On humour in the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Unrecognised humour

What makes me laugh while watching films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan? And am I the only one? For years I've found myself enjoying the dialogue scenes in his films and grinning constantly with a feeling of recognition as a native speaker. Watching these films in Europe with an audience unable to understand Turkish, I often wondered if and what these audiences were making of the endless petty talk taking up many minutes. For me this kind of constant aimless talking while drinking unmentionable amounts of tea is the default mode of life in Istanbul.

While binge watching the films and finding more and more humorous moments, I wondered why nobody has written about humour in Ceylan's films yet. Although obviously none of his films can be considered comedies, at least for Turkish audiences it would've been easy to make the association through a famous comedian like Yılmaz Erdoğan playing one of the main characters, Commissar Naci in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). Erdoğan is the star and director of a number of box-office hit comedies in Turkey, like Vizontele (2000); whereas Commissar Naci is probably the most frustrated character who barely smiles in the film (a truly amazing, jaw-dropping performance by Erdoğan).

In fact when you look for it, Ceylan's films abound in an under-the-skin, absurdist humour of everyday life. The contrast between the stressful situations and the awkward reactions and coping mechanisms of people seem to fascinate Ceylan over and over again.

Absurd conversations and social hierarchies

Take the scene in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, where five exhausted men, each burning with his own frustration, fear or jealousy, investigate a murder by driving to the possible burial place of the victim. Practically speaking the first 55 minutes of the film are set almost entirely inside the car. Already at minute 8 the men erupt in a passionate discussion about yoghurt. As absurd as this might seem, as a Turkish person I have been in such conversations about the same topic. The obsession with the thickness and flavour of yoghurt is a topic that divides the Turks while at the same time erasing all the other differences of class, age, ethnic origin – thus unifying them.

This kind of conversation provides a safe territory where everyone can speak their minds and get away with it, since there is no accounting for taste. While I recognise the humour in a scene like this, Turkish critic Senem Aytaç reads it completely differently, although we come to the same conclusion: that the film is really about social hierarchy; in her words "a hierarchy of power that permeates every aspect of everyday life, a race of oppressing one another."

In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia the social balance is very delicate and the stakes are high. How are these five men in the car (or actually fifteen men in a convoy of three cars) to build and sustain their relationship to each other hour after hour, given their differences in social status, profession, education, urban or rural background? As the search is prolonged and their patience wears away, the differences become more apparent and the social cohesion gets more difficult to maintain.

The power of language

Re-watching numerous dialogue scenes in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and in Ceylan's other films finally made me realise that what makes these situations so recognisable to me is the use of language, and thus the dialogue. In Turkey, it is imperative to use the correct forms of addressing each other. Using the informal 'you' when talking to an older person or a government employee is absolutely not done; for example the doctor in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia always uses the formal 'you' when speaking to the prosecutor, recognising him as his superior even when they are alone, while the prosecutor always addresses him in the informal way.

There are also numerous differences in social status, level of education, religion, ethnicity, spread over different local dialects, traditions, all reflected through language. Every conversation becomes extremely coded. Not only what you say, but how you say it, tone of voice, choice of words, even a small gesture, everything matters. Each time you speak you need to estimate which register would be the right one in any given situation. There is a term for this in linguistics: situational code-switching.

The essence of the conversation is often not what is said, but how it's said. Native speakers become experts in this by necessity, but how can this all be translated for non-native cinema audiences who depend on the subtitles?

Formal and everyday language

Language becomes almost palpable in a later scene in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia where the prosecutor dictates a criminal report at the crime scene, in the middle of nowhere. This 10-minute scene involves nine men standing around a corpse, waiting for the report to be taken down, so they can bring the corpse to the mortuary. The report must be written in the very complicated bureaucratic language that is never spoken in real life.

Pondering on each word, the prosecutor slowly dictates his long sentences to the clerk who sits on a camping stool with a laptop on his knees. He constantly interrupts his phrasing to ask for clarifications to others, such as 'how far they are from the nearest village', but also is annoyed when he gets interrupted by others and tells them to shut up. Then soon after, in full seriousness the prosecutor embeds a joke into his dictation by comparing the looks of the corpse to Clark Gable. Seeing that the clerk is taking every word down, they all break into laughter about everyone taking in his words without the slightest questioning. Although the prosecutor is consciously downplaying his own authority here, two minutes later he finds himself scolding the men for having forgotten to bring along a body bag, and not thinking about how and where to transport the corpse.

Language totally permeates this scene; the abrupt cross-cutting between the formal and daily language brings out the differences between the registers. Although everyone speaks Turkish, the grammar is different. And as the highest authority at the scene, it is the prosecutor who gets to switch between the greater options and is responsible for the final composition.

Who is speaking?

The presence of so much language invites the question: who is speaking? Interestingly, almost every review of every Ceylan film (in Turkey and abroad) claims the main character of each film to be an alter-ego of the director himself and consider that Ceylan is speaking through them. I beg to differ, although some of the confusion seems plausible, even perhaps intentional.

Unquestionably, his first three feature films Kasaba (The Small Town, 1997), Clouds of May (1999) and Uzak (Distant, 2002) can be considered autobiographical. In fact, Ceylan's last film that comes close to his personal experiences is probably Iklimler (Climates, 2006), in which he indeed plays the main character Isa himself!

