Columns | Books Around: New Turkish Cinema
By Olaf Möller[1]
"I write regularly for Stadt-Revue, which is something like the Village Voice of my beloved hometown. Then there's film-dienst, the film magazine of the Catholic Church, to which I contribute sometimes more frequently and sometimes less, depending on the mood. Besides that, this daily or that magazine runs something by me, occasionally. But the only magazines I'm tied to rather closely are Film Comment and Cinema Scope. Everything else is just on a more or less piece-by-piece basis."
It was only a matter of time till a bunch of books on
Turkish cinema would hit the stores; film-cultural fads work like that. To give
things a more positive spin, what’s a passing fancy for many might be a life’s
passion for a few who can now, in the tiny window of opportunity opened by
hype, realize that one work they always dreamed about. And let’s face it,
normally one wouldn’t get a book on Turkish cinema published too easily. (Next
up: Romania—wait another two years and see…)
All that said, I’m very, very happy that there are finally a few tomes on Turkish cinema around. Chalk that up to my life and times: I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood of Cologne, which meant living alongside many migrant families, mostly from Turkey—Gastarbeiter, as they were (and sometimes still are) derogatively called. (Good thing that the presumed guests stayed, became residents, etc. and saved us from ourselves.) Anyway, Turkish neighbours and classmates also meant Turkish movies. Step 1: A schoolmate of mine and I watched unsubtitled videos at his family’s apartment (he translated, or at least tried, or probably only pretended to try and instead made up his own dialogue). The pleasures of Turkish entertainment! That unique cinegenie of Cüneyt Arkın and Kartal Tibet!! The soul-soothing absurdity of Çetin İnanç’s The Man Who Saves the World (1982)!!! Bliss. Step 2: Cologne’s now defunct cinematheque began to host the occasional season of Turkish films, the serious stuff above all: the master of masters, Yılmaz Güney. (I also fondly remember a screening of Police [1988], a coarse though smart comedy directed by Güney acolyte Şerif Gören, featuring Garib the parrot.) Step 3: Somewhere during the second half of the ‘90s, Turkish films slowly started to get distributed on a regular basis in German cinemas. An audience of millions wanted to be entertained; a now also defunct Cologne downtown multiplex had one or two screens reserved exclusively for Turkish films, usually subtitled, which allowed me to closely follow the careers of, say, Yavuz Turgul (The Bandit, 1996), Sinan Çetin (Propaganda, 1999), Yılmaz Erdoğan (Vizontele, 2001), and Serdar Akar (Valley of the Wolves—Iraq, 2005).
New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory
Publisher : I.B. Tauris (February 15, 2010)
Language : English
Paperback : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1845119509
ISBN-13 : 978-1845119508
Asuman Suner Istanbul Technical University Associate Professor
Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging
Publisher : Reaktion Books (November 15, 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1861893701
ISBN-13 : 978-1861893703
Gönül Dönmez-Colin is a film scholar specializing in the cinemas of Central Asia and the Middle East. She is the author of Women, Islam and Cinema, Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Filmmakers from the Middle East and Central Asia, and The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East.
None of these names probably means much to most readers, as they’re key directors of post-Yeşilçam commercial cinema, the kind of stuff that usually doesn’t make the international festival rounds. Sad to say that neither Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) nor Asuman Suner’s New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010) is going to change that, even if both try to incorporate them into their essentially art-house-focused-and-driven arguments. Dönmez-Colin’s work might at least entice a few curious souls to start looking for such titles as Akar’s ultra-ambivalent gems On Board (1998) and In the Bar (2006) or Sırrı Süreyya Önder and Muharrem Gülmez’s weird International (2006), while Suner’s book likely won’t lead to pressing demand to see Akar’s Offside (2006) or Çağan Irmak’s My Father and My Son (2005), despite some serious supportive phrases.
As the books’ sub-headings suggest, both are covering more
or less the same ground vis-à-vis names and titles: there’s plenty on Nuri
Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, and Derviş Zaim, the four
low-budget pioneers turned main auteurs of contemporary Turkish art-house
cinema; home, migration, and exile in general are discussed, as well as the
Deutschländer/Alamancı cinemas in particular; the Kurdish, Greek, and Armenian
“questions” are addressed (the latter barely, as there are so few films even
acknowledging the existence of Armenians); and then, of course, women and
gender. Sorry to sound a bit dismissive but, really, these are the same themes
that everybody and his/her/its grandmother routinely fills pages with, which
begs the question of whether the books would have appeared at all if they
strayed too far outside this familiar turf.
