Climates (2006) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
“It’s so odd that Nuri Bilge and Ebru Ceylan, his wife, have achieved together this film about what is left unsaid, about lies and brutality in a couple. Obviously, Ceylan has watched Antonioni carefully, particularly The Red Desert. Besides, Antonioni was at that time with Monica Vitti, which was not a less difficult situation. Like Antonioni, Ceylan is very conscient of the landscapes or the fog. He’s very attentive to hesitations, which forms the bigger part of his actors’ interpretation. For exemple, the woman who knocks at the door of her former husband’s hotel room and ends up leaving because he doesn’t wake up quickly enough. We see her disappear in the corridor’s darkness and then slowly come back to him when he opens the door. This kind of sequences are numerous in Antonioni’s films. And there are so many more details that recall the Italian master in the mise en scène or the cinematography. For example the way he begins a sequence, very close from the ground, or how he cuts sublime frames with the lighting. Or the way he makes close shots on hair, playing with neatness and fuzzyness in the same frame: particularly in the nightmare scene on the beach, which is again in The Red Desert with the sequence of the dream with the little girl and the boat. It’s an extremely precise film about feelings as much as about modern Turkey.”
By Bastien Hader on January 27, 2008 in Paris.
Photographer born in 1941, from Antwerp in Belgium, Harry Gruyaert joined Magnum Photos in 1981 and became a full member in 1986.
From 1959 to 1962, he studied at Brussels School of photography and cinema then left Belgium and went to Paris working as a freelance fashion and advertising photographer as well as a director of photography for Flemish television. It’s for his work on color that H.G. is famous: color of different continents that he’s been seeking while travelling in Egypt, South Korea or India ; his pictures of Morocco earned him in 1976 the Kodak prize.
1972 is an important year: he covered the Olympic Games in Munich but also, living in London, took pictures of the indistinct forms and saturated colors transmitted by a faulty television, at a comparable rhythm to a reporter in front of a scoop. The TV Shots, aesthetically near to the work Nam June Paik was doing on video at the same time, earned his author a lasting recognition. Still exhibited this year in New York, it has just been reissued in a book by prestigious German publisher Steidl.
Besides the Rivages exhibition at the Bon Marché in Paris until February 16, he showed his images by the sides of Antonioni’s ones, a very important influence for him, all along with other Magnum photographers at la Cinémathèque Française in the exhibition L’Image d’après.