Kasaba

Shot in black-and-white on a minuscule budget, KASABA (THE SMALL TOWN) is set in a remote area of Anatolia where life, it seems, has stood still. The farmers tend their sheep; the women work in the home; the men either sit watching the world go by or labor on the farms. Occasionally the pace of life is quickened by the visit of a traveling fun-fair.

In this apparently timeless world, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan conducts a searching analysis of the relationship of humanity to nature. The film begins in the village school during the depths of winter; as the children read about the importance of family and community as the basis of social life, the teacher (Latif Altıntaş) looks moodily out of the window, wishing he was anywhere but imprisoned in a classroom. The visual irony is painful - although preaching community, life at school is far from being so.

The action shifts to springtime and the annual funfair. Ceylan contrasts the iron and steel of the big dipper (and other attractions) with the timeless landscape in which they are placed. While the villagers scream with pleasure as they enjoy the rides, we are made aware that this is simply visceral; and should not be compared with our relationship to nature. Yet it seems that no one is much interested in sustaining that bond; little Ali (Cihat Bütün) kills insects with a stick, and turns a tortoise upside down so that it cannot move - it will eventually die of exhaustion. Meanwhile Saffet (Emin Toprak) remains detached both from the fun-fair and the landscape surrounding it.

The explanation for his behavior comes in the film's third movement set in the height of summer, when Ali and Saffet's family sit round a fire, talking to one another. We learn that Saffet feels constrained by life in a small town; desperate to escape, but without any real knowledge of what he wants to do. His uncle Emin (Sercihan Alevoğlu) has been abroad and received a university education, but has returned to his birth; his father (Emin Ceylan) wonders whether all that education was actually worth it. Director Ceylan offers a vivid portrait of small-town life; communities stick together through thick and thin, but the opportunities for growth are limited. On the other hand, the pull of the community is so strong that it can seem suffocating, especially for Saffet.

As the film unfolds, so its complexities increase. Both Emin and the father are fond of telling stories handed down to them by their ancestors - of myths, legends, as well as the more immediate past. Historically these tales were designed to emphasize the value of community; but here they are rejected by the family. They tend to express their frustrations openly; their lack of opportunities, the problems of relating to one another, and the ever-present threat of death. Ceylan creates a portrait of a rural family unable (or perhaps unwilling) to cope with changing times; at times his vision of impending doom is positively Chekhovian in tone.

There is no easy way out of this dilemma: perhaps the only way we can resolve it is to accept that we are governed by the elements. The importance of this dictum is emphasized through repeated shots of the protagonists putting their hands into the river, walking through fields of maize, or standing alone, their shadows visible against the vast landscape beyond.

