He said, "I always try to make the contradictions between the characters in the film make it impossible for the audience to make it easy to judge. I tried to figure out what it was to live and what I was born for, and I made movies by thinking about what I observed in real life. The chairman of the jury of the main competition section of the 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival Golden Jubilee Award, the famous director from Turkey, Nuri Bige Ceylon, said.
For fans who love Ceylon, it is indeed very rare to see his films on the big screen of this year's Festival. Ceylon's films are always beautiful to the extreme.
Ceylon is known as the "Turkish National Treasure Director", who has been in the industry for many years but has not produced many works, including only eight feature films and one short film. From "Cocoon" to "Small Town", to "May Blue Sky", from "Far Away" to "Season Suitable for Breaking Up", to "Three Monkeys", from "Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor" to "Hibernation", to "Wild Pear Tree", almost every one of them can be called an art classic.
Six of Ceylon's films have been shortlisted for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d'Or ("Hibernation"), Best Director ("Three Monkeys"), Grand Jury Prize ("Far Away", "Past Asia Minor") and many other awards.
Some people say that he is a "lone wolf" in the film industry, not only because his work team only has family and friends, but also because today, when various commercial blockbusters are flooded, he still strives to adhere to the most original artistic creation.
Some say he is a continuation of Abbas's style, while others compare him to Antonioni. He is one of the most high-profile art film directors in the world today, and undoubtedly one of the most personal.
He has the profundity of Tarkovsky and the philosophical thinking of Bergman; he has the narrative structure of Abbas and the simplicity of Yasujiro Ozu; he is as concerned with human life as Antonioni, and as poetic as Angelopoulos. He gathered hundreds of families, but he was a school of his own, forming a unique and self-created method.
Only when you are a stranger in a foreign land can you understand the preciousness of home and country
Nuri Big Ceylon was born in the Turkish city of Istanbul on January 26, 1959 and received a good education in Istanbul. In his youth, Ceylon was admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Bosphorus. After graduating from university, Ceylon, like many graduates, experienced a period of confusion.
Turbulent Turkey makes him want to flee, and he wants to go far away in search of answers. During his year in London, he worked as a waiter, reading books and watching movies, but it was boring and boring, and he knew it wasn't the life he wanted.
One day later, he decided to return to Turkey. Although he found nothing in London, the experience played a crucial role in his creation.
This influence was first reflected in several early works by Ceylon. From the 1995 short film Cocoon to the 1998 feature film debut "Small Town" to 2000's "May Blue Sky", it has a very obvious autobiographical nature.
Cocoon
"Small Town"
"May Blue Sky"
The short film Cocoon tells the story of an old couple who reconcile and tolerate each other after a series of accidents. Just like Ceylon in his youth, he wanted to leave Turkey and eventually returned to this land.
"The Town" and "May Blue Sky" are filmed in the Countryside of Anterosia, where Ceylon lived as a child. "May in the Clouds" takes a "play within a play" approach, telling a director who returns to his hometown to shoot a movie called "Small Town", in which the father and mother are played by ceylon's real-life parents. In the story, in the quiet and peaceful Turkish countryside, there are his parents and relatives, and there is his attachment and thinking about his homeland.
At the time of filming Cocoon, Ceylon was 36 years old, had experienced studying in a different place, living in London, and after looking up at the Himalayas and completing military service, he began to reminisce about his childhood, hometown, and family in middle age, trying to buffer the loneliness and wandering brought to him by those past experiences.
Ceylon was not a high-profile director, nor was he truly well known, but he also often expressed his political views in public.
When the 2014 Masoma mine disaster in Turkey occurred, the movie "Hibernation" was in full swing, and as of May 16, 301 people had been confirmed to have been killed, which was the worst mine disaster in Turkey's history. Ceylon led the creative team to hold up a sign with the word "Soma" printed on it at the Cannes Film Festival, hoping to attract the attention of the international community to the mining disaster and strongly express its dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Erdogan.
Ceylon has since become a supporter of Turkey's largest opposition, the Republican People's Party, where he condemns Erdogan's inaction in the accident and mourns for his compatriots who were killed.
He has both distance and poetry, and music is nature
Ceylon's unique style is not only shaped by his experience, but also by his use of lens language and sound. In 1998, Ceylon's first feature film, The Town, won best picture in the Young Directors Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival.
The film "Small Town" basically has no story line, but only records a fragment of the childlike daily life of a pair of country girls and brothers, neither telling the past nor explaining the future. Ceylon uses a large number of fixed shots to weaken the narrative of the film, not only does not reduce the viewing of the film, but highlights the director's unique style.
