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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 12 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2008)

ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/08/030281–14© 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14797580802522168

Distant

Ali Riza TaskaleTaylor and FrancisRCUV_A_352384.sgm10.1080/14797580802522168Journal for Cultural Research1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis123000000July 2008Ali RizaTaskaletaskale@hacettepe.edu.tr

This article attempts to interpret Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s award-winning film Distant[Uzak] (2002) through a discussion of social and cultural theory. Distant subtlychronicles the nature of the “distance” between two as individuals, betweenthem and the other people in their lives, between them and strangers in theirneighborhood, and between them and their country. They are essentially lostsouls with little hope of resolving their problems and washing away their bitter-ness. To offer a systematic account of the film, the article especially elaborateson the concepts of time-image, isolated modern life and urban solitude, and thedirect link between dirt and strangeness.

In Distant, we see two main protagonists: Mahmut and Yusuf. Mahmut is aphotographer who seems to have abandoned his earlier idealism for commercialsuccess. He hides from life, feeling the intellectual’s isolation and perverse plea-sure in despair. He is a man but cannot act like a man; he is a photographer butcannot do his job. Briefly, he has a feeling of dissatisfaction which comes frombeing unable to actualize his beliefs, ideas. Yusuf, however, wanders, trying tofind a life, advances towards the foreground — from fields to the road, a villageto the city, unemployment to the hope of getting a job. Women are a problemfor them both. Mahmut has simple desires for women because of being a hedo-nist, a sensualist. Yusuf shadows attractive women but is too shy to approachthem before they inevitably meet a man and walk off arm in arm. He is a manwithout means and has no way to attract good women or to hire bad ones. Yusufhas no money, Mahmut has no one — two men left alone get it all wrong. Theyare fully human and therefore fully flawed, incapable of softness, kindness orempathy for the other, until it is just too late. Distant is not so much a tragedyas it is a giant mirror, showing us just how sad, doomed and, yes, distant, wereally are.

Mahmut is a man who is alienated by distancing himself from both people andemotions, and Yusuf is a man alienated by being a stranger and thus being distantto people and his own emotions. Apart from them, Distant is also about a commu-nication break between city and countryside as Turkey is a country in transition.It is too democratic to belong to the Muslim Middle East; it is not democraticenough for Europe. Everyone is fleeing the country. Mahmut’s ex-wife is moving

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to Canada and Yusuf is himself eventually leaving by ship. Thus, Mahmut appearslike a personification of contemporary Turkey, looking back on its past, isolatedby national identity and longing for what is out of its reach. Ceylan usually workswith men in his films who are egocentric, resistant to change and incapable oflove, and “his male figures quickly appear wholly disagreeable, their obsessionsand compulsions are too construed and one-sided” (Farzanefar 2007).

Time-Image

Distant, one could say, is a movie on affects and there is a constant focus onintensities rather than well-defined emotions. Thus, we often see abrupt transi-tions between different moods, which create a sustained sense of suspense. Thisis a specific use of a certain object, which Deleuze called “time-image”. Deleuze,in his two Cinema books (The Movement-Image and The Time-Image), maps a riftin film-making that can be roughly situated at the end of World War II. Heexplores what is a clearly dominant theme in cinema: the transition from themovement-image to the time-image. This split, however, cannot be reduced toa historical shift, but exists instead in differing configurations of movement andtime. The movement-image, according to Deleuze (1986), is exemplified by clas-sical Hollywood cinema. Time proceeds only as dictated by action (the action ofnarrative, of cause and effect, of rationality). Temporality in the movement-image, for Deleuze, is governed by the “sensory-motor schema”: “All movementsare determined by linear causality, and the characters are bent toward actionsthat respond to the situations of the present” (Deleuze 1986, p. 22). Even whentemporal continuity is momentarily disrupted (for example, in a flashback), thesemoments are reintegrated into the prescribed evolution of past, present andfuture. The movement-image is structured, not only by narrative, but by ratio-nality: closed framings, reasonable progressions and continuous juxtapositions(Deleuze 1986, pp. 25–29).