However, Ceylan's more recent films seem to be based on the personal experiences of the co-scriptwriters. Ercan Kesal (co-writer of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Three Monkeys (2008)) was trained as a doctor who had to do compulsory service in a small town. The doctor in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is modelled after his experiences, not Ceylan's. Akin Aksu, the co-writer of both The Wild Pear Tree (2018) and About Dry Grasses (2023), has experiences that form the basis for these films. He was born in 1986 in a small town of Çanakkale (where Ceylan grew up), and is an author who published his first book upon graduating from university and went on to become a primary school teacher in the Eastern city of Erzincan.

Dialogue as illuminating absurdity

In an interview in 2019, upon the publication of his book Bir Tasra Köpegi (A Country Dog), Aksu is asked about the length of the dialogues in his writing, and replies: "You don't need a license to speak, anyone can speak. Often the purpose of one's speech is oneself. When I started writing the text, I was like a silent spectator. Many events were taking place around me, I was listening to the speeches of many people who were agitated, angry, curious, joyful, especially when I saw them in the same environment, delivering the speeches as the biggest sign of their lives, and I was evaluating their emotions."

When asked if he laughed while writing, he responds: "I laughed a lot. There were times when I thought: what am I doing, what nonsense is this? The density of dialog is partly for this reason. The dialogues seem to make the absurdity of 'moments' and everyday life more visible, or so it seems to me."

From Humor to Grimness

However, the dialogues in Ceylan & Aksu's last collaboration to date, About Dry Grasses, made me stop laughing. Although I was totally immersed, and consider it one of Ceylan's best, this film emanates a grimness that is hard to put aside. Every minute of this film is built to demonstrate the systemic power structures. The same person is constantly redefined by the hierarchic context of each scene (primarily through language and secondly through the setting: what is said, how and where). The main character Samet, a primary school teacher, is equal among his friends, but dominating over his students while at the same time terrified by the school director and the inspectors of the ministry of education.

In this film, there are many scenes involving three people. I don't mean only the scenes with the three friends (although every scene showing this 'love triangle' is quite crucial for building up the tension in their relationship). I am referring to those scenes that don't even seem to be part of the story; when Samet is invited to drink tea with the gendarmerie commandant at the police station (through an announcement over the loudspeaker of an armoured tank on the street), the commandant erupts into a string of unprovoked verbal abuse of his inferiors. When Samet is in the office of the elderly veterinary he is forced to witness the preach to the young unemployed man about how he should live his life.

These scenes don't seem to bring the narrative any further and are despised by some critics as unnecessarily slowing down the pace where 'nothing happens', while others criticise them for being too obscure. In my opinion these scenes are essential to the story. They build up the tension and the unease of the main characters who become witnesses to the humiliation of others, and feel unable to balance them, even when they try to mediate.

The Wild Pear Tree vs. About Dry Grasses

The Wild Pear Tree is based on Aksu’s autobiographical debut novel Bir Üniversitelinin Not Defteri (2011) and seems like a rehearsal before making About Dry Grasses; all the elements are there: condescending, patronising, disrespectful remarks, insinuations, insincere attempts to flatter or placate each other. Yet the overall structure of the film is not dense enough to turn this into the intricate web of social interactions that it actually wants to represent. So many characters are introduced only for one scene interacting with the central character Sinan, and as they don't come back, their effect on him remains unclear.

In About Dry Grasses (where Sinan's story seems to be continuing with Samet in a new chapter) the narration is ordered differently; we keep revolving around the same characters seeing them in different surroundings; the friends meet in a café, at home, but also at the school where they work, and interact differently because of their surroundings.

Several reviews of About Dry Grasses refer to paedophilia as the main theme of the film, whereas in my opinion this is only one of the many examples of disturbing power-relationships. And of course, one that the society as a whole is sensitive to. But after all, Ceylan leaves all these big topics up in the air; for the question for him is not whether or not something abusive has really happened, but to show how easily the fundaments of abuse can be laid in a society living in a climate of fear and repression.

The universal in the specific

Then the question dooms: what are all the characters talking about? Except when they are arguing with each other, most of the characters keep talking about what they would rather do. Their dreams and ambitions are often about going somewhere, which all the more emphasises that all the characters in Ceylan's films are actually stuck somewhere. To live between the hope for a better life and/or to deal with the disappointment of finding out that the other place is not necessarily happier (for example in Uzak); this is a human condition that can be understood by every individual, anywhere and anytime.

Ceylan's characters are not only stuck geographically, but often also in other ways; in their professional life, in their relations with others, within the tradition, or even in their language. And this is perhaps why it feels like nothing happens; because indeed nothing does happen to help the characters to break out of their bleak situations, while their inner tensions and frustrations keep growing. But for me, the dialogue is where something happens. Language can change the mood faster than lightning, even when the surroundings remain the same.

To conclude: while all set in Turkey around very believable characters, I have come to realize that Ceylan's films are not really about a Turkish person, place, tradition or even Turkish language. Their power lies in the remarkable ability of Ceylan to zero in on the dense micro-stories of several characters revolving around each other, while also to zoom out and let the spectators reflect on the overall condition of the individuals. We might not exactly know how they are all caught up within the web surrounding them and how similar our own lives are to theirs, yet we recognise what they do, what they say and what they don't say. Their continuous repositioning of themselves through language transcends the literal meaning of the dialogue or the impenetrability of the Turkish language. Which explains how Ceylan's films, while always being so culture-specific and local can be appreciated so universally. Anyone can relate to these strange characters. After all, what matters is not which language they speak, but the grammar of their lives; our lives.