Dirt in the Lungs: Specters of Death-Images in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)

Resumen

This article examines Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) as a film that engages death not as a representational event but as a temporal condition articulated through cinematic form. Rather than organising its narrative around revelation, causality, or resolution, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film unfolds through delay, repetition, and procedural routine, allowing death to persist across landscape, duration, and institutional practice. The article argues that death in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia operates as a formal pressure that shapes perception and narration without stabilising into spectacle or closure. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image, Susana Viegas’s concept of the death-image, and Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, the article situates Ceylan’s film within a cinematic tradition that renders finitude perceptible through temporal organisation rather than thematic representation. Death appears not as an endpoint but as a condition internal to time itself,and which makes itself felt through suspension, interruption, and erasure. The analysis develops through close readings of three motifs: the nocturnal search across the Anatolian steppe, the prolonged tracking of a fallen apple, and the autopsy sequence in which dirt is discovered in the victim’s lungs and subsequently excluded from the official record. These moments do not function symbolically or allegorically. Instead, they expose how death persists as duration and trace, shaping movement, attention, and documentation. By reframing slowness and ambiguity as temporal mechanisms rather than stylistic effects, the article offers a new perspective on Ceylan’s cinema and contributes to broader discussions in film-philosophy concerning the relationship between time, death, and cinematic form.