The time-image, however, breaks itself from sensory-motor links. The empha-sis shifts from the logical progression of images to the experience of the imagein itself. What we come upon here are pure optical and sound situations —“opsigns” and “sonsigns” (Deleuze 1989, pp. 6–9) — unfettered by narrativeprogression and empty, disconnected any-spaces-whatever.1 This move from“acting” to “perceiving” carries over to the characters in the film, who ceaseto be “agents” and become, instead, “seers”. “Though Deleuze is hesitant to

1. Deleuze considers ‘any-space-whatever’ as a condition for the emergence of uniqueness andsingularities. Significantly, ‘any-spaces-whatever’ are spaces devoid of value, in which the linkbetween man and nature is broken (Deleuze 1989, pp. 169–172). The anonymity of space gives riseto an infinite possibility of creation. For Deleuze, ‘any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal,in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, thatis, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can bemade in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of thepossible’ (1986, p. 109).

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identify any single film that embodies the time-image, moments in films byPasolini, Ozu, and Godard gesture toward that ideal: moments of rupture, hesi-tation, irrational cutting, or prolonged duration” (Herzog 2000). Movement thatis aberrant (i.e. not rational or sensory-motor) can be seen, according toDeleuze, to be caused by time itself. Built through irrational movements and op/sonsigns, the time-image exists thus not as a chronology, but as a series of juxta-posed “presents”. What is achieved is exceedingly rare: “a direct image of time”(Deleuze 1989, pp. 41, 272).

One of the features of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films is based on a specific type ofopen-image. In this, image does not have a meaning. That is to say, the objectsand the environment — without undertaking a functional role in the narrative —are autonomous, and gain a material entity. This open-image has an ambivalent,indefinable and unstable side. It is autonomous and open to different connota-tions and different memory processes (Suner 2006, p. 125).

Stability is one of the core elements to define this open-image in Ceylan’scinema. The lack of dramatic tension of film stories forms one side of this stabil-ity. Ceylan’s films focus on ordinary daily situations. Characters do not react tothe situations; but they perform in the narrative space. They could be defined ashaving a kind of anticipation, withdrawal and passivity. Ceylan’s characters, onecould say, are not men of action; they cease to be “agents” and become, instead,“seers”.

The visual structure of the films forms another side of this stability. Ceylan(2003, p. 99) states that he has a simple presentation, and does not like complexcamera actions; rather, he says, he prefers real spaces for filming and only usesone or two additional lights. Indeed, the camera is generally fixed in his films.For example, this feeling of stability can be seen in the sound platform. One caneasily see/feel silence, which is marked by the interruptions of the sounds ofnature (crickets, bird cheeps, thunder, etc.). It is as if the audience is detachedfrom the scenes.

In this sense, Distant does not only represent a narrative; rather, provoking amachinic, spiritual response from the audience, it endeavors to open up its narra-tive to the virtual. In this, reality (the actual) no longer comes “before” theimage (the virtual); rather, they coexist (see Diken 2008). In a sense, therefore,the lives of the characters depicted in Distant are simultaneously actual andvirtual. Their actuality (in the narrative) and the virtual links established by thetime-images exist side by side. What makes the film interesting is therefore notonly its “actualized” structures, its narrative, but also its virtual potentialities;not only the meaning produced at the level of the narrative, but also the senseproduced at the level of impersonal, autopoietic processes through which virtualintensities can gain resonance (see Deleuze 1990, pp. 19, 187).

Ceylan takes care to disappear in order for his camera to view the faces andthe movements of his characters. In his films, we come upon many close-upshots. These shots are not only photographic in the sense of presenting stability,but they are also cinematic. Ceylan takes the time to wait for the emotions thatwill emerge from the corner of a wrinkle on the face, from an absent glance

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inhabited by interior demons. He patiently lurks in a corridor, until the momentwhen the accident occurs: the simple appearance of a protagonist in thecamera’s shot. This is an effective tactic — since the comedy of one situation islike the tragedy of another — and rewards the audience’s patience each time hegoes to the trouble of waiting.

