Alp Zeki Heper and His Two Short Films (A Woman & Sunrise/Dawn)


I think Alp Zeki Heper is one of Turkish cinema's lost geniuses. He finished his schooling at the Galatasaray high school (Istanbul) and went first to Geneva to study law. He dropped that and moved to France to study film. Having Costa-Gavras as classmate, he graduated at the Paris "Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques - IDHEC" and he received the diploma/prize of "best director".  He realized his first film projects in Paris. For his short films "A Woman" and "Dawn" he was awarded prizes by the IDHC and the Austrian Ministry of Culture.

After that he returned to Turkey, and things were beginning shape up.  With his first feature film shot in Turkey, "A Pale Night's Love Stories" [1966], an attempt to tell a love story in an abstract and poetic way, he caught the attention of other directors and critics. The film showed the influence of Bunuel, and because of sexual content was seized by the censor. Heper protested against the ban and wrote in a newspaper article: "Pale Night is a film about a love affair. Love can never be pornographic. What is pornographic is the position the censor takes against the film. The film's narrative is hard to understand, it is related to my own memories. I wanted to do away with the torture, the pressure that comes with love and emotional dependency. I thought freedom was some crazy feeling of love, and I was accused of pornography." The film was entered in the the 2nd Golden Orange Film Festival in Antalya, but was shown only at private screenings and not to the festival public.  On the whole, the film's visuals were appreciated, but because of the foreign or strange themes and narrative, the film wasn't really noticed. In later years, the film remained unseen, stored in archives and only talked about.

After this disappointment, Heper gave cinema a break. He came back and made a few mainstream films, but at the time, the censor banned them too. The director, exasperated by Turkey's censorship, burned most of his writings. Heper said: "In the end, I became a scriptwriter, a director, a set-designer, a cinematographer, an actor, a producer and a spectator. That is, I was forced to watch my own films all alone." Which means that he wasn't able to find a producer and distributor for his films which therefore weren't screened for the public. During the last ten years of his life he suffered from a mental illness and he died of cancer on 9th January 1984.

Of Heper's tragic life, two short films and four feature films remain. You can watch his two shorts in the video stream above. Two shorts which are even hard to find on the internet. But his legendary first feature film "A Pale Night's Love Stories", banned at the time, still isn't available. Turkey's first experimental film. According to hearsay, the director entrusted a print of the film to a friend and decreed that he wasn't to show the film to anybody. It seems Heper himself thought the film dangerous for the public, flawed and perverse.

The major breaking point in Heper's life was his 18 year old daughter's death by a shock reaction to an injection. This death was the main reason for Heper losing his hold on life, and after a while he started writing letters to himself, supposedly by his daughter, and as a means to escape he read those letters to his friends.

Selim İleri tells this anecdote: "He was a man torn between his genius and madness. I met him in a shared taxi during the height of the Martial Law period (12th September). He started to shout insults at the soldiers. I panicked, turned round and was forced to tell them: "He´s crazy, don´t hold it against him." I saw Alp last at the Beşiktaş ferry landing. He was livid with rage."

Of the two short films from that period, which are available to us today, the first one, "A Woman" creates an artificial world, obviously aided by the fact that there's no sound. Within a single space, the director treats the sorrows of two people married to each other. We might even say, Alp Zeki Heper created a surrealist home in this film. Outside, seen through the window, a light is being switched on and off. The director thus creates an artificial day and night, that is, something something appearing and disappearing, like the two people trying to found a family in this film. Those two people, the man and the woman, are leading their own existentialist lives.  Heper´s dilemma is the fact that a man and a woman, by founding a family, have to abandon their personal freedom. That´s why, while the woman rebels, the man remains passive and is adding fuel to the woman´s anger by frightened glances. Thus the [patriarchal] family´s basis is shaken and scattered on the ground. There is no winner in this war among the sexes in marriage. Both parties lose and are convicted. Zeki Heper takes a look at this drama with an original, authentic voice.

In Heper´s second short, "Dawn", we are watching, in a single space between two windows, a triangular love relationship of three people. Unlike "A Woman", "Dawn" isn´t a work totally devoid of sound. The use of music carries "Dawn" to a more epic, a more poetic level. We can see the style of Heper's first short in a more pronounced way in his use of space and lighting.

I think what is most striking in Heper's two shorts, is the space created by the camera. In Heper's films, space is important to convey the narrative and the emotions. What I'm trying to say, the director is somebody who isn't afraid to try something out, he's courageous far above his time.

I feel sad when I think of Zeki Heper's tragic life, that he wasn't understood at his time, and that it drove him mad.

1 yorum:

  1. Dear Trenkel
    Thank you so much for sharing Alp Heper works ! I looked at "Dawn" short film since years in Paris anf finally find it on youtube tahnks to you.My name is Ali Essafi, I'm a moroccan filmmaker.I'm editing right now a documentary film about the young actor of "Dawn". Actually he is also a moroccan poet and filmmaket who studied with Heper in Paris (Idhec), his name is Ahmed Bouanani. Mysteriously, his life is quiet similar to your Heper's biography. I knew him in the three last years of his life.. With his daughter we're trying to save his memory and works from the oblivion.. For my editing film I will need a copy of Dawn and to ask for the owner of this work's rights. Could you please help me if you have any information or contact...
    manu thanks. Ali
    my email: a.essafi@gmail.com

    YanıtlaSil