Understanding Turkey through 6 films
By Burcu Karahan, Lecturer in Turkish Language and Literature at Stanford University. Karahan is currently teaching a course on “Understanding Turkey Through Film,” which includes a series of film screenings that are open to the public. The series is also a part of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies’ annual conference.
The people of Turkey voted in a historical referendum on Sunday, April 16, to make amendments to Turkey’s constitution, and to change the country’s parliamentary democracy into an executive presidency that will provide the head of state with unconstrained executive and legislative powers. The amendments were approved by a very slim margin: 51% to 49%.
Although the result of the referendum has largely been considered a radical change for Turkey and a victory for President Erdogan by the international media, the “No” camp does not perceive the result as a change, but rather as official labeling of what was already a reality in Turkey: a one-man authoritarian rule.
Moreover, they find hope in the thin-razor loss. A close-up analysis of the results reveals that Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost in major cities and lost their tight grip on their voter base despite the fact that the referendum was held in unfair conditions, under a state of emergency that was introduced in July 2016. During the post-coup crackdown, more than 200 journalists have been arrested; 150 media outlets have been shut down; over 4,000 judges & prosecutors have been dismissed along with more than 7,000 academics; 130,000 government officials have been sacked and the Kurdish opposition party leaders and MPs have been imprisoned; and “No” campaigners have consistently been intimidated and imprisoned.
The important milestones in the cinema of Turkey have always been closely related to the political developments in the country. Yeşilçam, the name of the popular cinema in Turkey, gained popularity in the early 1950s as Turkey transitioned from a single-party regime to multi-party democracy. Yeşilçam produced comedies and melodramas, most of which were overtly plagiarized from Hollywood movies, and thematically in line with the populist policies of the Democratic Party — the party to win the first multi-party elections.
Yeşilçam cinema reached its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s creating big stars and audiences, both domestically and in the Middle East, and producing a stunning number of 200 films a year. Following the military coup in 1960, films focusing on social issues such as urban migration, feudal arrangements, and workers’ conditions started to appear alongside the star-centric melodramas and romantic comedies. The 1970s were marked by political turmoil due to constant violent clashes between the leftist and rightest groups and this social and political atmosphere was reflected in the cinema. Politically charged, social-realist movies emerged, dealing with social injustice, class inequality, economic and social underdevelopment, as well as the feudal system. These films were pioneered and inspired by renowned actor and director Yılmaz Güney.
By the end of 1970s and early 1980s, among other things, the fights between political groups in the streets and expansion of television broadcasting drastically shrunk the number of cinema goers. To save itself, the industry turned to soft-core pornographic movies. Then, Turkey witnessed yet another military coup in 1980 and a new constitution was drafted by the military in 1982 . Under immensely authoritarian governance and strict censorship, the political movies had to disappear and very few individualistic films were made. And in early 1990s the cinema of Turkey went into a period defined by many as the dead period.
After this long period of stagnation, the cinema of Turkey went through a notable revival starting in 1996 with the release of Yavuz Turgul’s Bandit and Derviş Zaim’s Somersault in a Coffin, each signaling a different path for the revival: popular/commercial films and art cinema. However, as diverse as those two paths were, the films of this “new” cinema decidedly addressed the questions of belonging (east/west, urban/rural) and identity (ethnic, gender-based, national, religious, sexual).
Beginning in 2010, we start to see a new direction in films from Turkey. The new generation of filmmakers whose films are featured in the series differ in their straightforward, critical approach to the social and political developments from the previous generation of auteur directors. The selection of the films in this series is unique because the films are either directorial debuts or only the second features from the filmmakers. These young filmmakers, who have already collected many awards both nationally and internationally, differ from the previous generation. They are neither trying to find where they belong, nor consumed with questions of identity. Instead, they question state and patriarchy as sources of inequality in their subtle and overt narratives of dissent.
With this film series I am not just hoping to give students and viewers a glimpse of contemporary Turkish society — its transformation under an over-controlling governance with self-serving ambitions for a more powerful, prosperous, and conservative Turkey — but I am also excited that we are witnessing this new direction in the cinema of Turkey as it is happening.
1) My Father’s Wings
Directed by Kıvanç Sezer (2016)
Plot: Ibrahim and his nephew Yusuf work as construction workers in a luxury house construction site in Istanbul. Ibrahim finds out that he has a severe lung cancer. On the contrary of Ibrahim who is sick and old, Yusuf is a worker who has ambition and enthusiasm for the future. Then a work accident happens in the construction site in which family of the worker is paid compensation illegally by the company and when Ibrahim gets to know, he thinks of his family. As earthquake victims they are entitled to have a house but they still need to pay it for years. However the money isn’t there. The idea of suicide and his cancer would lead him to death eventually. Then the question comes about the value of a person’s life. Will it worth to die or not?
This movie looks critically at the urban transformation that has been taking place in Istanbul in the last decade, by focusing on the devaluation of construction workers’ lives for the sake of quick and large profits. The film came out around the time when Turkey was ranked third in the world in fatal work accidents by the International Labour Organization.
