Intellectual Criticism and Space in Cinema; Winter Sleep

Winter Sleep is a movie that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. It is directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan who has a worldwide reputation and prestige. Let us also add that this movie won the FIBRESCI award, and it has more accomplishments at the box office than the director’s other movies, which have more stable cinematic language.

In regard to the narrative of Winter Sleep, although the preference for space is made effortlessly, through common sense and intuition, it is the right choice for sure. The reason for that is that Cappadocia and the Turkish intellectuals have identical attributes. Rough life climbing up a magnificent history, structures in which makeshift lives with a profound past reside as well as a sophisticated spatial formation that undertakes the duty of reflecting the silence that mocks its miserable people, and a generation that has been brought up incorrectly, corruptly mediating the vulgarized use of a magnificent architecture.

Winter Sleep is filled with these, and it is truly a film of melancholia. Because the director went about his creation in a place where the psychopathology of the space and the problems of our intellectual intersect, paradoxically, the work has found a strong structural foundation. That is to say, the success of Winter Sleep comes from the fact that it approached the architecture of Cappadocia, which had been used as a gallery of cliches and antiquity until then, with a negative commentary. The significance of the movie lies in the fact that it judges, or rather dissects, our intellect through the mistreated, hurt, and pessimistic appearance of Cappadocia.

On the one hand, corrupted intellectuals, who are looking for a remedy for their hopeless spiritual wounds in suffocating hazy, narrow rooms and in depressing spaces that are engaged with mazes, make their games central to their lives.