Authors

Discussion

This talk examines the narrative and ethical influences of Russian Realism (Fyodor Dostoevskii, Leo Tolstoi, and Anton Chekhov) on New Turkish Cinema. Turkish film directors Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki Demirkubuz openly acknowledge their engagement with Chekhov and Dostoevskii. Nineteenth century Russia shares with twenty-first century Turkey anxieties about art’s relationship to power as well as its ability to represent a world fragmented by rapid modernization. Taking into account the historical and cultural parallels of the Russian, Ottoman and Persian Empires, as the source for the similar preoccupations of Russian Realist literature and Turkish cinema, this talk focuses on Ceylan’s engagement with Chekhov and Demirkubuz’s with Dostoevsky. While Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)and Winter Sleep (2014)centre on Chekhovian themes of small-town loneliness and communication breakdown in human relationships, and Demirkubuz’s Waiting Room (2003) and Inside (2012)focus on Dostoevskian ideas of philosophical nihilism, suicide, and power relations, the films’ transmedial potentiality is even more powerful. I examine how Ceylan and Demirkubuz transform Chekhovian and Dostoevskian literary chronotopes into cinematic ones with the use of visual framing techniques, lighting, and use of space.  The talk concludes by arguing that the aesthetic and ethical structures of Russian Realism prove themselves to be surprisingly durable at the turn of the twenty first century in the Middle East.