In Search of Nomadic Thought: Rethinking The Festival of Troubadours

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are among the names who contributed to the development of film philosophy with nomadic thought. In this process, thinkers who explain nomadic thought through concepts have benefited from various concepts such as rhizome, deterritorialization, becoming, movement image, time image, and the body without organs. Within the scope of the study, the aforementioned concepts were discussed in the context of Özcan Alper's film The Festival of Troubadours (Âşıklar Bayramı, 2022). This discussion, which was built on the concepts borrowed from philosophy, was carried out with the categories created over the basic elements of the film about being a nomad. These categories were determined as the rejection of fatherhood, the road and journey, and the contributions of cinematographic elements to nomadic thought. Since the story of the film is based on being a road and a passenger, it carries traces of nomadic thought from the very first scenes. However, it is not appropriate to define nomadism as a simple "state of being in movement". The journey is only the primary reason that drives the characters of the film to become nomads. As a matter of fact, real nomadism is in the soul of the characters and in their minds. Throughout the journey, both characters strive and seek to achieve their goals. The state of being in search has also made them deterritorialized and included them in rhizome relations. Both characters have a common desire: to be liberated. As a matter of fact, at the end of the film, one character is liberated by giving and receiving blessings from all the people who touched his life, and the other character is liberated by discovering that the questions he carried in his mind for years were irrelevant. The Festival of Troubadours is a film based on the great collaboration of cinema and philosophy with its narrative structure and cinematographic preferences.