Notes
on Turkish Film
posted to www.marxmail.org on Nov. 1, 2002
While none of the other films I saw during the
Fourth Annual Turkish Film Festival achieved quite the artistic level of the
comic masterpiece "Sergeant Shakespeare," all of them were useful
windows into the complex reality of a country that stands right now as a
crucible between two powerful cultures on a collision course. With the USA
representing itself as the vanguard of a new Crusade, it is understandable that
the question of Turkish identity--either European or Mideastern--will come to
the fore.
With the Islamic-oriented (but not Islamic fundamentalist) Justice and
Development Party poised to take power in Turkey, these sorts of question are
posed even more sharply than ever. While little more than a travelogue, Binnur
Karaevli's 37-minute documentary "Cenneti Ararken" (Searching For
Paradise) addressed them from a personal angle. Karaevli is a 30 something
woman who learned English in Turkey to prepare her for either a job in Europe
or the USA. Departing from her home in Los Angeles, she flies back to Istanbul
visit her family and to search for Paradise Gardens, which epitomized the city
of her youth and all that was exceptional about her country. At the conclusion
of the film, she learns that the gardens have been razed in order to make space
for a restaurant and residential buildings. Only the name remains.
She walks around the city asking people if they are "European" or
"Asian". To a one, they insist that they are European. Only
intellectuals like the novelist Orhan Pamuk reply in a more ambivalent manner.
In a March 27, 1995 Nation Magazine review of his "The Black Book,"
one understands where Pamuk is coming from:
"Hoja, having learned Western engineering from his slave, becomes obsessed
with making a huge weapon for the Turkish Sultan's military campaign in Europe.
But once constructed, it gets stuck in a swamp at the base of a gleaming white
fortress in Poland, which the Turks fail to take. Surely a statement against
the abuse of knowledge and the forceful taking of other cultures, this defeat
also reflects the real failure of the Ottoman Turks to conquer the West in the
sixteenth century, when their armies were stopped at Vienna."
Indeed, although Turkey never continued its march across Europe, only leaving
traces of its relatively benign precapitalist Empire in the Balkans, Europe did
eventually sweep across Turkey. The challenge that European hegemony mounted
was so overwhelming that the Turkish elite was forced to transform the country
in order to remain viable. Mustafa Kemal tried to eliminate all of the Islamic
and Ottoman traces in the country and model the country along modern European
lines.
Today, as cat's paw of US imperialism in it's pending war against Iraq, we are
constantly reminded that Turkey is a "good" Islamic country as
opposed to Saudi Arabia and all the rest. Set in 1960 and openly gainsaying the
benefits of westernization, Semir Aslanyurek's "Sellale" (Waterfall)
focuses on the ancient Anatolian town of Antioch, where life appears to be the
same as it was a thousand years earlier. People depend on the waterfall to
drive the stone mill for turning grain into flour. When local officials bring
in a US engineer (a Turk pretending to a Western "expert") to
supervise the modernization of the wondrous waterfall along the lines of
ambitious projects like the Boulder Dam, their version of Paradise Garden is
destroyed. Only a trickle can be seen after the rocks above the falls are
dynamited. The local power structure is revealed to be as inept as the
Westernizing officers in Pamuk's novel.
Two films both seemed to consciously reject the kind of optimism projected by
the Turkish elites as it lurches uncertainly toward assimilation with the West.
Orhan Oguz "Hersye Ragmen" (In Spite of Everything) is an unsparing
look at a recently released prisoner who lives on the fringes of Istanbul
society in a ramshackle apartment shared with an alley cat. With few personal
and social skills, he ekes out an existence as a hearse driver. When a woman
recently returned to Istanbul from a stint as "guest worker" in
Germany tries to develop a relationship with him, he can barely sustain a
conversation let alone open himself up to intimacy.
In Umit Unal's "9", nearly the entire action takes place in the
interrogation room of a police station where residents of a
"respectable" Istanbul neighborhood point fingers at each other
during the investigation of the murder of a young female "street
person". The director implies that the murder is emblematic of a deeper
malaise in Turkish society that would explain the acceptance of authoritarian
rule by large sectors of the middle-class.
Unfortunately, both "Hersye Ragmen" and "9" are somewhat
lacking in entertainment values. While it is commendable that filmmakers put
forward such an unstinting view of their society, you cannot do this at the
expense of what makes film work as an art form. You need plot, dialogue and
inventive cinematography, which no amount of honesty can make up for.
Perhaps it was the example of such films that made "Sergeant Shakespeare"
director Sinan Cetin attack the notion that "Hollywood imperialism"
was responsible for the decline of the Turkish film industry. He stated that if
you make films that engage an audience, they would succeed commercially. Needless
to say, this is a universal challenge to filmmakers of any nationality.
Although Cuneyt Arkin's 1982 "Dunyaya Kurtaran Adam" (The Man Who
Saved the World--also commonly referred to as "The Turkish Star
Wars") was not part of the festival, it was shown at a Halloween fundraiser
party and dance for the sponsoring Moon and Stars Project. Whatever else one
wants to say about this film, nobody can ever accuse it of not wanting to
entertain.
Best described as a cheap imitation of the George Lukas "classic", it
is not above including footage from the original, throwing all copyright
considerations overboard. Arkin also borrows/steals from "Raiders of the
Lost Ark" as well, spicing up his film with musical passages lifted
directly from the Indiana Jones movie.
It is a masterpiece in the same sense that Ed Wood's "Plan Nine From Outer
Space" is. It mixes together conventions from science fiction serials of
the 1940s and 50s (as Lucas did) with Hong Kong martial arts action
conventions. Made on the ultra-cheap, the villains are dressed in fuzzy pink
costumes of the sort worn by baseball park mascots or appear to be improvised
from whatever was lying around the wardrobe department. The net effect is
comic, just as was Jackie Gleason in his appearance in the Honeymooners "Man
from Outer Space" Halloween costume cobbled together from household
appliances, etc.
The Byzantine plot consists mostly of one kung fu fighting sequence
after another as the two heroes of the film, including Arkin in a Han Solo type
role, dispatch their evil enemies. Obviously lacking a penny for special
effects, the film uses a trampoline to propel the actors over the heads of
their antagonists.
Adding to the overall sense of temporal and geographical displacement, the
battles are staged on location in the ruins of Cappadocia, an ancient Anatolian
region that was a center of the early Christian church and Zoroastrianism as
well. The space warriors chase each other from one 12th century crypt to
another without any attempt to explain the Christian relics on display. The
final half-hour of the film is a delirious mixture of crudely choreographed
kung fu fighting scenes, slapdash "death rays", slices of "Star
Wars", fantastically costumed extras who appear on their way to Mardi
Gras.
"Dunyaya Kurtaran Adam" can be seen online at: http://www.showtvnet.com/turksinemasi/film/dunyayi_kurtaran_adam.shtml.
Just click "Izleyin" (play) to start the movie. It is not subtitled,
but believe me, you won't need them to enjoy this Turkish delight.