Yol Kenarı: Kafkaesk Bir Sinema
Sideway: A Kafkaesque Cinema

Author(s): Yavuz Akyıldız
Subject(s): Aesthetics, Existentialism, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Özgür Yayın Dağıtım Ltd. Şti.
Keywords: Cinema; cinematography; Kafkaesque Cinema; existentialism; aesthetics;
Summary/Abstract: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu is considered one of the important auteurs of Turkish Cinema. Representing our cinema successfully in the international arena, the director has won many awards at prestigious international and national festivals, including the best film, the best director, and the best cinematographer. Our director, who produces story books, novels and painting works along with movies, establishes a strong structure between the arts he performs as an integrated artist, and philosophy and literature. This artistic structuring, which started especially with the movie Rıza (2006), reached a very competent and strong mastery stage in terms of cinematic art with the films Haze (2009), Hair (2010), I am not Him (2013), Sideways (2017) and Kerr (2022). Although Pirselimoğlu's cinema undergoes periodic changes in terms of aesthetics and thought, it has important common codes. He depicts themes such as isolation, oppression, the dark sides of human nature, ideological elements, bureaucracy, murder, obsession, existential anxiety, the absurd situation of human beings, alienation, crime, and human being as a mortal creature, through images in almost all of his films. These themes in Pirselimoğlu's cinema are the themes fed by the philosophy of existentialism. Kafkaesque aesthetics, which is an important component of the philosophy of existentialism, stands out as the basic aesthetic element that determines the atmosphere and thus the cinematography in the cinema of the director. In this study, after discussing existential philosophy and Kafkaesque aesthetics, the effects of these structures on Tayfun Pirselimoğlu's cinema will be examined through his last two films, Yol Side and Kerr. The philosophical background, dialogue, plot, cinematography that emerges in the films will be analyzed by establishing the links between the philosophy of existentialism and Kafkaesque aesthetics.

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