ABSTRACT
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) opens us to the sheets of past for which Ceylan relies on the Anatolian landscape as sensuous gateways. As the narrative and the images refuse to unfold fully, the audience is left with contradictory realities that encourage them to search for the hidden layers. The Anatolian setting of ages past plays a fundamental role in this tension with its thick enfolded layers in physical, cultural, and political terms. To address those layers, and the film’s manners of unfolding them, this article draws upon the theory of enfolding–unfolding aesthetics as proposed by Laura U. Marks, Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Image, and Mario Perniola’s notion of enigma.
