YILMAZ Guney is Turkey's most notorious film-maker. The former Clint Eastwood of the Turkish screen, Guney turned to writing and directing in the early 70s under the impact of the widescale politicisation of Turkish society and the growth of a powerful working class and mass socialist youth organisahis films being released in 1971 tions. He was prolific seven of for instance. He produced cinema which was not only realist and directly political but also very popular and influential.
In 1972, Guney was sentenced to twenty four years in prison for allegedly shooting in a bar a judge who had insulted him. This did not put an end to his work. Indeed, with the help of friends and fellow directors Zeki Ökten and Serif Gören, he has been responsible for (arguably) three of the greatest political films in world cinema produced in the last ten years: Suru (The Herd) Way). The showing of Dusman in Dusman (The Enemy), Yol (The London and the forthcoming distribution of Yol - 1982's principal winner at the Cannes film festival - provides an opportunity for reviewing his work.
How does Guney work from in prison? He says 'i felt I should put as much as possible of myself, of "my" story, of "my"
images, into the script. This consequently became a new kind of work for me, and it took much longer than anything I'd done before. The scripts were much more detailed, broken down into individual shots, covered with little notes alongside the dialogue to indicate my ideas about the shooting, the lighting or the performances ... in a room in Izmit prison with ' Suru was written eighty people in it!
Further, he says 'As i create my characters and flesh them out I try to act out their roles, both the men and the women in every detail, and to experience the way they think and feel. When I write I don't start out with a definite plan, with a specific end in view, I put myself in the place of my characters, imagine their relationships and feelings, and make the development of the plot dependent on that. Many things turn out quite differently from what I had expected.' The films as well as their author have been subject to severe repression (of course, now, under the conditions of military rule, the films are completely banned); Suru, for instance was a film about the Kurds in Turkey - all eight million of whom are officially deemed not to exist, they are rather 'mountain Turks' the economic and social backwardness of their society and its relation to Turkish capitalism. sheep are brought by train from As the 'herd' of the mountains of Kurdistan to Ankara we witness a great panorama of Turkish society and its contradictions.
Dusman is about unemployment and the rise of the fascist movement the title. It is a beautiful measured, didactic film about Turkey in the 1970s. Ismail a young man with a wife and small daughter is typical of Turkey's rising proletariat. Coming originally from the countryside where his family own a small piece of increasingly barren land, he lives in a town on the Dardanelles, Eceabat. He travels to Cannakkale across the water to look for work.
Both Cannakkale and Eceabat are small towns whose social cohesion has been completely destroyed by the spatial dynamics of Turkish capitalism.
Gradually, Ismail, a complete innocent, has his eyes opened to what is going on around him, a process which is followed by the audience. tions to a 'Western' lifestyle frustrated, becomes a prostitute and leaves him to go to the city. A German tourist attempts to buy Ismail. Other tourists are interested in buying parts of Turkey's ancient and recent past: Troy and Gallipoli, local entrepreneurs willingly offer their country's heritage up for sale.
Against this background, Ismail gets a job poisoning stray epithet for fascist. As we see dogs.
Ismail at work, the ever increasing number of dogs dying in - and the 'enemies' of There is none.
Scene from Yol
onto Ismail's cart reminds the audience wryly of Turkey's (one million votes in 1977). of a dog traditions.
plores one of his favourite Scene from Dusman His wife, her aspira'Dog' is the Turkish left's Yilmaz Guney close-up and being scooped up burgeoning fascist movement (Derek Malcolm in The Guardian completely misses this reference and instead presumes that these scenes offer some insight into the nature of Ismail's relationship with animals!) The symbol is extended at the end of the film, as Ismail, deserted by his wife, is leaving by coach for Istanbul to work in a factory where 'they have labour unions to defend workers' interests', the town is celebrating Republic Day with a military parade. Winding in and out of the ranks of the parade, the camera follows the progress as it were now at the eart of Turkey's culture anc Yol which opens at the into their minds. Lumière Cinema in London early in 1983, is also a film focussing on Turkey's culture and traditions. In particular, Guney exthemes: the intersection of pre-capitalist feudal norms and customs with the development of the capitalist economy. This is a theme of relevance not only to Turkey but to all countries dominated by imperialism. You follows the different fortunes of a group of prisoners released from prison for one week's leave. They return to their various backgrounds where each is made to deal with a personal situation in an oppressive social context. From these individual fictions a picture is presented of life as it is lived in the towns of Anatolia and Kurdistan. Guney says of the film: 'The prisons where human beings are confined are of several kinds. Prisons can be social, cultural, or political. For instance, the men I talk about in my film leave a prison with visible walls, only to find themselves in one with walls that can't be seen. That is to say the prisons they have inherited from a patriarchal society prisons that a specific way of life, a specific culture, has built The tremendous strength and originality of Guney's cinema is that while he consciously gives us a definite 'message' he combines this with a rich human involvement to produce a truly popular cinema. He says: 'In my view a film cannot limit itself to the simple narration of events. You have to plunge deep into the human mind.. Art has a kind of magic about it. And it is this magic which makes art what it At a time when tens of thousands of leftists and trade union leaders and militants are in the torture chambers of the military dictatorship that has ruled Turkey for the past two years Guney's films offer us a picture of Turkey battling with the contradictions of underdevelop ment. For the time being that battle has been won by the imperialists and the Turkish bourgeoisie but the story hasn't Guney himself managed to escape from prison and Turkey earlier this year. He is a wanted man, stripped of his citizenship by the junta. Perhaps now his films will get a wider international audience. Look out for them, and congratulations to the Rio cinema in Hackney for promoting Guney's work in London.
For more information about the situation in Turkey and the cam.
paign to get Guney into this Office's ban - contact the country overturning the Home Turkey Solidarity Campaign, B Box 5965, London WIN 3XX Socialist Challenge 7 January 1983 page 11
we publish an 3. AT 15 MILES. Rubber