Unforgettable director of epic films: Who is David Lean?

Born on March 25, 1908, in Croydon, England, Lean is the child of a mother who strongly opposed his involvement in cinema and who was strictly devoted to the Quaker doctrine, and an accountant father who expected him to pursue his own profession.

Despite all the restraints of the teachings he was born into and a period in which films had their share of prohibitions, he never gave up his interest and passion for what was happening around him, and the pleasure of going to the cinema, which his father described as a sin, a waste of time and money.

Throughout most of his career, he remains guarded about the details of his private life, and when he is rarely persuaded to speak out, he lets loose the story of his passion, born in the silence of movie theaters, through his films...

Sir David Lean (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor, widely considered one of the most important figures of British cinema. He directed the large-scale epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970), and A Passage to India (1984). He also directed the film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), as well as the romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945).

In the 1920s, he worked as a clapperboard player at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation's Lime Grove Studios for a while; The days of editorship began with the sound film era.

Lean, who stepped into the cinema as a technical man in the truest sense of the word, had the opportunity to benefit from both the fictional and narrative experiences of Anthony Asquith, whom he assisted for a while. Asquith's cinematic tendencies, which are close to documentary, and his sensitive and direct narrative, which are evident in almost all of his works, undoubtedly inspire Lean's directorial identity, a style that will find its way by expanding its boundaries.

In 1933, he first edited some low-budget productions, including Bernard Vorhaus's films Money for Speed and The Ghost Camera. After editing Paul Czinner's film As You Like It in 1936 and the film version of Bernard Shaw's groundbreaking Pygmalion in 1938, he edited and co-directed the 1941 film Major Barbara, another successful Shaw adaptation.

The first 'real' part of his technique, which some people find rigid and challenging, and which will make him a legend, is the 1942 propaganda film In Which We Serve, in which he worked with Noel Coward. The film, whose script was written by Coward, is about the crew of the Torrin warship of the British Royal Navy, which was sunk in World War II, as they wait to be rescued and even die. Although the motto of trying to overcome the stagnation of the cinema world during the war years with films that mostly aim to reflect the war from different aspects and to give morale to those at the front is not broken here, the film does not shy away from asking questions.

By reminding his characters with flashbacks of their lives before the incident, their families and most importantly 'who and why they are fighting', he leaves the doors of his discourse on the causes and consequences of the war ajar. The same motto would be repeated 15 years later by Lean, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); This time, the only representation of war will be a bridge that will be 'destroyed'.

Following the success of the film, Coward and Lean came together with the film's producer Anthony Havelock-Allan and cinematographer Ronald Neame, and founded the Cineguild production company. His first three works were adaptations of Coward's plays. Coward, the master of dialogue, and Lean, with his technical and visual genius, depict stoicism, the nature of the Englishman, and the power to overcome difficulties, through the life of the lower-middle-class Gibbons family in the period between the two world wars, in their first product, This Happy Breed, (1944). The opening sequence, which begins with a bird's eye view of the River Thames and wanders around the front door of the Gibbons' house, virtually celebrates the cinematographic success of Lean's first solo directorial work. Coming just a year later, Blithe Spirit (1945) became Lean's testing ground in English-style comedy.

Cineguild's third production, but unlike the others, Brief Encounter, (1945) is a classic romantic drama, witnessing the romance of a married woman and man who meet coincidentally in the cafeteria of a train station during their weekly routine and after a while, they find themselves in the arms of a 'forbidden' relationship. It does. In the midst of order and individualism, the film draws its path with the conflict between the beyond-the-ordinary secrecy, silence, and romantic excesses of the British, and in reflecting the moral world of a limited - inter-war - period, it again encounters the obstacle of the anxieties of that period. However, what makes/supposes this love impossible is the vital practices of men and women, which stem from the fact that they have suppressed even their most ordinary passions, outside the space and time surrounding them, and the impossibility of what has not been experienced.

This time, Lean turns to Charles Dickens adaptations, in collaboration with actor Alec Guinness, with whom they sometimes push the boundaries of consensus, but with whom they will continue their long-term relationship. He manages to overcome the criticisms and prejudices his predecessors faced in overcoming the various difficulties in adapting the classics to the big screen. Great Expectations, (1946) is more profound than Oliver Twist (1948), the perfect balance between human sensitivity and the magnificence of its visual presentation. In the re-creation of the Dickensian atmosphere with visual codes, relative emphasis is given to the tragedy part of the novel rather than its social criticism, in order not to be helpless in revealing the curtain of darkness surrounding the characters and the texture of social reality filtered through a fairy-tale narrative. Oliver Twist marks the director's maturity period. His aim with the simple reality he draws is to be objective despite the irony created by the complex decorations he uses to establish the narrative structure of the film. The emotional and characteristic reality that it adds to the material reality of the image through the distance and angles it puts between its object and its receiver is not a form of physical creation; It is just a combination of dramatic, serious, humorous, or qualified meanings. Both productions reflect the ridiculous, cruel, and brutal nature of Dickens' novels.

