Quote:
Metin Erksan’s most controversial film, Kuyu/The Well (1968), considered as one of the classics of Turkish cinema, is a rural drama that focuses on a relationship, founded on male obsession and female resistance, which culminates in tragedy.

From an artistic point of view, the film is one of the masterpieces of Turkish cinema. The minimalist narrative works in repetitions; the characters of the two protagonists who are both loners in an indifferent world are developed meticulously and with special concern for human psychology; societal dynamics are sharp; and the characters that are offsprings of such a society very accurately drawn. The photo­graphy and the camera angles are beyond reproach. However, the film’s graphic display of male brute power is controversial.

While many consider Kuyu as an important representative of the cinema of resistance and argue that Erksan has brought a special sensitivity to the situation of women in Turkey, the feminists condemn it as the sexual fantasies of a macho man. Erksan claims that the film takes its inspiration from the message in An-Nisa, Sura IV— ayet (verse) 19 of the Koran, which states that it is not lawful for men to possess women by force. They should consort with them in kindness because if they hate them, they hate a thing wherein Allah has placed much good.

Based on a newspaper article, but decorated with the fantasies of Erksan, the film displays the helplessness of an oppressed but level-headed young village woman against the perverse determination of a man obsessed with her

	
Kuyu.1968.dvdrip.x264.JaguaR.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 23 min
Size: 	1.26 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	694x578 ~> 742x578
Aspect ratio:  	1.284
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 956 kb/s
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#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 160 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/8236457E46D3E5D/Kuyu.1968.dvdrip.x264.JaguaR.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/DE2F50BA43E5CF6/Kuyu_-_Metin_Erksan_v3.srt

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:English

The post Metin Erksan – Kuyu AKA The Well (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Mehmet, who decides to take revenge on Ekrem and Reyhan as soon as he is released from prison, is forced to face facts he does not know.

Reyhan.1969.SD.WEBDL.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 21mn
Size:	290 MiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	640x360
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
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Audio
Turkish 2.0ch Opus

https://nitro.download/view/4C8341DF5FB6F1E/Reyhan.1969.SD.WEBDL.mkv

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:None

The post Metin Erksan – Reyhan (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An extraordinary interpretation of Hamlet from the phenomenal director of the Turkish Cinema: Metin Erksan.
In this presentation Hamlet is female and search vengeance of her father.
The relotionship of mother and son has a metamorphosis in that situation and force She-Hamlet to look for the lost father-and-daughter affection.
A foolish young girl, frenetic acts, glowing costumes, singing and dancing under expressionist camera angles.

Nominated for the Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival , Intikam Melegi – Kadin Hamlet is Erksan’s latest work of cinema.

Kadin.Hamlet.1977.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 26mn
Size:	1.43 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	720x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 142 Kbps
Audio
Turkish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/46C23EF56E1C96E/Kadin.Hamlet.1977.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:English

The post Metin Erksan – Kadin Hamlet (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Isn´t suicide an introverted desire to kill?”

The man wants to die and the woman wants to be famous. According to the man, there could not be a better plan than the woman killing him. This way the man will get his wish to die and the woman will become famous. The man tries to convince the woman: “You are my killer and my life source.” The gun finally goes off and the interrogation of the woman begins.

Quote:

The man asks his wife to kill himself, and explains why it is the only way to escape from her, that he will not be able to escape the cause except for him, everything he needs. He loves his wife as mad, but over time this love has turned into a captivity, when he feels that he is not free, he intends to get rid of it and knows that the only way to do this is to kill himself. Kill me, finish everything, break all my hopes for you, save me from my captivity. It is like a kind of death before it dies.

There is something else that comes to mind at this point. A sentence in Seneca’s book which name is Epistulae morales ad Lucilium : If you do not expect anything, you will not be afraid. The man thinks that he is going to kill his hope for the get rid of the this issue. He will never afraid it if he had never hope. In the meantime, he does not neglect to throw someone a bone. Saying that she/he will become famous in this way, she/he also flourishes the ego. Those who have killed our hopes will save us from fear, thank to them, but if the ego is also a little bit puffy, by the way?

– eksi sözlük

786MB | 37mn 53s | 854×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/E9326254E85DC03/Bir_intihar_(1973).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/396EEC6A9D24CF8/Bir_intihar_(1973)_eng_02.srt

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:None

The post Metin Erksan – Bir intihar aka A Suicide (1975) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An obscure gem, a hidden treasure to international cinema lovers; “Sevmek Zamani” is one of the best movies in Turkish cinema history. This cult film still remains as a cinematic enigma for the new generation in Turkey. Praised for its B&W cinematograhpy and regarded as a masterpiece, film follows the aesthetic tradition of Antoninoni. Also resembles some of Bela Tarr’s works with its visual sensibility; “Sevmek Zamani” is an eclectic mixture of modernist themes (i.e. individual loneliness), metaphysics (the fight of good vs evil), and notions of Marxism like director’s some other works. Metin Erksan is one of the first Turkish filmmakers who saw cinema as an art form apart from a mass entertaining medium.

