Cinema of Thought: A Dialectic of Body and Brain in Turkish Art Cinema

Abstract

Can films contribute to the production of thought? Or, to put the question more radically, can films generate thought on their own, or can there be films that think the unthought? When thought is equated with rationality, logic, concepts, generalizations, and abstractions, the answer can be “no” at the outset, particularly when ordinary people in the flow of their daily lives typically turn to mass films for escapism. On the other side of the spectrum, among the philosophers and social scientists who argue that cinema might contain serious intellectual elements, there is no general approach that radically challenges the meaning that ordinary people may attach to films. By focusing on Deleuze’s concepts of “body-cinema” and “brain-cinema”, this article aims to showcase how films can philosophize on their own. While going beyond the traditional association of thought with mind and reasoning, this article explores the diffused location of thought, existing in our very sensations and emotions. This article analyzes some of the significant films from the Turkish art cinema—both old and recent—to explore how thought is constituted with reference to the human body and brain in cinema.

1. Introduction

Can films contribute to the production of thought? Or, to put the question more radically, can films generate thought on their own, or can there be films that think the unthought? When thought is equated with rationality, logic, concepts, generalizations, and abstractions, the answer can be “no” at the outset, particularly when ordinary people in the flow of their daily lives turn to mass films for escapism. Cinema may contain serious intellectual elements; there is no general approach that can account for the meaning ordinary people attach to films. Can films only make concepts and theoretical arguments more concrete? Thanks to Deleuze’s work on the subject, the exploration of cinema’s capacity for producing thought about the things that escape the normal mode of thinking became possible. Such cinema means that films can produce new ideas in their own way through their own operations. The purpose of this study is to establish this argument. This article showcases how films philosophize on their own in light of the relationship between cinema and thought by focusing on Deleuze’s concepts of “body-cinema” and “brain-cinema”. While going beyond the traditional association of thought with mind and reasoning, this study explores the diffused location of thought, existing in our very sensations and emotions. This article analyzes some of the significant films from Turkish art cinema—both old and recent—to explore how thought is constituted with reference to the human body and brain in cinema.

We propose the Cine-Philosophical1 (also SineFilozofi) approach to examine the relation between thought and cinema. This approach contends that films can independently, in their own style, produce philosophy or thought. This approach differs from others, such as Daniel Frampton, who uses the term “filmosophy” [1], and Thomas Wartenberg [2], who prefers the term “cinematic philosophy”. Wartenberg does not believe that films can independently produce philosophy like written philosophy; the reference point is written philosophy. This is because Thomas Wartenberg, like most film philosophers, such as Robert Sinnerbrink [3], considers “philosophy” and “cinema” as two entirely separate fields. Even though philosophy is not always explicitly emphasized in these discussions, it is equated with the written medium; it is argued that there is no philosophy without writing. Logic, rationality, and generalization as well as theoretical, abstract, and conceptual discussion are accepted as the essentials of philosophy. It is assumed that art, and cinema in particular, operates in a separate domain and lacks these characteristics of philosophy. Although Frampton’s concept of “filmosophy” places films and their own epistemological and ontological originality at the center, it does not develop a framework that takes into account the fundamental characteristics of the medium. Frampton relates the aesthetics of films to written philosophical arguments, around the ideas that “films think” and “films do something to us”. Secondly, filmosophy focuses on the concept of “film” instead of “cinema”. The concept of “film” in filmosophy refers both to the film reel and to cinema, or the moving-image product.

Tal Shamir’s [4] conception of “cinematic philosophy” is more radical. According to this approach, philosophy is practiced in three ways: written, oral, and cinematic. Philosophy began orally in the Ancient Greece in Agora. Socrates produced thought through dialogues with the youth of Athens. Plato then transcribed these dialogues into writing, blending them with his own interpretations and thoughts, making him a philosopher in his own right, not just a transcriber of the oral philosophy. From this point on, it was believed that philosophy could not be practiced without writing; the channel necessary for the transmission of thought was confused with the thought itself. According to Shamir’s argument, cinema, a new medium, was judged in the same way by those involved in written philosophy. According to this assumption, the images in cinema appeal to emotions and affectivity; they have no relation to thought. Images contain deceptive elements, like the shadows in the allegory of the cave. The images that philosophy (written philosophy) has always sought to avoid are now presented in their new form in cinema.

