Born Yılmaz Pütün
1 April 1937
Yenice, Karataş, turkey
Died 9 September 1984 (aged 47)
Paris, France
Nationality kurdish
Other names Çirkin Kral (Ugly King)
Citizenship Turkish (until 1982)[1]
Occupation Film director
Screenwriter
Actor
Years active 1958 – 1983
Yılmaz Güney (born Yılmaz Pütün, 1 April 1937 – 9 September 1984) was a film director, scenarist, novelist, and actor, who produced movies in Turkish.He was the first man in the Turkish cinema.He quickly rose to prominence in Turkish Film Industry. Many of his works were devoted to the plight of ordinary, working class people in Turkey. Yılmaz Güney won the Palme d'Or with the film Yol he co-produced with Şerif Gören at Cannes Film Festival in 1982. He was at constant odds with the Turkish government because of his portrayals of Kurdish culture, people and language in his movies. After being accused of killing a judge, something Yılmaz claimed to be innocent of, and being convicted in a controversial trial in 1974[6], he fled the country and later lost his citizenship.
Background
Yılmaz Güney was born in 1937 in the Yenice county of Adana. His parents from Siverek and Varto and both had a Kurdish descent.they migrated to Adana to work as cotton field laborers. As a result of his family background, young Yılmaz grew among the working class. This was a strong background for his future works which generally focused on a realistic portrayal of downtrodden and marginalized strata of the population in the country. Güney studied law and economics at the universities of Ankara and Istanbul, but by the age of 21 he found himself actively involved in film-making.
Career in Turkey
As Yeşilçam, the Turkish studio system, a handful of directors, including Atıf Yılmaz, began to use cinema as a means of addressing the problems of the people. State-sanctioned melodramas, war films, and play adaptations had mostly previously been played in Turkish theaters. These new filmmakers began to shoot and screen more realistic pictures of Turkish/Kurdish life. Yılmaz Güney was one of the most popular names to emerge from this trend, a gruff-looking young actor who earned the moniker Çirkin Kral ("the Ugly King" in Turkish) or "paşay naşirîn" in Kurdish. After working as an apprentice screenwriter for and assistant to Atıf Yılmaz, Güney soon began appearing in as many as 20 films a year and became Turkey's one of the most popular actors.
The early 1960s brought restricted freedom to Turkey, and Güney was imprisoned from 1960 to 1962. In prison he wrote what some labeled a "communist" novel, They Died with Their Heads Bowed.[8] The country's political situation and Güney's relationship with the authorities became even more tense in the ensuing years. Not content with his star status atop the Turkish film industry, Güney began directing his own pictures in 1965. By 1968 he had formed his own production company, Güney Filmcilik. Over the next few years, the titles of his films mirrored the feelings of the people of Turkey: Umut (Hope, 1970); Ağıt (Elegy, 1972); Acı (Pain, 1971); The Hopeless (1971). Umut is considered to be the first realistic film of Turkish Cinema, the American director Elia Kazan was among the first to praise the film; “Umut is a poetic film, completely native, not an imitation of Hollywood or any of the European masters, it had risen out of a village environment”.[9]
After 1972, however, Güney would spend most of his life in prison. Arrested for harboring anarchist students, Güney was jailed during preproduction of Zavallılar (The Miserable, 1975), and before completing Endişe (Worry, 1974), which was finished in 1974 by Güney's assistant, Şerif Gören. This was a role that Gören would repeat over the next dozen years, directing several scripts that Güney wrote in prison.
Released from prison in 1974 as part of a general amnesty, Güney was re-arrested that same year for shooting Sefa Mutlu, the public prosecutor of Yumurtalık district in Adana Province, to death in a night club as a result of a drunken row[10] and given a prison sentence of 19 years. During this stretch of incarceration, his most successful screenplays were Sürü (The Herd, 1978) and Düşman (The Enemy, 1979), both directed by Zeki Ökten. Düşman won an Honourable Mention at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival in 1980.[11]
Güney's first marriage was with fellow Turkish actress, Nebahat Çehre, who co-starred alongside Güney in more than several films. Their relationship began in 1964 and they married in 1967. Prior to his marriage, Güney fathered a daughter, Elif Güney Pütün, from his relationship with Birsen Can Ünal.
Despite Güney and Nebahat Çehre's divorce in 1968, many of those closest to Güney have always regarded Çehre to have been the love of his life.
Later, Güney married Jale Fatma Süleymangil, more commonly known as Fatoş Güney, in 1970. Together, they had a son, Remzi Yılmaz Pütün.
Exile and death
In September 1980, Güney's works were banned by the new military junta. Güney declared, “There are only two possibilities: to fight or to give up, I chose to fight”.[12] After escaping from prison in 1981 and fleeing to France[13], Güney won the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival for his film Yol, whose director in the field was once again Şerif Gören. It was not until 1983 that Güney resumed directing, telling a brutal tale of imprisoned children in his final film, Duvar (The Wall, 1983), made in France with the cooperation of the French government. Meanwhile, Turkey's government revoked his citizenship and a court sentenced him to twenty-two extra years in jail.
Yılmaz Güney died of gastric cancer in 1984, in Paris, France.