Mutman (2006, p. 105) asserts that Ceylan has a politics in his films that is moreparticularly a resistance to the way in which an image is produced. Thus, he adds,this personal choice reveals an ethics of images through a withdrawal from theHegelian economy of recognition, of the dialectic of the recognizing slave andthe recognized master, and by implication, a withdrawal from the position ofthe “subject”, who is supposed to be an “auteur” director in this case. It is –significant in this context that in Distant, dialogues are kept to a minimum andmany scenes are passages of time without word or action, while much is narratedby implication in the fascinating beauty and intricacy of Ceylan’s images. Conse-quently, what is narrated by carefully designed and shot scenes is that whichcannot be put into words, that which cannot be brought back in speech, thesingular event as it occurs in everyday life. But this does not, however, mean that“the function of narrating is simply carried over to the image” (Mutman 2006,p. 106). In other words, when it is necessarily displaced to the image, somethingelse happens.

What is at stake is not merely a lack of dramatic emphasis, but the creation ofan entirely different temporality, rhythm and pace, which Mutman terms the“everyday”. The flow of what might be called an everyday temporality creates adespectacularization of the image, almost as if the image has decided to givethe event the dignity of its singular continuing to happen, of its inhering in itsotherness (Mutman 2006, p. 106). Hence, Uzak shows us a very different senseof the everyday and the event. From this perspective, “the event happens inthe everyday, here and now, yet it escapes our grasp and remains distant sinceit is not an object and we are not a subject in the everyday” (Mutman 2006,p. 106).

To conclude, Distant is not an action movie; it is not about images of move-ment as such, but about images of time. It is such an image that breaks itself freefrom sensory-motor links: imaginative, purely optical or sound situations freedfrom the constraints of progressive narration. Indeed, contemporary life is satu-rated with situations which we do not know how to react to and with spaces wecannot describe (Deleuze 1989, p. xi). Crucially, everything remains real in thetime-image, which is also why it has the quality of an object, but there exists nolonger a motor extension between the action and the reality of the setting;rather, “a dreamlike connection through the intermediary of the liberated senseorgans” is established (Deleuze 1989, p. 4). But how do they “liberate” the senseorgans? As Diken (2008) states, such images act as a stimuli for thought, because,by disrupting the chronological understanding of events, that is, by disrupting theperspective of the actual narrative by difference, their intervention enables theviewer to see time as a virtual whole. If the time-image opens up the actual tothe virtual, this is not a static relationship based on captivity. Rather, because it

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produces sense, the time-image ideally allows for creativity. In other words, withthe time-image

we are not just within time, caught up in its flow; we can distance ourselves fromimmediate and automatic response because we can perceive that world as thisor that. It is the virtual that opens the power of human decision or freedom.(Colebrook 2002, p. 167)

What can we say about Distant in this context? For instance, is producing time-image enough in cinema?

Let us call upon Deleuze again. The distinction that Deleuze draws betweenthe sensory-motor schema and that of the time-image emerges from Bergson’sdiscussion of the faculties of perception and the actualization of images intoaction. In order to act upon its environment, a body must isolate from the undif-ferentiated flow it perceives only those images that interest it in particular, uponwhich it can choose to act. The complex correlations between objects andimages are thus reduced to causal (and spatial) links. Deleuze finds that the asso-ciations made between elements in the movement-image progress along a similartrajectory. But to understand the ways in which the time-image breaks from thismodality, we must look more closely at Bergson’s theory of perception.

In Matter and Memory (first published in 1896), Bergson proposes a definitionof matter:

Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of “images”. And by “image” we mean acertain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representa-tion, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed half-way between the “thing” and the “representation”. (Bergson 1991, p. 9)

We could say here, following Deleuze, that Bergson’s theory of matter allows usto see films not as fixed representations, concrete images of a “real” object, butas images in their own right, with their own duration and axes of movement. Whatwe might call the “film-image” thus occurs in the gap between subject and object,through the collision of affective images. “Rather than a question of eithercontent or form, the difference lies in their affective power, whether they arebent toward action, in the case of the movement image, or if they open into differ-ent temporal modalities” (Herzog 2000). It is in this second category that the time-image falls, and it is here that Deleuze locates the creative potential of film. Thispotential does not exist solely within the physical image itself, however, but iscontained as well in the modes of perception and thinking that it triggers.

The act of creation, for Bergson, is a solution to a challenge from the outside,from life. The question of cinema is not a question of representing or perceivingmovement (as in Distant), but of thinking through movement, of creating newmovements and new images of thought. They can only be achieved through anactive, productive mode of perception, “one that reads and intuits rather thanmerely distilling for its immediate usefulness” (Herzog 2000).