Cine-Philosophy denotes a philosophy that is practiced through a composition of different elements of cinema, including images, sounds, text, and so on, just as oral philosophy is practiced through speech and written philosophy is practiced through writing. Our conception of cinema is more inclusive, encompassing Deleuze’s concepts of “movement-image” and “time-image”. Movement-image in cinema refers to “imaging of the movement” or slices or what Deleuze calls, after Bergson, “images” of the ever-changing world. For Bergson and Deleuze, everything in the universe is interconnected and everything is constantly in motion. Cinema is capable of capturing things (images) with their motion. Similarly, time-image means “imaging of time”, which refers to duration as opposed to the linear and mechanical clock-time2. Unlike clock-time, this pure time changes with changing situations and states of human conscious. Hence, past and future can overlap in the present through the mediation of memory3. Deleuze attributes movement-image to classical cinema, as the film reveals the movement in linear fashion: perception–affection–action. The modern cinema, that is, the cinema roughly following the World War II, is characterized by time-image as it breaks the simplistic linearity of perception–affection–action and delves into the consciousness of its characters, the complexity of situations, and the existence of things in pure time. In both types of cinema, the images are produced through camera movement, angles, and editing, and they consist of blocks of images, sound, and text. These are composed and intertwined. For example, the sound in cinema is different from the sound of the philosophy teacher and student in a philosophy class; in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie [7], the sound of a philosophy professor speaking to Nana in a café becomes cine-image in accordance with the cinematic style, ontic structure, and composition. The sound transforms just as the image transforms. There is a great difference between what we see directly through our eyes and the vision made possible in cinema through the operation of the camera, movements, angles, editing, sound, colors, and so on. Cine-operations in cinema help us see things as they are pure in themselves as “images” with their time and movement; for Deleuze, drawing on Bergson, everything in the universe is an image, which is somewhere between the matter and the representation. Thus, we move beyond our given eyes toward a “universal variation” (Deleuze Cinema II) [8]. The vision we make with our eyes is a limited vision, as Bergson persistently points out in his works, because it narrows vision to our own interests and purposes. Cinema operations can show us existence as it is, beyond our interests and purposes, a kind of contemplation. Similarly, the text seen in cinema also transforms through the operations of cinema. If we recall Godard’s films, we occasionally encounter intertitles. While the image and sound blocks continue, there is a sudden cut, and an intertitle appears. This text is no longer a bookish text; it is a cinematic text that sometimes interrupts the image and sound, sometimes complements them. Thus, we can speak of three types of philosophy: oral philosophy, written philosophy, and cine-philosophy. These three modes of doing philosophy are different ways of reaching the great thought or philosophy. These media are the extensions of thought, each providing a different and unique access to philosophy or thought, and none has superiority over the other.

It is necessary here to note that each medium has its own limitations and possibilities. Each medium contributes to philosophical thinking through different modes. For example, philosophizing concepts and rational discussions are easier through print than through other media. It is more convenient to make an idea emotive with cine-images, as they are essentially affective. This does not mean that emotion and affect are completely disconnected from rationality and logic, as will be demonstrated later in this study. In print, thoughts remain abstractions of the mind; but in cinema, ideas are sensations of body perceptions. This means that cinema can combine an idea with a sensory experience, making them more inclusive, as will be discussed in this study. With only written argumentation and abstract, general discussions based on logic, it is possible to reach only one side of thought.

To explore the relationship between thought, body, and cinema, this study analyzes some of the notable films of the Turkish art cinema that can be categorized under the terms of Deleuze as modern cinema. The films include Sevmek Zamanı (Time to Love) [9], Vesikali Yarim (My Prostitute Love) [10], Ben O Değilim (I Am not Him/Her) [11], Yol Kenarı (Roadside) [12], Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) [13], Kader (Destiny) [14], Seni Buldum Ya! (I Found You) [15], Nasipse Adayız (You Know Him) [16], and 11’e 10 Kala (10 min to 11) [17].