User Review fom Imdb:
A Paradoxical Presentation of Realism and Mysticism!
Erksan’s Sevmek Zamani expresses its story in a two-folded plane.First, a strict realism in the search for specific (but global at the same time) identity problem of Turkish people is investigated: Occident or Orient, the chaotic battle of these two different identity-construction choices. Second, through this separation, the movie shows us two perceptions of LOVE: An urbanized, modern female singer(Sema Ozcan) wanting to be with the guy (Musfik Kenter)who is in love with her poster on the one hand. On the other, the (Oriental) guy refusing this famous singer. The guy says:”I’m in love only and only with your poster”. The fetish and the sublime! That Love turns to be some kind of Sufistic way of perceiving the world. The Magnificient scene of boat-tripping with the poster must be seen!

1.38GB | 1 h 25 min | 720×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4C9C78C46A15B7D/Time.to.Love.(Sevmek.Zamani).1965.DVDRip.x264-Zog.mkv

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:English, Turkish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese

The post Metin Erksan – Sevmek zamani aka Time To Love [Enhanced Quality] (1965) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Hamlet is now female and so are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Instead of taking place in England, this version takes at the beach where everyone plays volleyball in bikinis. An expressionist and surrealist adaptation of Hamlet from director Metin Erksan.

Music score is from Soshtakovich’s Hamlet

“To be or not to be” scene

Friends from United States comes to bring back Hamlet

Theatre scene

“Famous” beach scene


Does anybody know this adresse?

https://nitro.download/view/4B431CB8AFB827D/Kadin_Hamlet_(Intikam_Melegi)_(1976).avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/38EF4B7911689D1/Kadin_Hamlet_%28Intikam_Melegi%29_%281976%29.srt

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:None

The post Metin Erksan – Intikam Melegi – Kadin Hamlet AKA The Angel of Vengeance – The Female Hamlet (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin International Film Festival, Metin Erksan’s wallop of a melodrama follows the machinations of an unrepentantly selfish tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors’ crops. Alongside this tale of soul-devouring competition is one of overheated desire, as a love triangle develops between the farmer, his more decent brother, and the beautiful villager the latter takes as his bride. A benchmark of Turkish cinema, this is a visceral, innovatively shot and vibrantly acted depiction of the horrors of greed.

Excerpt from Criterion

Dry Summer: The Laws of Nature
By Bilge Ebiri

When Dry Summer won the Golden Bear at the 1964 Berlin Film Festival, its director, Metin Erksan, was already among the biggest names in Turkish cinema. One would have thought that after the award—not just the first major international one given to a Turkish film but arguably the highest honor given to any cultural product from Turkey until then—he would become one of his country’s foremost artistic figures. But while the win was momentous, the ground beneath Erksan and his industry was already shifting. Dry Summer was, in many ways, the surprising, abrupt end of an incomplete chapter in the nation’s film history.

Although various films were made in Turkey throughout the early twentieth century, a self-sustaining and stable industry didn’t take hold until 1948, when the government introduced a 50 percent tax cut for theaters showing domestic films. The resulting boom in production enabled a new generation of filmmakers to breathe life into a cinema whose aesthetic to that point had been frustratingly stage-bound, even as they struggled with many of the same limitations as their forebears (prehistoric equipment, unforgiving schedules, overzealous censors). Among the directors in this new wave, a small group stood out for their more cinematically sophisticated works. Starting in the early 1950s, headstrong directors like Erksan, Lutfi Akad (Strike the Whore, Port of Lonely Souls), and Atıf Yılmaz (The Girl Who Watched the Mountain, This Land’s Children) sought to create more distinctly humanist and personal works, inspired in part by Italian neorealism.

Erksan had been one of Turkey’s first film critics in the early to mid-1940s and in 1952 directed his first feature, The Dark World, a biopic of the blind folk troubadour Âşık Veysel. The film included numerous documentary scenes of the elderly musician himself—a docu-narrative hybrid avant la lettre. It also represented an early attempt to convey an authentic portrait of life in the impoverished Anatolian heartland, something Erksan would return to numerous times over his career. As such, it ran afoul of the authorities and was released only in a butchered version, thus marking the first of the director’s many confrontations with censor boards.

