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SOUND OF SILENCE 1 /SILENCE OF SOUND 2 *
YEŞIM USTAOĞLU
DRAWS IMAGES OF SILENCE
Deniz BAYRAKDAR *
“In the history of films, every great moment that shines is a silent one.” –King Vidor, quoted in
Joseph Cotton, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere: An Autobiography. 3
Silence and the autumn 4 of Turkish cinema
Turkish cinema has arrived at its autumn before experiencing its spring. The whole of the 1980s is
veiled under the ceasing of sounds in arts and especially in Turkish cinema. Beginning from the mid
1990s film production began to flourish, although with specific examples, and then a “New Wave”
came out of its cocoon 5 after years of exile in our “Imaginary Homeland Turkish Cinema.” 6
These recent examples of the “New Wave” in Turkish cinema use silence as a powerful medium of
sound. Their use of silence suggests the death of the language, lack of dialogue and understanding. In
these films there is also silence in the image. Especially auteur directors of the recent films make use
of silence “as not simply the absence of sound, 7 ” they also silence the image by slowing the
movement and going into details of the images and constructing frames to still pictures. Such
moments of silencing the sound and image could be considered as a new experience for the
spectator as well as the director; i.e. silenced gaze towards the cities or mute looks at the landscape.
Space of the first gaze is more the metropole, Istanbul and the later in my examples, the Black Sea
Region. Istanbul films’ silence compared to films of Anatolia is also different in its tonal approach. In
both cases, silence in the context of social exclusion, language, gender and generations is
experimented as a strong and basic tool by the directors of the New Cinema. Directors such as Yeşim
Ustaoğlu, Semih Kaplanoğlu, Zeki Demirkubuz, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, Derviş Zaim,
Reha Erdem and Özcan Alper use silence as a formal element of their films. Their use of silence can
be categorized in terms of the common formal aspects, and their use of aural and visual elements.
The conceptualization of silence in their films needs a detailed analysis of how sound and silence
ratio is constructed technically and aesthetically. I would rather state that they have to be measured,
evaluated according to their “silence values.” The silence in these films is often analysed from a social
and a historical perspective but an analysis of painterly qualities of these “mute images” is lacking.
These directors draw “silence” through framing, lighting, colors as well as through the use of figure
and ground. The “silence” is experienced as tableaus of temporal and spatial entities. These films
primarily contribute to the value of the cinematographic achievement of the New Turkish Cinema
and also, these directors share a vision, a comment on Turkey now and then through their films as
social signifiers, as tools for questioning the self and the other. By analyzing films such as Güneşe
Yolculuk/Journey to the Sun (Yeşim Ustaoğlu,1999) Büyük Adam, Küçük Aşk/Hejar (Handan İpekçi,
2011) Tül Akbal Süalp describes silence 8 as “Exile of the word to the no one’s country” and underlines
that in recent films women’s language has ceased.
... These spaces and women are strange to that people hence neither the sound of
these space nor the sound of women at the threshold is heard... They share the common
fate of these geographies: they are exiled from themselves. .. 9
* Kadir Has University, Department of Radio, Television and Cinema
Thanks to Defne Tüzün and Teoman Türeli for proofreading this
essay.