Filmography
Actor
Alageyik (1958)
Bu Vatanın Çocukları (1958)
Tütün Zamanı (1959)
Dolandırıcılar Şahı (1961)
Tatlı Bela (1961)
İkisi de Cesurdu (1963)
Halime'den Mektup Var (1964)
Her Gün Ölmektense (1964)
Kamalı Zeybek (1964)
Kara Şahin (1964)
Kocaoğlan (1964)
Koçero (1964)
Mor Defter (1964)
On korkusuz Adam (1964)
Prangasız Mahkumlar (1964)
Zımba Gibi Delikanlı (1964)
Gönül Kuşu (1965)
Haracıma Dokunma (1965)
Kahreden Kurşun (1965)
Kan Gövdeyi Götürdü (1965)
Kanlı Buğday (1965)
Kasımpaşalı (1965)
Kasımpaşalı Recep (1965)
Konyakçı (1965)
Korkusuzlar (1965)
Krallar Kralı (1965)
Sayılı Kabadayılar (1965)
Silaha Yeminliydim (1965)
Sokakta Kan Vardı (1965)
Tehlikeli Adam (1965)
Torpido Yılmaz (1965)
Üçünüzü de Mıhlarım (1965)
Yaralı Kartal (1965)
Ben Öldükçe Yaşarım (1965)
Beyaz Atlı Adam (1965)
Dağların Oğlu (1965)
Davudo (1965)
Anası Yiğit Doğurmuş (1966)
Arslanların Dönüşü (1966)
At Avrat Silah (1966)
Bomba Kemal (1966)
Çirkin Kral (1966)
Esrefpaşalı (1966)
Law of the Border (Hudutların Kanunu; 1966)
Kibar Haydut (1966)
Kovboy Ali (1966)
Silahların Kanunu (1966)
Tilki Selim (1966)
Ve Silahlara Veda (1966)
Yedi Dağın Aslanı (1966)
Yiğit Yaralı ÖlÜr (1966)
At hırsızı Banus (1967)
Balatlı Arif (1967)
Bana Kurşun İşlemez (1967)
Benim Adım Kerim (1967)
Büyük Cellatlar (1967)
Çirkin Kral Affetmez (1967)
Eşkiya Celladı (1967)
İnce Cumali (1967)
Kızılırmak-Karakoyun (1967)
Kozanoğlu (1967)
Kuduz Recep (1967)
Kurbanlık Katil (1967)
Şeytanın Oğlu (1967)
Kardeşim Benim (1968)
Kargacı Halil (1968)
Marmara Hasan (1968)
Öldürmek Hakkımdır (1968)
Pire Nuri (1968)
Seyyit Han (1968)
Aslan Bey (1968)
Azrail Benim (1968)
Beyoğlu Canavarı (1968)
Can Pazarı (1968)
Aç Kurtlar (1969)
Belanın Yedi Türlüsü (1969)
Bin Defa Ölürüm (1969)
Bir Çirkin Adam (1969)
Çifte Tabancalı Kabadayı (1969)
Güney Ölüm Saçıyor (1969)
Kan Su Gibi Akacak (1969)
Kurşunların Kanunu (1969)
Çifte Yürekli (1970)
İmzam Kanla Yazılır (1970)
Kanımın Son Damlasına Kadar (1970)
Onu Allah Affetsin (1970)
Piyade Osman (1970)
Sevgili Muhafızım (1970)
Şeytan Kayaları (1970)
Son Kızgın Adam (1970)
Umut (1970)
Yedi Belalılar (1970)
Zeyno (1970)
Canlı Hedef (1970)
Baba (1971)
Çirkin ve Cesur (1971)
İbret (1971)
Kaçaklar (1971)
Namus ve Silah (1971)
Umutsuzlar (1971)
Vurguncular (1971)
Ağıt (1972)
Sahtekar (1972)
Zavallılar (1975)
Arkadaş (1974)
Endişe (1974)
Director
At Avrat Silah (1966)
Bana Kurşun İşlemez (1967)
Benim Adım Kerim (1967)
Pire Nuri (1968)
Seyyit Han (1968)
Aç Kurtlar (1969)
Bir Çirkin Adam (1969)
Umut (1970)
Canlı Hedef (1970)
Piyade Osman (1970)
Baba (1971)
İbret (1971)
Kaçaklar (1971)
Umutsuzlar (1971)
Vurguncular (1971)
Yarın Son Gündür (1971)
Acı (1971)
Ağıt (1972)
Arkadaş (1974)
Endişe (1974)
Zavallılar (1975)
Surü (1978)
Düşman (1979)
Yol (1982)
Duvar (1983)
Senaryo
1983 . Yol Sinema Filmi
1981 . Düşman Sinema Filmi
1979 . Sürü Sinema Filmi
1978 . İzin Sinema Filmi
1975 . Bir Gün Mutlaka Sinema Filmi
1975 . Zavallılar Sinema Filmi
1974 . Endişe Sinema Filmi
1974 . Arkadaş Sinema Filmi
1974 . İbret Sinema Filmi
1971 . Çirkin Ve Cesur Sinema Filmi
1971 . Yarın Son Gündür Sinema Filmi
1971 . Vurguncular Sinema Filmi
1971 . Umutsuzlar Sinema Filmi
1971 . Kaçaklar Sinema Filmi
1971 . Baba Sinema Filmi
1971 . Ağıt Sinema Filmi
1971 . Acı Sinema Filmi
1971 . Şeytan Kayaları Sinema Filmi
1970 . İmzam Kanla Yazılır Sinema Filmi
1970 . Yedi Belalılar Sinema Filmi
1970 . Umut Sinema Filmi
1970 . Sevgili Muhafızım Sinema Filmi
1970 . Piyade Osman Sinema Filmi
1970 . Canlı Hedef Sinema Filmi
1970 . Bir Çirkin Adam Sinema Filmi
1969 . Bin Defa Ölürüm Sinema Filmi
1969 . Belanın Yedi Türlüsü Sinema Filmi
1969 . Aç Kurtlar Sinema Filmi
1969 . Seyyit Han Sinema Filmi
1968 . Pire Nuri Sinema Filmi
1968 . Kardeşim Benim - Kargacı Halil Sinema Filmi
1968 . Azrail Benim Sinema Filmi
1968 . Şeytanın Oğlu Sinema Filmi
1967 . Çirkin Kral Affetmez Sinema Filmi
1967 . Benim Adım Kerim Sinema Filmi
1967 . Bana Kurşun İşlemez Sinema Filmi
1967 . At Hırsızı Banuş Sinema Filmi
1967 . Yedi Dağın Aslanı Sinema Filmi
1966 . Tilki Selim / Hedefdekiler Sinema Filmi
1966 . Kovboy Ali Sinema Filmi
1966 . Hudutların Kanunu Sinema Filmi
1966 . Eşrefpaşalı Sinema Filmi
1966 . Burçak Tarlası Sinema Filmi