“Style in philosophy”, Deleuze writes:

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strains toward three different poles: concepts or new ways of thinking; percepts,or new ways of seeing and hearing; and affects, or new ways of feeling. They’rethe philosophical trinity, philosophy as opera: you need all three to get thingsmoving. (Deleuze 1995, pp. 164–165)

Cinema contains the potential to transect all three poles. While its relation topercepts and affects has been touched upon in terms of the act of perception,the concept draws cinema toward a new type of image, the image of thought.

In this context, there must be a further link between thought and cinemabecause cinema helps us sense and feel the virtual. The “any-space-whatever”emerges because the link between man and nature breaks. The “any-space-what-ever” functions in much the same manner that the time-image does: it places theidentity of character, plot, etc. into crisis. Thus, one could say that the time-image is the condition for the possibility of thought, but it is also the conditionwhich makes a complete, closed thought impossible, or which places truth in crisis.

In Distant, except for the last scene, we are left without any possibility of apositive change. The characters’ limitations, such as a blasé attitude, despair,loneliness or, in a clear sense, passivity, prevent them from affection to thinking,from passivity to acting. For example, Mahmut’s lack of will prevents him fromsuch an “understanding” of Yusuf for it is only on the basis of will that the selfcan decide on its destiny, change or overcome itself. In this respect, Mahmutseems to be caught up in the pessimist lock in a way reminiscent of an animal incaptivity. Since the world of being is really a world of becoming (since the self isnot an unchanging category), one can strive to enlarge one’s perspective andassume the responsibility for oneself, which is also the definition of freedom. Inthis sense, one can will to overcome this pessimism, a will which is lacking inMahmut (see Diken 2008).

It should be noted that the first point to make is that the creation of time-image is not, and does not need to be, an end in itself in cinema. If the time-image “disturbs” the constellation of the actual world through a shock, this shockgives birth to thought, to thinking. Deleuze (1989, p. 156) calls this automaticthought, which “arouses the thinker in you” without being related to or causedby the representational aspects of a film, “spiritual automaton”. What doescinema force us to think, then? It forces us to think the open, the virtual“whole”. Yet, since cinema itself is part of this whole, it is impossible for it tothink the whole from a partial perspective. In other words, cinema forces us tothink what is impossible, that is, a nothingness: the inexistence of the virtual(which is real but not actual), the impossible virtual, the unthinkable in thought(see Deleuze 1989, pp. 156–157, 168; also Diken 2008).

Although art and philosophy are materially different enterprises, the arts canbe used to affect a new philosophical style because, Deleuze claims, they arecomparable and even compatible. Directors, painters, architects, musicians andphilosophers are all essentially “thinkers” (Deleuze 1986, p. ix). The differenceis that artists, unlike philosophers, do not create concepts; rather, they create“percepts” and “affects”, which are particular to a given medium but whichphilosophy can engage conceptually (Flaxman 2000, p. 3). The cinema creates

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images and signs, the conceptualization of which revitalizes thought. ForDeleuze, image and thought merge on what he calls “the plane of immanence”,a transcendental, preindividual and even prephilosophical field of infinitevariation (Flaxman 2000, p. 7).

Hence, the question is not whether a film is “successful” or not, but ratherwhether it gives rise to new images of thought, new acts of creation. The pointis not for a film to make us think, but for us, via the affect, the percept, to thinkfilmicly. This is not an apolitical or ahistorical practice. It demands a rigorousrejection of binaristic thinking, stratification and linearity.

Modern City Life and Loneliness

Distant at its best poses significant questions about loneliness and isolatedmodern life, and it is a deeply-felt film about a uniquely masculine register ofurban solitude. In this sense, Distant is a story where loneliness, disillusionand despair mix because “it captures the sadness of contemporary life withoutintimacy. Without passion or joy, just with a hardly assumed fate” (Ebert 2004).

