Once Upon a Time in Anatolia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Three pairs of headlights crawl across a black hill, and for a long time that is all there is. No music tells you what to feel. The cars stop, doors open, men spill out onto a ridge, argue about whether this is the fountain the killer remembers, find nothing, and climb back in. Then they do it again, somewhere else. Nuri Bilge Ceylan spends most of 157 minutes on this — a murder investigation in which the investigation keeps failing — and the first thing to understand is that the failure is the film. The corpse is out there. The man who buried it cannot find it. Everyone is exhausted. Nothing the searchers do changes the situation they are in.

That is a precise condition, and Deleuze has a name for it: the crisis of the action-image. In ordinary cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to resolve it — the sensory-motor circuit, situation to action and back. The whole genre of the police procedural runs on it. Ceylan takes the genre and pulls the wire. The men perceive endlessly — the dark hills, each other's faces, the suspect's blank shame — but their perception no longer hooks up to any effective act. Kenan, handcuffed, simply cannot deliver the one piece of knowledge the plot needs. So the circuit hangs open, and into the gap pours something the action-image has no room for: time itself, felt as duration rather than as the measure of getting somewhere.

What fills that open circuit is what Deleuze calls a pure optical and sound situation — an opsign, a sonsign. When a character can only look and listen, with no action available, we look and listen with him. Strip the score, as Ceylan does, and what remains is wind, insect drone, an idling engine, the murmur of tired men. You stop waiting for the plot to move because the plot has nowhere to go, and you start hearing the night. The doctor, Cemal, becomes the film's true center precisely because he is the one who mostly watches. He is what Deleuze calls a seer — a voyant — not an agent. He doesn't drive the case; he registers it, and his quiet clinical questions to the prosecutor are less interrogation than attention.

The steppe these men cross is what Deleuze would call an any-space-whatever — a space that has stopped serving as a stage for action and become pure affect. The round breast-like hills, the lone tree, the dry grass moving in the dark: this is not a setting where things happen, it is emptiness presented for its own weight. Anatolia is geological indifference, and the men are points of light dissolving in it. The convoy itself is what Deleuze names the voyage form, the trip that transforms nothing — they drive and drive and arrive, essentially, back where they started, only wearier and more truthful.

Then two images interrupt the procedure and lift the film somewhere stranger. The power fails at a village headman's house, and his daughter carries tea by oil lamp; her face swims up out of the gloom, haloed, and the men fall silent. This is the affection-image at its purest — what Deleuze calls a qualisign, an immobile reflecting face that expresses a single quality, here something close to grace, with no action to discharge it into. And earlier, an apple drops from a branch, rolls down a slope, and settles among others rotting in a stream while the camera simply watches it go. For a moment the world films itself without us — Deleuze's plane of immanence, vision freed from any human center. The men pause; matter keeps moving.

The lineage here is exact. The anti-procedural — a disappearance that becomes a pretext for moral drift instead of resolving — comes straight from Antonioni's L'Avventura, where a search dissolves into landscape. The processional journey through terrain as metaphysical quest is Tarkovsky's Stalker. The convoy of city men driving into rural opacity on a death-shadowed errand is Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, and the register of mortality circled inside a moving car, never stated, is his Taste of Cherry almost exactly — that is the key the doctor and prosecutor speak in. The weary collective trudging through dead time with no music to relieve it is Béla Tarr's Sátántangó. Even the ironic-epic title borrows Leone's ritual durational waiting, faces held against monument. Ceylan's own invention is to fuse all of this with the police procedural — to use a genre built entirely on the sensory-motor circuit as the body he hollows out.

And the night does deliver a truth, just never the one the plot promised. The prosecutor's story about a beautiful woman who predicted the day of her own death turns out, under the doctor's questions, to be his confession that the woman was his wife and her death likely a suicide he caused. Buried story, buried body. At the autopsy the doctor finds soil in the victim's lungs — buried alive — and chooses to leave it out of the report. Here truth becomes undecidable as a creative principle, what Deleuze calls the powers of the false: an omission that is also a mercy, a lie that is the night's one honest act. The detection that the procedural promised never comes. What comes instead is harder, and you only see it because Ceylan made you sit in the dark long enough to look.