The first installment of Zeki Demirkubuz’s Tales of Darkness trilogy (which would subsequently include The Confession and The Waiting Room), Fate is perhaps his most fully realized adoption of themes inspired by his literary influences (and self-acknowledged personal favorite among his films to date), in this case, Albert Camus’s widely read, absurdist fiction, The Stranger. […]
Like Zeki Demirkubuz’s preceding film, Innocence, his equally elegant third feature, The Third Page also opens to a shot of the film’s central character, in his case, a struggling bit player named Isa (Ruhi Sari) being questioned in a private room as a broken door continues to prop open. At first, the parallel framing suggests […]
Zeki Demirkubuz’s sophomore feature, Innocence represents a marked stylistic departure from the fragmentation and narrative asymmetry of Block-C and converges towards what would prove to be more quintessential recurring elements within his body of work: long takes, painstaking observation of temps mort, stationary camera framing, the inclusion of a hyper-extended dialogue “ellipses” (or in the […]
In his essay on the film, critic Gözde Anaran insightfully notes that Zeki Demirkubuz had been an inmate of the Block-C penitentiary after the September 12, 1980 coup d’état. This sense of institutionalization also surfaces in the way Demirkubuz frames the middle class, high-rise residential apartment complex that provide the claustrophobic setting for his first […]
One of the aspects of David Gatten’s work-in-progress, avant garde series, The Secret History of the Dividing Line that greatly impressed me was the idea of film splicing as an intrinsic act of violence, and that innate in this process of “traumatic creation” is the sculpting of a kind of liminal, alien landscape that is […]
André Delvaux often spoken passionately and poignantly of the unique bicultural experience that had infused early Belgian cinema (an industry that also fostered other pioneering bicultural filmmakers such as social realist – and undoubted spiritual ancestor to the cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne – Paul Meyer) that had become increasingly regionalized towards the end […]