1966 . At Avrat Silah Sinema Filmi
1966 . Krallar Kralı Sinema Filmi
1965 . Konyakçı Sinema Filmi
1965 . Kasımpaşalı Recep Sinema Filmi
1965 . Kasımpaşalı / Korkunç Vurgun Sinema Filmi
1965 . Gönül Kuşu Sinema Filmi
1965 . Prangasız Mahkumlar Sinema Filmi
1964 . Koçero Sinema Filmi
1964 . Kamalı Zeybek Sinema Filmi
1964 . Hergün Ölmektense Sinema Filmi
1964 . İkisi De Cesurdu Sinema Filmi
1963 . Ölüme Yalnız Gidilir Sinema Filmi
1962 . Yaban Gülü Sinema Filmi
1961 . Suçlu Sinema Filmi
1960 . Karacaoğlan'ın Kara Sevdası Sinema Filmi
1959 . Bu Vatanın Çocukları Sinema Filmi
1959 . Ala Geyik Sinema Filmi
Books
Boynu Bükük Öldüler (1971)
Salpa (1975)
Ağıt
Arkadaş
Sürü
Ölüm Beni Çağırıyor - Gençlik Öyküleri
Acı
Yol
Sanık
Hücrem
Soba, Pencere Camı ve İki Ekmek İstiyoruz
Oğluma Hikayeler
Zavallılar
Endişe
Hudutların Kanunu
Baba
Aç Kurtlar
Umut
Bir Gün Mutlaka
Umutsuzlar
Seyyit Han
Yunan Bıçağı
İnsan, Militan ve Sanatçı Yılmaz Güney
Selimiye Mektupları
f.biography
A biography of Güney, Halkın Sanatçısı, Halkın Savaşçısı: Yılmaz Güney, was published by Dönüşüm Publishing in 1992, and reprinted in 2000. Its publisher was fined in 2001 because of some of the book's content, although this was overturned in 2003 when the relevant law was repealed.[33]
Films about Guney
Yilmaz Guney: His Life, His Films (Jane Cousins-Mills, 1987) [34]
The Legend of the Ugly King (Hüseyin Tabak, 2017) [35]
Yilmaz Guney: Rebel with a Cause (Karzan Kardozi, 2013)[36]
The Ballad of Exiles Yilmaz Guney (Ilker Savaskurt, 2016)[37]
wiki ---
-------------------------
The critic J. Hoberman once described the Turkish filmmaker Yílmaz Güney as “something like Clint Eastwood, James Dean, and Che Guevara combined”, (1) and for anyone familiar with the particulars of his career, it's sometimes astonishing that this roughneck-star-auteur ever actually existed. A wildly popular action movie star whose bloody genre knockoffs gave way in the 1970s to an intensely humanist and politically committed cinema, he not only became Turkish cinema's leading figure (not to mention its only representative on the international stage), but also its renegade outlaw prince. More than two decades after his untimely death in exile, his spectre haunts Turkish cinema today: his face can still be seen on the covers of numerous magazines, and several films – both documentary and fictional – have been made about his life over the last decade.
What accounts for Güney's resilience in Turkey, after all these years? Oddly enough, it might be what initially seems to be a failing of his work: despite his political commitment, Güney's films often lacked the discipline to lay out or support any specific ideology. He was at heart a provocateur, and his films bear the scars of his desperation, both in their narratives and in their very being. Over and over again, Güney's narratives collapse in on themselves, veering off in different directions as his characters lose their tenuous grip on reality. As a result, his films never offer solutions; when they seem to, they undermine the stated solutions in blunt, unusual ways. Güney is the poet of helplessness, exasperation and madness. As such, his perspective has managed to outlive the political fads of his time.
Yílmaz Güney was born Yílmaz Pütün in 1937, near the city of Adana, in Turkey's Southeast. The details of his ethnicity are somewhat disputed. One or both of his parents may have been Kurds. In recent years, Güney's films have sometimes been identified with the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey, although his own statements on the movement during his lifetime were often contradictory, even after he fled Turkey. It's more likely that he identified with the movement somewhat not because of any kind of ethnic solidarity, but because he recognised in it the aura of the oppressed. Güney did flirt with Marxism early in his life, and revolutionary politics would figure prominently in his career. His related struggles with the law, which would also consume so much of his career, started early as well: although his first jail sentence came in 1961, it was for potentially “subversive content” in a short story written in 1956, when he was still in high school.
