REHA ERDEM: A DIRECTOR “IN BETWEEN”

First, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki Demirkurbuz laid the foundations for a new independent Turkish cinema. In the meantime production companies started to produce mainstream films. In this modern era new directors like Özcan Alper, Seyfi Teoman and Hüseyin Karabey started a second wave, they were giving a political context to their stories. In between, Reha Erdem kept on making films as he tried to create a unique form of storytelling on screen. As far as I am concerned he is the most exciting director working in Turkey today.

Reha Erdem can be called a deconstructive filmmaker. His films are a rebellion against both conventional and independent filmmaking. He tries to find a new path in cinematic narration and his biggest influences are Tsai Ming Liang and Gus Van Sant, as he himself has admitted. He is looking for the magical cinematic moments that do not need to be narrative-driven. As he declared in many interviews, he wants audiences to be as imaginative as possible.

In his first film A Ay (1990), he already worked on a new experimental cinematic narration through which he created an expressionist visual poetics. Afterwards the director came up with Kaç Para Kaç (1998), which involved more conventional filmmaking style compared to his debut film. It is one of the rare films that used the city of Istanbul as a functional background in cinematic storytelling. Because of his French film education, early in his work one could already detect two different stylistic approaches converging in his unique filmmaking. In Beş Vakit (2006) the director tells of the traumas of three teenagers growing up in a village on the outskirts of a mountain on the Aegean coast of Turkey. This slow-paced film combines hypnotic visuals with Arvo Part’s haunting music creating an uncanny and sometimes disturbing atmosphere. To hear Estonian Orthodox music in a film set in the Turkish countryside could be the last thing you would expect to hear, but are precisely these choices that grant his movies a sense indefinable time and space. The same thing is also valid for his last film Kosmos (2010).

Even though the film is set in Kars, a small city in eastern Turkey, it is impossible to locate the time and space where the film takes place. This timelessness is also referenced in the film with the repetitive image of a tower clock that always shows the same hour in different parts of the story. Like in Kosmos (2010), in Hayat Var (My Only Sunshine, 2008) he created a totally nonexistent space, a nonexistent Istanbul. He deconstructed classical storytelling in this film by using a fragmented narrative structure that directly reflects the shattered state of the teenage girl’s mind and body. Hayat Var might be the only film in Turkish cinema history that used the Bosphorus as something that mattered cinematically. Like the Aegean village in Beş Vakit, the Bosphorus became here the location representing the “in-between” situation of a teenager’s mind that was stuck between a woman’s body and a little girl’s dreams.

Erdem uses eastern locations and fills them with a western mental approach. That’s why he is sometimes criticised as an “orientalist” in an oriental land. However, I don’t agree with this criticism. He just uses the advantage of being a part of an “in-between” culture and fuses the cultural deposits of east and west. He creates a world of his own that belongs to nowhere. He creates an alternative reality with his cinema, that’s why we can’t talk about an absolute reality in his films. Audiences’ expectations are always subverted, which gives no realistic visions for the audience to connect with the characters or the stories being told. He just wants you to experience the dream world he created and wants you to join the characters, like birds flying without a reason in Kosmos or lay down on the edge of a cliff like the teenagers of Beş Vakit.