A "Sensuous" Approach to the Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan : Principles of Embodied Film Experience

• Main Author: Aydin, Ali
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Filmvetenskap 2018
• Subjects: Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Cocoon; The Small Town; Clouds of May; Distant; phenomenology; haptic visuality; embodied film experience; senses; sensual/sensuous; body; skin; tactile; mimesis; interpretation; erotics; play/game.; Studies on Film; Filmvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-158137

Over the last decades, film theories with their focus on the mere audiovisual quality of cinema have been questioned by film scholars with a phenomenological interest. According to these critical approaches, the film experience cannot be understood through a mere involvement of the eye (and the ear). In this context, to disregard the significance of a multisensory attachment to the film results in the consideration of relationship between the film and the viewer to be a dominating one. This dissertation examines this multisensory attachment and aims to define the film experience as an embodied relationship between the film and the viewer by means of a formal analysis of the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s early films. Throughout the dissertation, it is argued that Ceylan encourages his viewer in various forms to have a more sensual and immediate experience of his films rather than to compel them to adhere to symbols and abstractions through a kind of intellectual effort – an intellectual effort that would damage the “sensuous” attachment between the film and the viewer.