CHAPTER ELEVEN Auteurism, Recognition and Reception: Ceylan as a Global Auteur Özgür Yaren A uteur theory and the very concept of the auteur have long lost their pertinence in the academia. Film studies scholarship today focuses more on reception and spectatorship and tends to conceive of films, whether labelled as artworks or popular cultural products, more as the products of social and political context than the individual ‘craftsmanship’ of the directors/producers. Nevertheless, auteurs, as well as the term itself, seem to endure paradigmatic theoretical shifts. Having accomplished becoming simultaneously a transnational filmmaker and a part of the national film canon, despite the different and sometimes conflicting requirements of each role, Nuri Bilge Ceylan personifies what auteur – or global auteur – means today. To understand how Ceylan has secured his position in the complex and precarious map of competing value systems, we need to explore contemporary auteurism and the tensions between different modes of artistic recognition in global and national contexts. For Cahiers du Cinema’s young critics of the late 1950s, and Andrew Sarris, who transposed the French term to Anglo-Saxon film criticism in the early 1960s, auteur was a rank reserved exclusively for those offbeat filmmakers who assumedly contended to create genuine, individual work despite the forbidding unifying codes of studios and genre conventions. These bona fide filmmakers were striving for greater authority and control over their films. Decades after auteur theory lost its relevance, the term auteur could no longer maintain its original meaning, only to find a new one that encompasses a remarkably larger group of filmmakers, and in most cases producer-directors. Unlike many of their counterparts who worked in the heyday of the Hollywood studios and sought a way to deliver individual artistic expression while on the studio payroll, new auteurs are independent – in the sense of precariousness – and unavoidably multitasking filmmakers. They write, direct and produce auteurism, recognition and reception 187 (seeking funds and making co-production deals through their own companies, which are dedicated to producing their films only), thus nominally have full control over every level of production, thanks to their artisanal production mode. The politique des auteurs in this new global environment is also quite different from the young film critic Truffaut’s brawling days when a generation of director-to-be critics was contesting the established field of art cinema, its production mode, the film industry, the evaluation circles and the dominant politics of evaluation. The Cahier’s auteurism was launched as part of a battle plan for reforming the French film industry to allow control of filmmaking by the worker (Staiger 1985: 12). Above that, they were rebelling against le cinéma de papa and its outdated aesthetic qualities. This setting is in deep contrast with the global age, where ‘auteurism has been completely institutionalised in film archives, mass media, festival circuits, academic curriculum and even commercial theatres, to the extent that paradoxically it no longer triggers noteworthy polemics once a director has been recognised and granted authorship’ (Jeong 2016: 4). This dramatic drift is a sign that although the term auteur is still in use, its shape and scale have changed drastically. Therefore, it makes sense to designate today’s auteur filmmakers as ‘global auteurs’ since their status is granted by a global network, unanimously within the chain of hierarchy, from major European film festivals (none more so than Cannes) to lesser international film festivals around the globe. However, the totality of the global age’s established art field, its aesthetic references (in short, modernist European cinema) and its mechanisms of validation and recognition could be limiting in terms of artistic expression. Hence, the redefined, extended idea of the auteur is far from being independent, let alone ‘offbeat’. In other words, the determining power of the framework of festivals and the global market paradoxically limit the auteur’s freedom, even as they grant authorial brand to filmmakers. This brings back the constituent problem of the auteur as an idealised artist, struggling to have maximum control over their works and to claim their individual means of expression against all industrial and structural constraints. For many critics, the dependency of the art house filmmakers (particularly in non-western cultures) on the global market and the film festivals forces them to adjust to the expectations of such and to provide an ‘exoticism either in the form of gritty realism or picturesque squalor’ (Elsaesser 2016: 26) or a political statement aligned with global, neoliberal values. This obligation however has many filmmakers facing a dilemma since the domestic audience is very susceptible to ‘self-exoticizing visual gestures’ (Chow 1995: 171), judging them as a lack of authenticity. Prominent Turkish film critic Onat Kutlar once famously told a panel that he and his close circle of critics hastily baptised rural stories of late 1970s Yeşilçam as ‘Young Cinema’ while these films looked like ‘kilim’ (handwoven Turkish rugs) (Kuzu 2021). Kutlar’s pun, likening the word ‘film’ to ‘kilim’ (‘film’ is generally pronounced as ‘filim’ 188 ö z g ü r ya r e n in Turkish), wittily sums up what Chow calls self-exoticism (1995: 171). In addition, filmmakers from illiberal countries such as Iran, China and Turkey have a political dilemma which Elsaesser defines as serving at least two masters, or ‘double occupancy’: ‘a government exerting censorship, versus the international film festival whose director expects dissidence and resistance’ (2016: 26–7). If we name the complex mechanisms which define hierarchical boundaries within a cultural field and validate a particular cultural form by elevating it to the status of ‘art’ as ‘cultural legitimation’ (Baumann 2001), this double occupancy is a clear token of the tension between its different modes in global and national contexts. