Portraits and Landscape: İklimler/Climates (2006)

This chapter offers a close analysis of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s İklimler/Climates (2006) from the point of view of its intermedial relationship with photography and painting. His first film shot in digital, Climates signals a move away from his hometown province of Çanakkale, where his previous films had been shot, or bore a strong relationship with, and to which he would only return in Ahlat Ağacı/The Wild Pear Tree (2018). It is also the first and only film where Ceylan appears as an actor, implicating his own body into his highly personal cinematic world. Taking these considerations into account, as well as acknowledging the significant role of photography in Ceylan’s career, the chapter discusses the film’s intermedial relationship with the art of painting and with the art of photography, noticeable in two opposing but complementary types of shots: the close-up ‘moving portraits’ of faces and the establishing shots of landscape. The combination of painterly and photographic ‘moving portraits/affection-images’ and ‘landscape views’ brings into the equation the issue of cinematic scale and proportion, whose manipulation is the fundamental property of the cinema capable of creating meaningful parallels between the diverse physical and human geographies of Turkey, and between subjective memory and the weight of history.