2) Majority (Çoğunluk)
Directed by Seren Yüce (2010)
Plot: 21-year-old Mertkan lives in Istanbul. Although safe and stable, his life is entirely unfulfilling. He lives with his parents, helps out at his father’s construction company, and spends evenings with his friends cruising shopping malls and discos. After meeting a girl named Gül and gaining a little self-confidence, it seems that Mertkan will find the strength to stand up to his authoritarian father; the elder man is against a relationship with a girl whose “people only want to divide our country.” Will Mertkan find the determination to avoid becoming the kind of man that his domineering father wants him to be? With a sure hand, this family drama subtly delves into criticism of Turkish society and its ills. The director’s seemingly detached look at the characters enables him to penetrate their inner worlds, their emotional lives. The events of an ordinary existence transform into an absorbing struggle for liberation from parental domination, one that requires sufficient will and decisiveness.
Majority points to the smallest social unit, family, as the source of racism and masculinity, where these are produced and reproduced generation after generation. Although the inspiration for the movie is very local i.e., Turkish society, in a world that is increasingly marked by masculinism and racism it is impossible not to make associations and connections.
3) Clair Obscur (Tereddüt)
Directed by Yeşim Ustaoğlu (2016)
Plot: The career psychiatrist Chenaz and the young housewife Elma are so different as representations of Turkish women, that they almost look like a cliché. But ‘Clair Obscur’ is far from it, and when a traumatic event crosses their paths, it suddenly becomes obvious that they have more in common than first assumed. Chenaz is modern and liberated, even in her relationship with her boyfriend, while Elma is uneducated and cows to her older husband and mother-in-law, and their common whims. At least that’s what it looks like from a distance, but as the drama develops — and it really does — the contours get blurred. With its hesitant pace, ‘Clair Obscur’ gets under our skin and catches us over and over with our guard down thanks to its surprising and disturbing plot. Yesim Ustaoglus paints a striking portrait of a young generation of women, who in spite of the year we are living in are still beholden to a society where men consider them more as utility objects than as equals. Reflected in the photographer Michael Hammon’s masterful images, where cultural and natural forces sensually flex their muscles.
Unafraid to tackle politically charged issues such as violence against ethnic and religious minorities, Ustaoğlu picks up yet another minority group — women. In the last decade in Turkey, the number of women exposed to violence and the brutality of violence has drastically escalated. In light of these distressing developments, Ustaoğlu reveals how increasing violence against women brings the seemingly different women (educated, secular, upper middle class vs uneducated, religious, lower middle class) closer together in Turkey.
4) The Last Schnitzel (Son Şinitzel)
Directed by Kaan Arıcı & İsmet Kurtuluş (2017)
Plot: When the president of The Grand Turkish Republic demands a schnitzel before allowing any Turks to leave the vanishing earth, his hapless assistant Kamil must come up with the fried meat, despite the chickens being dead for over 200 years.
The Last Schnitzel, a short sci-fi comedy, simply put, is about the selfish needs of an authoritarian president of a country called the Grand Turkish Republic, set in a dystopian future. This film is alarmingly prescient, especially after Turkey’s recent referendum.
5) Dust Cloth (Toz Bezi)
Directed by Ahu Öztürk (2015)
Plot: Nesrin and Hatun are two Kurdish cleaning women living in Istanbul. While Nesrin tries to survive with her little daughter, trying to understand why her husband left her, Hatun dreams of buying a house in the district where they clean.
This film comes back to the issue of hardships women have to endure in Turkey, this time marked also by ethnic identity. The film displays the underprivileged and marginalized lives of Nesrin and Hatun, not only because they are women (as in Majority) and cleaners from lower middle class (as in Clair Obscur), but also because they are Kurdish.
6) Frenzy (Abluka)
Directed by Emin Alper (2015)
Plot: Istanbul is in the grip of political violence. Hamza, a high-ranking police officer offers Kadir a conditional release from prison. To be released he has to accept to work in the new intelligence unit of garbage collectors. Kadir accepts, and starts collecting trash from the shanty towns, checking to see whether it contains material related to bomb-making. Kadir finds his younger brother Ahmet in one of those neighborhoods. Ahmet works at the municipality as part of a team responsible for destroying stray dogs. Ahmet’s unwillingness to bond with Kadir as brothers, in spite of Kadir’s insistance, leads Kadir to plot conspiracy theories to explain Ahmet’s distance.
This psychological drama critiques the oppressive state by exposing how the paranoia of the state, caused by its fear of dissent and terrorism, seeps into the lives of its citizens, and even members of the same family. The film portrays an increasingly dystopian tone for a society under the tight grasp of the state and becomes a chilling reminder of the state of Turkish society after the Gezi protests in 2013.
Screenings of these films at Stanford University will be the North American premiere for all but one of the films and we are delighted to host some of the directors, and hear their perspectives on the new directions in Turkish cinema and how their work is rooted in the social and political changes in the country.
This course and film series is a collaboration between the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and Stanford Arts.
