Cinematographic Analysis of Yusuf Trilogy in the Context of Rural Sociology

Introduction

This study discusses subject of ‘village-city conflict’ through Semih Kaplanoğlu’s films Egg/Yumurta (2007) & Milk/Süt (2008) & Honey/Bal (2010) which are called Yusuf Trilogy. Since the story told in the trilogy is about the growing up process of the main character named Yusuf, this film series is called the ‘Yusuf Trilogy’. There is a backward flow of time in the trilogy. Accordingly, the first film in the series, Egg/Yumurta (2007), deals with Yusuf’s middle age, Milk/Süt (2008) with his youth, and Honey/Bal (2010) with his childhood. Although the name of the main characters in the trilogy remains ‘Yusuf’, the change of the protagonist’s surname is a remarkable detail in the narrative pattern.

Islam and Sufism have a very important place in Semih Kaplanoğlu’s cinematography. It seems that the director is in search of a spiritual reality in the Yusuf Trilogy. In this respect, the director’s approach to cinema seems similar to that of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Carl Dreyer. It can also be said that Semih Kaplanoğlu has a surrealist approach like Luis Buñuel. The common feature of all these directors is that they have a spiritual understanding of reality, like Semih Kaplanoğlu. Kaplanoğlu depicts the spiritual reality that he uses as a theme in his films without explicitly showing Islamic elements. In his films, Kaplanoğlu tries to explain the Sufi faith through elements of everyday life.

In the Yusuf trilogy, the director’s main goal is to give the audience a spiritual experience beyond creating a kind of entertainment cinema. Accordingly, the films of the Yusuf trilogy contain a variety of metaphors that lead the audience to a spiritual questioning. Like metaphors, the village-city places that form the background of the narrative pattern in Kaplanoğlu’s films have also a multi-layered and implicit structure. In this regard, the analysis of village and city places as the background of the films is also important to explain the metaphors that express spiritual reality.

In the field of cinema, which is a part of cultural representation, ‘reality’ is constructed selectively. There are different approaches of semantic selectivity. These approaches may appear as determinism or indeterminism. Since Kaplanoğlu’s films are far from a rhetorical approach, ‘realism’ is always at the forefront. This realism does not arise from determinism and does not include a positivist approach. However, it should not be forgotten that the relationship with reality is mutual and mediated. For the director, the process of constructing the reality that contains meaning is ideological. At this point, it is necessary to ask the question: ‘What kind of reality did Semih Kaplanoğlu build in his Yusuf trilogy?’