2. On Thought, Body, and Cinema

One of the oldest questions in written philosophy is, “What is thinking?”. While Aristotle argued that the most fundamental characteristic distinguishing humans from other living beings is “reason”, he also equated reason with thought. However, the thought considered in this study is not equated with reason, science, written philosophy, or even art. There are two elements that must be emphasized here: “body” and “mind”. It is impossible to establish the relationship between cinema and thought without considering the “body” and “mind”. Feeling and understanding our physical body and brain through the collaboration of different philosophical forms (oral platform, written platform, cinematic) is easier. Only oral, written, and cinematic forms help us see the body and brain from specific points of view. Written philosophy, when it declares itself as pure philosophy, can only conceptualize the body and brain; however, the body cannot be touched, and the pathos in the mind cannot be accessed. For this reason, cinema can be an opportunity to bring written philosophy down from the academic ivory tower to the Agora, to the marketplace. We consider cinema to be the “philosophy of the marketplace” and the “art of the marketplace”. Anyone with the ability to see and hear can access the thought in films. For this reason, cinema is a democratic form of philosophy. This article reflects on the style of thought centered on the mind and body that films create. The study evaluates Deleuze’s conceptualization of “body cinema” and “brain cinema” by drawing on various concepts from written philosophy and different films.

In Cinema II: The Time-Image [8], Gilles Deleuze argues that what escapes thought is actually “life”; to reach the “unthought” is to reach “life” (189). At this point, Aristotle’s definition of man as a “thinking animal” now splits off in a different direction: the body. To reach life, one must first dive into the body. The body relentlessly forces thought to confront what escapes it, namely life. Deleuze clearly reverses the ordering: life can no longer be brought before the categories of thought; rather, thought “will be thrown into the categories of life”. The categories of life consist of the body’s postures and gestures (189). When Spinoza suggested that we do not yet know what a body or a substance can do, he actually opened up a vast field for Deleuze in terms of thought. If we do not know what the body is capable of, then thinking, in this case, involves learning what the body can do, its postures, gestures, and capacities (189) [8].

We can see a similar connection between thought and the body’s power and capacity made previously by Heidegger, albeit in a different context. The philosopher emphasizes, first and foremost, that thought is something we do not know and are trying to learn. In his book What Is Called Thinking? [18], Heidegger explains through the example of an apprentice carpenter who is learning to think:

“…His learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood—to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft.”

What Heidegger wants to emphasize is that thinking is like making a cabinet. The hand here has been detached from its functional connections. Other animals, such as monkeys, also have hands; however, here the hand is a living organ that goes beyond mere bodily grasp, capturing, transforming, and thinking with the powers of the wood in its context. The hand that produces films also makes imprints on different thoughts, much like a carpenter. Deleuze says that in Bresson’s films, a new idea is created: the creation of space from unrelated fragments, an undefined, unthought-of space. Deleuze notes that it is Bresson’s “hand” that creates this. Neither philosophy nor theory are the things that bring this unification about.

Thinking then is not a concept that can be reduced to an abstract mental process. On the contrary, it is related to the postures, attitudes, strengths, and actions of an extremely lively and learning body. According to Deleuze, if we want to understand thinking, we must bring it before the categories of life, namely bodily postures. Again, Heidegger explains this through a similar statement:

“We shall never learn what ‘is called’ swimming, for example, or what it ‘calls for,’ by reading a treatise on swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming. The question ‘What is called thinking?’ can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition.”

[18]

Therefore, thinking is directly related to the question, “what can a body do?”. To think is to learn what a body can do. Learning does not mean learning concepts; learning is to immerse one’s hand in wood, as in the apprentice-cabinetmaker example. It is to jump into the stream, as in the example of swimming. These acts are stripped of their functional connections. Learning is trying to catch the body’s attitudes, postures, and poses from within and being in touch with it. This is what cinema can do in this learning process. In our age, which we call the age of thinking, cinema apprehends the everyday bodies that easily escape our thought. What can a body do in its sleep, dreams, drunkenness, struggles, resistances? Cinema reveals them.