A slow yet beautifully shot film, in which each frame tells us something about the characters' relationship to their environments, KASABA is a work of near-genius.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan,the rising star of the Turkish cinema is surely a talent.I've been longing to see a movie by him for a long time.And this happened to be the first movie I found the opportunity to watch.This was one of those short(exactly 82 min)sweet movies about life.It has a bit of a traditional tissue in it.It's just like watching an American movie like "Garden State" or the "Station Agent". The plot and the setting is totally different but the feeling you got is similar.The movie is seen from the perspective of two kids in four somewhat interrelated scenes.In the first part we see a school environment in winter in which the kids are hailing out the national pledge in the cold school garden.We see the the family's 11 year old daughter as a pupil "facing with her feeling of shame and some merciless clues of life " in that scene this is obvious but what is more catching is that the teacher wants the students to read some part from a text-book about community-specifically the sense of belonging to a community-the need to belong to some social unit.The kids just read the passage without making sense of what is written there.You see Turkey revolutionized its alphabet from Arabic to Roman letters but basically there's still a "maktap literacy" going on in these traditional distant state schools.The kids do probably know something about human beings' social needs but they don't necessarily pay attention to the passage they're studying in theory. The second part is in spring. We see the girl with her 4 year younger brother, and their wandering towards the corn field where their family are waiting for them.They just drop in a graveyard to eat some plums.There is something inter-cultural here too.When her brother tries to reach the plums on the branch his sister says "Hey you're stomping at the grave" The adults in Anatolia scare their kids with a warning in such situations "Hey the dead will inhale you" This innocent tell-off results from the respect for the dead actually.This part has the least number of dialogs actually.While the siblings are discovering mysteries of nature they barely talk and the director turns his camera into nature.Even at one point he focuses on the eyes of a helpless donkey badgered by flies.In the third part the brother and sister arrive at the corn filed where the some sort of a bonfire is lit and the grandmother's are roasting maize cobs.The grandfather tells his experiences during the First World War, how he was taken prisoner by the British and sent to India, how he endured years of starvation. This is the nature of the old Anatolian man.Whenever they see a youngster they just think that they live in a tacky world so they tell how they suffered.While the grand-dad is such a spiritually mature man in consequence of his early sufferings the father of the kids is the only educated man in the family.He sort of had difficulties to educate himself he even taught himself foreign languages.But even though he is strong in analytical thought he has barely spiritual weltanschauung.He is a great admirer of Alexander and he tells about every war Alexander did wage.And then there is this cousin Saffet who is gritty nihilist."You worked all your life so what?" You just came back to the point where you started?"Even though he is coarse and ironic he is the most realistic one actually.The fourth part takes place at home.It ends with a placid river scene actually. As for the technical details.The movie is openly monochrome.The DVD details say the director wanted something simple so he used simple cameras and most of the cast are either his relatives or his acquaintances actually. At some points I thought there could have been more dialogs.Because while the second part has barely a flowing dialog the third part is inundated with dialogs.(The grandfather's war experiences and the father's Alexander admiration).Plus Nuri Bilge Ceylan's camera technique focusing on nature looks like Elem Klimov's strategy in Idi i smotri(Come and See)(1985).I had felt bored because of this lack of dialogs and excessiveness of such camera angles in Come and See. But since Kasaba is not that long it's better but if it were longer it would be definitely boring.All in all it was a good step for me to know Nuri Bilge Ceylan's art.

No need to talk about the story as there are many sentences around, this film is very good for me as long as i can see all from the eyes of the children, the rest, really i did not get any slightest feeling, the conversations are so poor that you do your best to stay concentrated & awake (especially if you watch it at night) actually i stopped watching it in the middle, but the next day i wanted to finish because i tried to persuade myself that i had watched it wrong :) the film is unique in Turkish cinema, and because of that i put it in a different place, i must congratulate NBC (the director) because of his serving that kind of out-of-line film in our history, but that cannot make it a good film alone... apart from my mostly negative comments above, the class scene (at the beginning where the boy enters class with snow all around his body and what happens after..) is very effective, i like it very much when i first saw the class scene on youtube, that i wanted to watch the film immediately, another thing is that i liked the dream scenes, so simple but so innocent, for my part, NBC has a very powerful photographer eye, but when you make all film full of that kind of scenes you make it rather slower and sometimes unavoidably boring, and he must definitely write more effective sentences, really they never grab me, its like a very beautiful and extraordinary girl but talking like my grandmom, to sum up the case, its a very extraordinary film but without something to go back and re-watch (except class scene)on the other hand i appreciate this film very much because it is not made for making money, otherwise it would have been less boring and probably NBC would have chosen some other cast out of his family members, he seems to made it for himself.

A self motivated cinema volunteer Nuri Bilge Ceylan Shot Kasaba after his short film Cocoon (Koza)sounded successfully among Turkish Filmmakers. With a slow rhythm but not a routine, film takes you to a small town (kasaba). Photographic quality of the film is excellent. Script may have shortcomings but never mind with his full amateur crew Ceylan figured out a remarkable and promising vision for Turkish Cinema. Town deserved to be viewed...

I can tell you this movie with 3 words. natural, poetic and amateur.