The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in the Contemporary Turkish Cinema

Ebru Thwaites Diken

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319716992
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319717005
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores how politics, religion and cinema encounter and re-invent each other in contemporary Turkish cinema. It investigates their common origin—the spectacle, which each field views as an instrument of governmentality. The book analyses six recent, some of which are internationally known Turkish films: The Messenger (Ulak), A Man's Fear of God (Takva), Let's Sin (?tiraz?m Var), SixtyOne Days (?ftarl?k Gazoz), The Imam and The Shadowless (Gölgesizler). Thwaites discusses how the cinematic nature of politics and religion unfold amidst the increasing media visibility of religion in contemporary Turkey. The chapters explore the relationship between art and religion, and compare religion and philosophy in their relation to truth, belief, and economy. Through close examination of these films, the author highlights the role of cinema in contemporary Turkey and at the heart of the religious paradigm.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ebru Thwaites DikenThe Spectacle of Politics and Religion in the Contemporary Turkish Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71700-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Cinema, Politics and Religion

Ebru Thwaites Diken¹

(1)

Department of Sociology, İstinye University, İstanbul, Turkey

Abstract

Politics and religion are specular phenomena. Power and belief are grounded in seeing. The mediation of politics and religion is increasingly cinematized in contemporary societies. Cinema, politics and religion seem to be autonomous fields. However, they share common origins, in terms of the concept of the spectacle, which they all operationalize as an instrument of governmentality. In this context, this chapter discusses the cinematic roots of politics and religion as a basis to discuss, in the following chapters, how the cinematic nature of politics and religion unfolds in contemporary Turkish cinema. It briefly outlines the differing articulations of the ‘return of religion’ in six selected films, giving an outline of how they reflect this differentiation.

Keywords

Turkish cinemapoliticsreligionspectaclevisualgazegovernmentality

End Abstract

Modernity , it seems, can do neither with nor without religion . The ‘return of religion’, which has already marked the contemporary political and cultural imagination , only accentuates this paradox. Thus, although the criticism of religion was once considered to be ‘completed’ with modernity (Marx 1957), religion today seems to have become indispensible to truth and truth-telling procedures (Thwaites Diken 2015: 393).

A country governed by neo-liberal Islam, Turkey is deeply affected by different versions of the ‘return of religion’ , not only politically, but also culturally (see Thwaites Diken 2015: 393). And contemporary Turkish cinema is paradigmatic in this respect. But the increasing visibility of religion in Turkish cinema is not equally apparent in social and cultural analyses.

This book investigates how the three different fields—politics, religion and cinema—problematize and reinvent each other in the context of contemporary Turkish cinema. I focus on the relationship between politics, religion and cinema in terms of their common origins. In this context, I find the concept of the ‘spectacle’ especially interesting. This is grounded in the fact that, in contemporary societies, the mediation of religion and politics is increasingly cinematized. Following this, the aim of the book is to contribute to an understanding of how the cinematic nature of politics and religion unfolds in the context of Turkish cinema. While doing so, it explores the capacity of cinema, as an art form, to generate political and religious statements, sensations, affections and truths.

Power—in politics and religion—always relies on visual mechanisms (Thwaites Diken 2017: 128). Religious rituals and political ceremonies have historically been designed as spectacles . And today, cinema holds a privileged position with respect to spectacle . It is the most obvious art form to observe the spectacle as a historical socio-economic condition (Thwaites Diken 2017: 128). In this sense, insofar as it is a mass art , cinema shapes the collective unconscious with reference to which subjectivity is produced (Reine 2014). Thus, to think about politics and religion in terms of spectacle , cinema functions as a focal point for this book.

