Publisher Description

ReFocus: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan brings together a cohort of expert scholars to analyse the films of Turkey's most renowned filmmaker. His self-reflexive films inspired by local incidents have reached global dimensions, and won awards at prestigious films festivals, including the Grand Prix, Best Director and Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.
This collection highlights Ceylan's aesthetics, auteurism and unique position within the film industry of Turkey and contemporary global cinema while focusing on his transnational style of filmmaking that also favours intertextual exchanges between his films, but also with other landmark works, merging photography, painting, and literature.

Table of Contents

List of figuresNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction - Gönül Dönmez-ColinChapter 1. Portrait of the Provincial Artist as an Urban Intellectual - Gönül Dönmez-ColinChapter 2. Vanishing Image of History: Uzak/Distant (2002) - Mahmut MutmanChapter 3. Portraits and Landscape: klimler/Climates (2006) - Cecília MelloChapter 4. Aesthetic Silences and the Political Bind: Üç Maymun/Three Monkeys (2008) - Vuslat D KatsanisChapter 5. The Aesthetics of Space and Absence: Üç Maymun/Three Monkeys (2008) and Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) - Adam OchonickyChapter 6. Transnational Indistinctions: Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and K Uykusu/Winter Sleep (2014) - Ebru Thwaites DikenChapter 7. The Politics of Dialogue and Ethics of Engagement: K Uykusu/Winter Sleep (2014) - Emre ÇalayanChapter 8. Staying in the Primary Home, Relationships, Desires to Go and Roots: K Uykusu/Winter Sleep (2014) and Ahlat Aac/The Wild Pear Tree (2018) - Hasan AkbulutChapter 9. Of Fathers, Sons and 'Solitary, Misshapen' Trees: Ahlat Aac/The Wild Pear Tree (2018) - Cokun LiktorChapter 10. 'Gender Trouble' and the Crises of Masculinities in the Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Gönül Dönmez-ColinChapter 11. Auteurism, Recognition and Reception: Ceylan as a Global Auteur - Özgür Yaren

Review

This rigorous and passionate collection bestows on Turkish maverick Nuri Bilge Ceylan the scholarly attention he deserves. From his early shorts to his mature features, Ceylan has offered a unique and penetrating vision of humanity's existential struggles. His aesthetic and philosophical motifs are in dialogue with the likes of Ozu, Tarkovsky, Kiarostami, Martel and Antonioni, placing him among the greatest world-cinema auteurs of all time. By unveiling Ceylan's local roots, global connections and transmedial relations, this book makes a definitive contribution to film history and theory. -- Lúcia Nagib, University of Reading
An intriguing collection of essays on the work of the celebrated Turkish film director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. A rewarding read for anyone interested in world cinema, it succeeds in placing Ceylan within his cultural context and analysing his wider significance within Film Studies. -- Oliver Leaman, University of Kentucky
Offers essential commentary on aspects of local culture and politics and on the resonance of certain words, names, characters, music, and locales to which a non-Turkish critic would probably be oblivious. -- James Quandt * The New York Review of Books *

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