Theories of the modern city have frequently figured urban life as isolating,anonymous, degrading of social ties, hostile to community. The very scale,density and diversity of urban populations, in one version, separate and alienateindividuals from each other. For instance, Tonkiss (2003) discusses the relationbetween urban solitude and community, and suggests an “ethics of indifference”that opens up certain rights to the city. He associates this “ethics of indiffer-ence” with what White calls “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy”(quoted in Tonkiss 2003, p. 300). It involves a certain freedom in the city, thelonely liberty of knowing that no one is looking, nobody is listening. Solitudeappears here as a kind of social relation, as a form of social being, rather thansimply as the absence of sociality (Levinas 1987). Not interacting with others inthis sense becomes a primary condition for urban social life, securing individualcalm together with relative social peace.

The mundane maneuvers of everyday life (not making eye-contact on thesidewalk, ignoring the weird intimacy of the crowded subway) play out on amicroscale a wider tension between individuality and collective life. In the city,as elsewhere, individual freedom has as its correlates impersonality and anonym-ity, “[f]or here, as elsewhere”, Simmel (1997, p. 181) writes wonderfully, “it isby no means necessary that the freedom of man be reflected in his emotionallife as comfort”. We find similar ideas in the urban memoirs of Benjamin (1986,p. 13), who remembers how, on childhood walks in the city with his mother,“solitude appeared to me as the fit state of man”, as well as in the urban sociol-ogy of Louis Wirth (1995, p. 70): “being with others in the city is characterizedby close — sometimes unsettlingly close — physical proximity twinned with socialdistance”. Perhaps, one could assert that keeping your distance in the press ofup-close bodies is a special urban trick or art. The uncanny intimacy that is thetouch of strangers is only the most immediate version of the bodily nearness and

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social distance that is typical of urban life. As the passing scene orients the indi-vidual to a succession of images, others become just so many things in a generalfield of objects. You learn to look past a face. Such a “blasé attitude” is at oncean inuring against and an acceptance of difference.

In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (first published in 1903), Simmel arguesthat city dwellers develop a “blasé attitude” toward all things. Their onlymeasure of things is in terms of quantities and they lose any sense of qualities.Out of this indifference comes a deep reserve and an aversion to contact withothers. Simmel elucidates some social—psychological features of the culture ofmodern cities. In the modern city, many anonymous persons come into fleetingcontact with one another, for example, travelling on public transport or purchas-ing goods in a department store. Individuals are removed from the emotional tiesand social bonds that link people together in smaller communities. According toSimmel, the money economy, the blasé attitude, reserve and intellectuality, allof them are governed by the same principles — reduction of quality to quantity,of the concrete values of life to the mediating value of money. However, hecautions against any attribution of causality.

Simmel describes a social—psychological configuration of affects which seemscharacteristic of those who live in large urban centers. These affects could beregarded as not truly social, not based on relationality or participation. Theurban dweller’s mental life is predominantly intellectualistic in character.People respond to situations in a rational rather than an emotional manner. Thebroad orientation of urban dwellers tends to be calculative; the daily life ofpeople is filled “with weighing, calculating, enumerating”, which reduces “qual-itative values to quantitative terms” (Simmel 1971a, p. 328). A common stanceof urban dwellers is thus the blasé outlook: a renunciation of responsiveness andan indifference towards the values that distinguish things. The world of the blaséperson is flat, grey and homogenous. Often accompanying this outlook is to befound an attitude of reserve. A reserved attitude acts as a protective shield forthe urban dweller behind which candid views and heartfelt sentiments can bepreserved from the scrutiny of others.

In Distant, Yusuf is troubled by relations between himself and Mahmut, betweenindifference and sociality. Yusuf stands as a typical object of indifference whileMahmut stands as a passive subject of solitude, and having such a blasé attitude,does not appear to have cherished privacy unduly. Simply put, he is an example tourban loneliness who is leading a solitary, obsessive and carefully orchestrated life,one in which he cannot escape from his lingering unhappiness, blasé attitude andinability to communicate with others. Though Mahmut and Yusuf have a commonbackground and share the same small domestic space, they barely communicatewith each other, and literally keep the doors closed between the different roomsthat they occupy. Their relationship (or non-relationship) is like “take and take”— rather than “give and take”. Hence, Distant is about the distances that open upinexorably as we enter middle age: “between the past and the present, betweenthe present and an unattainable future, and between lonely men who shut them-selves in their own impregnable carapaces of pride” (Ebert 2004).