Importantly, at first glance, cinema, politics and religion seem to be autonomous spheres. Each, after all, operates with different rules which organize its internal hierarchies. Nevertheless, they have homologies in terms of how subjectivity is created through spectation. In other words, all three fields have a structural and a genealogical relationship with the concept of the ‘spectacle’ . The term ‘spectacle’ expresses a totalizing effect of power which uses non-coercive means in contemporary capitalism (Debord 1983). It dominates social consciousness in every domain of social life by entertaining, passifying, and distracting. In this sense, it serves as the illusory ‘opium’ of the masses, which has taken the place of religion in modernity (Debord 1983). Just as religion consists in transference—in that humans transfer their own good attributes, such as love, friendship and justice, to an external Other and objectify an ideal conception of themselves as ‘God’ (Feuerbach 1841)—in modernity , humans are objectified (and thus alienated) through spectacular technology (Debord 1983, 20).

Power constructs itself, operates and accumulates through specular mechanisms. The way in which vision is mediated is central to the making of modern power (Crary 2002). Power involves seeing and being seen. The front cover of Thomas Hobbes’ (1651) famous book The Leviathan is a classic example that illuminates the constitution of power through the gaze (see Thwaites Diken 2017: 130). The picture shows a gigantic human figure who overlooks a town. We see only the upper part of the Leviathan’s body, which is made up of smaller human figures who look up at its face. While the Leviathan , holding a sword and a wand in its hands, represents the sovereign power, the state; the people who comprise its body are the citizens of the modern state.

The picture illustrates that the sovereign’s power comes from the governed. The people’s gaze is what constitutes the source of the Leviathan’s authority. Hobbes suggested that people can live in peace only if they give up their freedom and transfer their rights to a supreme authority in return for security. The social contract indicates that the sovereign’s legitimacy depends on the fact that the people see the sovereign as sovereign . If they stop seeing, sovereignty cannot survive. Yet, at the same time, from whichever angle one looks at the picture, the viewer is faced with the inspecting gaze of the Leviathan , which stares back, constantly reminding her of her subjection to its authority. ‘What we see in the eye of the sovereign is the locus of one’s own seeing in the alien form of blind spectacle —as artifice’ (Pye 2015, 172).

Religion, too, is a specular phenomenon. Belief relates to spectation. Anthropological studies show how rituals as spectacles constitute God as a reality by impersonating it (see Kennedy 2009, 207). The spectator is actively involved in the creation of meaning in such rituals, which is to say that, if it were not for the spectating subject , God would not exist. But the crucial point in this respect is that it is not important whether the subject participating in the spectacle believes in it. It is enough that she participates, the paradox being that the miracle can occur as long as one spectates while at the same time the miracle can seem independent of one’s gaze . Belief , in this sense, is grounded in seeing.

Against this background, I am particularly interested in how cinema assists belief and politics in the context of recent Turkish films. In the last two decades, Turkish cinema has become increasingly visible in the global art scene. Many Turkish films have featured in international festivals and more than a few have returned home with significant prizes. Many others have received critical acclaim.

There is also a wide consensus that a paradigmatic shift has taken place in Turkish cinema over the same period. First, cinematic production in Turkey has become more compatible with post-industrial art production mechanisms. Second, new themes have been deployed by recent films which has contributed to the thematic and aesthetic diversification in contemporary Turkish cinema. The new themes generally revolve around reinterpretations of modernity , the reconstruction of identities , the reconfiguration of women’s role in politics and so on. Against this background, many film studies scholars in Turkey prefer the term ‘New Cinema of Turkey’, which broadly covers the period after 1996 (Akser and Bayraktar 2014, xviii–xx). This term encompasses both popular and art house films of different genres. Yet all of these works share a common thematical problematique—an increasing engagement with ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ (Suner 2010).

Significantly, in this context, Turkish cinema has also made a religious turn in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Cinema, Politics and Religion
• 2.  The Messenger (Ulak)
• 3.  A Man’s Fear of God (Takva)
• 4.  Let’s Sin! (İtirazım Var)
• 5.  Sixty-One Days (İftarlık Gazoz)
• 6.  The Imam (The İmam)
• 7.  The Shadowless (Gölgesizler)
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter