Author: Dan Schneider

Dan Schneider is a poet, novelist, critic, and founder of the Cosmoetica arts website. His YouTube channel features interviews with artists, experts, and more.
Film by Dan Schneider
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A shot of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in a window (text: "Greatest Living Filmmaker"), the director of "Once Upon A Time in Anatolia," which is being analyzed and reviewed in-depth by film critic Dan Schneider for the automachination literary magazine.

MASTERPIECE: On Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia” (2011)

A few years ago, while reviewing Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2006 great film, “Climates”, I wrote:

“Climates is a masterpiece, but it is more than that. It is also possibly an augur to even better things cinematically. It is not an overstatement to declare that Ceylan may be the best living filmmaker today. And, if one argues with that claim, then one might only add that he’s the best still at the height of his powers. Yes, Angelopolous’s Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow was great, but he’s been at a high level for decades now. Ceylan, on the other hand, is still in ascent. Watch Climates, and feel his pull.”

In short, I was right. The filmmaker was capable of even greater heights. Yet, this level was only reached after the slight hiccup and regression that was 2009’s Three Monkeys- a good but ultimately unsatisfactory formula film that, despite virtuosic moments, was uninvolving.

Ceylan’s latest film, 2011’s “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia” (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da), is involving yet existential, crafted yet natural, sublime yet base, based on a true story yet utterly mythic, and a few other polarities that I think readers of this essay will prefer to discover for themselves. That stated, let me tell you what this film is not, despite the gush of praise from critics who have praised it, mindlessly critically cribbing from each other, despite not even remotely understanding the very film they praise. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is not a police procedural film, nor is it an homage nor riff on Sergio Leone’s cinema. As to the first charge, yes, there is police procedural work that provides the external scaffolding structure of the film, but to state that this film is a police procedural is akin to stating that Huckleberry Finn is a book about the perils of 19th Century river rafting. It utterly misses the point that the film merely uses the scaffolding of the police procedural to dig at the existential issues its characters are dealing with, or, in many instances, not dealing with, even as they tangentially dart in and across their lives… […]

Poetry by Dan Schneider
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An early photo of Malcolm X during his "Detroit Red" years of gangsterism, as captured by Dan Schneider's classic poem on Malcolm X.

BIG RED: A Triptych (Poetry on Malcolm X)

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
– Frederick Douglass

“You are a glass that I have paid to shatter
and I swallow the pieces down with my spit.”
– Buying The Whore, Anne Sexton

THE ARGUMENT: In 1945 a two-bit hustler named Malcolm Little ruled the Harlem night. Born on May 19th, 1925 to the Reverend Earl Little and his wife, Louise, Malcolm had a childhood fraught with temptation and danger. Taking a cue from the Romans, he became their greatest advocate.

“Hey baby, the word is this:
You can do it or you can not do it;
that’s the choice- it’s like some cat
who comes dicin’ for some reefer without any stash.
I say ‘It’s copacetic, my brother.’
BUT he knows he’ll hafta pay….
someday. […]