Head-On (Gegen die Wand)

Daniela Berghahn

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

When Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was hailed as a turning point for German cinema. Not only was this unconventional love story the first German film in eighteen years to win the prestigious award, but the success of writer-director Fatih Akin was also celebrated as the revival of German auteur cinema. Meanwhile Turkey claimed Akin as its own prodigal son and his film a victory for Turkish cinema. Daniela Berghahn provides a detailed and entertaining account of the film's artistic inspirations, its production history and the debates that surrounded it in the German and Turkish press. Arguing that much of the media discourse on Turkish German identity politics detracted from Akin's remarkable artistic achievement, Berghahn instead situates Head-On in the critical contexts of global art cinema and transnational melodrama. This comparative approach excavates new layers of meaning and offers highly original insights into Akin's landmark film.

1 And the Winner Is ...

The road to the red carpet in Berlin was a rocky one for Fatih Akin, both with regard to Head-On's production history as well as to its entry into the competition at the 54th Berlin International Film Festival. Obstacles were numerous and unforeseen, but conversely, when all seemed lost, things magically fell into place. Winning the Golden Bear on 14 February 2004, catapulted the then thirty-one-year-old director to instant stardom. His artistic success made him the model migrant whom the Turkish community in Germany and in Turkey as well as advocates of a liberal multicultural Germany were eager to enlist as their ambassador.

Fatih Akin was born in Hamburg in 1973, the second son of a Turkish immigrant family. His father, Mustafa, came to Germany in 1966 as one of thousands of Gastarbeiter (literally 'guest workers') from Turkey, who were recruited in the 1960s to support West Germany's rapid economic growth.¹⁴ In 1968, Mustafa married Hadiye, who followed him from Turkey to Hamburg. Both had menial jobs in cleaning and manufacturing companies, until in the 1980s Hadiye Akin, who had worked as a teacher in Turkey, was offered a position teaching Turkish children in Hamburg. Like most immigrants, the family planned to stay in Germany for just a few years. But, as the tongue-in-cheek title of Akin's autobiographical documentary Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We Forgot to Return, 2000) suggests, year after year, the Akins postponed their return to their homeland – until in 1994, they eventually became German citizens.

Akin started his career in the film industry in the early 1990s when he took on supporting roles in television dramas. Since he was unwilling to play the stereotypical Turk in productions where 'migrants could only appear in one guise: as a problem', he started making his own films.¹⁵ His breakthrough came with Short Sharp Shock, a film that combines the generic conventions of the ghetto-centric gangster movie with a light-hearted exploration of multiculturalism and a heavy dose of cinephilia. Aesthetically modelled on Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), it draws its thematic inspiration from Claude Berri's Tchao Pantin (So Long, Stooge!, 1983) and Mehdi Charef's Le thé au harem d' Archimède (Tea in the Harem, 1985), films about interethnic friendships that emphasise the solidarity of the dispossessed. In contrast to earlier films about immigrants in France, Charef's semi-autobiographical debut feature eschewed an overtly political agenda. Instead of engaging with issues of immigration and racial conflict, the film captures the everyday life of two teenage boys, one French, the other of Algerian descent, who live on a housing estate in the Parisian banlieue. What sparked Akin's interest in Tea in the Harem was the theme of close male friendships across ethnic divides and the fact that Charef makes no big deal of alterity.¹⁶ Perhaps even more pertinent are the parallels between Short Sharp Shock and Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine given that the multiethnic friendship group consisting of Gabriel (Mehmet Kurtuluş) the Turk, Costa (Adam Bousdoukos) the Greek and Bobby (Aleksandar Jovanovic) the Serb, echoes the beur-blanc-noir trio of Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), Vinz (Vincent Cassell) and Hubert (Hubert Koundé) at the centre of La Haine.