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One can find many scenes in Distant about blasé attitudes, urban loneliness,social distance and the city’s hostility to the countryside. For instance, whenYusuf wants to call his mother he asks Mahmut, and while he speaks on the phoneMahmut wiretaps him. This scene is a sign of city dwellers’ lack of confidenceregarding country folk. While by no means an ogre, Mahmut is petty bourgeoisand spends much of his time putting Yusuf’s shoes in a cupboard and turning offany lights Yusuf may have left on. At one point it seems as if Yusuf has found ajob, but when he indirectly asks Mahmut to be his “guarantor”, the latter doesnot even notice. Mahmut is just oblivious to Yusuf’s predicament.

Both men soon long for the absence of the other. They are a couple of loserslost in their own respective worlds. Due to Mahmut’s insistence on keeping therelationship distant, Yusuf is forced to find conversation in local cafes, wearingthe same clothes he arrived in. In parallel scenes, both men follow women at adistance without daring to address them and — as a key symbol of their alienationand desire — both are seen (separately, of course) staring out over the vast gulfof water that is the Bosphorus. Mahmut is very much a loner who enjoys his soli-tude. He usually stays at home and spends his time in the interior places. Also,Yusuf — a poor, lonely man whose lack of cultural and economic capital preventshim from being a part of city life — always watches the streets and people froma distance.

Urban ideals, like others, are always flawed. The special capacity of cities forprivacy also allows for blasé attitudes, unconcern, neglect, disrespect. Thebalance between difference and indifference is a precarious one. Ceylan oftenworks with foregrounds and backgrounds, in focus and blurred, close-ups andlong shots. But the beauty of these landscapes in the city is often deceptive,“seeming to refer to something else, something abysmal: power struggles, thedesire to conquer, refusal, uncertainty and doubt” (Farzanefar 2007).

As Ceylan observes about modern city life: “You begin to live in your ownapartment like a prison” (Ceylan 2003, p. 209). Today’s large urban centersconsist not only of tourist attractions, museums and up-scale shops, but alsoinclude the homeless living in cardboard tents underneath bridges and the thou-sands of isolated apartment dwellers who rarely venture out, content to live ananonymous existence. Freedom in the city means “negative freedom”, the free-dom that follows in part from the indifference of others — the right to be leftalone. If cities stand as the “place where the other is and where we ourselves areother, as the place where we play the other” (Barthes 1997, p. 171), the logic ofotherness is frequently played out in violent modes of exclusion or in isolatingforms of disconnection and strangeness.

Uses of the Stranger: Dirt

In Distant, Yusuf is depicted as a man alienated by being a stranger and thusby being distant to people and his own emotions. He recently became unem-ployed when the local factory laid off a thousand workers, probably most of the

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population of his village and surrounding areas. He has come to Istanbul to staywith Mahmut while he tries to find employment in the shipping industry, havingfantasies of seeing the world and making lots of money. Contrary to Mahmut, heis uncultured, uneducated and uncouth, and has no money, no skills and nochoices. In this context, he is a typical example of a “modern stranger”. WhatYusuf is confronted with in Istanbul is not a new and different life but rather his“provincialism” (Suner 2006, p. 117).

Mahmut has a keen sense of smell2 and is bothered by a mouse in the kitchenthat has eluded the sticky trap on the floor. One night, the mouse is caught inthe trap and starts to squeak. Both Mahmut and Yusuf wake up. Mahmut does notdo anything and tells Yusuf to leave it in the bathroom. But Yusuf feels pity forthe mouse and offers to do something about it for Mahmut. Mahmut does not doanything and asks Yusuf to handle it. Yusuf puts the whole thing in a plasic bagand throws it out in the trash. However, the mouse is still alive and there arecats around. Thus Yusuf kills the mouse by hitting it against the wall. The mousedies and Yusuf dumps the bag in the bin. Here, Yusuf is depicted as a strangerwho does “dirty things” like washing, cleaning, tidying up, cooking and disposingof rubbish, which people can usually find “vulgar”, dirty and boring. The mouseis a telling metaphor for Yusuf’s life, a metaphor of his strangeness. It is also atelling metaphor and yet another echo of the distance between people, aroundpeople, within people and everywhere.