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests that cultural legitimation has three primary forms: a ‘specific’ legitimacy which is maintained by other cultural producers, a ‘bourgeois’ legitimacy, granted by agents and institutions of the dominant class and a ‘popular’ legitimacy based on public acclaim (1993: 50–1). Bearing in mind that Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, which explains the institutions, the processes of evaluation and mechanisms of legitimation and recognition, was developed strictly in and for the French national context, one can cautiously try to use it to understand the working principles of different contexts (Mangez and Liénard 2015: 184). That is what Allen and Lincoln (2004) did when they successfully adopted the forms of cultural legitimation to the field of film and introduced three main types of recognition: professional, critical and popular. Accordingly, film festivals and awards are specific institutions where the professional recognition of a film and a filmmaker is bestowed by other artists and filmmakers. Critics and film scholars are discernibly the main agents for the critical recognition of films. Audience attendance and box office figures as reliable statistical indicators represent popular recognition, and thus the legitimacy of films as cultural products (2004: 879–80). The most common tension within the film field obviously stems from the distinction between commercial cinema and art cinema, where diverse types of recognition typically contradict each other. As it would be difficult for a commercial film to gain critical recognition, an art house film attracting popular recognition is equally rare. Moreover, the three types of recognition mentioned earlier rarely an overlap. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing trend challenging the hierarchies in the cultural field, blurring the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow cultural products. Wider cultural trends influence and complicate the film field by altering established classifications (Yaren and Hazır 2020). Mutual hybridisation of mainstream and art house films (Andrews 2013: xi; Drake 2008) and growingly eclectic, broadening cultural repertoires of audiences further complicate classical distinctions within the film field (Barnett and Allen 2000: 145). The tension between different modes of artistic recognition in global and national contexts is particularly important in the case of global auteurs. auteurism, recognition and reception 189 Since it is hard to please separate sets of expectations at once and virtually impossible in certain national contexts when discrepancies are too distinct to reconcile, filmmakers with an art house agenda tend to choose one over the other, usually preferring international festival audiences to domestic filmgoers. Three Turkish filmmakers who began their careers in the 1990s, Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, have demonstrated different strategies for coping with this problem. Demirkubuz has opted for a domestic audience later in his career and ceased to seek international acclaim for his homespun dramas. Ustaoğlu has gone in the opposite direction by targeting national and international festival audiences to tackle political themes and the questions of history, identity and patriarchy in Turkey. Ceylan, however, has succeeded to be an exception not only in Turkey, but among art house filmmakers of the same generation globally in terms of vanquishing the constraints of the word auteur, holding control of his films and exhibiting defiance if not contravening global and domestic expectations regarding his works. recognition Ceylan’s film career initially affirmed the distinction and the artistic hierarchy with clearly defined boundaries: an art house filmmaker committed to the European art cinema tradition who has targeted festival audiences over domestic popular audiences (Erdem 1997). He found some ground at Cannes with his debut short film Koza/Cocoon (1995). His early feature films, Kasaba/The Small Town (1997), Mayıs Sıkıntısı/Clouds of May (1999) and Uzak/Distant (2002) were entirely independent, low-budget national productions. They were loosely interconnected by strong autobiographical elements, and shared a common style with certain aesthetic strategies that would later come to be associated with Ceylan as an auteur. The minimalist, slow, image-oriented stylistic preferences were on a par with or even obligated by this production mode. Distant was the last of Ceylan’s early films that were the output of a certain amateur artisanal production mode (Çağlayan 2018: 215). Before the professionalism and division of labour steps in, this mode of production allows the director to hold full control of his work, not for creative preferences alone – for being a resolute filmmaker, not wanting to surrender control of any aspects – but due to financial constraints as well. In the 2000s, there were still no producers in Turkey willing to invest in art-house films, nor were there banks ready to lend money to film producers, which resulted in some directors establishing their own production companies to apply for national and international film support funds (Zıraman 2018: 78). ‘When I interviewed Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Cannes last year, the Turkish director was personable but clearly tired’, wrote Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound, ‘having spent the previous few days selling his film Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Gönül Dönmez-Colin 1. Portrait of the Provincial Artist as an Urban Intellectual Gönül Dönmez-Colin 2. Vanishing Image of History: Uzak/Distant (2002) Mahmut Mutman 3. Portraits and Landscape: İklimler/Climates (2006) Cecília Mello 4. Aesthetic Silences and the Political Bind: Üç Maymun/ Three Monkeys (2008) Vuslat D. Katsanis 5. The Aesthetics of Space and Absence: Üç Maymun/ Three Monkeys (2008) and Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/ Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) Adam Ochonicky 6. Transnational Indistinctions: Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/ Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Kış Uykusu/ Winter Sleep (2014) Ebru Thwaites Diken 7. The Politics of Dialogue and Ethics of Engagement: Kış Uykusu/Winter Sleep (2014) Emre Çağlayan vii viii xii 1 19 37 51 68 84 103 119 vi contents 8. Staying in the Primary Home, Relationships, Desires to Go and Roots: Kış Uykusu/Winter Sleep (2014) and Ahlat Ağacı/ The Wild Pear Tree (2018) Hasan Akbulut 9. Of Fathers, Sons and ‘Solitary, Misshapen’ Trees: Ahlat Ağacı/The Wild Pear Tree (2018) Coşkun Liktor 10. ‘Gender Trouble’ and the Crises of Masculinities in the Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Gönül Dönmez-Colin 11. Auteurism, Recognition and Reception: Ceylan as a Global Auteur Özgür Yaren Index 135 152 168 186 203