Tracking the Fallen Apple: Ineffability, Religious Tropes, and Existential Despair in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The constant balance between a secular constitution, Muslim majority, and an unavoidable Byzantine Christian history stands as one of Turkey's most unique characteristics as a nation. This complexity-indeed, tension-forms an uneasy foundation for Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a film that serves as a site of negotiation for contemporary belief and doubt. In the end, the film can be seen as a type of existential ritual, whereby Ceylan utilizes and sometimes inverts religious tropes to test their efficacy in the face of evil, horror, and hopelessness.This approach places Ceylan within the "post-secular constellation," which Bradatan and Ungureanu (2014) describe as a diverse group of European filmmakers, varying in their aims, beliefs, and aesthetics, but united in their opposition to dogmatic secularism. Though many are atheists and remain highly critical of religion, their films present the case that "religion cannot be simply dismissed from our lives as a useless remnant from the past" (6). They all "display a certain degree of frustration with the typically secular-agnostic or atheistic-approach." While they often wrestle with belief, they acknowledge an indebtedness to religious tradition in their films in various ways (narrative, thematic, or aesthetic).Indeed, Ceylan is more likely to dialogue with other filmmakers in his work than with theology or religion proper, but-as scholars like John Lyden (2003) and Robert Johnston (2000, 2014) have argued-the cinema has become a religious form for artists and audiences alike. Anatolia often fiercely recalls the most austere, pessimistic cartographers of existential alienation, such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Bela Tarr. Yet, despite his obvious skepticism of institutional religion, Ceylan's work is also filled with gestures that can be seen as religious, broadly speaking. For example, in terms of pictorial style, gradual pace, and metaphysical themes, we see a filmmaker in the "transcendental" tradition, evidently influenced by religiously-inflected filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, and Yasujiro Ozu.1Deploying and engaging with religious tropes is certainly not the same as assent to their foundational meanings, but it does imply a dialogue with those traditions, at the very least. "Filmmaking, for me, is to tell the indescribable things," Ceylan says (Wigon, 2012: n.p.). In this regard, he may also be aligned with (sometimes) hopeful cinematic questioners from religious backgrounds, such as Krzysztof Kieslowski and Abbas Kiarostami; like them, his hopes are essential, but his doubts are often very grave. The darkness looms large, but has not yet fully extinguished the light.In the end, this cinematic dialogue may be an expression of a particularly contemporary form of agnostic "faith," born out of the exceedingly complex religious dynamics of contemporary Turkey (which, in its very constitution, shows the complexities of a uniquely globalized contemporary nation: at once, Muslim, secular, post-Christian, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern). Turkey is emblematic of the contemporary tension between the tribal, provincial, traditional past and the polyvalent, multi-cultural, globalized future. On the one hand, Anatolia is deeply Turkish, but that also means its scope is the evolution of contemporary, global culture.This essay traces and analyzes these religious contours in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. After a summary of the broader religious implications of the film's structure, the religious dynamics of Ceylan's formal choices will be explored, as manifest in two representative arenas of theological import: the personification of the natural world, and the icon.Setting the Stage: NarrativeIn short, Anatolia is the four-chapter story of how a cohort of police investigators, a prosecutor, a medical examiner (Dr. Cemal) and two alleged killers spend a dark, windy night searching for the body of a victim, the location of which the alleged criminals cannot accurately recall. …