More often than not, people become strangers either because they have noother choice or, less dramatically, because they are in pursuit of a better life.The story of the stranger almost always begins with the “permission” of the polit-ical authorities in the group, who, in fact, in many cases, actively invite orrecruit outsiders. In order to scrutinize the “uses of the stranger”, Karakayalı(2006, p. 314) mainly uses Simmel’s conceptualization of the stranger andprovides us with four types of “uses of the stranger”: circulation (of goods,money and information), arbitration, management of secret/sacred domainsand, finally, what might be called “dirty jobs”.

There is a rather direct link between dirt and strangeness. Thus, for example,although artisans in ancient societies often had a “magical charisma”, especiallyin ancient Greece, they were seen as practicing “banausic” (practical, utilitar-ian, only working for profit) labor, which implied that, in contradistinction toagricultural labor, this kind of work was done in closed, dark rooms, filled withpolluted air (quoted in Karakayalı 2006, p. 323). More generally, “[b]y the fourthcentury [BC] the word banausia conveyed the idea of vulgarity, bad taste; and its

2. Over the centuries, the bourgeoisie have sought to distance themselves from social subordinatesthrough smell and scent, and they are an indication of how European society was changing in thenineteenth century. Removing dirt from the poor was equivalent to increasing their wisdom;convincing the bourgeois of the need to wash was to prepare him/her to exercise the virtues of his/her class. The concern to avoid getting dirty, the new frequency of ablutions, and the stress on thespecific requirements of washing shaped the bourgeoisie’s apprenticeship in hygienic practices.Mahmut is a petty bourgeois and when he smells Yusuf’s shoes, he aims to separate himself fromYusuf. It is a way of insisting on class differences, making a clear distinction between urban man andcountry man, individualism and community, petty bourgeois and peasant.

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‘technical’ meaning was being discussed in ‘philosophical circles’” (Karakayalı2006, p. 323). Both Plato and Aristotle condemned banausic labor; the latterargued that a good polis should never employ its citizens in this type of occupa-tion. Without doubt, this applies to the case of “guest workers” in westernEurope, who, at least initially, are often employed in cleaning jobs. So also is thecase of domestic workers and nannies from developing countries who areemployed in wealthy households in the West, and whose major tasks includewashing, cleaning, tidying up and cooking — tasks that other family membersusually find “vulgar”, dirty and boring.

The case of “guest workers” is indeed quite important for understanding thesituation of strangers in modern society.

Although the relationship between the stranger and dirt has almost a universalnature, it seems to be all the more emphasized in the twentieth century, over-shadowing all other attributes of strangers, such as mobility and neutrality. Nodoubt, the most paradigmatic example of the stranger in the twentieth centuryhas neither been the “trader”, nor the “judge”, nor even the “confidant”, butthe migrant worker, who performs unskilled manual labor. In fact, today, thisimage seems to be increasingly replaced by the refugee who is kept in closelyscrutinized asylums, or the illegal immigrant who hides in containers in commer-cial ships or who crosses borders, crawling under barbed wire in the dark(Karakayalı 2006, p. 324).

The problem with this type of stranger here is related to the question ofwhether the modern era has produced a new stranger and, if so, in what form? Itis probably this question that has led some commentators to argue that theconceptual framework developed about the stranger can only be applied to“traditional” strangers and is quite useless in dealing with the “modernstranger”. Thus, Harman (1988) suggests that in stark contrast to the stranger inpremodern societies, modern strangers are those who seek “community” in aworld where formal, impersonal and distanced relations between people havebecome the norm (as, for example, in the case of Yusuf, who migrated to Istanbulfrom a small town). While a full discussion of the various senses in which thecategory of “the other” is used in modern social thought is beyond the scope ofour discussion (Otnes 1997), it is worth noting that, for Simmel, strangenessrefers to a very specific form of otherness that is based on extraneousness or“alien origin”. At the same time, stranger relations epitomize the tensionbetween distance and nearness that permeates all social relations: “all personalrelations whatsoever can be analyzed in terms of this scheme” (Simmel 1971b,p. 146). On a different note, Bauman (1991) turns the notion of the stranger intoa metaphor and extends its usage by “applying” it to groups such as the “newpoor”, who are an integral part of late-modern societies but who cannot enjoythe fruits of the “consumption society”.

