“The Small Town,” par Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 1997
PARIS CINEMA 2009
MK2 Bibliotheque
Vendredi, le dix juillet, 2009
It is winter. A group of school children are walking a hilly dirt road covered with snow. A man approaches and a child yells, “Ahmet le fou!” It’s the town fool and as he nears them he slips on the snow and ice., The children laugh. He tries to get back on his feet but falls again, and the children laugh some more. They cruelly mock him, and as they do the camera moves in for a prolonged close-up of his face. His eyes are wide and dark and deep. You begin to wonder what can he be thinking? What is he perhaps remembering? Nuri Bilge Ceylan does this all the time. His long close-ups upon very interesting faces with many emotions churning with the passage of time gives us, the audience, an opportunity to stop and wonder about the character’s inner life. (“Mehmet le fou” is here played by the same actor, a friend of Ceylan’s, who starred as the photographer in “Uzak.” His name is Muzaffer Ozdemir, and I have seen him referred to as Ceylan’s alter-ego.)
The next scene occurs outside the village school. This is the beginning of our introduction to the local mores, and the Turkish patriotism taught in schools during the last decade of the 20th century. The school children are gathered before a flag and a statue of Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic in 1923. They sing of their pride and joy in being Turkish, they agree to work hard for their country, all in fealty to Ataturk.
Then we are in the classroom. A young boy is standing in the center of the room, putting on a show for the others as he blows upon a floating feather, managing to return it up high in the air whenever it comes down. All the children are enjoying his success, but then it lands on the cross pipe of the vent of the wood burning stove and stays up there.
The teacher enters the room and the children become totally quiet immediately and then yell in proper unison their respectful greeting to their teacher. He begins class by asking various students to read from a book detailing the necessary rules that people must follow in order that society might continue functioning well. There are sets of written rules and of unwritten rules. The unwritten rules concern personal moral behavior. The importance of the family unit as mortar that holds society together is stressed. People must never do anything that might loosen family bonds.
When the teacher had first taken attendance, one child was listed as absent. But he does arrive, late, and snow is falling, and is now melting upon him and his clothing. He sits by the stove and takes off his shoes and hangs his wet socks above the hot stove top. There is a close-up of the socks hanging there (cf. the many times Yasuhiro Ozu uses pillow shots of laundry hung on the line outdoors) while on the audio track we hear the falling drops of water sizzling rhythmically as they fall to the burning hot metal below.
Reading from the morality text resumes. The feather falls back down from the cross pipe and the children, at their desks, take turns bowing it back up into the air. As a student continues reading, the teacher looks at the snow falling outside through the window near his desk. He looks bored and wistful as the feather finally falls on him, and he picks it off his clothing but he does not play with it.
The teacher says the classroom smells bad. He has all the children pull out their lunches and he goes around the room sticking his nose into each to find the smell. He stops at the desk of one of the older girls in the class. It’s her lunch gone bad, and he tells her to throw it away. He will provide her some food, and she should tell her mother to be more careful for bad food could poison her. She is shamed before the entire class, and quietly begins to cry.
The girl’s name is Asiye. She is 11 years old and her younger brother, Ali, 7, accompanies her each way to and from school.
We spend a lot of time with a mysterious young man who wanders about the town and surrounding farms. Who is he and why is he here? Again, as we explore his face, we wonder what he is thinking about? He strolls through the fields. The grass is high and leaves have reappeared upon the trees. It is now spring, no longer winter, and the countryside is lovely. The sudden shift from cold grey winter to the emergence of spring is used to indicate how these people’s lives are inextricably bound with the passage of the seasons, the cycles of nature. He sees flocks of sheep in the fields. He comes upon an open truck filled with goats, and he stops to pet them. I fear they may be on their way to an abattoir. But, sadly they won’t make it to such a formal death. There are men down below unsentimentally taking the goats, and throwing each upon a pile on the naked earth and immediately slitting their throats. They are left to writhe there as they bleed to death. Here are two polar opposites of attitudes towards animals shown in rapid succession.
Ali turns out to be a pretty nasty, and maybe angry, little boy. As he walks with his sister, he lingers for a moment to throw a rock at a town elder sitting by a wall. The rock hits the wall right by the man’s head but the man doesn’t give Ali the satisfaction of even a blink of the eye.
