Classical music and voice in Nuri Bilge Ceylan films of the 2010s: parsimony together with verbiage

ABSTRACT

In the films of Turkish auteur director Nuri Bilge Ceylan music is characterized by its spare use and the frequency of a classicall Western repertoire in a similar aesthetic use to that of French director Robert Bresson. In Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (2014) and The Wild Pear Tree (2018), the same musical work is repeated in films with long dialogues, in a turn towards verbiage in the director’s cinematography, previously characterized by sparse dialogues. The aim of this paper is to consider the relationship between music and dialogue in the structure of these two films. As in Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), many of the dialogues in Ceylan’s two films function as verbal battles and the musical moments are related to character movement and/or introspection. Film analysis of the passages with music and the dialogues connected to them was taken as a form of methodology, relating them to the general film narrative scheme.

KEYWORDS
music; Nuri Bilge Ceylan; dialogue; narative; Robert Bresson