Although Güney is thought of as an actor-turned-director, his beginnings in film were initially behind the camera, as an assistant and screenplay collaborator to the director Atíf Yílmaz on the 1958 films Bu Vatanýn Cocuklarý (This Nation's Children) and Alageyik (The Fallow Deer); he would also take a lead role in the latter film. His onscreen intensity immediately struck a chord with viewers: by the early 1960s, despite (or partially because of) his 18-month prison sentence, Güney had become a star, making as many as 20 films a year in the drunken heyday of the Turkish film industry. Most of the films he appeared in were cheap, violent genre knockoffs that proved inordinately popular in Turkey's rural Anatolian heartland. Some of their English titles are quite revealing: I'll Plug All Three of You, The Bullets of Damnation, I Swear By My Gun, The Bodies Float in a River of Blood, The Blood Will Flow Like Water, Güney Spreads Death, My Signature is Written in Blood. An enthusiastic gun owner, famous for his late-night carousing and his drunken brawls, Güney was dubbed “The Ugly King”: his visage was a bracing corrective to the endless stream of clean-cut, handsome leads who had previously reigned in Turkish cinema.
Urban viewers and elites initially scorned Güney's films as little more than disposable entertainment for the rural masses. But they too would eventually come around: it helped that Güney also gave surprisingly tender performances in films such as 1966's The Law of the Borders (Hudutlarýn Kanunu), from the veteran director Lütfü Akad. Güney's directorial debut came with the 1966 programmer At Avrat Silah (Horse, Woman, and Gun). This was quickly followed by 1967's Benim Adým Kerim (My Name is Kerim) and Bana Kursun Islemez (Bullets Can't Hurt Me).
Although his early films all followed the simple mold of the revenge dramas and crime thrillers that had made him a star, two works stand out from this period: Seyyit Han (The Bride of the Earth) (1968) and Aç Kurtlar (The Hungry Wolves) (1969). Both works display a stark naturalism that sets them apart from the other genre quickies of the period. The Bride of the Earth, though still in essence a rural revenge drama, contains surprising moments of quiet lyricism that suggest Güney was becoming familiar with the cinema of Satyajit Ray and Roberto Rossellini.
Güney's artistic breakthrough came with Umut (Hope) in 1970, generally acknowledged as his first masterpiece. In it, Güney himself plays Cabbar, an impoverished, naive horse-cab driver duped into searching for buried treasure. Those familiar with the actor/director's earlier work will recognise the victim narratives of those violent genre films in the early scenes of Umut. But instead of getting even, Güney's character descends further and further into delusion, until the film becomes an ironic, surreal, at times bitterly comic, repudiation of its title.
The actor's rough persona had not prepared Turkish moviegoers for the delicate, haunting nature of his mature cinematic work. Stylistically, Umut starts off as an exercise in stark realism, and gradually shifts to a more mytho-poetic register. But maybe not mytho-poetic enough: despite numerous awards and a theatrical run, the film was eventually deemed politically subversive and banned for a period by the authorities, which only helped make Güney even more popular than before among viewers.
Umut's troubles with the authorities proved to be prophetic in terms of Güney's cinema. Although the 1970s were his most artistically accomplished decade, Güney would spend most of this period in prison. He was arrested again in March 1972, for harboring anarchist refugees accused of a political assassination, only to be released under a general amnesty in 1974. But he was then re-arrested in September 1974, this time for the murder of a judge during a late night drunken brawl at a restaurant, during the shooting of Endise (Anxiety). The details of the event are still not clear: Güney's associates claimed that the director was merely recording gunshots for post-synchronisation purposes. Despite the unlikely nature of that story, much of Güney's mythology today rests on the belief that he was wrongfully convicted. Either way, he would spend the rest of the decade, as well as the early 1980s, in prison. Amazingly, some of his most notable films from this period, including 1978's Sürü (The Herd), 1979's Düsman (The Enemy) and 1982's Yol, were directed by proxy, with the convict-auteur writing, producing and smuggling out directions to trusted surrogates.
Umut heralded a new direction in Güney's filmmaking, but the director-star was not yet prepared to abandon his popular image, and the films that immediately followed were more disposable melodramas and action thrillers such as Canlý Hedef (Live Target) (1970), Umutsuzlar (The Hopeless Ones) (1971) and Kacaklar (The Fugitives) (1971). However, with 1971's Baba (The Father), Güney again seized the cultural spotlight.
Like Umut, Baba begins as a grimly realistic portrait of a desperate family man under relentlessly miserable circumstances. Güney plays Cemal, a worker who does minor jobs for some gangster/businessmen (in Güney's world the two are usually interchangeable). He tries to find work in Germany, but can't pass a physical. After being told his family will be well provided for, he takes the fall for a crime committed by his rich boss.
Needless to say, his family is not provided for. As it progresses, Baba becomes a more standard revenge picture, not entirely different from Güney's earlier action films. While in prison, Cemal becomes a vengeful, well-respected tough guy. The film's uneasy embrace of benevolent gangsterism flies in the face of the incisive class politics of its earlier scenes. Whereas Umut drifted towards a surreal kind of poetry, Baba displays a populist anger that suggests Güney was trying to create a cinema that would encompass both his personae, that of the Marxist artist and the populist roughneck.
Over and over, one finds these tonal shifts in Güney's films. They begin as grim portraits of social anguish, and then veer off in bizarre, sometimes contradictory directions. A less generous view might suggest that Güney didn't quite know what to do with his stories – that he was very good at portraying societal despair, but was at a loss for developing resonant stories out of it. But the shifts seem too planned, too deliberate, to be chalked up to mere inadequacy. Güney's work has been compared to that of Third World filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha or American “primitives” such as Samuel Fuller. But perhaps a more appropriate comparison is to the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom Güney shares a distinctly anti-Utopian, renegade classicism. The Turkish critic Atilla Dorsay has written of the director's films as classical tragedies. (2) Güney's tonal shifts might be better understood in that light: As in Pasolini's Teorema (1968) and Porcile (1969), political awakening often leads to social and psychic meltdown.
