Women in the Cinemas of Iran and Turkey

As Images and as Image-Makers

Gönül Dönmez-Colin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351050296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume compares the cinemas of Iran and Turkey in terms of the presence and absence of women on both sides of the camera. From a critical point of view, it provides detailed readings of works by both male and female film-makers, emphasizing issues facing women's film-making.

Presenting an overview of the modern histories of the two neighbouring countries, the study traces certain similarities and contrasts, particularly in the reception, adaption and representation of Western modernity and cinema. This is followed by the exploration of the images of women on screen with attention to minority women, investigating post-traumatic cinema's approaches to women (Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and the 1980 coup d'état in Turkey) and women's interpretations of post-traumatic experiences. Furthermore, the representations of sexualities and LGBTI identities within cultural, traditional and state-imposed restrictions are also discussed. Investigating border-crossing in physical and metaphorical terms, the research explores the hybridities in the artistic expressions of 'deterritorialized' film-makers negotiating loyalties to both vatan (motherland) and the adopted country.

This comprehensive analysis of the cinemas of Iran and Turkey, based on extensive research, fieldwork, interviews and viewing of countless films is a key resource for students and scholars interested in film, gender and cultural studies and the Middle East.

1 From inflated plastic dolls, patience stones, honour bearers, home-breakers and ‘commodified others’ to free agents: Screen images of women

The image of the woman has been an integral part of cinema since the beginnings although the meaning attached to the image has often been distorted. In the early stages of the cinemas of Iran and Turkey, the woman was presented as the seductress with loose morals or as the shallow sex object of high society love tragedies and burlesque comedies designed to entice males with repressed sexual fantasies. Through the nation-building processes, or wars with the neighbours, the woman was the metonymy for the country. When family values required endorsing, she was the obedient wife/daughter/sister and during transition to Occidental capitalism, the torchbearer of modernity. Rural films showed her as the victim of repressive customs and traditions, the vulnerable maiden leading men to crime to revenge her lost honour. Once fallen, her destiny was prostitution. Emancipation periods highlighted the working woman but the subtext was the regaining of lost femininity after relinquishing the desire for emancipation. As Rich underscores, it seemed to be a given fact that men generated works of art and women inhabited them. The myths and images of women constructed by men have created a certain language and culture that have influenced both men and women artists with the ‘word’s masculine persuasive force’ that negated everything that a woman really was (1980).

Women have been stereotyped globally since the beginnings of cinema into specific roles that subordinated them to male characters (Haskell 1987). One of the initial responses of Hollywood to the emasculating implications of the Great Crash (1929) and the ensuing Great Depression was the ‘fallen woman’ or the ‘shady lady’ as in Morocco (1930), Blonde Venus (1932) and Shanghai Express (1932) of Joseph von Sternberg; Tarnished Lady of George Cukor (1931) and Back Street of John M. Stahl (1932) (Rubin 1996).¹ Another Hollywood cliché was the vamp or the femme fatale who paid for her ‘sins’. Serving as a convenient warning to women who deviate from the patriarchal norms, this characterization was easily adopted by most societies.

In several cultures, the woman’s body is both the fortified treasure and the abhorred curse. Men are dependent on women as wives, mothers and romantic objects, relationships that lend women dyadic power, power that originates from dependencies in interpersonal relationships (Guttentag & Secord 1983; Glick & Fiske 1997). Traditionalism regarding the woman’s role in society has been considered as the generator of hostile sexism and antagonism towards women who challenge the male power and the status quo of male authority, although traditionalism could also be positive. However, the simultaneous existence of male structural power and female dyadic power creates ambivalent sexist ideologies, comprised of both hostile and benevolent sexism (Glick & Fiske 1996, 1997), one of the instruments of which is stereotyping, which promotes gender inequality.

Stereotyping or victimization of women in the Hollywood of 1930s through 1950s was commensurate with the pattern of social and moral behaviour women were expected to conform in real life, argues Basinger. It was easy to label characters sexually, ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’, parentally ‘mother’ or ‘daughter’, or connubially, ‘wife’ or ‘old maid’ to provide a quick and easy reference for viewers regarding the female characters’ status in relation to men, marriage and motherhood, ‘the big three of the woman’s world’ (1993).