The young man visits the town carnival. A striking shot from beneath his head, looking up at the sky, reveals a group of carnival goers riding in chairs hung from chains that float by in a wide arc. It’s very gay and well photographed. He joins a large group of people assembled in a ride made to look like a large, long and narrow boat. It begins to swing, forward and backwards and higher and upwards and the people smile more and more broadly and scream louder and louder in ever increasing delight. The young man sits behind two men in jackets and hats seen in silhouette backlit by the sun. We are treated to another low-angled shot of the people in the flying seats. Then, there is a rather sudden segue to a deserted children’s playground, where an empty two-seater double-sided swing is moving ever so slightly from the wind. Why play on an old swing when the more modern delights of the carnival have come to town?
Asiye and Ali are together in the forest. They are actually in a cemetery where Asiye is picking plums. It s unclear if this activity is related to her spoiled lunch. Does her family need for her to forage for food? Ali is worried about picking the plums in a cemetery. Asiye assures him it’s alright, saying the dead don’t need them. Ali then asks her to read the names on the headstones. She demurs, pointing out that he’d not known any of these people anyway, so their names should not matter to him. They are of the past and Ali is striding forward into the future. They, and we, begin to hear noises. There is a donkey tied to a tree nearby, and he is braying. Ali stares at the donkey. The camera closes in on his eyes, and then on the donkey’s wet saucer eyes and back and forth between Ali and the donkey, the close-ups getting increasingly tightly framed. Both pairs of eyes are very beautiful and deep and conscient looking. Before leaving, Ali throws a rock at the donkey.
They find a turtle on the ground. He’s large and Asiye stands upon its shell with both feet. She says this won’t hurt the turtle because his carapace is very strong. Ali wants to see the turtle’s head and legs which the animal is keeping safely inside his shell. Asiye tells him he must remain very still, and after awhile the head and legs will emerge. This is something that is very difficult for the 7-year-old Ali to do, but he tries real hard, lying on his belly, near the turtle, and staring at it. But then they hear a gun shot. It’s a signal for them that it is time to leave the forest.
Asiye had told Ali that if a turtle lands on its back it dies. He questions her back, “Why?” She explains that somehow turtles are just unable to turn themselves over. The two children begin to leave the forest. But not before Ali takes his turn standing upon the turtle’s shell.
They leave. The head and legs of the turtle begin to emerge now that he is alone. We know well what is going to happen. Ali comes back, without Asiye. He turns the turtle onto its back. And then he leaves. Later in the film, we revisit the doomed turtle, still on its back, its head and legs moving about and falling down in exhaustion until it has the energy to try again. You hope that Ali will come back eventually and turn the turtle back right-side-up. But is a seven-year-old capable of remembering what he’d done in the daily adventure of growing up?
The children find the members of their extended family gathered beneath trees nearby the corn field. They have come here for a family picnic. There is an elderly man and an elderly woman and she is peeling fruit while seated on the ground. (These two people are played by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s own parents.) She is also roasting ears of corn on a camp fire. Asiye’s and Ali’s father and mother are here, too. The children have come out from the forest to join them. The mysterious young man arrives as well. He is Saffet, the cousin of the children’s father (and, he is played by the same actor, Mehmet Emin Toprak, who played the photographer’s cousin in the later film, “Uzak” or “Distant.” To top it off, Toprak is Ceylan’s cousin in real life.).
Night falls. It gets dark. The family shows no sign of leaving. It nearly looks like they may spend the entire night here, talking. The discussions are very revealing. The men, in particular, three generations of them, each epitomize a different philosophical approach to human existence. Their family histories vary wildly and they have differing goals and values by which they are living their lives.
Saffer has just returned from his tour of required military duty. But he is left with no idea of what to do with the rest of his life. We see a flashback to when he first left the village of his birth. We learn that he never expected to return. But here he is, and now we have a hint of what he may have been thinking as he strolled the fields and farms and visited the carnival. We have learned that he has no plans, no job and no family ties. For him, life is meaningless. He is the modern day nihilist.
During the remaining daylight, Ali goes off into the fields behind the picnickers. We see him beating the ground with a stick, apparently killing an insect we had just seen in close-up. When it gets dark, he sits with the adults. He sees an insect crawling up the sleeve of his shirt, and is surprisingly gentle with it. Rather than killing it, he carefully captures it in his hand.
The middle-aged man is Saffet’s uncle, and father to Ali and Asiye. He knows many languages. He’s the only one in the entire village to have ever pursued an advanced education. In fact, a very advanced education. He studied abroad. Some of his studies took him to the United States. He most admires Alexander the Great and the United States of America. He begins a very long exposition of the exploits of Alexander the Great. He has, on the tip of his tongue, the dates and names and places of Alexander’s four major campaigns and claims to know exactly why and how Alexander won his battles. He talks on and on about Alexander, annoying both his own father, and his cousin. His father is annoyed at his flaunting his book learning. For all the education his son has obtained, he is still back in this village with all the other uneducated peasants. Saffet is annoyed that Alexander the Great gets all the credit for winning his military campaigns. Saffet believes it was the ordinary soldier, such as himself, who actually won the battles for Alexander. Saffet’s uncle retorts that they were simply following the orders of their wise leader, and it was the strategies and tactics that Alexander developed that were necessary for them to succeed. This man symbolizes the rationalist.
