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hills, similar to Fredi Murer’s Höhenfeuer (1985) in the Swiss Alps –a story of love between sister and
brother. She finds old photographs of the exile from Trebolu to Mersin and closes her into the dimly
lit cottage in the mountains putting the picture of the brother for whose deportation she feels guilty
about. She rejects the Muslim rituals and turns to the iconography of her origins and to her mother
tongue after the arrival of a Pontus Greek, Tanasis. Ustaoğlu’s mute scenes reveal the stress of the
ceasing of the language, the secret behind this lack of words. The aural void concentrates our gaze on
the landscape that is isolated and framed by mountains and heights on the sea and the clouds as the
color grey is a synonym for silence and mourning. Home is Treboli which refers to others’ new homes
in exile in Thessaloniki and beyond the Russian border across the sea. The framing with depth of
field evokes numerous sounds in the spectator’s mind, and how homes of the departed should be
observed, from a space backwards with respect for Ayşe’s secret and her disavowal.
Ustaoğlu’s use of silence of sound is passionate, her sounds of silence are minimalistic traces of
tones in the background. Bulutları Beklerken/Waiting for the Clouds (2003) owes its strength to this
sort of silence so that we forget that this is a sound film and decode the secrets of Ayşe/Eleni by
means of silent moments. This reminds us Des O’Rawe’ discussion of Balazs’ statement about the
sound that among other qualities of cinema, cinema makes sound visible through silence. Even the
dialogues between the village people are hardly understood through barriers of a Northern accent
which makes an intimacy and immanency with useless words, hence sound finds its ways in the
silence of the landscape’s aura. We are freed from the restrictions of a talkie and praise the visual
richness that would be damped through voices.
For Balazs, silence is an acoustic effect that cannot be perceived by means of “hearing nothing.”
On the contrary, in the f lm, “silence does not halt action even for an instant and such silent action
gives even silence a living face.”
The same approach of silence is followed in Pandora’s Box/Pandora’nın Kutusu (2008). The film
won the best movie and the best actress awards in the San Sebastian film festival. Again the story
mainly takes place among women and a genealogical pattern is observed. The grandmother lives in
the mountains of the Black Sea. She cannot leave this space as she is unable to leave the memory of
her husband who went away. She develops Alzheimer’s before being brought to Istanbul to live with
her elder daughter, who is an obsessive‐compulsive woman and is presented as a castrating figure
for her husband and her son. Her understanding of being a wife and a mother is to fulfill her duties
like cleaning her kitchen. The grandmother has one more daughter and a son. They are both losers, a
journalist who cannot cope with her lover and a man who hides himself in his cave‐like house. The
grandmother turns back to her original world of language, the world of the exile. She cannot
recognize her children and the only companion of her silent world is her grandson who has also left
his parent’s home and accompanies her grandmother back to her cottage on the Black Sea
Mountains.
Ustaoğlu’s short film Duet (Düet, 1990) tells the everyday life of a widowed man who sticks to the
origins of the Turkish music. The silence of older people in her films represents the silence of the
infant, like the grandmother in Pandora’s Box who goes back to the homeland of her childhood
neglecting the habits of an adult and the basics of communication. The grandmother’s “great secret”
goes away with her husband and she ceases to speak. Ayşe does the same during her transformation
to her older age, to Eleni. The young boy Mehmet ‡ who is like a grandson to Ayşe and the grandson
of the grandmother in Pandora’s Box (2008) represent the blurred future whereas the old generation
is cursed to vanish behind the mountains.
Yeşim Ustaoğlu draws her last film Araf (2012) also with silence. Zehra, a young woman working
in a fast food center on the roadside falls in love with a truck driver who abandons her. Zehra realizes