Controversial feminist sociologist Fatima Mernissi claimed that the Muslim social order faced two threats, ‘the infidel without and the woman within’ (1975: 12 in Dönmez-Colin 2010).² The society is traditionally divided along the lines of gender – the woman confined to the home as a private object of desire and the man free to dominate the world outside (in addition to the world inside). The identity of the woman is split into the ‘family woman’, the organizer of the inner/private space and the prostitute, the woman who disrupts the order by crossing over to the public space, the domain of men, which substantiates cinema’s obsession with the good woman/bad woman binaries. As a wife and mother, the woman is the ‘keeper of Islam’ (Saktanber 2002).³ She can also be the ‘source of fıtna’ (disorder and anarchy) (Moghadam 2002), her sexuality as a potential threat to men’s dignity and hence, the destruction of the social stability, which is man’s duty to safeguard (Dönmez-Colin 2010).

In the two countries that are the focus of this study, cinema has presented women as ‘trouble for men’ from the early sex comedies or melodramas to postmodern works. In Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Turkey 2011), the commissar character declares, ‘Whenever there is trouble, there is a woman behind it’ although as Judith Butler underscores, ‘trouble’ at times euphemizes some ‘fundamentally mysterious problem usually related to the alleged mystery of all things feminine’ (1999).

Iranian history is rich with stories of rebellious women, the transnational legend, Fatemeh Arreh setting the precedent. Hamid Dabashi reminds us that even in the middle of the nineteenth century, Fatemeh Beygum Baraghani, honorifically called Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn (Pure Solace of the Eyes) (1814–52), a poet, a theorist and a revolutionary strategist, led a radical faction of the Babi movement in Iran and Iraq and was expelled from Iraq by the Ottoman authorities. She scandalized social convention for rejecting her husband, living with a revolutionary comrade and unveiling in public. Women rebelled against the government during the mid-1880s resulting in the construction of the first women’s prison before women achieved political rights. Women were instrumental in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution demanding accountability from the monarchy (2001: 217).

Danesh/Knowledge, the first Iranian women’s magazine, was established in 1910, advocating education for women, more harmonious (and monogamous) marriages and careers in medicine and teaching. It played a part in shaping an identity for the Iranian women in relation to the other women in the world and creating a sense of modern Iranian motherhood (Amin 2002).

The Women’s Awakening of 1936–41, albeit a state-imposed feminism project, offered new opportunities to women in exchange for abandoning the veil in public (1936). During a period of modernization, women advanced in education and employment opportunities, formed women’s organizations and published a woman’s journal. One of the most gifted Iranian poets of the twentieth century, Parvin Etesami (1907–41), is credited for the creation of the Iranian feminine subject and she was not alone in her endeavours. However, according to Dabashi, the most critical aspect of the long history of Iranian cultural modernity is that its principal architects have been men despite crucial feminine exceptions (Dabashi 2001: 216).

Nezihe Muhiddin, one of the earliest feminists, was born into an unusually open-minded family during the Ottoman Empire.⁴ She started to teach science and write articles on the education of women when she was 19, contributing regularly to the influential women’s magazine, Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (magazine exclusively for women, by women first published in 1895) to promote education and equal rights. Following the establishment of the Republic, she formed the first – and to date only – women’s political party. As the party was not officially recognized by the state, she established the Turkish Women Association (banned in 1935). She fought for women’s suffrage and right to be elected to office, which was granted locally in 1930 and nationally in 1934. However, despite women’s important role in cultural modernity, the principal architects have been men in Turkey as well who constructed emancipation to inspire women to work with men in nation-building (Tekeli 1981; Kandiyoti 1987).

Women were encouraged to become teachers, engineers or doctors, but described as good wives and mothers in what Arat defines as the ‘reconstruction of tradition’, which treated ‘women as symbols and as tools of modernization and Westernization, rather than as the equal and full partners of men’ (1994).

Negotiating modernity through the woman’s body

‘Modernity is perhaps one of the most controversial terms in scholarly literature’, claims Alev Çınar. ‘Modernity may refer to a lifestyle, a culture, a discourse, a historical epoch, a movement, a project, a mind-set, an intellectual trend, to capitalism, industrialization, democracy, constitutionalism, or secularism’ (2005: 1). Using the term ‘as an analytical category’ is more challenging in non-European contexts as she underlines, because of the complexity of the experience where, as a result of colonialism and globalization, situations have evolved mostly in a European context. Iran and Turkey, although never directly colonized, have also modelled their ‘modernity’ according to the European model although as Gaonkar (1999: 1–18) and Çınar (2005) underscore, in the non-Western context, the widespread presence of modernity is not necessarily an obsequious imitation but rather a creative blend of the European influences with the local and regional practices.

