Considered Turkey’s most talented, controversial and daring filmmaker, the late Yilmaz Güney spent much of his adult life in prison. Targeted for his ethnicity and political views, he was first arrested for publishing a subversive novel, then for harboring anarchist students and finally for shooting a judge in a drunken nightclub brawl. As a result, the Kurdish Güney wrote many of the scripts to his award-winning films inside a cell, including the 1978 Suru (The Herd), which is showing today as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston film series Yilmaz Güney: Turkish Legend. Suru chronicles the tribulations of a rural, sheep-farming Kurdish clan facing the disappearance of their way of life as the modern world encroaches on them.
Ironically, Suru was filmed in Turkish, not Kurdish, because Güney faced continued political oppression. His films, which dealt with the lives of his downtrodden countrymen, earned him no friends in the repressive government. In a 1983 interview with The Middle East magazine, Güney said, “The Herd, in fact, is the history of the Kurdish people, but I could not even use the Kurdish language in this film; if we had used the Kurdish language, all those who took part in this film would have been sent to jail.” It was one more example of Güney’s inability to fully and directly express himself. “During my whole life as a creator, I have had to use indirect means to express my thoughts,” he said in that magazine interview. “And I must frankly admit that…my works have not totally expressed what I wanted, either in their style or in their spirit. The dominant element in these works is that they are a compromise.” Brilliant compromises, as it happens.
Two Güney films close out the series this weekend. Seyit Han (Bride of the Earth) screens at 7 p.m. Friday; Suru screens at 7 p.m. Saturday. 1001 Bissonnet. For information, call 713-639-7515 or visit www.mfah.org. $6 to $7.
Fri., April 6, 7 p.m.; Sat., April 7, 7 p.m., 2012