He is good at using the wind, rain, thunder, electricity and fog in nature to show the changes in nature and strengthen the viewing of movies. He likes to alternate between panoramic shots and close-ups to express the relationship between the characters and the environment, and use fixed shots instead of moving shots to explore the facial expressions of the characters.
Ceylon was a photographer for a period of time, so he paid great attention to composition. His lens language is often reminiscent of Tarkovsky, but Tarkovsky's lens shows the vast cold and melancholy former Soviet Union, while Ceylon's lens is more of Anatolian style and the emotional state of the world.
Another obvious feature of Ceylon is that it does not like to use the soundtrack. Ceylon's films avoid the soundtrack as much as possible, and use more natural sounds, such as the sound of the wind and birdsong, to create an atmosphere.
In terms of lines, Ceylon's early films often compressed a lot of lines and relied on plot and scenes to tell the story, so that silence is better than sound at this time.
This silence did not begin to change until "Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor". Until last year's new work "Wild Pear Tree", Ceylon joined a large dialogue. In the 188-minute film, the dialogue threads most of the main threads. Through the road back to home, Ceylon expresses his views on the paternal problems faced by young people in Turkey, the crisis of trust, the entanglement between ideals and reality, and the choice between cultural orientation and religious belief.
He added a lot of dialogue to the film, and when someone questioned it, he said, "I'm making more dialogue appear in my films in the way I like, and I'm trying to do it, but that doesn't mean that every film in the future will add this dialogue, and I'll probably be like before." ”
Culture and art blend together, and seriousness is not necessarily dull
It can be said that Ceylon is an intellectual film, and this quality is perfectly reflected in the Palme d'Or's "Hibernation". In the movie, Cappadocia, where the story takes place, has the famous "fairy chimney" cave dwelling, in such a scene, the snowy winter is indeed more suitable for "hibernation".
Ceylon uses a common "detailed description" in literary techniques to reflect the general image of the character with an event, and the protagonist Aiden has a high self-esteem but has nothing to do, and can only rely on his sister to collect rent to survive. Seemingly personable intellectuals are stripped of their seemingly grandiose shell by their sisters and wives on opposite sides, and in the end all that remains is the dilemma of self-doubt.
Perhaps every intellectual in the elite class has encountered such a dilemma and wants to change others with his proud standards, but between different classes, different positions, and different identities, in the end, no one can convince each other, and people will not become more harmonious because of communication. Because the value benchmarks are different, there is always an ice wall between people that is difficult to cross, and it is better to sleep in the cold winter.
After all, "repaying grievances with virtue can only impress people with bad hearts" is only a personal opinion, and when encountering "modesty and concessions, it will only make the other party to the quarrel feel that you are weak and deceitful", communication becomes meaningless. Here, Ceylon throws out his view, "You can't use these virtues to despise others because you are kind and generous." ”
Most of the scenes in the film "Hibernation" are concentrated indoors, and several dialogue scenes are even more than 15 minutes long each, and the entire film is 196 minutes long.
For off-screen audiences who don't know Turkish and are relatively new to Turkish culture, Ceylon's films don't seem to have much entertainment to speak. But in fact, as long as you are willing to enter the movie with your heart, you will find that Ceylon also has many humorous moments.
All thinking will eventually return to man himself
In Ceylon's works in recent years, he has always thrown out one question after another about "people", but his attention to people themselves is not the same as Bergman's questions, Antonioni observations, and Bresson's bystanders.
First of all, Ceylon is a "participant", and his presence will become the fulcrum of the core story in the film. In 2002's "Far Away", he tells the story of a young man from the countryside who came to his cousin who was working as a photographer in a big city, and the hardships of job hunting and his cousin's indifference finally made the young man choose to leave.
2006's "Season for Breakup" tells the story of a couple who break up from cold war to anger, and finally although the husband finds a wife, the gap between the two has not been eliminated. It is Ceylon himself who plays the male protagonist of this film, and the role of "wife" is also played by Ceylon's real wife.
Compared with "Far Away", the film "Seasons For Breakups" adds more lines, and the pace also accelerates, but the two films are in the same vein in a depressing atmosphere, exploring communication between people and giving a pessimistic answer - the gap between people cannot be filled.
The film "Three Monkeys" continues the theme of the first two films in terms of theme, that is, the trust, communication and irreconcilable contradictions between people in family relationships. Ceylon also adds thoughts about his social issues and politics to the film, implicitly expressing his views on today's Turkish society through the collision of different classes.
Today, Ceylon is in the golden stage of creation, and perhaps he can discover more thought-provoking elements and make more breakthroughs in his future creations. Perhaps he will continue his usual pessimistic realism to describe to the outside world what he sees as people, homes, lives, society, and Turkey. As long as he's still making movies, that's something to look forward to.