Most Turkish cinema during this period sought to mimic popular Egyptian melodramas and American genre pictures. Respected auteurs like Erksan and Akad made their share of such films too. But they also attempted to connect more with the lives of average citizens in a rapidly modernizing country, still deeply divided along cultural, economic, and geographic lines. Erksan’s 1960 film Beyond the Nights, for example, was a crime drama about a group of wayward friends planning a robbery, but it emphasized the hopes and fears of its troubled, rootless protagonists over the story’s typical policier elements. His 1962 adaptation of Fakir Baykurt’s novel of a rural land dispute, Revenge of the Snakes, again ran into trouble with censors—until, amazingly, Turkish president Cemal Gürsel intervened, deeming the work “a service to the nation” and noting that its depiction of the harsh realities of village life was not only accurate but underplayed.

Revenge of the Snakes had been a look at the corrosive nature of property, focused on the land. Now Erksan wanted to follow that up with a similar tale focused on water. He had written his own story around this theme but abandoned it in favor of Dry Summer, an adaptation of Necati Cumalı’s novella of the same name. (Several years later, the director would complete this unofficial trilogy with The Well, about the treatment of women as property.)

After films like The Dark World and Revenge of the Snakes, with Dry Summer Erksan wanted to create an even more faithful depiction of rural life. This film would be far more ambitious, made outside of Turkey’s traditional production houses. Financed personally by producer Ulvi Doǧan, who also played the young romantic lead Hasan, the film reportedly shot for nine months, on location in the Aegean town where Cumalı had once served as an attorney. The production even used real villagers as extras, some of whom claimed to have witnessed the events that inspired Cumalı’s story. Adding to the realism were the voices of the rural characters in the film. Turkey is a nation with a staggeringly broad range of dialects and vocal inflections, but for decades, characters in films spoke proper Istanbul Turkish—even if the films took place in remote Anatolian villages. In Dry Summer, however, the characters speak with Aegean accents. (This was a departure from the novella as well.)

But perhaps more importantly, Dry Summer evinces Erksan’s feel for the textures of rural life—its monotony, sensuousness, and violence. The film opens on repeated shots of Osman (Erol Taş) and his two mules making their way through the streets of his village—six shots in a row of basically the same thing. This odd, willful repetition is echoed at the end, when we get repeated shots of Osman’s dead body floating down the spring he sought to control. It’s a frame that places the events of the film within the rhythms of the countryside, lending it the quality of a fable.

The characters in Dry Summer are extensions of the natural world around them. Osman’s decision to block the spring that runs from his and his brother Hasan’s land to the neighboring farms below is seen by his fellow villagers as an act of violence against the earth. “Water is the earth’s blood!” they repeatedly protest. Hence the heavily symbolic ending, in which Hasan repeatedly rises out of the water as he approaches and finally overwhelms his brother, as if the very water is taking revenge on Osman. Similarly, an early romantic exchange between Hasan and his lover, Bahar (Hülya Koçyiğit), takes place in a thicket of tall reeds—groping and grasping in the dark, the two might as well be creatures of the earth giving way to their most natural impulses. This was an earthiness, a forthright animal magnetism, rarely found in the urbane Turkish cinema of the 1960s.

With a kind of dark, subtle wit, Erksan contrasts the raging passions of the main characters—Hasan’s for Bahar, and Osman’s for, first, the water and his land and, later, also for Bahar—with the powerlessness of the authorities and elites. The local officials who get involved in the water dispute force Osman to make his water available to the other villagers. But further legal recourse results in the same authorities standing over Osman again as, just a little while later, he closes the water supply off. Similarly, after he goes to prison, Hasan is seen chatting with a fellow inmate named Kamel, who lectures him about the importance of “legal technique” and seems to want to awaken our hero’s class consciousness. Coded as an intellectual—he’s reading a paper, wearing a vest and glasses, and smoking with a cigarette holder—this refined, bookish older man seems like a typical directorial stand-in, a voice of reason who argues against impulsive violence and for unified, organized action. But such ideas go out the window as soon as Hasan returns to his village.

Alongside Dry Summer’s “realist” virtues, the film also displays some of the more idiosyncratic qualities of Erksan’s cinema. In fact, today the film is more notable for the bizarre, stylized avenues down which it pursues its villain’s gathering madness. Obsession had always been a key theme in Erksan’s work, but this film becomes downright surreal as Osman is consumed by lust for his brother’s wife—watching her, groping her, coming on to her, and, at one point, proposing to a scarecrow that he pretends is her. One can sense the film’s fascinating, uneasy truce between its more naturalistic qualities and these outré elements during the scene where Osman, milking a cow in Bahar’s presence, begins suggestively sucking on the animal’s teat, a moment of typical “village realism” transformed into a wild, comic grotesque. (Here we must also give credit to Erol Taş, who would become one of the great heavies of Turkish cinema, notorious for his portrayal of imperious landowners, gangsters, murderers, even Mexican bandits, and, in one series, a mad scientist named Dr. Satan.)

