Yilmaz Güney and the film Arkadaş (1974)
A study of the film Arkadaş (1974) in the context of Güney's filmic oeuvre
Yilmaz Güney and the film Arkadaş (1974)
Yilmaz Güney was born Yilmaz Pütün on 1 September 1937 in Yenice, in the district of Karabük in the province of Adana. His father, a Zaza, was from the Kurdish village of Sivérek in the South-East of Turkey. His mother was a Kurd from the village of Muþ, near Lake Van; Güney started in the film industry as an assistant to the legendary director Atíf Yimaz (1925-2006) and went on to have a highly successful career as an actor in popular films throughout the 1960s, becoming known as the “Ugly King” (Ebiri 2-3).[1]
The 1960s are considered as the Golden Years of Turkish cinema. Colour films began in 1963 and dominated the market by 1967. In 1966, with 241 films, Turkish cinema was the fourth in the feature film production worldwide. During this period, a new kind of cinema emerged influenced by the social and political atmosphere of the country after the coup d’état of 27 May 1960 and the establishment of a progressive constitution in 1961, which brought a more relaxed atmosphere that nourished arts. Translations of diverse ideologies, including Marxism-Leninism, became available. With the steady development of industrialization and the growing national awareness in the so-called Third World, of which Turkey was a part, a certain euphoria for the arrival of a socialist revolution was felt, which was reflected in the films of the 1960s-70s, with Yilmaz Güney in Turkey, Ousmane Sembene in Senegal and Fernando Solanes in Argentina, for example, as pioneers. (Dönmez-Colin 5)
In 1970, Güney founded his own film production company, Güney Films, which produced over twenty films, notably Umut (Hope) (1970) which was screened at the 23rd Cannes film festival but banned in Turkey until 1995.
Yilmaz Güney represents a breaking point between the popular cinema and political cinema in Turkey. His stories, characters and themes reflect the political ‘angst’ of the 1970s. He also has a unique place in Turkish cinema as the unattractive lead. The characters he portrayed were people on the margins: unemployed, poor vagabonds. Güney portrayed these lonely anti-heroes who resisted the capitalist system in Turkey through their hanging on to life. In creating these heroes Güney leaned on the Turkish popular folk tales and their rebel hero, the urban lumpen proletariat, as a loser character with a specific body language and a peculiar vocabulary. In his later films, Güney’s lumpen characters took on a darker political tone. They were no longer lonely Robin Hoods in the slums, the members of the lumpen proletariat who stole from the rich to give back to the poor. They were now rebels who fall victim to both the conservative traditions of society and state oppression during the military coup between 1980-1983. (Akser 144)
In 1972, Güney was sentenced to seven years in prison for sedition. During a brief period of liberty following his release from prison in May 1974, under a general amnesty for political prisoners granted by Prime Minister Ecevit, Güney started filming Arkadaş (Friends) in the summer of 1974. In September 1974, he was arrested on the charge of killing a local judge, Sefa Mutlu, who had insulted Güney and members of the film crew, including Güney’s wife Fatoş, in a restaurant in the town of Adana while on location for Endişe (Anxiety). From that time on, Güney was held in prison until his escape in 1981. While in prison, Güney continued to write scripts and co-direct, in collaboration notably with the director Zeki Ӧkten (1941-2009), on Sürü (The Herd) (1979) and Düşman (The Enemy) (1979), and with Serif Gören (b.1944) on Yol (The Road) (1982). On 12 September 1980, the Turkish military seized power from the civilian government led by Süleyman Demirel (1924-2015). In 1981 Güney’s prison sentence was increased to over 100 years. Echoing the storyline in Yol, Güney fled in October 1981 by boat to Greece while on a temporary release from jail during Bayram, a Muslim religious holiday, and, after completing the edit of Yol in Switzerland, was granted asylum by President Mitterrand, who had been elected President on 21 May 1981. In France, Güney made his final film Duvar (The Wall) (1983). He died of stomach cancer on 9 September 1984 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery (Ebiri 1-12).
Yilmaz Güney was a rare artist who could blend political messages with commercially successful populist films. His Umut /The Hope (1970), extolled by the intellectuals of the cinematheque, is considered a turning point in Turkish cinema. Sürü / The Herd (1978), scripted by Güney while in prison and directed by Zeki Ӧkten, foregrounding the tragic story of the disintegration of a nomad family, is one of the best films of Turkish cinema. Yol / The Way (Şerif Gören, 1982), also scripted by Güney, shared the Palme d’or with Missing (Costa Gavras) at the Cannes film Festival, 1983. (Dönmez-Colin 6)
“There is no secret that Yilmaz Guney’s films always have a leftist political ideology to it and Arkadas is no different. Guney, like all master-film makers uses cinema as a tool to put forward a personal inner dilemma about the class difference and one’s inability to change” (Kardozi). The first part of Arkadaş is shot in Istanbul and the surrounding beach town of Bayramoğlu.
