Chapter 8 Accumulating Schubert: Music and Narrative in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep

In: Music, Narrative and the Moving Image
Author:
Heidi Hart
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Abstract

The soundtrack for Ceylan’s 2014 film Winter Sleep includes only five minutes of music: the opening passage of Schubert’s A-major Piano Sonata no. 20, Andantino, repeated in moments suggesting the main character’s Bildung and introspection. As the film progresses, this musical signal takes on increased narrative weight; its repetition adheres to a growing sense of the damage this character’s privilege enacts on his wife and on the families who owe him rent. Drawing on Irina Rajewsky’s recent work on transmedial movement, this paper argues for repetition and accumulation as narrative strategies across media, while pointing out the material associativity unique to music – in this case a Schubert passage that, in its broken-record replication, exposes the cost of traditional European bourgeois values in a Turkish household as patriarchal as it is ‘western’. Here music does not intensify an emotional-narrative arc but adds a critical dimension to dialogue and visual storytelling.

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