Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011)
Ceylan’s quiet investigation of a murder and other mysteries
Country: Turkey
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Time: 2 hours and 29 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Mubi (free w/subscription)
What It Evokes: Unforgiving landscapes, the metaphysics of murder, film noir and westerns
Forced to continuously confront the results of human cruelty, the detective maps meaning across a topography of malfeasance. Within the confines of film noir, he often emerges a grisly metaphysician. He unravels the world in order to re-configure it—by reconstructing what happened, he will discover why. In this way, the detective strives to furnish meaning in spite of its preordained absence. Fundamentally, this is a romantic struggle, even when hidden behind a carapace of cynicism. It registers the need to render the world legible. Small wonder Wittgenstein loved a good crime story.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s neo-noir Once Upon A Time In Anatolia possesses its share of detectives (really, local Anatolian cops), as well as a prosecutor, a doctor, a murderer and his brother. The problem is that they lack a corpse. (Claiming to have been drunk on the night of the killing, Kenan, the confessed murderer, struggles to remember the body’s burial place.) In turn, their search for a deceased body across the Anatolian steppe over the course of one night and one day structures the film, giving way to mysteries far less soluble than homicide.
As the group casts about the tenebrous countryside, conversations and musings proliferate. The prosecutor tells the doctor of a woman who apparently predicted her death months in advance. A small town’s mukhtar (local mayor) speaks of building a morgue to house the bodies of the elderly so that their families can come home to say goodbye one last time. A local cop talks about blowing off steam by driving onto the empty steppe and shooting his gun at nothingness. These conversations, recursive and disjointed, populate the film, offering insight into different characters as they attempt to locate meaning within unforgiving physical and ethical terrain. In turn, the work’s noir structure gives way to something far more indeterminate—a space where mysteries multiply, even if the mystery has already been solved. In the aftermath of a murder, we find the human proclivity to search (for a body, for a cause, for a reason, for a meaning beyond some tawdry drunken dispute) and the fragmentary and unsatisfactory procedures adopted in the execution of this aim.
Throughout, Ceylan employs extended wide shots (within a wide screen format) to subsume the film’s characters within their environment. Conventionally, this type of shot tends to quickly establish a scene’s location and orient characters in space before the camera’s growing proximity allows the action to unfurl—when used for this purpose, they are known as “establishing shots.” By extending their duration, Ceylan distances us from his characters, reinforcing the ways each remains atomized as they strive to navigate larger forces symbolized by the landscape’s natural elements.
In similar ways, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia employs genre conventions without feeling the need to assume their full weight, playing characters against type and utilizing the police procedural to explore the psychological and sociological stratagems (embodied through the mediums of memory, oral history, writing, and photography) that comprise our need to document in an attempt to fix meaning (through, say, a police report or an autopsy or a story retold). Yet these methods fail to capture the totalizing organic unities that comprise existence. They remain contingent and incomplete, incapable of encompassing what Kant called the thing-in-itself. As a result, the film emerges a cohesive work about what doesn’t quite cohere.
On some primal level, this constitutes humanity’s struggle against fate’s superior capacities. Meaning forever remains elusive. New information spills outside the bounds of explanatory systems and narratives. If the film’s characters cannot help but insist upon their own effective agency, which remains the same as trusting their ability to generate representations of “reality,” they likewise must confront these representations perpetual liability to collapse. The manifold ways in which they compensate for this recognition becomes its most interesting aspect. Within a world dominated by men, women in particular become invested with the power to structure forms of signification, orienting (if not resolving) individual journeys. Though largely absent from the screen, women materialize as male constructions, moral accountants who appear through memory or in apparition-like bursts and promise the potential for greater self-understanding. If this approach doesn’t quite correspond to our moment’s politics, it nonetheless captures something true about the ways desire, longing, absence, and regret structure the narratives of self deemed necessary for continued existence. In particular, a recurrent discussion between the prosecutor and doctor (who functions as our guide into this environment) about a woman who anticipated her own death gives way to new forms of knowledge, similarly contingent and partial, that generate new forms of self-understanding. These too hold out the promise of revealing much, if never all.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan — Three Monkeys (2008)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan — Winter Sleep (2014)