Cinemas of the Other

A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from Iran and Turkey: 2nd Edition

Gonul Donmez-Colin

• Publisher: Intellect
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841507651
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

An updated collection of recent interviews with filmmakers whose works represent trends in the film industries of Turkey and Iran, this new geospecific edition expands upon the earlier volume Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia.Following an introduction delineating the histories of the film industries of the countries of the Middle East, the book contains interviews stretching over a decade, which position the filmmakers and their creative concerns within the social or political context of their respective countries. The striking variety of approaches toward each interview creates a rich diversity of tone and opens the door to a better understanding of images of 'otherness' in film. In addition to transcripts of the interviews, each chapter also includes stills from important films discussed, biographical information about the filmmakers, and filmographies of their works.Dönmez-Colin offers in this expanded edition a carefully researched and richly detailed firsthand account of the developments and trends in these regional film industries that is sure to be appreciated by film scholars and researchers of the Middle East.

TURKEY

Kutluğ Ataman

KUTLUĞ ATAMAN

Identity – social, political or sexual – is at the core of the works of Kutluğ Ataman, a politically engaged transnational multimedia artist and activist born in Turkey, educated in Paris and LA, living in several cosmopolitan metropolises of the world (Istanbul, London Buenos Aires, Karachi) simultaneously. Ataman continually crosses the borders between not only the past and the present and reality and fiction, but also cinema and the museum. He has received the prestigious Carnegie Prize for his video installation Kuba about an alternative shanty-town neighbourhood in Istanbul, home to characters pushed to the margins. He is the first Turkish artist to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale. One of the leading spokespersons of the gay liberation movement in Turkey, Ataman favours characters outside the norms such as an eccentric opera singer past her eighties in Semiha B, Unplugged (1997) or a Turkish transvestite in Switzerland in Never My Soul (2001).

Ataman’s works have been exhibited around the world. He is the recipient of the Carnegie Prize (2004), was short-listed for Turner Prize (2004) and has won the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2009). In 2003, he was selected as the artist of the year by the Observer newspaper in the UK. He is the joint winner of the European Cultural Fund ‘Routes’ Princess Margriet Award 2011 for cultural diversity. Eleven of his artistic works, under the title of Enemy Inside Me, were on display at Istanbul’s prestigious Modern Art Museum in 2011. Whereas some of his works such as Turkish Delight draw attention to the western Orientalist gaze concerning the east and the prevailing cultural prejudice, other works such as Testimony touch upon political controversies including the Armenian genocide.

Ataman’s feature film, Lola + Billidikid shot in Berlin in 1997 that focuses on doubly marginalized transvestites from the Turkish community, is so far the only honest and open film to come out of Turkey on sexual identity and the oppression of the freedom of choice in patriarchal societies. In 2 Genç Kız/2 Girls, he creates a bourgeois woman, portrayed as an enviable parasite during the populist Yeşilçam period, but instead of passing judgement on her, questions the values of the modern Turkish society shaped by consumerism, drawing attention to the shopping mall culture that has invaded the cosmopolitan urban space. ‘… Society has turned everyone into a consumer of everyone else. Men, being on top, consume women’. The two adolescents are in a most precarious age to face issues of identity, their liminality often pushing them to the periphery. But for Ataman, ‘there are as many centres as there are individuals’.

2 Girls

The following conversation with Kutluğ Ataman took place over breakfast during the London Film Festival 2005 where 2 Genç Kız/2 Girls was shown and continued through several encounters in Turkey.

AS MANY CENTRES AS INDIVIDUALS

2 Girls presents a picture of Turkish society that is unlike what is commonly perceived in the West. The young protagonists are not much different from others their age and class anywhere in the modern world. This is quite relevant in terms of Turkey’s ongoing membership attempts to the European Union, and Europe’s reservations about including the ‘other’.