“I am not in love with you, but with your picture. Please do not interfere between the picture and me”, says Halil to Meral in Metin Erksan’s Sevmek Zamani. Sevmek Zamani is one of the significant films of Turkish art cinema, capturing deep human emotions and inner tensions. Shot in a villa on Istanbul’s famous Princes’ Islands, the film showcases the complexities of the romantic relationship between two lovers caught in social norms. The protagonist, Halil, falls in love with a photograph of a rich woman, Meral. While Meral is drawn to him, he rejects her for her wealthy background—thus continues a romantic odyssey between the two that eventually results in their death. The dialogue highlighted above not only involves the dimension of speech but also disrupts our sensory-motor mechanisms with its visual aspects: the posture, attitude, waiting, and patience of the body saying it (Halil’s body) and the body receiving it (Meral’s body). It becomes clear that we do not know what the body we think we know is capable of doing. At this moment, we recall Spinoza’s related statement that we do not know what a body can do (39) [19] and Heidegger’s “thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age” is that we are not yet thinking. The body of Halil, who is a painter in the film, does not display the usual posture or stance of a painter’s body; it is in a kind of sleep, resembling a mummy. And this drunken, melancholic, sleepwalking body, by gazing at Meral’s picture for hours, transforms the later from an ordinary copy to something more, taking it from virtual reality to actual reality. The human-body and the picture-body face each other, observing one another. The picture itself, in this state, becomes an individual. It exerts force on the human-body across from it, pulling it in. In this pulling process, the human-body journeys downward to Heidegger’s “we are not yet thinking”. The picture-body, in Halil’s eyes, is the true body, the real body, the actual body. Halil contemplates for hours in front of the picture-body, but this contemplation is not the kind of thinking we use in daily life; it is a thinking that exists in the pull of the self-withdrawing, as Heidegger would describe.

If we restate Heidegger’s claim, we can concretize what this state of thought that draws us in actually is. According to the thinker, the most thought-provoking thing in our age is that we are not yet thinking. However, our failure to think is not merely due to the body or mind not turning toward thought but is directly linked to thought’s own withdrawal. The answer to the question “when does man think?” is given by the thinker as follows: “Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking even though he may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever” (17) [18]. What the picture-body that draws Halil into itself does in Sevmek Zamanı is just this: Halil, under the influence and power of Meral’s picture’s force of attraction, surrenders and thinks. While thinking, the stance shown to us by the camera, lighting and smoking a cigarette, the angles and counter angles of the shots, the mutual gazes between the picture-body and the human-body, and Halil melting under the gaze of the picture-body—these are the categories of Halil’s state of being a thinker-body. Halil does not resist what draws him in but rather responds to the gaze of the picture-body, releasing himself freely to its force of attraction.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche hints that what thought says about what it has thought might be found in silence: “It is the still words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves’ footsteps guide the world” [20]. Kierkegaard’s central claim in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air is also that thinking can be lived in a state of waiting, spectacle, and silence. The philosopher makes the arrival of spring possible by having the lily flower and the bird welcome it in silence, giving them a voice. According to Kierkegaard, people can never manage to stay silent, which is why they always experience pain or joy either too much or too little. Words either amplify or diminish pain or joy. However, experiencing the moment as it is can only be lived in silence. The experience of the Halil in front of the image-body is similar. When physical Meral disturbs this experience, Halil becomes restless, and even though we do not hear a scream in the film, his bodily stance suggests that he wants to scream. Thinking, as Nietzsche suggests, can never speak what it has thought through shouting. However, it must be added that Nietzsche believes that shouting is necessary for people to awaken. Indeed, in his texts after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, shouts are frequent. Of course, the scream in writing is different from the scream in cinema. The scream in cinema exposes itself through all cinematic compositions. Even if we do not hear a scream in Halil’s situation, after Meral appears and intervenes between him and the picture, his bodily stance shows that he wants to shout. However, over time, Meral’s effort, or in the last gaze, her love, gradually softens Halil, and he lets himself go with the flow, greeting Meral in the boat in silence. The silence in front of Meral’s picture is now experienced in front of physical Meral. This is another moment of thinking.