When Akin pitched the screenplay of Short Sharp Shock to Ralph Schwingel at the Hamburg-based production company Wüste Film, he was hoping to play the lead role, Gabriel. At the time, he was just twenty years old, still at school and with hardly any acting experience under his belt. Schwingel quickly sensed that Akin had a keen interest and some talent for directing, took him under his wing and suggested that, 'rather than letting anybody else make a mess of it', Akin should have a go at directing Short Sharp Shock himself.¹⁷ The only problem was that Akin was a complete beginner with no directing experience. Determined to become a film director, he enrolled at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. Yet rather than wait for Akin to graduate, Schwingel offered him the chance to hone his skills by making two short films: Sensin – Du bist es! (Sensin – You're the One, 1995) and Getürkt (Weed, 1996). Schwingel, who had invested his own money in these two shorts, was well aware that they would not recoup the investment but were indispensible if Wüste Film was to find a co-producer for Short Sharp Shock. In return, Schwingel asked Akin to commit to producing his first three feature films with Wüste Film.¹⁸ Short Sharp Shock performed poorly at the box office (77,000 viewers in Germany, plus another 5,000 in Spain and Turkey) yet critics liked it and the film garnered a number of awards, including the Bavarian Film Award for Best Direction Young Film (1999) and the prestigious Adolf Grimme Prize (2001). The recognition Akin received made it relatively easy for him to raise the production budget (5 million German Marks) for his next project, the light-hearted road movie cum romantic comedy Im Juli (In July, 2000), in which Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu), a nerdy teacher from Hamburg falls in love with a gorgeous Turkish woman (İdil Üner) and follows her all the way to Istanbul, while being entirely oblivious to the amorous advances of his travelling companion Juli (Christiane Paul). With Moritz Bleibtreu and Christiane Paul, two of Germany's most bankable contemporary stars in the lead roles, the film was a remarkable box-office success, attracting well over half a million viewers in Germany alone.

Costa, Gabriel and Bobby in Short Sharp Shock

Juli and Daniel in In July (© Wüste Film)

His next feature, Solino did equally well at the box office but provoked a rather mixed response from the critics. It was Akin's first and only attempt to direct a screenplay written by someone else (Ruth Toma). The film tells the story of an Italian immigrant family, the Amatos, who trade their idyllic pastoral existence in Solino (meaning 'little sun') in Southern Italy for a more prosperous life in Germany.

Their destination is the grey and dismal city of Duisburg, one of the centres of the mining and heavy industry during the 1960s. Before long the father quits his job in the coal mines and opens a pizzeria. The film's promotional campaign billed Solino as the story of the first pizzeria in Germany. Like numerous other films that revolve around ethnic food, including La Graine et le mulet (Couscous, 2007) and Nina's Heavenly Delights (2006), Solino reminds majority-culture audiences that immigrants have enriched culinary culture by adding some of the host nations' favourite foods, be it couscous, chicken tikka masala or pizza.

Solino: The arrival of the Amato family in Duisburg; The Amatos in the basement kitchen of their Pizzeria Solino

In a bid for mainstream audiences, the theatrical release version of Solino was dubbed in German. This is common practice for foreign-language films in Germany; however, given that Solino dramatises the history of labour migration as a family saga, it was entirely implausible to have Italian immigrants speak perfect German as soon as they set foot on German soil, let alone while they are still living in sun-drenched Apulia. Fatih Akin was vehemently opposed to dubbing but had to bow to the demands of commerce, with only 10 per cent of the prints being released in the original bilingual version.¹⁹ While the decision paid off at the German box office, the compromises he had to make left Akin dissatisfied. This strengthened his resolve to stick to his guns and do things his way with his next project, Head-On.

The inspiration for the film's central narrative conceit of a sham marriage dates back to Akin's adolescence, when a Turkish girl at his secondary school asked him to marry her so that she could escape from the restrictive moral codes and vigilance of her family. Akin refused but never forgot this unconventional proposal and subsequently developed the screenplay of Head-On around it.²⁰

Originally, Akin had intended Head-On to be a romantic comedy with a touch of culture clash, following the tried and tested formula of similarly themed films such as Green Card (1999) and The Wedding Banquet (1993). Then 9/11 happened – and that changed everything. To narrate the story of Sibel and Cahit as a comedy had suddenly become impossible. When watching the news coverage of aeroplanes crashing into the World Trade Center, Akin immediately thought:

I hope it's not got anything to do with Muslims. I knew instantly, if it's got to do with Muslims, then it's got something to do with me. [...] After 9/11 it was clear that a comedy was out of the question [...]. Perhaps, this seems far-fetched. Shortly afterwards Afghanistan was attacked and I felt a sense of rage, which is reflected in the film. A week before we started shooting Head-On, the Americans invaded Iraq. The intense anger in the film is due to 9/11.²¹

Nobody would be able to convey this latent sense of rage better than Birol Ünel, a trained stage actor of Turkish descent with a reputation for heavy drinking and violent outbursts on set. He had played a small part in In July and, despite having proved difficult to manage at the time, Akin was impressed by his stupendous talent and wrote the screenplay of Head-On with Ünel in mind. He was determined to cast Ünel in the role of the cocaine-snorting suici...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 And the Winner Is...
• 2 Caught up in Identity Politics: From Turkish German Film-maker to Transnational Auteur
• 3 Head-On as Transnational Melodrama
• Notes
• Credits
• eCopyright