Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a state not dissimilar to dim, incommunicable transcendence. This correlation between absolute distinction and manic divinity may, however, work in the opposite direction as well: just as delusions feed off of grandeur, grandeur is sustained by delusion’s need to justify itself. Akın (Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu), the protagonist of Gürcan Keltek’s dazzling and radical New Dawn Fades, has an affliction of the mind, but it is his body that wanders, first through worldly intimacy and then into spiritual conspiracy. His journey, stretching over the film’s 130-minute runtime, is fractured, amorphous, and undulating, a cacophony of interactions and visages laid over the byzantine topography of the city of Istanbul. Keltek’s first foray into fiction, after the docu-features Colony and Meteors, is both a portrait and landscape; conjuring the mind’s solipsistic act in tension with the broader visions it brings forth, New Dawn Fades straddles the delicate boundaries between detail and depth, mind and matter, city and man.
Psychogeography — the effect of lived spaces on living experiences — underlines much of Keltek’s film, although it’s arguably less crucial to its central narrative than the singular exploration of a psyche gone rogue and possibly reformed. The camera is tethered in nearly all sequences to Akın, studying his movements and expressions. He wears a face of serenity, biking and walking through the streets of Istanbul with little aim; perhaps he sees something we don’t. An oblique screenplay hints at an unspecified mental illness, accompanied by drugs for treatment, but Akın’s narcosis throughout, as he reconnects with old friends (one a fellow patient, another possibly an old flame) and evades his frightened mother, appears to have a sinister and outside influence. “The only thing that remains from a loss is a trace,” echoes a mantra late in the film, portending less the vagaries of literary deconstruction than it does Akın very literally losing his grip on reality. His condition, in this regard, resembles those of the protagonists of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Carlos Reygadas in their perpetual search for higher meaning; but higher meaning is rendered tangible, if not perceptible, in Keltek’s swerve into a phantasmagoria of demonic and divine.
This introduction of overt mythology would derail a lesser film, but applied thus it provides a conceptual toolkit — if not a merely phenomenological substrate — with which Keltek refracts his many manifestations of troubled psychosis. Like the narrator of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Akın faces a world of psychoactive sensations, and their dysfunctional strata probe deep — beyond explicit political commentary, as might’ve been the case with Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu — into the recesses of a mind torn between this world and the next. Even this spiritual gnosis, however, shouldn’t be taken as the film’s literal reading: though Chalcedon and the cult of Mithras are evoked, New Dawn Fades works best not so much as a simple exploration of psychological interiority, but as an attempt to exorcize this interiority through pure, unadulterated fantasy. The film is radical in its uncompromising stance; its title takes from a Joy Division song, but what lingers, after a voyage through time that feels as much a few days long as it does a few years, is the crepuscular image of an awakening prematurely snuffed out. Scored to the vividly spectral tunes of British artist Son of Philip (which may be properly labeled “psychomusical”), New Dawn Fades begins under the hallowed dome of the Hagia Sophia and concludes with a sunset on the Bosphorus — both visions of the sublime, and the madman’s highest fear and joy.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 4.
