Becoming-animal in the narrative and the form of Reha Erdem’s Kosmos

Abstract

This article performs a narrative and aesthetic analysis of Reha Erdem’s movie, Kosmos (2009), through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concept of becoming-animal. Erdem narrativizes the story of an odd traveller dervish named Kosmos, who has supernatural abilities and an expanded capability of communication—one that displays liminal features between human and animal. Through his distinctive editing technique, particularly by juxtaposing human and animal faces, the director further deconstructs the conceptual boundaries between humanity and animality, revealing the inherent connectedness of the two. Hence, this article discloses the consistency between the narrative and the form of Kosmos through a close reading based upon the notion of becoming-animal and its conceptual constituents.