Thus, thinking is a concept, intertwined with life, that cannot be confined to logic or concepts. Perhaps it escapes our grasp when we try to define it. Cinema can present thought to us in action at the moment it immerses us in a cinematic experience. Revealing the concealed, seeing it as a glimmer, a radiance, is not easily possible with what Badiou calls paradigmatic language [21]. Non-paradigmatic language, or poetic language, may allow us to see the truth in its beauty, even if only for a moment, as in Metin Erksan’s film, Time to Love is Thinking Time.

Through our analysis of the selected films from Turkish art cinema, we explore the intersection between body, brain, and thought. This study showcases how the cinematic operations enable us to exhibit the conjunction and disjunction between our knowledge and morals and feelings in a changing world, underscoring a co-constitutive character of the body and brain. As we shall see, there is not only thought in the brain, but also shock and violence; likewise, there is not only shock and violence in the body, but also emotion.

3. Body, Brain, and Thought in Cinema

3.1. Everyday/Tired Bodies and “Encounter”/“Event”

We need to classify the body analytically in order to more closely assess the thinking states of bodies. In Lütfi Ömer Akad’s Vesikali Yarim (My Prostitute Love [10]), the moment when the grocer Halil starts thinking is also the moment he starts loving. In this film, Halil falls in love at first sight with the nightclub hostess Sabiha. Sabiha’s love is produced through effort and labor, and borrowing from Walter Benjamin [22], this is “love at last sight”. Before encountering Sabiha, Halil is living in the world of beliefs and assumptions, engaging in functional, routine activities that Bergson describes as “automatic/habitual recognition” [8]. In this state, Halil is not yet in the phase of thought. However, when he meets Sabiha at the nightclub, his sensory-motor mechanism is disrupted. At that moment, he becomes the “seer/spectator”. His previous ways of seeing were aligned with his interests and desires, but now, when another body, Sabiha’s body, exerts force on his own, his eyes widen, his gaze focuses solely on Sabiha, and the song in the background is completely muted. Halil enters the world of “attentive recognition” in Bergsonian sense, the world of thought, or as Deleuze emphasizes, the world of “life” [8]. “Love at first sight” is also the moment when Halil begins to think.

In Sevmek Zamanı and Vesikali Yarim, the state of contemplation of Halil is what escapes thought, namely, that life pulls the bodies inward and the bodily positions begin to transform according to that attraction. Sometimes these bodies are tired bodies, because everything has been said before, everything is finished, and what remains is the attitudes and postures of tired bodies4. We often do not know why bodies are tired. The reasons why the bodies are tired are not given in an organic scheme. We see tired and weak bodies in images, making us aware of thought that escapes the banality of everyday life.

This tiredness prevents Halil, the wall painter (Time to Love), and Halil, the greengrocer (My Prostitute Love), from seeing what escapes thought, namely life. New possibilities in life, hidden elements, are waiting to be discovered or even invented. When we see the tired daily state of the body in cinema, we actually start to think about the “unthinkable”. When fatigue is experienced, we are pushed into life, or to put it the other way around, life begins to attract tired bodies. Deftness is to let yourself go freely into that attraction. In the end, the Halils in the two films also let themselves be pulled. Halil in Time to Love surrenders to picture-body and to Walter Benjamin’s “love at the last sight”. Halil in Time to Love, however, leaves Sabiha after a shocking first sight love. The greengrocer later becomes a vigilant walker just like the painter Halil, exhibiting contemplative bodily attitudes. Body postures begin to change. Love transforms Halils’ bodies. Halil’s thinking begins with, borrowing from Badiou, “encounters” or “events”, which is a moment of leap, a scratch, a rift in “situations” or daily routines and habitual thinking [23].

