The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan: The Global Vision of a Turkish Filmmaker

Film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s meditative, visually stunning contributions to the ’New Turkish Cinema’ have marked him out as a pioneer of his medium. Reaping success from his prize-winning, breakout film Uzak (2002), and from later festival favourites Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014), he has quickly established himself as an original and provocative writer, director and producer of 21st century cinema. In an age where Turkey’s modernisation has created societal tensions and departures from past tradition, Ceylan’s films present a cinema of dislocation and a vision of ’nostalgia’ understood as homesickness: sick of being away from home; sick of being at home. This book offers an overdue study of Ceylan’s work and a critical examination of the principle themes therein. In particular, chapters focus on time and space, melancholy and loneliness, absence, rural and urban experience, and notions of paradox, as explored through films which are often slow and uncompromising in their pessimistic outlook.
Moving on from the tendency to situate Ceylan’s oeuvre exclusively within the canon of ’New Turkish Cinema’, one of this book’s major achievements is also to assess the influence of classic European thought, literature and film and how such a notably minimal - and in many ways nationally-specific - approach translates to an increasingly transnational context for film. This will prove an important book for film students and scholars, and those interested in Turkish visual culture.

Bülent Diken is Professor of Social and Cultural Theory at Lancaster University, UK, and at Kadir Has University, Turkey. In particular, his research interests include the sociology of cinema, and he has a number of previous publications, which include The Culture of Exception (2008) and Sociology through the Projector (2005).

Graeme Gilloch is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He researches and teaches courses in visual culture - especially film and photography - and metropolitan and urban cultures.

Craig Hammond is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK. He researches film from a sociological perspective, amongst other interests. His previous publications include Hope, Utopia and Creativity in Higher Education (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).