Confessions

If you are a filmmaker, you might be expected to like certain classics, which is somewhat of a cliché. Surely, I admire many classic films, but I also have odd tastes and thoughts that perhaps should be hidden to avoid judgment by film historians (or fanatic cinephiles). But, still, I want to rid myself of this burden and avoid worshiping any sacred cow accepted by any art community. So, here are my confessions:

I don’t like most of the films from the early years of cinema including the silent era, even the classics that film historians glorify. For me, everything changed when sound became a creative tool in cinema. This shift allowed the medium to develop its own distinct language, and it became not just a visual medium but a harmonious blend of auditory and visual experience. At the end of the 20s, cinema was introduced to sound, but it needed some time to develop the use of it. So, to me, the art of cinema was actually born in the late 30s or early 40s and reached mastery in the 50s (with Bresson‘s influence being significant). Of course, many classics before that era hold an important place in the evolution of cinema (if we go back even further, the art of painting also played a significant role in shaping our minds for cinematic thinking), but they remain inherently primitive in terms of cinematic language. So, no matter how much they are praised, I don’t enjoy watching those films.
I like Turkish blockbusters and melodramas from the 70s, along with cheesy American Westerns from the 50s and 60s. Perhaps they don’t have a cinematic depth as they recycle similar themes, styles, and stories over and over, but they have a strong cinematic identity and culture which I appreciate.
I find directors Kubrick, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders, Akira Kurosawa, Christopher Nolan, Sergei Parajanov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, David Lynch, Yilmaz Guney, and Satyajit Ray to be extremely overrated. Surely, they are good, but I think they are unfairly praised.
I consider the following elements as flaws in the evolution of cinema: filmmakers, critics, academics, and festival programmers with socio-political agendas, prescriptive screenwriting instructors who consider cinema to be just storytelling, experimental films exploiting the concept of experimentation rather than evolving the medium, guidelines for interpreting films, activists, DEI politics, labels, symbols and metaphors, film voting, film pitching, excessive numbers of film competitions and awards, film forums, co-production markets, and film funding mechanisms.
I think that even the best documentaries cannot match the believability and authenticity of some good fiction films, such as Puiu‘s or Kiarostami‘s works (what is a documentary anyway, perhaps some films that we label as fiction are real documentaries).
Commercial and populist-oriented filmmakers, I mean the ones who make films only for financial profit, are the most honest figures in the history of cinema because their intentions are transparent. The rest, myself included, are hypocrites to some extent. We are seeking benefits too, even if they are not always tangible, but we often hide them to be accepted by art communities (the most pathetic form of it is using socio-political labels for self-promotion, from which I can at least exclude myself).
If I were to list the greatest films ever made, I would naturally include one of my films too. After all, I create what I admire to see.

That’s it, now you can sue me.

Reflections