The protagonists belong to the middle class, but the lifestyles of the two families are quite different, and such differences are felt more deeply in Istanbul. Behiye, who is from the outskirts of town, opposes her environment in her own way. Her flaming red hair is a symbol of her resistance to conformity. (Now that I think about it, Lola, the main character in my previous film, Lola + Billidikid also had red hair, perhaps not so flaming.) I draw a picture of two kinds of youth: one is the product of shopping malls and marketing, where the motto is: ‘You can be yourself’. ‘You can consume fashion’. Shopping malls prefabricate cliché youth. Outside that milieu are those like Behiye, represented by one single image – poor, angry and exploited. Remarkably, the outskirts – the so-called banlieu as in the French case – is very dynamic. A new concept has sprung in the last two–three years. The kids from the periphery arrive at the centre on weekends or holidays and display an amazingly distinct style in dressing or performing their music. Culture is not mass-produced in the banlieu. It is not about the latest model of Nokia cellular phone over there. At present, the true culture is growing not at the centre but in the periphery.

Politics of identity is ambivalent in Turkey.

Istanbul has been changing rapidly. The question of identity is perhaps passé for the world, or tedious; but for us, it is very powerful. The ‘politically correct’ is dominant. Monolithic politics cannot be broken. The question of identity is taboo in Turkey, which curtails any form of behaviour.

The search for identity is naturally more painfully felt during the formative years of adolescence. Was this the motivation for focusing on two adolescents?

Stories about youth, I mean stories that tell the truth about youth, do not exist. This is the main motivation. I could have written the story myself but I came across a very beautiful novel. The dynamics between the two characters attracted me. The clash of these dynamics and the fact that one consumes the other is very dramatic.

Journey to the Moon

Is the author Perihan Mağden a famous novelist and was the novel İki Genç Kızın Romanı a bestseller?

Perihan Mağden is a known columnist in Turkey. She has written several novels. This one was written two and a half years ago and was a bestseller. It has recently been translated into English and in fact, is coming out today in England.

The two girls are from different parts of town but they are both ‘middle class’ as you have mentioned earlier. Behiye’s family is the traditional Turkish family from the outskirts, not fanatically religious but bound to customs and traditions, whereas Handan’s uptown environment is where traditional values are fractured (appositely symbolized in the film by the decomposed family), but not yet replaced by something more tangible. Handan’s father escaped to Australia after fathering her and her mother does favours to older men for money for Handan’s upkeep and education but splurges at the shopping mall instead of buying groceries. Female bonding develops between the two young girls, culminating in Behiye cohabiting with Handan, but they remain as products of different worlds.

When something happens in Turkey, the West always attributes it to Islamists. Often, it has nothing to do with the Islamists. Behiye’s family is a dysfunctional working-class family. Everyone works, even the mother. Behiye wants to escape the vicious circle of the suburbs but if you touch what does not belong to you, you burn. After having burned, does Behiye try to run away again? She does. Handan’s perspective is different. She is more intelligent than her mother. She is like a bubble, but she has plans, has programmes of a different system. She is always victorious. She belongs to the system. The system is always victorious. If you put her in Los Angeles, she can belong there, too. This has something to do with modernism, global production and mega-malls representing the second face of Istanbul, which is the result of an economy that manifested itself in the 1980s – an apolitical economy built on the consumption of identity. The foundation stones of this identity are laid with corruption: fashion, restaurants, market – ‘I consume, therefore, I am’. The consequences of globalization are terrifying. In Los Angeles, where I lived for fifteen years, there were cultural centres for social cruising, composed of replicas of European streets. You could imagine yourself walking on any shopping street around the world. Shopping–cinema–culture – all in one! Another shopping mall will open soon in the uptown Şişli neighbourhood of Istanbul, bigger than the one you see in the film. It will be the largest in the world!

Apart from the two protagonists, Behiye and Handan, there is a third girl, Çiğdem. What is her role in the story?

She is Behiye’s friend, her intuition. She is pragmatic and conservative. Therefore, she suffers less. She knows Turkey. For me she is the antithesis of Behiye. When Behiye is defeated, she becomes like Çiğdem. The book uses Çiğdem as a vehicle.