Halil in My Prostitute Love is an unthinking body that lives its daily routines before the “encounter” with Sabiha. After the encounter, Halil is caught by Sabiha’s attraction, but the problems compound here. What kind of choice is Halil, who is married and has children, going to make? Choosing means thinking. Cinema exposes bodies in the process of choosing. When Halil’s new problem of choice arises, Halil’s body gradually passes into the contemplation mode. The montage brings together Halil’s bodily postures, the sunset, landscapes, and excerpts from nature, aligning Halil’s body with the bodies of the nature. The serene scenes of nature and Halil’s contemplative scenes are superimposed. The thought of choosing draws Halil in. After making his choice, Halil’s return to his home is different from the body that assumes life after his encounter with Sabiha. He is still touching his child, and his attitude towards his mother and father are those of “required” bodily positions. Now the ethics of duty in the Kantian sense is in effect. Halil becomes the body that acts according to the ethics of duty.

Similarly, in Ben O Değilim, Nihat is swept into the mundaneness of daily life. The film is directed by Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, who belongs to the recent wave of Turkish art cinema that explores the themes of romance, societal norms, and gender issues. The film’s protagonist Nihat, played by well-known Turkish art cinema actor and scenarist, Ercan Kesal, is a middle-aged man living a lonely life. As he works in a cafeteria, he begins to draw the interest of Ayse, who invites him home, where he discovers that Ayse’s husband is in prison. The discovery changes Nihat’s life. The events that pull and push bodies gradually force both Nihat and Nihat’s viewers to think about the unthinkable. How is another type of life possible? Pirselimoğlu’s other film, Yol Kenarı (Roadside) [12], is a mystery that revolves around a town that faces mysterious deaths and natural events. Things are further complicated when a young man lands in the town to work in a café. When a stain is spotted on his back, people start believing that he is the Mahdi. The film reveals the bodies against the doomsday moment, whose reason is not shown but the consequences are brought before us. They do not even have names, they are just tired, mundane bodies of everyday life; they themselves do not know what to do. This problem puts a heavy burden on thinking: How could a different type of world be created? How should bodies change their attitudes, postures, and positions in order to escape the apocalypse? The bodies of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki Demirkubuz cinema are also tired, bodies that have difficulty in choosing. Ceylan is one of the leading art cinema directors in Turkey, known for films such as Uc Maymun (Three Monkeys), Ahlat Agci (The Wild Pear Tree), Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da, and Kis Uykusu (Winter Sleep) [24]. Time, which is the main subject in Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, takes over both history and bodies. The film revolves around the murder and search for a dead body by the state authorities. In the process, the characters’ bodies perform their mundane, routine actions, like externally manipulated puppets or emotionless mummies. In Demirkubuz’s Kader, Musa is an indifferent body despite all the events that happened to him. His unresponsiveness to his mother’s death, his lack of self-defense despite not being responsible for the death of his boss’s wife and children, indicates that we are dealing with another mummy body. What are these bodies thinking? Bodies that are unresponsive, insensitive, or react in an absurd manner, as well as stiffened mummy and puppet acts, make both the righteous characters in the film world and the audience in the conventional and real universe think. Thought arises from unusual bodily symptoms.

3.2. Ritual/Grotesque and Tired/Everyday Bodies

Deleuze [8] speaks of the ceremonial body, which refers to the grotesque state of the body beyond its tired, everyday form. Here, the camera no longer follows the everyday state of the body; the body undergoes a ritual. It is placed into a glass cage or crystal; the body is thrown into a masked ball, both grotesque and graceful—magnificent. Ultimately, the visible body reaches its disappearance.

In Vesikali Yarim and Sevmek Zamanı, we also encounter images that evoke the ceremonial body. In Sevmek Zamanı, the bourgeois woman Meral draws attention with her bodily postures and even her ceremonial gestures and speeches, which indicate that she is being observed by camera and audience. At the end of the film, when she is about to unwillingly marry someone else, her fleeing in her wedding dress, her ceremonial posture in white at the edge of the lake, and her pose after boarding the boat with Halil all represent a graceful, constructed body. The bodies in the nightclub are grotesque images, distorting the flow of music outside daily life.

