Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Turkish Film Festival (Thu.-Sat., Nov. 16-18, International House, 3701 Chestnut St.) A geographic bridge between Europe and the Middle East, Turkey's cinema reflects its geography. Although only two of the three films in this brief series were available for preview, they still present an idea of the country's vast and conflicting cultural currents. Filmed in Italy, Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Window (Thu.) is a Euro-style melodrama about the repercussions of the Holocaust, while Erden Kiral's Yolda (Sat.), a fictional account of his relationship with the celebrated director Yilmaz Güney, is a dead ringer for the poetic rhetorical tradition of Iran and southwest Asia. (Friday's screening is the five-part anthology Istanbul Tales, which was not available in advance.)

Yoldar

Unfortunately, neither movie comes close to representing Turkish cinema at its finest. Window is an insipid mush that ranks the suffering of a gay man whose lover was murdered by the Nazis in second place to the sorrows of a middle-class housewife. Yolda is turgid rather than contemplative, and probably incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with Güney's life history. An action-movie star of the 1960s, Güney turned to directing in the 1970s. His films, consistently critical of the Turkish government, landed him in jail on several occasions, and he has the unusual distinction of winning the Palme d'or for a film (1982's Yol) that was produced while he was imprisoned for the murder of a judge. (He subsequently emigrated to France, directed one film in exile, and then died of cancer in 1984.)

Although it refers to Güney only by his first name, Yolda is a transparent account of Kiral's attempt to film Yol under Güney's instructions, and his subsequent firing from the project. (He was replaced as Güney's agent by Serif Gören, although the Palme was awarded to Güney alone.) It isn't a particularly self-serving portrait — the actor playing Kiral's main function is to stand in abandoned spaces and stare helplessly at the camera, like some refugee from a third-rate Antonioni knock-off — but it's not particularly enlightening, either. Kiral seems to confuse poetic distillation with bland vagueness. It doesn't help that the movie is indifferently shot, lingering on images of scant visual power. It's a shame — more than a shame, really — that the series doesn't include new work from Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Faith Akin, or even Yol itself, which like most of Güney's films has never been released on DVD in this country, although out-of-print VHS copies circulate through the usual channels. (Adding insult to omission, Facing Window has already played Philadelphia as a Sony Classics release.) There's a rich lode of Turkish films waiting to be discovered, but this series, assembled by the cultural outreach organization Moon and Stars, doesn't even scratch the surface.

Jim Jarmusch: A Filmmaker Celebrated (Nov. 20-Dec. 11, County, Ambler and Bryn Mawr theaters) A true independent — you can tell by the fact that he rejects the term — Jim Jarmusch has forged a body of work as individual, instinctive and influential as any American filmmaker of the last two decades. The County/Ambler/Bryn Mawr triumvirate's mini-retrospective, which kicks off with a talk by Jennifer Steinberg at the County on Nov. 20, hits all the right notes, extracting Jarmusch's best three films — 1984's Stranger than Paradise, 1989's Mystery Train and 1995's Dead Man — with the mildly redundant addition of the recent Broken Flowers. (Sorry, fans of Ghost Dog and Down by Law.) The fact that the series would seem no less complete if it stopped in 1995 doesn't speak well of Jarmusch's aimless recent work (the less said about Night on Earth the better), but it's fascinating to watch the jump from Mystery Train to Dead Man, which in some ways is Jarmusch's first genuine feature. A lover of the understated and deadpan, Jarmusch often seems like a short filmmaker at heart: Paradise evolved from a short and proceeds in disconnected vignettes, Down by Law and Broken Flowers are picaresques, and Mystery Train, Night on Earth and Coffee & Cigarettes are outright anthologies. Dead Man builds a sustained narrative by casting Johnny Depp as a blank-faced fugitive wandering through the old West, a reactive, almost passive protagonist freed from the need to grow or change. Characters in Jarmusch's movies don't evolve so much as they spiral inward toward their own center, a self dictated as much by place (like the vividly detailed Memphis of Mystery Train) as any existential core. Which is to say his works are at once profoundly American, in the rugged tradition of Samuel Fuller and Monte Hellman, and utterly at odds with the historical amnesia and rootless reinvention so endemic to the country's current hollowness. Seeing Jarmusch's films — and in glorious 35mm, yet — won't change the world, but it might give you a clearer picture of what we've lost.

(sam@citypaper.net)