Vanishing Image of History: Uzak/Distant (2002)

This chapter approaches Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak/Distant (2002) as the climax of his trilogy, following Kasaba/The Small Town (1997) and Mayıs Sıkıntısı/Clouds of May (1999). The use of his friends and family members in these early works is often explained in terms of an inevitable budget-friendly choice. Ceylan turns the budgetary limits into an astonishing cinematographic search for origins and memory. Family has been his constant search starting with his experimental short, Cocoon (1995). However, conventional as it might appear to be, this is an affective family of bodies, faces and voices, and of relations rather than an origin for the main character. The narrative is traversed by two kinds of difference, which together foreclose any possibility of a pure or commanding origin in a kind of impossible exchange with each other: a spatial difference between the country and the city on the one hand, and a social difference between the middle class and the working class, on the other. The chapter explores Ceylan’s filmic image as tracking and tracing spatial/class difference in a critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of gesture and Walter Benjamin’s concept of dialectical image and argues that the country cousin Yusuf comes to embody the vanishing image of history.