That said, Turkish cinema does invite these kinds of
discussions—though what’s more puzzling is that Dönmez-Colin and Suner at times
even have the same blind spots. (Let’s only note that neither of them thinks
the blatant anti-Semitism of Akar’s Valley of the Wolves is worth considering
in depth.) Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging proved to be the
more enjoyable and enlightening read, which, to be honest, I didn’t expect, as
I’m not exactly a fan of Dönmez-Colin: she always seemed too much the
professional engagée to me. Whenever I read her texts I have the distinct
impression that she’s supportive of (something that’s incidentally) a film
because she thinks it’s good for us; here for once it feels as if she’s talking
about carefully selected films that she likes. So even if the themes dealt with
and arguments made are fairly generic, it’s still engaging, educational, and at
times even fun to follow them through with her. Admittedly, her book has a
major advantage over Suner’s: its scope. Dönmez-Colin discusses Turkish cinema
in general (even if the last two-plus decades are the centre of her attention),
which means that older masters like the venerable Atıf Yılmaz (Oh, Beautiful
Istanbul, 1966), the great Ömer Kavur (Istanbul, 1981), or the ever-excellent
Erden Kıral (A Season in Hakkari, 1983) are discussed a bit more extensively,
while the likes of Lütfi Ömer Akad (Strike the Whore, 1949) and Metin Erksan
(Dry Summer, 1963) at least get their due. Best of all, Dönmez-Colin devotes a
whole chapter to Yılmaz Güney, and justifiably so considering his ongoing
influence on younger directors, above all Ustaoğlu, as well as his pivotal
importance for any discussion of Kurdish cinema. The importance of Turkish
Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging lies in just that: Dönmez-Colin lays
out convincingly how today’s Turkish cinema is connected to its past (even if
at one point she wonders whether this isn’t a passé way of thinking). In a
film-cultural climate where these kinds of developments seem to count less and
less, this is an important argument to insist on.
While Dönmez-Colin from time to time references this
historian-theorist or that essayist-philosopher, Suner does little else but in
New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory. At least it feels like
that. In the first chapters of this very academic read, Suner barely talks
about the films as films, i.e., rarely describes an image, analyzes its
components, or tries to understand what they mean. Instead, it’s content,
content, symbol, content, historic backgrounds of the stories, some more
content, and lots of digression-heavy references to all kinds of thinkers old
and new; this is useful, of course, but leaves one wanting. Things get a bit
more detailed in the chapters devoted to Ceylan and Demirkubuz, but not more
interesting: Ceylan is all about home and paradox, Demirkubuz vexingly opaque.
Yawn. And then, suddenly, there are a few pages of interest, and they’re
devoted to two works by…Fatih Akın, of all people. Yet, what Suner has to say
about the music in Head-On (2003) and Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of
Istanbul (2005) is worth reading and pondering. Beyond that, the book has
little more to offer than the ordinary emptiness of a culture more interested
in its own rituals and mores than the subjects they use to express these
with—even if one does learn quite a few things.
Olaf Moller
Posted in Columns, CS45, From Cinema Scope Magazine
[1] "Olaf Möller is a freelance writer and programmer based in Cologne and Helsinki. He is a critic for various international film magazines and a consultant for several film festivals. He is an adjunct Professor of Film History and Theory at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University, and has co-written and published a variety of books on cinema." It's a typically modest blurb that appears at the end of innumerable articles for international film magazines but behind it lie countless texts for festival catalogs, regular columns in Cinema Scope and Film Comment (where Möller has also served as a European editor since 2004), annual festival reports.
from Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam and Udine, books on filmmakers such as John Cook and Michael Pilz, selection duties for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and curatorial work on retrospectives and film programs for the Austrian Film Museum. He also happens to be the Other First Secretary and Minister of Spirituality of the Ferroni Brigade.
There are several qualities that Möller has brought to the proverbial table of film criticism since the beginning of the last decade: a) astute and well-informed writing, with an instantly recognizable style and his own brand of syntax and punctuation, balancing seriousness and humor without lapsing into dry academispeak or empty witticisms; b) unprecedented knowledge of the blind spots of film history and contemporary cinephilia, based on years of indefatigable investigation and championing of the unknown, unseen, ignored and forgotten directors and films; c) a total lack of snobbish territoriality that is all too frequent among some trailblazers; d) contempt for what currently passes as political correctness and politeness, never shying away from strong opinions (some of his favorite targets are cinephilia as a "cult of universal surface," "abstract humanism" and a paternalistic approach to non-Western cultures), even if he occasionally puts off some of his readers and colleagues (no wonder one highly respected Australian critic has called him "Olaf the Mauler"). SOURCE
Interview with Olaf Möller, Part 1 | Interview with Olaf Möller, Part 2
Harvard | Conversation Olaf Möller
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