored, they never become neo-realistically present: in other words, the film doesn’t care for a form to capture its secondary character's desperation, instead emphasising one that prioritises its primary character’s lassitude. Even when we follow Yusuf in his search for work and love, the camera remains as distant as the title. When we see him going out into the snow to try and secure work on a ship, Ceylan makes much of the walk and little of the work. We watch Yusuf traipse through the park with Ceylan playing up the crunching of the snow, dogs barking, people laughing and a train rattling along. The director offers an acoustic density and plays up the visually attentive. Snow is a rare enough event in Istanbul for the director to revel in it but the framing is also pronounced. When Yusuf moves towards the harbour, Ceylan in close up shows an anchor large in the frame, with Yusuf a small figure in the distance. When he arrives at the port, we see him once again tiny. This isn’t a question of perspective, as we saw earlier in the shot with the anchor, but of scale. He stands next to a capsized ship. When he arrives at the harbour office, someone tells him he can’t just go on board and get a job; he has to contact the shipping agents at the beginning of the week. But this seems almost an afterthought: what matters in the scene is its form; not Yusuf's efforts.

    Thus the sequence has little of the pathos we expect from the neo-realistic: where the search for a home and a place of employment are central to the tone of Umberto D and Bicycle Thieves. Yet if this suggests a lack of empathy for Yusuf’s plight, Ceylan’s film indicates instead that the empathic has become more diffuse. It is more about alienation and passivity, as the city is less a hostile place that destroys people’s hopes, than an aloof one that creates weak connections. After Mahmut tells Yusuf he wants things easy, Yusuf says that the city has changed his cousin. Mahmut speaks of Yusuf having no pride, a point that the film’s second half has been slowly playing out as Mahmut is unable to tell his ex-wife that he still needs her when she tells him that she and her partner are emigrating to Canada. His pride stops him saying anything when they meet up, but it doesn’t stop him from going to the airport when she leaves and watches her exit the country. Nothing indicates his comment about pride has been of any use to him, and where is the pride in doing a job that offers little variety and no creativity?

       In a discussion at a friend’s place, one of the friends recalls how they took great efforts to get a better shot, and all Mahmut can say is that the friend is rambling and photography is dead. The friend says Mahmut had ambitions to make films like Tarkovsky’s (we see Mahmut watching Stalker and Mirror), but Mahmut practices the bad faith of a man who gives the impression of no choice. Times have changed he seems to propose, and with his ex he speaks of the abortion she had when they were together, which has made it difficult for her to have a child since. How can she know getting rid of the baby was the reason why she cannot now get pregnant, he wonders, as he says too that he didn’t want the child because they were about to get divorced. When he preaches to his cousin about responsibilities, we might wonder if he has evaded his. Perhaps he may have struggled to combine artistic integrity with parental demand, but there he is with neither art nor family. 

     Yusuf is younger than Mahmut, and if he seeks a job he no less yearns for human warmth. While Mahmut becomes voyeuristic as he watches his previous life disappear when his ex passes through security; Yusuf seeks affection with troublesome gaucheness. He becomes infatuated with a neighbour’s daughter and follows her across the city. She notices him just as she meets up with another man. He then follows another woman briefly and when sitting on a train invades her space with his thigh. But if his behaviour in this instance is more disagreeable, he is nevertheless a more agreeable character, someone who is without love and work through little fault of his own. The work Mahmut does and the relationships he finds himself in seem more self-determined.

  In this sense, Ceylan has made a film that is both neo-realistically aware of Yusuf’s difficulties and modernistically attuned to the alienated narratives of Antonioni, Wenders and Bertolucci, where characters are creatures of their own chaos as readily as societal flotsam. This combination works well for a 21st-century Turkey that is both modern in its mores and expectations, while still traditional, especially close to its eastern border. We should remember too that Istanbul is a city on two continents and this returns us to our original remarks about Mahmut’s flat, which is in Beyoglu, a cosmopolitan and bohemian part of the city and far removed from the village life Yusuf will have known. The flat itself rugs, antique furniture, framed pictures and photographs, and a study, looks like the sort of place an existential loner would live in, while the cousin can never be more than an intrusive presence in such an environment. “…The photographer is leading an intellectual life, along with his friends, and the values of intellectuals are different; their habits change a lot. Most people in Istanbul are not like this; they’re more normal, they’ve come from the country” Ceylan says. “But intellectuals’ habits are more problematic – especially when they earn money, they don’t need other people. So you don’t want anything from other people, and in return you don’t give anything to people.” (Senses of Cinema) The film ends as if for all Mahmut’s self-reliance there is a yearning there equal to Yusuf’s and perhaps no better understood, even if Mahmut happens to be intellectual; the other without much of an education. The film ends on a slow zoom into Mahmut looking like the typically brooding figure of modernist film: a long black coat, a grey scarf and a fag in his hand. It is an image Mahmut may have cultivated but seems to be doing him little good. It is an image of a self-made man of sorts but hardly one the filmmaker suggests anybody should wish to emulate even if it is one Ceylan has chosen to replicate in a Turkish context. A figure who may be close to his own personality or not, but who might just have invited such comparisons in letting the cameras into his home.


© Tony McKibbin