Bauman’s conceptualization of the stranger has gone through a series ofchanges. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Bauman’s conception is basedon the experience of European Jews, which is also the “classical” example inmuch of the early sociological literature (see Karakayalı 2003a, b). In Modernity

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and Ambivalence (1991), however, the stranger takes on a metaphorical sense,signifying ambivalence and indetermination in social relations. One should notethat, despite appearances, “Bauman’s thesis does not directly follow fromSimmel’s work. Although Simmel underlines that strangers are not merelyoutsiders, there is no indication in his text that they should therefore be char-acterized as ambivalent” (Karakayalı 2006, p. 325). At this point, we could saythat “Simmel’s stranger is ambivalent; he is constantly ‘both/and’, but he isstill a generalized city dweller. As opposed to this, Bauman’s focus is on howdifferent kinds of city dwellers move or cannot move in the city” (Diken 1998,p. 135).

The modern stranger appears in two guises and at two different, but insepara-ble, levels. At a global level, the modern stranger can be viewed as the citizenof a post-colonial nation. It might even be argued that the “Third World” of theCold War era was, if not still is, a kind of global ghetto. At a local or “national”level, modern strangers are the immigrants who have migrated either to themetropoles of old colonial powers from previous colonies, or, as in the case ofimmigration to North America, who arrive to a newly colonized land from thepoorer or troubled regions of the world (Karakayalı 2006, p. 326).

This point is crucial for understanding both the similarities and differencesbetween “old” and “new” strangers. In pre-industrial societies, the strangerappears as a modernizing element. In such societies, strangers are assigned tothe most unorthodox and uncommon tasks that often require special skills; theyare far more mobile, and often more “objective” and “rational” than thenatives. In modern society, the stranger goes through a metamorphosis. The“modern stranger” — like Yusuf — appears to be far too “traditional”, too “back-ward”, too community-oriented, too little educated, and unskilled. Modernstrangers often take upon themselves the most primitive, the most “common”,in short the “dirtiest” tasks (Karakayalı 2006, p. 326).

Hope

According to Mutman, Distant can be read as the allegory of a historical partingbetween the intellectual and the working class as well as between theory andpractice — “a parting determined by a violent and rapid process of the constitu-tion of a new capitalist hegemony which defeated both groups and shifted thesocial position of intellectuals” (Mutman 2006, p. 109). Speaking of the film ashistorical allegory, we should not forget that the ancient Greek word “allegory”means “telling in another way”, or literally “other-telling”. The “other-telling”cannot forget the other in telling:

The Distant respects Yusuf’s escape from his script and determination. If it isthe return of the everyday and the marginal, this return is not the productionof a victorious historical determination, nor a better historical image. Itproduces an image which does not invest in or speculate on its visibility but de-spectacularizes itself. Breaking with the empty and homogenous time of progress

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and its completion of events as achieved and past history, it maintains the silentinscription of the event in its creation of an everyday time of insignificance anderasure. In this, it produces an image to-come rather than the next or futureimage and joins its protagonist’s minor of resistance and line of flight. (Mutman2006, p. 110)

At a distance is always the other. At a distance from Mahmut, there stands Yusuf.The realization that “Yusuf is the nearest thing Mahmut will now ever get tohuman companionship in the evening of his life is appallingly sad and funny”(Bradshaw 2004). In the final scene, Mahmut smokes a Samsun (a cheap cigarettebrand in Turkey) that Yusuf has left in his house. Samsun has a hard and bittertaste Mahmut has built up an existence in Istanbul and thus smokes good-qualitycigarettes such as Marlboro Lights. Mahmut has obviously become more and morebourgeois and has new values. You cannot change your class without paying forit. The big town is full of lonely lives and to share something is getting more andmore difficult, if not impossible. Contrary to other negative affects depicted inthe film, this final scene is full of hope. Having “survived” his (un)welcomed visi-tor, Mahmut sits watching the ships pass by him and smokes the hard and bitterSamsun. The open-image, the narrative does not close; it obliges the audienceto think. Mahmut given up smoking, but as Yusuf has left some cigarettes behind,he chooses to smoke one, thereby stepping out of character, and any changesuggests hope.

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