Over the past 10 years, Iranian films have popped up on the arthouse scene with increasing regularity, and to much acclaim. So, perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that Iran’s western neighbor, Turkey, has an equally rich cinematic culture, with origins all the way back to the silent screen era. By the 1970s, Turkey was producing between 100 and 300 movies per year. The rest of the world took notice in 1982, when Yilmaz Güney’s incendiary Yol won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Now Güney’s maverick moviemaking has inspired a new generation of independent filmmakers, many of whom were featured at the Museum of Fine Art’s recent Turkish Film Festival. One of the entries in that series was by Ömer Kavur, who considered by many to be Turkey’s most important contemporary director. This week, the Harvard Film Archive offers its own mini-festival of his work.

Kavur indeed specializes in “cinematic dreams.” His films are enigmatic and chock full of symbolism; his protagonists (usually men) embark on a quest that they — and we — struggle to comprehend. They receive visitations from beautiful, elusive women. Angels? Muses? Ghosts? Goddesses? Unknown. Everyday rituals and mundane tasks are interrupted or altered by surreal events.

Above all, past, present, and future collide. Kavur is obsessed with time: clocks appear prominently in almost all of his films. Clockmakers acquire heroic status. Characters claim that the mechanisms of timepieces are directly linked to the human soul. Are the clocks our connection to some fourth (or fifth or sixth) dimension? Are we, as Kavur puts it, just “floating on the surface”?

The earliest film in the series, Yusef and Kenan (1979; March 26 at 7 p.m.), offers glimmers of Kavur’s definitive style: his fascination with the cobbled streets of Turkey’s cities and the green hills of its countryside, his affection for children, and his deep respect for traditional crafts. The predictable plot, which traces two young orphans’ struggle to survive on the mean streets of Istanbul, calls attention to the plight of homeless street kids. The influence of Güney, whose work was grounded in political activism and social critique, is keenly felt.

Veering in a completely different direction, Motherland Hotel (1987; March 27 at 7 p.m.) offers a harrowing portrait of psychological disintegration. Zebercet, the overseer of an Istanbul inn, is fixated on a beautiful guest who has already checked out at the film’s start. He desperately hopes she’ll return, but it’s clear she won’t. As the days pass, he becomes increasingly unhinged. Repressed, icy, and downright creepy, Zebercet bears more than a passing resemblance to the manager of the Bates Motel.

If Motherland Hotel is a claustrophobic descent into Hell, Night Journey (1987; March 24 at 7 p.m.) is an elegiac meditation on art and transience. Ali, a beleaguered movie director, can’t generate much enthusiasm for his latest project until location scouting leads him to a “real ghost town,” a city abandoned in 1923 by its Greek residents. He decides to remain there, moving into a crumbling church to rewrite his script and to do some soul searching. As he surrenders to the spell of the place, his writing dissolves into memories (real and imagined) and unanswerable questions.

The young photographer in The Secret Face (1991; March 25 at 7 p.m. and March 30 at 9:15 p.m.) is a little less willing to submit to his fate. His tale, modeled on the myth of Parsifal and the Holy Grail, involves yet another mystery lady, a series of broken clocks, photographs of anonymous subjects, and a wise clockmaker. The photographer’s determination to uncover the connections among these seemingly disparate elements takes him on a long magical, mystery tour through several cities. Acclaimed novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote the screenplay (Kavur scripted the other four films here), and that contributes to the exceptional beauty of this poetic film.

The Journey on the Hour Hand (1997, March 28; at 7 p.m. and March 30 at 7 p.m.) screened at Cannes and has won many awards in Turkey. Kavur has said that the film is loosely based on the Odyssey, but it also feels rooted in film noir. His wanderer, a clock repairman, finds himself enmeshed in shady dealings when he arrives in a strange town to fix a broken clock tower. The resident femme fatale is Esra (who, like Penelope, weaves and waits), owner of the clock tower and keeper of dark secrets. As in any good noir, the aura here is at once foreboding and seductive.

At various points, Kavur’s work recalls Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Alain Resnais, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Carol Reed, and even the writing of Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino. But he has a grace and gravity of his own, at once timeless and, well, time-full. His latest film, Melekler Evi, was completed this fall but has yet to be shown in the US. Let’s hope it makes its way here.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001