Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

REVUE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVIEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAPÊ-RIVISTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE LA PRENSA-BASIN ÖZETi
ARTS
"Itis better to a bad boxer rahter
than a good spectator, my boy. Il
By TON Istanbul Office
so said YIlmaz Gilney, famous actor,
writer and director in a letter to
his son. Perhaps this sentence expresses
the totality of his life experiences
- tiny roles in the Turkish cinema
where he began, climbing up to the king's
throne that he reached with great difficulty,
and his efforts to renew himself in balance
and out of balance. He didn't finish school.
Because he was not afraid of jeopardizing
the profession that he had learned as an apprentice
and losing what he had in the way
of craftsmanship, he was not afraid of taking
risks.
Yllmaz Güney put his stamp both as a
film maker and a political personality on a
period that stretched from the 1960s up to
the first half of the 1980s. The one aspect of
his persona upon which all his close friends
and film critics agree is that Güney.had as
many positive sides as he had negative. He
had an artistic personality that he developed
step by step and renewed and in doing
so, at times, he lived for sensation.
In an interview he gave in 1974, Güney
himself acknowledged himself as a sensitive
and intuitive person in the following
way: "... When I am looked ..t through the
eyes' of a sociologist, perhaps I can be understood
completely. But when an ordinary
person looks, he may say 'Hey this guy says
this and does that. This is contradictory.'
"Today there are some things that could
be characterized as contradictory in the
eyes of a number of people. But I definitely
don't agree with them. Because I know
what needs to be done today and how I shall
do it. So the results of today's product I
think will appear two years from now. And
what I have done will be better understood
....
"Now, if a person lives in some communal
form, no matter how much he may be
opposed to the ideology of the community,
he carries it with him. I, too, carry the ideology
of this community with all its mistakes.
So at the various moments when I am confronted
with some echo from life, my consciousness
of being opposed to this and
wanting to destroy it comes. And this, as I
made known e.lsewhere before, brought
y Ilmaz Güney to the point of being destroyed.
I am making a new film but basicaIly
I'm uncomfortable and disturbed. I
see the film I'm making. Even if they say
that this film today is the best film in Turkey,
it doesn't matter to me. My being able
to catch the mistakes and not repeat them is
what's important."
Ytlmaz Güney, whose real name was
Ylimaz Putun, began his fIlm-making life
Yllmaz Güney
in Adana, the city in which he was born. He
carried film cans and huge, huge film panels
on his back. His fltSt acting roles were in
"Bu Vatanm Çocuklan" and "Alageyik,"
which were directed by Atlf Yllmaz in
1958. He also contributed to these films as a
scriptwriter, and later he had big and small
roles, did scenario writing and storytelling
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