Arkadaş, meaning ‘friend’ but also ‘comrade’ in the parlance of the period, is an odd entry in Güney’s oeuvre. Structured as a ‘rich girl-poor boy in love film’, it is Güney‘s attempt to engage in class difference while staying true to one’s commitments. It takes place in Bayramoğlu, a then up-and-coming resort towards the Asian end of Istanbul (Kumburgaz had the same attraction on the European end; both places had long lost their appeal). The scene in question, however, is not in Bayramoğlu but comes after a series of ethnographic shots of bourgeois decadence on the beach. In this scene, taking place in Çicek Pasaji (Flower Passage), Azem, played by Güney himself, meets his old college friend Cemil (Kerim Afşar) for the first time in the film. Again, as if writing an ethnography, Güney documents the folksy quality of life in this celebrated drinking hole: beer in tall glasses, fried mussels, kokoreç (grilled intestines), accordion player Madam Anahit, drinkers and passers-by. In the 1970s, Çicek Pasaji was packed with students, intellectuals and after-work crowds, as it was the place-to-be for a conversation over beer. Built as ‘Cite de Pera’ in the 1870s, the likes of which are to be found in Milan and Paris, Çicek Pasaji is no longer a living venue but a renovated place, adorned with hanging flower pots and framed pictures of its celebrities, including the late Madam Anahit. As the neighbouring fish market has retreated under the attack of gift shops selling cheap traditions, the passage lost its crowd to the nearby Nevizade Street. After leaving Çicek Pasaji, Güney’s camera lingers in yet another locale erased from Istanbul’s cityscape, Sulukule, the lowbrow entertainment district, now marked for gentrification. “Arkadaş” reads like a dated ethnography of times and places gone by. (Soysal 28)
The second geographic location for Arkadaş is an Anatolian village in the district of Aksaray where Azem and Celim grew up.
Güney plays Azem, a public worker who comes to visit his prosperous childhood friend Cemil (Kerim Asfar) amid the decadent tranquillity of an upper middle-class summer tourist village. The militant, class-conscious Azem is angered by what he perceives as Cemil’s selling out of his youthful activism and small-town-roots. He finds himself at odds with Cemil’s petit-bourgeois wife, and begins to try to indoctrinate the youth of the village into the class struggle. The film’s idyllic, relatively conventional narrative style then gives way to a stylistically splintered, elliptical second half, much of it set among the rural poor, as Azem takes Cemil back to their village, where Cemil begins to see the error of his ways and becomes increasingly suicidal. (Ebiri 6)
The choice of a bourgeois milieu as the principal setting in Arkadaş was exceptional for Güney, and perhaps explains its muted critical reception.
Güney has never been known for his subtlety, but his indulgences are usually tempered by moments of surprising insight and tenderness, particularly in those films set among the rural Anatolian poor. The Friend’s bourgeois setting thus becomes a liability for the director, as he allows the film to devolve into caricature. It is not without its moments of beauty or mystery - Güney the actor’s gaze is characteristically hypnotic, and he gives one of his most complex performances here – but it is far from the masterpiece some anticipated. (Ebiri 6)
Güney’s strength and influence as an actor and director is that his work cannot be separated from his politics. For the majority of contemporary directors working in the Hollywood tradition, politics generally took a backseat to entertainment. Where politics featured, it was generally issue-driven, as in films focused on the injustices of the Vietnam war (Francis Ford-Coppolla’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter (1978)), police corruption (Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973)), political corruption (Alan Pakula’s All the Presidents Men (1976)), racism (Norman Jewinson’s In the heat of the Night (1967) or environment (James Bridges’ China Syndrome (1979)). Güney’s prolonged incarceration for political activism from 1960-1963, 1972-1974, and 1974-1981 meant that from his career as a film maker and actor was conditioned by his personal experience of oppression and suffering.
Works Cited
Akser, Murat. “Yilmaz Güney’s Beautiful Losers: Idiom and Performance in Turkish Political Film.” Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and The New Europe, edited by Deniz Bayrakdar, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 142-53.
Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. The Routledge Dictionary of Turkish Cinema. Routledge, 2014.
Ebiri, Bilge. “Güney Yílmaz.” Senses of Cinema, Great Directors, issue 3, Oct. 2005, sensesofcinema.com, pp. 1-12.
Kardosi, Kardan. “Arkadas (Yilmaz Guney, 1974): Utopia between a Visual Reality and a Cinematic Separation.” 22 November 2010. https://themovingsilent.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/yilmaz-guney-the-ugly-king/. Accessed 20 December 2020.
Soysal, Levent. World Film Locations: Istanbul. Edited by Ӧzlem Köksal, Intellect Books, 2011
Tabak, Hüseyin, “Who was Yilmaz Güney?” Duhok International Film Festival, 25 January 2013. . https://duhokiff.com/index.php/press/spotlight/item/711-who-was-yilmaz-gueney. Accessed 20 December 2020.
[1] The Legend of the Ugly King (2017), directed by Hüseyin Tabak, provides valuable biographical information about Yilmaz Güney and his film career.