The ritual body is interestingly exposed in Reha Erdem’s Seni Buldum Ya!, from the recent wave of Turkish cinema. The film captures the story of two scammers who exploit the lockdown that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. In the film, the actions of the bodies involved in fraud are presented in a grotesque manner. These actions of the bodies are a form of the power of falseness. Deleuze gives special attention to this power in Cinema II, in the section “The powers of the false”. Rather than the power of the judgmental truth, it is the opposing force first, followed by transformative creative actions, like those of an artist (1989). In Erdem’s film, the forces of falseness seep into the bodies involved in computer-mediated communication. If face-to-face communication is suspended during the pandemic period, the theatrical qualities of the body become more pronounced, especially when the fake bodies involved in crime start to display fabricated and false performances. When the fraudster of a fictional government institution named “4th Apartment” infiltrates the computers of other bodies, the bodies inevitably begin to perform according to the situation. Behind the scenes of the 4th Apartment, Kerim, and especially Felek, who interact with other bodies, have adapted themselves to the codes of the fictional state agency. Bodies move according to these codes—their ways of speaking, the legal terms they use, their postures. The other bodies also attempt to create fake gestures and dialogues that match the questioning tone. Facial expressions and gestures become parts of the ritual body. But what truly disrupts our sensory-motor mechanism are the unexpected leaps during communication. Suddenly, music interrupts, bodies stand up and dance, and with the swirling movements, they are introduced to each other from a distance. A formal interrogation is interrupted so suddenly that even the fake state official Felek stands up and performs a dance. The color and style of the clothes are in harmony with the dance. On the other hand, the women Felek wishes to con, with their theatrical speech, tactics, therapy sessions, and romantic dates, go beyond Felek’s fabricated performance. Rather than Felek influencing them with his ritual body, they start transforming him. At some point, Felek becomes a body performing therapy sessions, and when he eventually falls in love with a woman he tried to con, she, in turn, deceives him with her ritual body. Felek’s tired, everyday body has transformed into a ritual body through such experiences. After falling in love, the grotesque transformation in his body is also clearly present in his mind. He is not even regretful of being deceived by the power of falseness: Yes, he may have been deceived, he may have been conned by the woman he loves, but what matters is that he has captured life by escaping from thought, with his whole body: “I found you!”, as the film title suggests. The moment he finds her is the moment he begins to think—this is the event. As in Sevmek Zamanı and Vesikali Yarim, the moment of falling in love is the moment thinking begins.

Ercan Kesal’s Nasipse Adayız is another film that exposes the distinction between ritual bodies and everyday bodies. Kemal is a doctor in a private hospital who wants to be a politician. He enters a process where he feels forced to adopt the roles of the political world beyond his own. However, his bodily posture and the dialogues he produces struggle to fit this role. His assistants, who are in charge of helping him become a mayor, do not face these difficulties; the ritualistic nature of their speech, laughter, and bodily stances is evident. Doctor Kemal’s body is serious and tired from the start. In contrast, the grotesque bodies of those he addresses in order to obtain votes are entirely different. Their styles of expression and the bodies formed according to these styles are motivated by their own interests and desires. Eating, drinking, playing folk music, dancing, and line dancing expose a carnival-like world. The contrast between Doctor Kemal’s tired body and the grotesque bodies leads to a thought for both Doctor Kemal and us as viewers: politics itself is actually ritualistic, not scientific.

3.3. Brain-Cinema and Thought

So far we have explored the relationship of body and thought; now we shall turn to the realm of brain in cinema. It is important to note that the brain is not less passionate or less emotional than the body, just as the body is not distant from reason and logic. As Deleuze points out, “…there is as much feeling or intensity, passion, in a cinema of the brain as in a cinema of the body” [8] (p. 200). Similarly, we cannot speak of a pure cinema of the brain and body. What matters is to give more weight to one of these two. Different filmmakers compose these two through different styles. In Tayfun Pirselimoğlu’s Yol Kenarı, the ship is like a brain. The townspeople hear the apocalyptic sounds coming from this brain and sometimes observe it. It is a brain full of possibilities, and the townspeople are far from the system in their actions and discourses. There seems to be harmony between the frantic and melancholic movements of the human-brains in the town and the world-brain that is the ship. Has the internal (human-brains) called upon the external (world-brain ship), or has the external called upon the internal? It is hard to decide.

