A "Sensuous" Approach to the Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan : Principles of Embodied Film Experience

Abstract: Over the last decades, film theories with their focus on the mere audiovisual quality of cinema have been questioned by film scholars with a phenomenological interest. According to these critical approaches, the film experience cannot be understood through a mere involvement of the eye (and the ear). In this context, to disregard the significance of a multisensory attachment to the film results in the consideration of relationship between the film and the viewer to be a dominating one. This dissertation examines this multisensory attachment and aims to define the film experience as an embodied relationship between the film and the viewer by means of a formal analysis of the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s early films. Throughout the dissertation, it is argued that Ceylan encourages his viewer in various forms to have a more sensual and immediate experience of his films rather than to compel them to adhere to symbols and abstractions through a kind of intellectual effort – an intellectual effort that would damage the “sensuous” attachment between the film and the viewer.