Perhaps the two films in Güney's oeuvre with the most jarring tonal shifts are 1974's Arkadas (The Friend) and Anxiety. The former, one of his most ambitious works, is something of a departure in setting for the director, as its milieu is decidedly bourgeois. Güney plays Azem, a public worker who comes to visit his prosperous childhood friend Cemil (Kerim Afsar) amid the decadent tranquility of an upper middle-class summer tourist village. The militant, class-conscious Azem is angered by what he perceives as Cemil's selling out of his youthful activism and small-town roots. He finds himself at odds with Cemil's petit-bourgeois wife, and begins to try to indoctrinate the youth of the village into the class struggle. The film's idyllic, relatively conventional narrative style then gives way to a stylistically splintered, elliptical second half, much of it set among the rural poor, as Azem takes Cemil back to their village, where Cemil begins to see the error of his ways and becomes increasingly suicidal.
As might be evident from the above description, The Friend, made immediately after Güney's release from prison, seriously flirts with didacticism – in fact, at times plunges headlong into it. As such, it's a bit of a disappointment. Güney has never been known for his subtlety, but his indulgences are usually tempered by moments of surprising insight and tenderness, particularly in those films set among the rural Anatolian poor. The Friend's bourgeois setting thus becomes a liability for the director, as he allows the film to devolve into caricature. It's not without its moments of beauty or mystery – Güney the actor's gaze is characteristically hypnotic, and he gives one of his more complex performances here – but it's far from the masterpiece some anticipated. (3)
More successful, though troubled in all sorts of other ways, was Anxiety, the film Güney was directing at the time of his final arrest. Broadly, it tells the story of a group of migrant cotton workers near Adana. Its primary focus, however, is Cevher (Erkan Yücel), a family man desperate to earn money to buy back his freedom thanks to his involvement in a blood feud. When his fellow laborers go on strike, Cevher cannot afford to cease working.
Stylistically, Anxiety is a bizarre blend. It begins almost like a documentary, astutely weaving its fictional characters into a verité-style narrative full of delicately observed moments. But its second half is more agitprop, as if Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) had been hijacked by Soviet filmmakers. Despite all that, politically Anxiety represents an advance for Güney: his presentation of Cevher's dilemma is relatively free of didacticism. The film's moments of agitprop come off as projections rather than anything resembling reality. Indeed, the hyper-expressionism of Anxiety's later scenes are decidedly unreal – there may even be a bitterly mocking undertone to Güney's portrait of labour activism, as if to underline the futility of action in such a repressive society.
After Güney re-entered prison, he had to rely on his former assistants to carry out his orders on set (Serif Gören is credited as co-director on Anxiety). He also no longer had himself as an actor, a considerable factor given the enormous superstar persona he had developed over the years. One film, Zavallýlar (The Poor Ones) (1975), starring Güney, was virtually abandoned halfway through, ending on a freeze-frame of the actor and released incomplete. But the three films Güney would now write and produce proved to be three of his best, most acclaimed works.
The issue of Güney's authorship over films he didn't technically direct is one that requires addressing. There was certainly something odd about the fact that it was producer Güney and not director Serif Goren who received the Palme d'Or for Yol in 1982. Still, Güney, despite his incarceration, had a very unique amount of control over his remote sets. Highly detailed shot lists were smuggled out of prison. He was allowed to watch dailies, order re-shoots, and even edit in prison. Although his surrogate directors were able to smuggle in aspects of their own styles into the films (one can see some quite marked differences between the austerity of Sürü and the epic melodrama of Yol), a glance at the films they later made without their master suggests that Güney's authorship over these works was nearly complete.
Sürü, directed by Zeki Okten, portrays the lives of desperate Kurdish farmers in Turkey's backward Southeast. An impoverished family, already suffering from the effects of a blood feud with a neighbouring clan, has to transport a herd of sheep to the capital city of Ankara. The episodic narrative follows them from the wastes of Turkey's mountainous Southeast, to an apocalyptic train ride, and finally to the big city itself. Along the way, we watch the herd gradually depleted: first, as bribes that have to be paid to officials and train conductors, then by illness and injury, and then by sabotage. In Ankara, the family is torn apart by madness, death, and poverty. The final scene has the family's patriarch running through the crowded city, desperately searching for his lost son, one more mad man wandering the streets.
The combination of Güney's fable-like vision of the film and director Okten's solid sense of storytelling made for one of Güney's most successful works. Sürü won the Golden Leopard at Locarno and awards at Berlin, as well as Turkish film festivals. Okten also directed The Enemy, a sprawling portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Grimly realistic, it tells the story of Ismail (Aytac Arman), a man looking for work to help support his family and his flighty, spendthrift wife. Although the wife is initially seen as dim, greedy and unfaithful, Güney identifies the real culprit as the society at large, forcing unrealistic and destructive ideals on the uneducated poor. His diffuse screenplay also tackles topics as disparate as Greek–Turkish relations and foreign tourism. But somehow, Okten and Güney hold it all together. Though criticised by some writers for its rambling ambitions, The Enemy today seems like one of Güney's most accessible, most stylistically unified
The 1980s brought a renewed period of political repression in Turkey. A coup in September 1980 and subsequent military rule resulted in dire circumstances for Güney, who had little of the freedom he previously enjoyed in his earlier prison stays. (His folk hero status had usually guaranteed that he'd be idolised by both his fellow inmates and his military captors.) Even so, Güney was able to pull off his greatest accomplishment yet from behind bars. Yol was a massive undertaking, a sprawling portrait of Turkey hovering on the edge of chaos. The film tells the story of five prisoners, several of them Kurds, given brief leaves to visit their families, and who, for various reasons, do not return; the Turkish social landscape is presented as being little different from the world behind bars. The film encompasses the disintegration of family relations, the civil war against Kurdish guerillas, and the oppression of women.