Erksan’s films would take on an increasingly perverse quality in the ensuing years: In his 1964 noir The Guilty Are Among Us, he stages the film’s climax during a posh gala where all the guests wear scuba-diving outfits. The following year’s Time to Love is a symbolic, absurdist romance about a man who falls in love with a woman’s portrait, forsaking the woman herself. Female Hamlet (1977) is a modernized version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, full of wildly surreal, comic passages depicting Hamlet’s outward madness; the film seems to reflect its protagonist’s pretend lunacy, veering between comedy, musical, and Peckinpah-influenced slow-motion bloodfest.

Dry Summer’s combination of such sensuous outlandishness with more social realist qualities resulted in its also running into trouble with the government, which didn’t want a film depicting life in the Turkish heartland as tragic and boiling over with lust screened abroad. But producer Doğan reportedly smuggled the negative into Germany in the trunk of a car, and after the film won the Golden Bear, the authorities softened their stance. In his memoirs, the director Lutfi Akad relates how his film The White Handkerchief (1955) was directly affected: Initially, Akad’s film was permitted to screen only under the condition that it not be shown outside Turkey. After Dry Summer’s Berlin win, the authorities decided that The White Handkerchief’s “being viewed abroad will have positive effects on Turkish cinema.” Dry Summer even led to some legal reforms, according to Erksan: previously, Turkish law had held that streams, rivers, and other waterways were public property but that springs could be privately owned; after Dry Summer, the law was revised to make springs public as well.

When news of the Berlin win came, the government organized the meeting of the first Turkish Cinema Council, inviting filmmakers, producers, exhibitors, and critics. However, as the director Halit Refiğ tells it, the gathering ended in argument and recrimination: exhibitors who wanted to show more foreign films made common cause with critics growing wary of domestic films, which they saw as inferior to Hollywood’s and those of the exciting new cinemas of Europe. What was supposed to be an event bringing the industry together and consolidating the recent strides of Turkish cinema wound up driving everyone apart.

Within a year, the battle lines would become even more stark, with the founding of the Turkish Cinematheque, an institution inspired by the Cinémathèque française and focused on bringing foreign films into the country. Its founders looked down on Turkish cinema as technically backward, aesthetically incompetent, and politically conservative. This was a particularly troubling development for Erksan, who had not only tried to spearhead a “national cinema” but had also proven his leftist bona fides in regular battles with government censors. Along the way, Dry Summer’s Berlin win began to seem less like a high point and more like a fluke. There was even a silly rumor that the film had won only because Erksan seduced one of the jury members, an Egyptian actress.

Unfortunately, domestic filmmakers had to live down the intelligentsia’s contempt for years. That the industry was moving increasingly toward cheaper, more vulgar product didn’t help. By the early 1970s, Turkey was churning out well over two hundred films a year, but the majority of these were porn flicks, and many of the rest were foreign knockoffs. (Even Erksan was forced to take some of these gigs: until the restoration of Dry Summer, the only one of his films to find any real audience abroad was Şeytan, his 1974 remake of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, embraced in later years by cult audiences looking for an irony fix.)

Such developments also echoed Dry Summer’s fate, in an odd way. Although the authorities had been ready to welcome it with open arms after Berlin, the negative of the film never made it back from Germany, and for many years it was very difficult to see. Meanwhile, it was reportedly chopped up and distributed in the West (by Doǧan) as a soft-core film titled My Brother’s Wife, with new scenes starring a Hülya Koçyiğit look-alike shot and added by others.

Embittered with the industry that he’d helped to shape, and resentful of critics, Erksan gradually withdrew from filmmaking. Aside from a TV miniseries in 1982, his last film was 1977’s Female Hamlet. In later years, he devoted himself to teaching and to writing books about politics and history. However, he lived long enough to learn of Dry Summer’s 2008 restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna and the World Cinema Project, and its renewed embrace by the international community. He also lived long enough to see his own countrymen rediscover the national cinema he had fought so long to forge— ironically, through the medium of television, where the films that he, Akad, Yılmaz, and others had fought to make in the fifties, sixties, and seventies found new life as classics, even for the intellectuals who had scorned them back in the day.

Erksan died in 2012. Akad had preceded him by a year, but not before writing these words about his friend and colleague, which could have served as a kind of epitaph: “He struggled on, repressing the pain of all the films he didn’t get to make . . . Under different circumstances, I have no doubt that he would have numbered among the great names of world cinema.”

Bilge Ebiri is a film critic and writer for New York Magazine.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/48AF1D509D283B2/susuz.yaz.-aka.dry.summer-.-1964-.criterion.bluray.720p.flac.x264-mandr.mkv

Language(s):Turkish
Subtitles:English, muxed in mkv

The post Metin Erksan & David E. Durston – Susuz Yaz AKA Dry Summer (1964) first appeared on Cinema of the World.