One important aspect of brain-cinema is memory. This memory is not just personal; it is a memory belonging to the cosmic dimension, in the Bergsonian sense of “generally pure past”. This memory is accessed with a sudden leap; one might land in a past event, such as primary school years, and slices from that time (teacher, friends, games, etc.) are caught and summoned. When it is called into the present, this memory is no longer purely virtual; it becomes a memory of reminiscence, with personal attributes becoming more intense. Memory also has a cultural dimension, which extends to libraries, monuments, buildings, and ceremonies. In this case, we move beyond individual memory, traveling through pre-personal and even post-personal layers. The individual-brain is always in a state of encounter with the cultural world, which transcends the persona of the individual-brain (for cultural memory, see Assmann [25]). In Pelin Esmer’s 11’e 10 Kala, the elderly Uncle Mithat’s obsession with collecting is an effort to search through the layers of the past. Uncle Mithat collects not only newspapers and other material objects but also records the sounds of everyday life on the street. Both images and physical objects now surpass Uncle Mithat’s and other individuals’ brains. This world-brain, or cosmic-brain, contains layers of past, present, and future. It holds a passing present (there is not “now”, because now always passes), past times, and seeds for the future that will be planted in the world. But it also forms the “peaks of the present”, as discussed by Bergson and Deleuze. Augustinos divides the present into three parts: the past of the present, the present of the present, and the future of the present. In this case, the “now” is gathered around an “event”. Referring to Esmer’s film, the search for Volume 11 of the Istanbul Encyclopedia is an event. In this event, Uncle Mithat realizing that the specific volume is missing forms the present moment of the event. However, Mithat had already started collecting the encyclopedia earlier, so the collection of the previous 10 volumes constitutes the past of the event. The future of the present is when Mithat sends Ali to the secondhand bookstore to find the 11th volume, and at the end of the film, after Ali leaves the apartment, he leaves behind the 11th volume.

In Esmer’s film, another event is the fact that the owners of the buildings demolish the Emniyet Apartment due to its lack of earthquake resistance and build a new building, which brings Ali and Uncle Mithat together. Ali does not want to lose his job, while Mithat refuses to leave his apartment, which is filled with his collection. The past of this event is the initiation of a petition by the homeowners to the municipality for evacuation, and the future is Ali giving up the struggle and leaving the building, while Mithat is left alone with his incomplete volume in a corner. The film ends with an open ending, and it is likely that Mithat, like Ali, has lost the struggle.

Alain Resnais, as Deleuze points out, is one of the philosopher-directors who created a brain cinema that surrounds the bodies. Resnais is not concerned with the personal traits or the storyline of the characters; rather, Resnais seeks to “extract the sensations” from characters that pass through the ages, exist in the present, and will exist in the future. In Deleuze’s terms, Resnais reaches sensations that transcend the characters and “reaches thought”. Thus, for Resnais, the seed of thought appears as sensation. When we recall Metin Erksan’s Sevmek Zamanı, the emotion that disrupts the sensory-motor mechanism of painter Halil and Meral is “love”. Once this sensation begins, the previously unseen life, body, and brain become visible. Once this act of seeing starts, there is no return. With the changing way of seeing, new forms of seeing, new branches, and new gaps emerge. Recalling the film philosopher Rudolf Arnheim, “to see is to think” [26]. Likewise, for Siegfried Kracauer, cinema saves the physical world by revealing beings that become invisible under our practical gaze in everyday life [27]. So, sensation begins with seeing, and from there, we can journey into a more complex conceptual world, the world of thought.

4. Concluding Remarks

This article first tried to expand the notion of thought as something that is more than just reasoning, which in Bergsonian terms would be “spatialization” or pulverization of thought. The thought, as this article argues, is something that subsumes bodily sensations that can address emotions. This study, while avoiding the dichotomy between body and brain, establishes the role of film in creating thought through a creative usage of the models of body and brain. By this way, every component of the film, from visual pace, tone, texts, and compositions to camera angles and sound effects, have central importance in constructing thought. As far as Turkish art cinema’s relationship with thought is concerned, a number of Turkish filmmakers—most of them have been discussed in this article—over the past decade have demonstrated a great interest in producing thought cinema. We suggest a further exploration into the reasons why Turkish art cinema has advanced in recent years, even as popular cinema has faltered in the country.