As with The Enemy, Güney's ambitious conception found its ideal realisation in the hands of another director: Yol was originally slated to be directed by Erden Kýral, but Güney quickly replaced Kýral with Serif Gören, who had effectively completed Anxiety some years earlier. (In 2005, Kýral would release Yolda, a fictional dramatisation of this period.) Gören's facility with actors and his feel for the rhythms of daily life served Yol rather well. For all its digressions, Yol is sharply focused, stylistically unified. It's also incredibly sad and haunting: it was Güney's most pessimistic film to date.
Amazingly, Güney initially convinced the authorities that the film would be a positive depiction of the Turkish justice system's “temporary leave” policy, whereby prisoners were allowed on some holidays to briefly leave prison to be with their families. As a result, his crew was able to get police and military cooperation, and the soldiers shown in some parts of the film are real military men. (Gören's ease with documentary shooting should also be credited here.)
After production was completed, Güney fled prison in 1981, and completed Yol abroad. Then, he appeared at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, with Interpol hot on his tail, won the Palme d'Or, and just as quickly disappeared. His mythology, needless to say, hit the stratosphere. Many of his films had already been banned in Turkey, but he finally became official persona non grata in his home country, at the same time he was being hailed as the Zorro of international filmmaking.
Güney's high profile would only translate into one final film, however. He relocated to France and set to work on Duvar (The Wall) (1983), a grim depiction of life inside a Turkish prison, shot in Paris. The despair of Yol did nothing to prepare audiences for this chamber of horrors, however: much like Pasolini's Salo, The Wall is almost unwatchable in its portrayal of the horrors of prison. Much of Güney's cast were children, and even the film's production proved too intense for some: a contemporary documentary made for French television shows Güney being somewhat abusive towards his cast, trying to provoke an emotional response. (Perhaps he was thinking of his neorealist idol Vittorio De Sica, who had reportedly put lit cigarettes in the pocket of one young actor to get some real tears out of him.) By the time The Wall was released, it was unable to match the critical or financial promise of Yol.
Seen today, for all its flaws, The Wall displays a remarkable degree of directorial control, uncharacteristic of Güney, suggesting that his newfound financial and political freedom might have resulted in a more stylistically unified, accomplished cinema. That, however, was not to be. Güney died of stomach cancer in 1984, still in exile in Paris, his final film's unblinking despair an eerie prophecy of his own sad end.
Güney's whirlwind career didn't quite end with his death, however. His films had been banned in Turkey, thus ensuring his folk hero status for years to come. It wasn't until the early '90s that Güney's films began to reappear in theatres and on television there; by the end of the decade, they were being released on video and VCD as well, along with numerous documentaries about his life. Some have now begun appearing on DVD, which bodes well for further international exposure to his work: although Güney's face on the cover of a magazine can still guarantee runaway sales in Turkey, he has slid into obscurity on the international stage, partly due to the lack of a major retrospective of his films.
Along the way, however, an intriguing turf war has begun to emerge over the director's films. Kurdish nationalists see in him one of their own, a countryman who was never allowed to express his true ethnicity until the very end of his life. The intellectual Left sees in him the makings of a true political auteur, a cross between Satyajit Ray and Gillo Pontecorvo. Even conservatives recognise in his work a certain revulsion at the decadent aimlessness of Western life.
In a way, Güney himself, despite his ardent political activism, managed to fuel this kind of controversy. He may have considered himself an ardent Marxist, but his political ideology wasn't particularly well thought-through. What made him an engaging filmmaker was precisely what would have made him a terrible politician: his class struggle was the stuff of populist melodrama, not the dry socialism of a state seizing the means of production. As such, he became an icon for the powerless in all segments of society, be they left-wing or right-wing, Turkish or Kurdish, nationalist or socialist. Fierce, vital and undisciplined, his work today is ready for rediscovery by Western audiences.
-web.archive
-------------------------
Yilmaz Güney: From "Ugly King" to Poet of Despair
A master of startling imagery, vigorous storytelling and political commitment, Yilmaz Güney (1931-84) is a legendary figure in Turkish cinema and undoubtedly the best-known and most controversial filmmaker the country has produced to date.
Born to a Kurdish mother and a Zaza Kurd father in rural southern Turkey, Güney’s career in cinema began in 1953 when he took a job with a film distributor touring prints nationwide. While pursuing degrees in law and economics- in Ankara and ultimately Istanbul- Güney made a name for himself as a talented, and at times controversial, writer of fiction whose political outspokenness landed him briefly in prison, for the first of many times.
By the end of the 1950s, Güney was working steadily as a screenwriter, assistant director and actor to filmmaker Atif Yilmaz, known for his popular comedies and realist cinema. A handsome man with a charismatic screen presence, Güney became a huge star in their vein, playing tough guys and outlaws and earning himself the nickname “the Ugly King.” (Güney’s rugged face and gruff, physical acting style both lacked the polish of the typical Turkish leading man of the day.) A cinephile with wide-ranging tastes, Güney was a huge fan of such Hollywood actors as Cagney, Bogart and Lancaster and often drew inspiration from the restless physicality and brooding masculinity they all shared.