The country of Iraq is mentioned, perhaps in the context of Saffet’s military service. Saffet’s uncle takes the opportunity to show off more of his knowledge and world travel experience. Iraq, present day Mesopotamia, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “Cradle of Civilization.” He pronounces “Mesopotamia” as one does not only in Turkey, but in France and America, too.
The children all the while are eagerly eating the roasted corn. Ali wants more but there isn’t any more. He is given a piece of fruit instead, perhaps one of the plums from the cemetery. The children bed down under warm blankets. The adults continue discussing life via the mechanism of war.
The grandfather retains his faith in God. He’d served in World War I, was captured by the Brits, and sent off to India where he suffered hunger and severe deprivation. His daughter-in-law brings up the matter of the death of a two-year-old child. Why would God allow that? The old man defers to God’s wisdom, not attempting to explain the “why.” The grandfather is eager to live anther twenty years, should God allow. From what he’s heard, if he were an American, it would be more likely, easier, to live anther twenty years. (The French audience laughs at this unexpected pronouncement.) He is proud to be a farmer. He advises Saffet to settle down, get married, and have a family. The grandfather symbolizes Turkish traditions of deep, enduring faith. He is the religious traditionalist.
The children are said to symbolize the ruthlessness of the natural world up to the time when they learn “compassion, kindness, pity and forgiveness.” We have experienced Ali’s unremitting ruthlessness. Toward the end of the film, after the all night picnic, Ali, feverish with a cold, has a dream. He sees his mother go toward the window, and look outside. Suddenly the camera shows her curled up upon the deep window sill, from which she tips over and falls lifelessly to the floor. The scene shifts back to the turtle that Ali had placed on its back. It is still alive, helplessly and hopelessly flailing its legs. Ali may be advancing to a stage in life where he finally does feel the charitable, altruistic impulses listed above.
There were two women who figured prominently in the film, but have hardly been mentioned. The children’s mother and grandmother are symbols of the hardworking Anatolian women who are the primary bearers of tradition through the generations. They are both reserved and committed to their family roles as defined by Turkish society.
And Asiye is still thinking about the foreign lands, far off from her village, mentioned by the adults. She asks her mother where India is. Her mother answers that it is to the east, pointing. Asiye looks, and observes, “On the other side of the mountains?” That itself is a long distance for an 11-year-old girl to grasp. It may well be that Asiye will never travel far at all from the village of her birth.
In the very last scene of the film, Asiye is standing at the edge of a brook. She reaches down toward something she’s seen in the shallow, clear water. The camera closes in on her hand as she grabs or captures something in the water. Stop action - FIN.
I have not yet figured out the meaning of the final image. But I hugely admire the masterful portrayal that Nuri Bilge Ceylan has here presented us of the very town in Anatolia where he grew up until the age of ten. The screenplay is an adaptation of an autobiographical book written by his sister, Emine Ceylan, entitled “Cornfield.” Ceylan chose to film in black and white to emphasize that the story takes place in the past, like looking through an old family album of black and white photographs. He is also expressing the distance he feels from his own childhood here in this very village.
This film was the first of a trilogy: “Small Town,” 1997; “Clouds of May,” 1999; and, finally, “Distant,” 2003. Saffet continues as the country cousin through all three films, though in the last, for some reason, he is named “Yosuf.” Ceylan here continues using friends and relatives in the cast, and parts of his own life as material for the film.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan has here given us a multifaceted and detailed description of these people who live lives closely allied with the natural world. They participate in a yearly cycle of rituals such as school, butchering, harvest, carnivals, and they perpetuate their myths. We experience the complexity of individuals and their family bonds, with different members having such different experiences of life and of the world, near and far. These experiences include those of education, travel, the military, religion, status and their life’s work. Despite these differences, on the whole the families have so far remained bound together.
The sound track is comprised mostly of the ambient natural sounds of the countryside. Birds chirping, dogs barking, the donkey braying and the sound of the wind. Thus, it is all the more emotionally powerful when we hear as background the improvisational playing of the clarinet by Ali Kayaci. There is a shot of his smooth, dark, oval face as he blows into his instrument that comprises an unforgettable portrait. The music is very evocative of Saffet’s emotions as he revisits his small home town.
