Polarisation through film sound: Sonic ressentiment in contemporary Turkish cinema

Abstract

This article explores Emin Alper’s Kurak Günler (Burning Days, 2022) and Özcan Alper’s Karanlık Gece (Black Night, 2022) through a comparative close listening and audiovisual analysis, focusing on how their soundtracks, comprising music, ambience, and speech, organise political conflict. In both films, sounds associated with specific characters and power dynamics resonate throughout the narrative, infusing the rural landscape with moral ambiguity. This interplay generates ressentiment within local power networks, which, in turn, supports a broader political examination of contemporary Turkey from an urban-secular art-house listening position, illustrating how culturally encoded sounds, repetition, and narrative reinforcement both presuppose and strengthen this position. In Kurak Günler, the sounds of municipal power increasingly envelop the town, whereas in Karanlık Gece, the interplay of silence and listening masks a pervasive criminality. The comparison shows how contemporary film sound can expose institutional failure, masculine violence and complicity while also reproducing moral distinctions between opposing social worlds.