During the 1960s Güney established his own production company just as a lasting socio-cultural and political unrest began to take hold of Turkey. Güney’s first few films as a director were fascinating genre exercises with subtle political undertones. With Bride of the Earth (1968), he began to explore revenge melodramas and crime films to examine the often feudal conditions that yet existed in Turkey’s rural regions. Hope (1970) proved a turning point with its decidedly non-glamorized urban setting that drew comparisons to Italian neo-realism. Its original mixture of realist detail, expressionism and even darkly absurdist humor brought international recognition, while its depiction of the hopelessness of the urban poor incurred the wrath of Turkish censors. After his arrest and week-long imprisonment in the unrest that followed the coup by Turkey’s military in March 1971, Güney left Istanbul to avoid further trouble with the authorities and retreated to the mountains of Anatolia, where he made Elegy.
After a period of intense productivity that produced a series of impassioned films, Güney was again imprisoned in 1972, accused of ties to revolutionary groups. Released as part of a 1974 general amnesty, Güney was able to make two more films before being arrested and convicted for the murder of a right-wing judge, apparently during a restaurant brawl. The details of the crime remain obscure and controversial and Güney always maintained his innocence despite incriminating evidence.
Inside prison, Güney devoted himself furiously to screenwriting, completing three scripts and copious notes which he sent to his collaborators and which resulted in The Herd (1978) and his most famous film Yol (1982). Pointing out that filmmaking is always a collaborative process, Güney declared himself deeply satisfied with these films. Indeed, Güney considered these late films to be more intregal to his oeuvre than his first genre films.
Taking advantage of his relatively lax encarceration, Güney escaped in 1981 by simply walking out of prison. Given that his stayin prison had only seemed to ratify his already near-legendary status, Güney’s claim that the government wanted him to escape, so they could exile him, seems plausible. Thus he was able to be present (although as a fugitive) at Cannes in 1982, where Yol won the Palme d’Or, a success that enabled him to direct 1983’s The Wall in France before dying suddenly of cancer that same year.
Güney is often compared to his near-contemporary Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the biographical parallels are striking. Celebrities before they began directing films - Guney as a movie star, Pasolini as an autho r- both drew controversial for their outspoken leftist politics. And, tragically both died suddenly in their mid-50s, at the height of their fame. The general ideological stance shared by the two artists was no doubt profoundly influenced by their outsider status - Güney as a Kurd, Pasolini as a homosexual. More significantly, both filmmakers merged their political ideas with strikingly original approaches to the image and a penchant for poetry and allegory. Deeply influenced by Italian neo-realism, which they used as a basis for their visual style, both artists veered similarly into mythopoetic reverie fired by profound anger at the plight of the oppressed. Like Pasolini, too, Güney was fascinated by the distinct tension and contradiction between Turkey’s rural peasantry and rapidly modernizing society. – David Pendleton
Special thanks: Cemal Kafadar, the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, Harvard University;
Erkut Gomulu—Director, Boston Turkish Film Festival; Hüseyin Karabey, the Güney Foundation.
Hope (Umut)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney
Turkey 1970, 35mm, b/w, 100 min. Turkish with English subtitles
Güney stars as Cabbar, an impoverished cart driver in Adana who dreams ceaselessly and fruitlessly of a better life for his family. Rejecting the invitation of to join some of his fellow workers as they begin to plan for political action, Cabbar seeks improbable escape from his declining fortunes, first in the lottery and then in rumors of buried treasure. The downward trajectory of Güney’s hopeless dreamer is matched by the film’s shift from neo-realist drama to absurdist existential parable and its balance of bitter political despair and black humor. Güney’s first international success (despite its censorship in Turkey), Hope also reaveals Güney’s increasing willingness to experiment, making a striking use of silence and disjunction between image and sound.
Bride of the Earth (Seyit Han)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Yilmaz Güney, Nebahat Çehre, Hayati Hamzaoglu
Turkey 1968, 35mm, b/w, 78 min. Turkish with English subtitles
The first film that Güney acknowledged as a fully realized effort Bride of the Earth stars the director himself as a man separated from his bride-to-be by the superstitions and feudal conditions of rural life. The film’s attention to poverty as a barrier to happiness and personal aspiration looks forward to Güney’s more overtly political work while demonstrating his eye for striking images, particularly in his dramatic use of landscape, as well as more baroque, almost Bosch-like touches- a woman trapped in a wicker cage, a man in quicksand up to his neck.
Yol
Directed by Serif Gören. With Tarik Akan, Serif Sezer, Halil Ergün
Turkey 1982, 35mm, color, 111 min. Turkish with English subtitles
Despite the fact that it was actually shot by his associate Serif Gören, Yol remains Güney’s best-known and celebrated film. One of his darkest films, Yol offers an important summation of Güney’s cinema with its tale of a group of released prisoners. Ironically, their release is only temporary and may not even be a blessing, for each return home only to find themselves as imprisoned as when they were in jail. Yol makes clear that life in Turkey under military rule was itself a kind of Kafka-esque prison, with prisoners their own jailers, keeping each other in check through despotic families and constricting social mores - trapped between fascism and what Güney called “the moral debris left behind by feudalism and patriarchy.”
Elegy (Agit)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Yilmaz Güney, Hayati Hamazaoglu, Bilal Inci
Turkey 1971, 35mm, color, 80 min. Turkish with English subtitles
Güney stars as one of four smugglers living and working in a rocky, desolate mountainous region. The macho braggadocio and violence of the men (reminiscent of The Wild Bunch) is contrasted with the quiet determination of a woman doctor who ministers to the impoverished villagers as best she can. Although the film is apparently a step back from the political neo-realism of Hope towards the rough lyricism of Bride of the Earth and The Hungry Wolves, Elegy ‘s narrative develops a dialectic between the anti-social behavior of the smugglers and the communitarian aspirations of the doctor. Güney skillfully draws on the allegorical potential of the landscape: the characters live under constant threat of avalanche. The film’s evocative cinematography makes use of the muted palette of the rocky landscape in a manner reminiscent of late Hollywood Western, from Ford to Peckinpah.