The 50s are the period of relatively little-known productions in Lean's filmography, but which were turning points in his career. His last two films for Cineguild, The Passionate Friends, (1949) and Madeleine, (1950), although technically solid, were criticized for lacking the director's personal perspective in general and the emotional intensity of his early works in particular. The 1952 film Sound Barrier, which Lean shot for Alexander Korda after Cineguild and tells the story of a pilot who broke the sound barrier, is valuable for the director as it constitutes the first leg of epic productions that are a prediction of the second half of his career.

Adapted from a stage comedy by Harold Brighouse, Hobson's Choice (1954) reunites Lean and actor John Mills, with whom they would later work in five more films. Summertime, produced in 1955 and co-produced by United Artists under the star of Katherine Hepburn, made Lean make a serious decision to abandon his studio-dependent way of working.

A leap threshold is now inevitable in the creation process of Lean, just like the political and social history of the world. Lean structures its story and visual framework from the outside, in relation to the human being's relationship with the historical, political, and socio-cultural environment; that is, from the social and historical field to man's own life practice and his existential struggle within his unbreakable cycle. Ultimately, Lean's characters are ordinary dreamers and heroes who seek to change the world in line with their own expectations. War-weary people who bear the fatigue of always resisting...

When it comes to the political history of countries, Lean, who creates the impression/illusion that he does not care about refuting or confirming their political discourses, acting as the spokesperson of post-imperial England in the lands he visits, will receive the applause of even the countries he is thought to insult with his films. This being the case, he steps into the era of epic films with 1957's The Bridge on the River Kwai. It is the years of World War II... British Colonel Nicholson is captured by the Japanese along with his unit. The colonel, who resisted, based on the Geneva Convention, that officers should be forced to work under harsh conditions like soldiers in the construction of the bridge to be built over the River Kwai, worked almost voluntarily with all his men over time.

Lean will repeat the historical struggle of the individual in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, with the roles of Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, and Omar Sharif identified with their roles. In the person of the British spy Lawrence, who tries to bring the Arab World, which lacks unity and order, to the side of England by provoking it to revolt against the Ottoman Empire, beyond creating a defender of nationalist discourse, he is left alone with his identity and loneliness in the vast deserts. It aims to understand a person's psychology.

Lean continued on his way with another magnificent production: Doctor Zhivago, (1965). Adapted from Boris Pasternak's novel, the film creates a vision of a better Russia, exactly in line with its author's desire, in the historical and political backdrop of the 1917 October Revolution, where governments fall and armies clash and bears witness to how love continues unabated despite everything. Zhivago's drama is the portrait of the intellectual who had to confront the reality of his values with the revolution; His evolution is represented by his wife and lover, who come from two different social classes.

After a five-year break, Lean appeared with Ryan's Daughter (1970). In the background is Northern Ireland, shaken by civil war in 1916. Villagers who cynically resist British rule in the shadow of the war, a village teacher who doesn't touch the water and wants more than what he has, his young wife and her lover, the British officer, whose unhappiness in his marriage is added to the problem of belonging. On the axis of the themes of occupation, civil-military conflict, and moral cowardice surrounding a people fighting for independence, the extreme characters contribute to the dramatic dose of the film and also tend to create a theatrical atmosphere. Perhaps for this reason, the interest shown in his previous films, which were not shorter, gave way to criticism that this film was overly long, slow, and far from the modern cinema style of the director.

Lean must have taken these criticisms very seriously because he did not make a film for fourteen years. He made an ambitious comeback in 1984 with A Passage to India, an adaptation of E M Forster's book. After the First World War, Mrs. Moore, who goes to visit her son who is a judge in India, and her son's fiancée, Adela, who accompanies her, intend to act differently from the arrogant British administrators and break taboos. Young Doctor Aziz reciprocates this goodwill and organizes a trip to the Marabar Caves, but unexpected events occur here and the hostility between the two races reaches its peak. Aziz's attempt to understand the British is replaced by disappointment when he is accused of rape. The film, which explores the east-west problem of India under British rule against Indians, and the prejudices and misunderstandings that prevent people from two different cultures from trying to get closer to each other, presents the naivety and narrow-mindedness of the Indians in an optimistic manner, and the arrogance and rudeness of the British, in the mystical chaos of India. ridicules. With its characters based on Eastern and Western stereotypes, the film questions the concept of otherness while expanding its scope on the axis of imperialism, racism, and prejudices between the two races. It can easily be said that the film raises awareness about the discrimination that Indians face due to their national identity, as well as other othernesses - cultural, customary, economic, and political.

We also have the knowledge that throughout Lean's filmography, the images and archetypes carry a consistent style and worldview, based on their success in conveying the story and conveying a certain emotion and point of view.

Lean, who started his career as a technical man, must have left the editing room with the foresight that he would be remembered as the director of magnificent films, as he would have disproved the words of those who described his perfectionism as an obsession throughout his filmography.

It is not known whether his life was as crowded as his magnificent scenes, but his obsession with the process rather than what would emerge was undoubtedly an answer that confirmed the crowdedness of his mind. Lean, who was known for his conciliatory and humble personality outside, was an extremely arrogant and daring man when it came to his films. He was preparing to film the Joseph Conrad adaptation of Nostromo when he died of pneumonia in 1991. Unfortunately, he didn't have enough time to add another one to the big but cautious steps he had taken over the years...