By Serhan Mersin
The Shadowless (2009), the fourth feature film of Ümit Ünal, is the film of loss and struggle between existence and absence. Taking place in a barber shop in Istanbul and a remote, unkown village, the story does not give any cue about the time period. The surrealist atmosphere creates ambiguous, mysterious non-linear story which fluctuates in time and space. Therefore, it is a good example of a film playing with the narration.
In recent years, it is possible to see many examples of films, such as Pulp Fiction (1994), Usual Suspects (1995), Sixth Sense (1999), Run Lola Run (1998), Memento (2000), and Irreversible (2002), which successfully distort the narrative structure. Despite their narrative complexities, these films attract the spectator through their cognitive and perceptional distinctions and tricks they play with the narration. By distorting the narrative, and using different techniques than conventional ones, they make the spectator reconstruct the story (fabula, as Bordwell calls) while watching the film. However, despite the narrative distortion, the spectator recalls the story compatible with conventional narrative schemata. Recollecting the story, the spectator organizes the information by reconstructing space, time, and assemble causality relationship between events. This situation matches up with the idea of scheme theory which claims that the story is never recorded by the spectator passively. Therefore, the spectator starts from the main event, generate inferences by filling the gaps, and coherently construct the story, not by experiencing the actions arranged in the plot (syuzhet, as Bordwell calls), which are presented with flashbacks, ambiguities in cause and effect structure, etc.
Cinema in Turkey 