Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Winter Sleep
2014 · Nuri Bilge Ceylan · Winter Sleep on Sightlines
Somewhere in this film a wild horse is broken. Nobody stops to explain it. It happens on the property of a man who owns a hotel cut into the rock of Cappadocia, a retired actor named Aydın who writes a column for the local paper, collects rents he prefers not to collect in person, and is unfailingly kind in a way that leaves everyone near him exhausted. Watch the horse and you have the film. Something wild is brought in, handled expertly, and ends up owned.
Ceylan came to cinema from photography, from Tarkovskian landscapes, and Cappadocia under snow is one of the most photogenic places on earth. His invention here was to refuse it. Three hours and sixteen minutes, and the camera goes indoors, into candlelight, and stays there while people talk. He took the durational patience usually spent on weather and spent it on a husband and a wife in a bedroom. What he found is that an argument has a grain, like snowfall, and changes by the minute. Power in these scenes moves sentence by sentence.
Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image — the regime of most films ever made — someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting exists to carry that chain from the look through to the deed. Winter Sleep is what happens when the chain snaps. Deleuze called the snap the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Aydın perceives plenty. He perceives a tenant family in trouble on land he owns. He perceives that his young wife has stopped speaking to him honestly. What he does with each perception is compose a paragraph about it. The tenants go unvisited. The column gets written.
The precise name for what takes the deed's place is the discourse-image: action transposed into talk, staged as a problem the film poses and cannot resolve. This is the lens that earns the running time. The standard complaint about Winter Sleep is that it's three hours of people talking, which is true and is the point. In another movie the scene where Nihal is finally cornered would be a slammed door. Here it is a sentence, delivered beautifully. Deleuze's claim is that this isn't theatre invading cinema. It's cinema finding the image that fits a world where nothing a person says alters their situation. The talk is the event. It just doesn't work.
Aydın is a retired actor. That's the film's joke and its thesis. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, had a word for a posture that makes a social arrangement visible: the gest. Not a gesture belonging to a character, but an attitude that exposes the structure a body is standing inside. Aydın's courtesy is a gest. His generosity is a form of control, and the control is legible precisely because the generosity is sincere. He never bullies a tenant. He sends someone else, and is gracious about it. Haluk Bilginer, a titan of the Turkish stage, plays this so that you see the performance and believe the man at the same time.
Underneath runs a second idea, what Deleuze called crystalline description: words that assemble an object and then quietly stand in for it. Aydın has been describing himself for decades. Man of letters, patron, reasonable man. The description now occupies the place where he used to be, and his eloquence is a wall. The film's method is to let his wife and his divorced sister take that description apart in real time while he rebuilds it faster than they can dismantle it. The remarkable thing is how often he is right about the particulars, and how little that helps.
Deleuze gave the name crystal to the point where a present and its own reflection stop being separable, and he sorted crystals by their condition. The one that fits here is crystal-decomposition, which he found in Visconti: an inherited, well-ordered world rotting from the inside, everyone in it slightly too late. Aydın's hotel is carved into rock, which is as literal as inheritance gets. Winter closes in, the guests thin out, and the house becomes a sealed chamber in which the family's arrangement can finally be smelled. Chekhov is credited, and Chekhov is the right ancestor: the estate whose owners talk while it decays.
Two smaller things change how you sit through the length. The steppe here has stopped being scenery. Deleuze called such places any-space-whatever, space that no longer serves as the setting for an action, just a stretch of world holding a mood; Ceylan hands you rock and snow with the spectacle drained out. And he hands you a great deal of dead time, stretches where nothing advances. In a film whose plot is talk, dead time isn't a lapse. It's where you catch up with what was just said to someone. Which brings back the horse. Deleuze's relation-image has a node for the object that condenses a film's organizing relation, the symbol, and the horse is it. Ceylan is careful never to say so.
Film is a conversation between films, and this one is candid about its debts. Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage supplied the template: a disintegrating marriage staged as long two-handers in cramped rooms, faces held in confrontation, argument as the only event. Winter Light supplied the man himself, the figure of standing whose fluency covers an emptiness he can't name. Dreyer's Gertrud supplied the nerve: hushed near-static long takes, people reciting literary dialogue while avoiding each other's eyes, dialogue promoted to the primary formal device. From Tarkovsky's Stalker and Mirror come the durational grammar and the conviction that terrain, stone and raking window-light carry moral weight. From Antonioni's La Notte comes the shape, a couple's estrangement laid across one span with architecture doing the measuring. What Ceylan adds to Bergman is the removal of therapy's forward motion. Nobody here is working toward anything.
The significance is partly what it proved admissible: a 196-minute chamber film made of talk took the Palme d'Or, which is a fact about what the art form was prepared to count as cinema. The more durable contribution is where Ceylan put the collapse. Bergman's couples fail because they cannot speak. Aydın fails because he speaks superbly. Ceylan located the crisis Deleuze traced through post-war Europe, perception that no longer issues in action, inside one man's rhetorical competence, and made the case that this is now its commonest form. He dedicated the film to the youth of Turkey in the centenary year of Turkish cinema, which is a film naming its descendants before they exist.
Watch it again and track one thing: who gets the last sentence in each scene, and who has to go on living in the room afterward. They are never the same person. And the question the film leaves open is the uncomfortable one. He is often right. Does that matter?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Aydın perceives a tenant family in trouble on his land and his young wife's withdrawal, and answers both by writing a newspaper column; 'tenants go unvisited' while the talk continues.
- discourse-image — The entire 196-minute film transposes action into 'long, candlelit arguments' that 'shift power by the sentence' and resolve nothing; the film poses the problem of Aydın and cannot settle it.
- the gest — A retired actor whose 'generosity is a form of control' — his courtesy toward tenants he never visits in person is a posture that exposes the landlord relation; Bilginer's 'magnificent, maddening plausibility.'
- crystalline description — The 'self-appointed man of letters' whose 'eloquence is a wall': his own description of himself has replaced him, and the wife and sister dismantle it sentence by sentence across the arguments.
- crystal-decomposition — A hotel carved into the rock of Cappadocia, an inherited estate of rents and letters sealed by winter while its owner is 'slowly dismantled'; the acknowledged Chekhov debt (the decaying estate whose owners talk).
- espace quelconque — Ceylan, a photographer of Tarkovskian landscapes, sets the film in extraordinary Cappadocia and refuses to exploit it: snow and rock presented with the spectacle drained out, no longer a setting for action.
- temps mort — Three hours and sixteen minutes of slow-burn long takes in a single chamber location, with sustained stretches — falling snow, the quiet of the hotel — that advance nothing.
- symbol — The wild horse that is caught and broken on Aydın's property, never explained by the dialogue, condensing the film's organizing relation between benevolence and mastery.