I am very impressed by your video installations, which I follow closely. I also liked your second film, Lola + Billydikid, but I must say I have some reservations about Karanlık Sular/The Serpent’s Tale, Yes, that was my first film. I am a gradual performer. I did not make a big hit with the first film. Feelings are important in that film. Turkey was a closed system before the Turgut Özal years and his politics. You open the Pandora’s box and worms and snakes come out. The film is about doing new things, a sentiment about Istanbul and its disappearance. For instance, the wall of Tarlabaşı (built to control entry to the brothels) was being torn down. I could not make this film in the commercial atmosphere of today. I was lucky then. Now it is a cult film with its followers. They love it or hate it. In Thessaloniki this year, a retrospective of all my work will be held. But I don’t want to see this film again.

You have received the Best Director award in the National Competition of Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival for 2 Girls. Has the film been released in Turkey?

It was released last summer and distributed all over the country, even in the most conservative areas. It was number one on the charts along with Translator, starring Nicole Kidman. The film was shown for three months. It was a summer release but still 72,000 people went to see it, which is not bad for a film of mine. Turkish society is conservative and generally, they find my films disturbing. A DVD of this film will be coming out soon.

– London, October 2005

BIO/FILMOGRAPHY

Kutlug Ataman was born in Istanbul in 1961. He left Turkey after the 1980 military intervention having experienced persecution and imprisonment. He studied at film schools in Paris and Los Angeles, graduating with an MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles, USA, with the short film, La Fuga. His first full-length feature, Karanlık Sular/The Serpent’s Tale, won prizes at several international film festivals in addition to the Best Film, Best Script and Best Director awards of the Turkish Film Critics’ Association at the Istanbul International Film Festival and Jury Prize at the Ankara International Film Festival. Lola + Bilidikid (1998) opened the Panorama section of the 49^th Berlin International Film Festival. 2 Genç Kız/2 Girls (2005) was successfully released in Germany, Turkey and the US, and it won awards at several international film festivals. Aya Seyahat/Journey to the Moon (2009), a full-length mock-documentary is the film version of Ataman’s installation, Mesopotamian Dramaturgies.

Feature films:

1994 Karanlık Sular/The Serpent’s Tale

1998 Lola + Bilidikid

2005 2 Genç Kız/2 Girls

2006 Lola + Bilidikid – Director’s Cut

2009 Aya Seyahat/Journey to the Moon

HANDAN İPEKÇİ

Handan İpekçi is considered as the only woman film-maker in Turkey who scripts, produces and directs her films. When no one would produce her first feature film, Babam Askerde/Dad Is in the Army (1994), she founded her own production company. The film focused on the children of political prisoners of the 12 September 1980 coup and how the mothers justified the absence of the father to their children, a subject İpekçi knew well as she, too, was one of those mothers. When the film found no distributor, she arranged for public screenings through democratic organizations, going from one Anatolian town to another with the only copy of the reel under her arm and reached 10,000 people in a period when Turkish films with distributors could reach only 2000–3000 spectators. During a period when cinema halls were being closed systematically and the only cinemas left open in the provinces were showing sex films, she often had to contribute to the ‘purification’ of the cinema halls before the screenings. Her second feature, Büyük Adam Küçük Aşk aka Hejar/Big Man Little Love aka Hejar focused on an unusual friendship between an orphaned Kurdish girl and a retired Kemalist judge of stern principles. Again, she had to produce the film herself for lack of courageous producers. The film was denounced for highlighting Kurdish nationalism and for portraying the police in a derogatory manner. After having won prestigious awards at the national film festival Golden Orange in Antalya and having been chosen as Turkey’s official submission to the 74^th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, the Ministry of Culture that had originally supported the project revoked its screening licence and İpekçi was brought to trial. Saklı Yüzler/Hidden Faces (2007), a film within a film, focuses on honour killings whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• IRAN
• TURKEY
• Film Credits
• Selected Bibliography