National cinemas that eventually emerged presented hybrid identities, the essential role model, Hollywood, enmeshed with the predominant local and regional customs and traditions. The ambivalence towards cinema was not much different than ambivalence towards any Western invention (gavur icadı in Turkish vernacular) representing modernity – the utopia, which could also be dystopia. Coveted or rejected, modernity was typified through two commodities that men yearned to consume: Technology, particularly US-made cars (preferably the convertible) for the coveted modernity and the body of the woman – immodestly dressed, drinking alcohol, playing poker, dancing with men and having illicit sex – for the rejected modernity.

Naficy draws attention to an early Iranian silent film, Haji Aga, Aktor-e Sinema/Mr Haji, the Film Star (Ohanians 1932), which takes a satirical point of view to show the fascination with the new invention, the modernity itself and the wish to appear modern and become modern. The film features a traditional religious man in Western clothes, hypocritically moral, engaging in sexual play with the life-sized cardboard cut-out of a Westernized female mannequin (2011a: 214). Films with similar motives were common in Ottoman Turkish cinema as well, the message justifying the blatant exploitation of the woman’s body as fodder for comedy. Ahmet Fehim’s 1919 sex vaudeville, Mürebbiye/The Governess featuring an oversexed French woman without morals, is a good example. To gender the West, the Other as female, naturally, has further cultural and social implications for the image of the woman and the West.

Dokhtar-e Lor ya Iran-e Diruz va Iran-e Emruz/The Lor Girl or Yesterday’s Iran and Today’s Iran (Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Marwan Irani & Abdolhosain Sepanta 1933) mentioned in the Introduction brought a number of novelties in addition to being the first sound film in Persian language and the first to show a Muslim woman on screen. To transmit the message of the liberation of Iran from the traditional tribal system, the film defied the conventional norm of forbidding women to attract male spectators and presented the rural girl Golnar as the subject and the object of the spectatorial gaze. Golnar (meaning pomegranate blossom) sang and danced in the teahouses on the Lorestan-Khuzistan road without proper hijab, a small kerchief hardly covering her waist-long braids (foreshadowing of the Unveiling Act of 1936 three years later). The film also deviated from the classic ‘damsel in distress’ narratives by presenting a woman mocking her male enemies and even beating a bandit with a whip. Released soon after Reza Shah’s banning of ta’zieh (1932), the traditional passion play that improvises on Shiite themes and rituals, The Lor Girl was very popular as an alternative entertainment. Its political subtext on the lawlessness of Iran during the end of the Qajar rule and the call of Reza Shah to restore order appealed to the national sentiments veiling the Orientalist iconography that reproduced the oriental woman of Hollywood films in the appearance of Golnar.

Iconography with a slant

About half of the first fiction films made in the Ottoman Turkey were about women although the woman’s representation in these films was far from positive. In a period when women of a certain class were denouncing their subordinate status in heated debates with men, publishing journals, writing books, attending universities and even working in the factories and the public service (Tekeli 1995: 120), cinema was occupied with the images of ‘bad girls’ and ‘fallen women’. Sedat Simavi’s Pençe/The Clutch (1917), considered as the first complete feature along with his Casus/The Spy, made the same year, features two female protagonists, Leman and Feride, one is a nymphomaniac, the other, an adulteress. In Ahmet Fehim’s The Governess (1919), mentioned earlier, the first film to expose a female in her intimate attire and the first to be censored, a charming French woman seduced all males in a rich household.⁵ Another example of the eroticization of the woman’s body from the same period is Muhsin Ertuğrul’s Istanbul’da Bir Facia’i Aşk/A Love Tragedy in Istanbul (1922). Based on a true story about a courtesan and moulded into the film noir subgenre, the film established the ‘bad woman’ archetype in Turkish cinema, its popularity leading to multiple replications by various film-makers in the next four decades. Ertuğrul succeeded in leaving a legacy of classics such as Şehvet Kurbanı/The Victim of Lust (1939), inspired by Der Blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Joseph von Sternberg, Germany 1930) following the same formula. The Victim of Lust established the sensual Cahide Sonku as the Turkish Marlene Dietrich, in the role of the mysterious temptress, securing her position as the first star of Turkish cinema.

Muhsin Ertuğrul also initiated the trend for rural tales of rape, pregnancy and abandonment with Aysel, Bataklı Damın Kızı/The Girl From the Marshes aka Ays...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From inflated plastic dolls, patience stones, honour bearers, home-breakers and ‘commodified others’ to free agents: Screen images of women
• 2 Women on the thorny trail of image-making
• 3 Post-traumatic cinema and gender
• 4 Narratives of resistance
• 5 Sexualities and queer imaginaries
• 6 Border-crossings and ‘deterritorialized’ film-makers
• 7 His films: Abbas Kiarostami and Nuri Bilge Ceylan
• Afterword
• Index