A Note on the Specifity of Turkish Cinema
The emergence of a new Turkish cinema is an exciting development for all of us,
and confirms something someone said a few years ago, namely: “At a moment when we in the West, for all kinds of socio-economic reasons, no longer have our own Antonionis any more… it is good to know that elsewhere, outside the First World, we can look forward to their reinvention.” Turkish filmmakers today have indeed been compared to Antonioni, along with Tarkovsky and Kiarostami, and no doubt many others; and if it is always comical to watch people coming to terms with the unknown and the unexpected by referring to the familiar and the already known, and awkwardly trying to squeeze the new into the outlines of already catalogued names and styles; nonetheless, these particular names are interesting first-thoughts and will perhaps allow us to triangulate Turkish production in a tentative way.
Kiarostami and the Iranians: well, of course. Along with Turkey, Iran is one of the rare Asian (or Eurasian) modernizing and non-socialist countries not to have been occupied by the colonial powers (and therefore not technically “postcolonial”). Both offer combinations of peasant production and urban industrial capitalism of a uniquely transitional kind, and their cinema in that respect has no particular equivalent elsewhere, not even in East Asia. I’m reminded of the excitement generated by the rediscovery of pre-Soviet Russian film and the possibility of an alternate route to film from the canonical evolutionary path we knew in the West. Here the village and the communal persist in ways scarcely visible elsewhere in the Third World, and yet coexist with capitalism. It is a combination that might have been expected to produce distinctive forms and contents, and I want to describe some of those in a moment.
Indeed, we might well have thrown in the original French New Wave as a cross-reference for both Ceylan and Zeki Demirkubuz, since the reflexive side of these films is omnipresent, without being mannered or obtrusive. In Demirkubuz television is indeed a constant presence, gnawing away at the big screen as it were, and reminding us of the twin dangers of image addiction and of the empty time of nforced unemployment: and here I must record a peculiar fact, namely that in my (extremely limited) contact with recent Turkish film, I have so far found none in which television watching (especially in hotel lobbies) or film-making (the two are perhaps opposites) do not play a role. I don’t know what this means, but I do ssociate it with unemployment and enforced leisure (I’ll come back to that), and also conjecture that this deeper marking by the representational media confirms the latter’s unique superstructural position in late capitalism generally (as compared to the earlier modern stage). But here the new technology is a contradictory sign, that faces two ways: it marks the increasing privatization of communication in the postmodern age, but also (the hotel lobby!) its collective function, the screen around which an atomized urban group of isolated individuals clusters and shares its loneliness.
As for the Iranian cross-reference, I want to reiterate the still communal fabric of these societies, in which people on the street still address each other as brother or uncle, as sister; in which the collective persists within modern urban life, and not as some impoverished village in the wholesale devastation of late capitalism and globalization. There is still, in Iran and in Turkey, very much the same phenomenon of the flight from the land and the immense over-population of the cities that can be witnessed on all the continents of the globe: but it is not the kind of social disintegration we find in the Latin American cities, nor either the frantic and universal entrepreneurial agitation of the East Asian ones. Their common debt to Italian neo-realism, with its non-actors and its commitment to everyday life, underscores that kinship, although we might have said that they touch that particular tradition from opposite ends, Iranian cinema emerging from the beginnings, with Rosselini; Turkish cinema emerging from neo-realism’s culmination and transformation in Antonioni.
Yet all this very much in a contemporary situation of globalization and its simultaneities. Thus both cinemas also register, each in its own way, a unique combination of the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern – a combination that has been able to fascinate Western audience, owing no doubt to the structural deficiencies of their own societies and the absence from them of any traditional or collective elements.
Still, even these general impressions risk suggesting some unity of style in the new Turkish cinema, and a sense of cultural identity (indeed, the terminological problem we face in talking about Turkish cinema generally lies in the word “national”, a word utterly misplaced in any discussion of these anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan works). At any rate, nothing is more unlike the films of Ceylan than those of one of the other distinctive newer Turkish directors, Zeki Demirkubuz, which have nonetheless attracted their own (quite different stereotypes). Indeed, if Antonioni and the rest were pressed into service for Ceylan, here on the contrary it is Dostoyevsky who is appealed to, and who does really seem to present some distant family likeness to the interminable and passionate quarrels and unresolvable discussions we find here; even though, as far as I can remember, Dostoyevsky was not much interested in the problems of the couple or of married unhappiness. But to be sure the interview between policeman and suspect is here given a certain inflection; and prostitution also becomes an inescapable feature of a situation in which women are also largely unemployed, “whore” then becoming the automatic characterization of any relatively liberated or independent woman.
I’ll conclude with three brief remarks on Demirkubuz: first, about an obsessive detail that I find quite wonderful; not a signature exactly, but a minor aberrant law of this universe, like the direction of prevalent winds or the average seasonal temperature or rainfall. It is a law that only seems to obtain in the interview situation, in the offices of bosses and officials, such as prosecutors or police chiefs. You stand and wait, the dignitary motions his assistants out of the room and closes the door, and then, as irritating as a nervous twitch or the silent stubbornness of an animal, the door’s catch fails, it slips open again like a bad habit, the guiltiness of built space itself, provoking the annoyance of the state, testifying to the ineptness of the workers, indicating, perhaps, that nothing is secret and that sooner or later what is said confidentially in this inner sanctum will be common knowledge all over the city, who knows? This is a purely cinematographic gesture, which it is fruitless and naive to interrogate for some meaning, as though it were a symbol. But it is a gradually familiar recurrence that tells us whose films these are.
A second remark has to do with the appearance of Camus alongside Dostoyevsky, in Demirkubuz’ Fate, allegedly a filmic version of L’Etranger. But just as the unique and intolerable ravings and arguments are not truly Dostoyevskian, but rather model a different kind of hell, so also the apathy of Musa is very far from the charged and
mysterious, active indifference of Camus’ first-person character (if only because Musa is in third-person as it were). Nor is the difference only that of the happy ending, so to speak; Musa’s passionate defense of himself is utterly without equivalent in those “cries of hatred” Camus’ stranger solicits at the end, before his execution. I think we have rather to identify a dialectic here, or at least an opposition. After the intolerable shrieking scenes of the other films it is as though the recording apparatus searched out their reversal and inversion, their polar antithesis. Musa’s indifference is that; it is not a negation of the experience of intolerable feeling and irresistible expression, or at least only a structural negation: for it is caught within the same paradigm, the exception that proves the rule, the absence that ratifies and reconfirms a presence. It is a haunting performance, that draws the whole surrounding urban and social environment with it into remarkable visual clarity.
Still, viewers will no doubt have been disconcerted by the long (Dostoyevskian) interview at the end, and this brings me to my third and last point, about timing. It is not so much the philosophical content that matters, in my opinion. This is rather a requirement of musical timing, of pace, of the formal need to sequence one kind of narrative time with a consecutive time of a radically different quality, the way a painter inserts a radically different kind of space, that jarringly escapes the previous system of narrative categories and inhabits new ones, underscoring the break rather than papering it over or providing smooth transitions. It’s disconcerting, no doubt, but we need to be disconcerted, as we richly ar not only by this director, but by recent Turkish film generally.
Fredric Jameson. A Note on the Specifity of Turkish Cinema. 2004.
Excerpt from the paper presented at Duke University on September 20, 2004 in conjunction with “ Arada/Between: Ten Contemporary Turkish Films.”
