Ceylan’s Equality

This chapter rehearses the thesis put forth by Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator (2009): politics does not arise from resituating an individual elsewhere on a hierarchy of meaning, but from the presupposition of an even playing field. That this should cease in the cinema is a point of contention – it is realised vividly in Climates. Ceylan initiates this through a traversing of roles, redistributing the hierarchy of meaning between film and spectator. Turning this redistribution into an aesthetic approach of fragmentation, the spectator is herself invited to traverse roles. It is not then a matter of ‘gaining knowledge’ rather than ‘the providing of knowledge’, as Colin MacCabe argued in his seminal essay on Brecht and cinema (1985: 54); rather, it regards the potentialising a freer form of association between the spectator and the film. Through analysis of Ceylan’s uses of burlesque comic registers and visual fragmentation, I shall argue the political agency of the spectator is potentialised in the cinema in ways denied by Rancière.