The Herd (Süru)
Directed by Zeki Ökten. With Tarik Akan, Melike Demirag, Tuncel Kurtiz
Turkey 1978, 35mm, color, 129 min. Turkish with English subtitles
The Herd has a simple premise that it utilizes to devastating effect: the economic survival of a Kurdish family depends on its ability to drive its herd of sheep from the mountains to Ankara. The film follows the driving of the herd; the constant threats to the livestock and the family serve both as a kind of ethnographic documentary and as existential (and political) parable. Explaining to an interviewer about his use of metaphor and allegory to express himself politically in his films, Güney declared that the subject of The Herd was the history of the Kurds. At the same time, he noted, the film was made in Turkish; any public use of the Kurdish language was illegal at the time.
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Yilmaz Güney, Sevgi Can, Hayati Hamazaoglu
Turkey 1969, 35mm, b/w, 70 min. Turkish with English subtitles
Both hunter and hunted, a bandit (Güney) lives in a desolate snowscape, beautifully captured in stark black-and-white cinematography. Seemingly invincible, the bandit becomes increasingly desperate to protect his family from his enemies. The film’s emotive musical score recalls Ennio Morricone as surely as the film’s tale of revenge recalls Sergio Leone. Indeed, the stoic, tight-lipped determination of Güney’s bandit seems modeled after Clint Eastwood. Güney stages his lone figures in a landscape made almost abstract by the blinding white of the snow, giving the film a bleak poetry. The solitude of the hero of The Hungry Wolves will increasingly be seen in Güney’s future films as not so much heroic as doomed.
The Friend (Arkadas)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Kerim Afsar, Yilmaz Güney, Melike Demirag
Turkey 1974, 35mm, color, 100 min. Turkish with English subtitles
The Friend is the one of Güney’s films that most resembles a European art film. For one thing, Güney focuses on alienation among the Turkish middle classes, although he does it by contrasting their empty lives with the struggles of the peasantry. At a seaside resort, a wealthy aristocrat originally from an impoverished small town finds himself reunited with a childhood friend, played by Güney. The director, who constructs an Antonionian malaise out of the glassy surfaces of the resort’s commercial district and the arid domestic interiors of the family’s summer home. The film is often compared to Teorema, with The Friend detailing the disturbance inside the family created by the friend’s visit. The film also marks the last time Güney would appear onscreen as an actor.
The Poor (Zavallilar)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney, Atif Yilmaz. With Yilmaz Güney, Yildirim Önal, Güven Sengil
Turkey 1974, 35mm, color, 72 min. Turkish with English subtitles
Like so many of Güney’s subsequent films, The Poor is about prisoners. The film opens on a winter night as three convicts are released. A complex structure of flashbacks describes how they came to be imprisoned, while at the same time following the men through the night as they find themselves faced with reentering a society in which they are outcasts. All have had lives marked with betrayal, degradation and violence stemming from their poverty. Filming was interrupted in mid-production when Güney was himself briefly imprisoned for having sheltered some anarchist students. Rather than delay the film’s completion, Güney asked his mentor Atif Yilmaz to finish it, despite the major revisions required since Güney himself had been playing one of the three leads. The result is a fascinating mix of hard-bitten realism and florid melodrama.
The Enemy (1979 film)
The Enemy (Turkish: Düşman) is a 1979 Turkish drama film, written, produced and co-directed by Yılmaz Güney with Zeki Ökten during Güney's second imprisonment, featuring Aytaç Arman as Ismail an overqualified young Turkish worker who unable to find employment is reduced to poisoning the local stray dogs and begging his father for part of his inheritance. The film was screened in competition for the Golden Bear at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival in 1980, where it won an Honourable Mention and the OCIC Award.[1] It was also scheduled to compete in the cancelled 17th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, for which it received four Belated Golden Oranges, including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress.
The Wall (1983)-Duvar
Teens in a Turkish prison struggle to survive under hideous conditions. Made by dying Yilmaz Guney in France, after he escaped from a Turkish prison, enabling him to accept his award at Cannes for Yol (The Road). When the Turkish superstar leading man turned human rights activist, Guney was convicted for pro-Kurdish political activity and murder, by the Turkish military regime. Director/writer Guney's last film, Duvar (The Wall), was banned in Turkey for 17 years. The incarcerated teens organize and fight back, brutalize each other, exult over the smallest triumph, while joking, suffering and learning from the inhumanity they wallow in. The prison also separately houses men and women, many played by other Turkish expatriates.
Endise (1974)
(English Title: Anxiety)This is the story of Cevher and his family, who all work in cotton fields in late seventies in Turkey. Cevher has to pay blood money to save his life. He even considers getting his daughter married to a rich and old guy. And on the cotton fields, they have to compete with machines, which are preferred to human workers. Eventually, workers unite and go on strike.
Baba (1971)
"Baba" is a bitter melodrama set in Istambul. A father is not able to earn enough money to feed his family. He is waiting to emigrate to Germany. When his landlord's son kills a man while drunk, the father is prepared to answer for the deed himself, provided that the landlord supports his wife and children. As there is little difference for the father between ten years in prison or ten years in a foreign country, he regards this to be the best solution.
The Hungry Wolves (1969)
Memed is a fugitive with a sole purpose to find and execute bandits in the mountains. When a rich landowner wants to avenge the death of his father, he hires Memed as a bounty hunter.Yilmaz Güney directs and stars in this ferociously exciLng “Turkish western” set in the blinding snows of the eastern mountains,where a laconic hired killer finds himself both hunter and hunted.
---harvard.edu
Grave of Yılmaz Güney at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris