Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (review)

A variety of recent publications have highlighted specific aspects of Turkish cinema,¹ Turkish-German diasporic cinema,² the New Turkish Cinema,³ and the history of Turkish cinema.⁴ Is another big cinematic tradition about to be discovered as a result of this surge in scholarly writing? Just a decade ago there were only a handful of books on Indian film; now they occupy significant shelf space at every respectable bookstore. Is Turkish cinema going to be next?

In this context, Gönül Dönmez-Colin's volume is both timely and handy. The book covers all issues related to Turkey and its cinema that the average student of film in the West may want to know about. It opens with a broad yet succinct historical overview; it discusses the ways in which Turkish cinema has addressed concerns of national identity and rural-urban migration; it addresses uneasy questions of gender and sexuality (from homosexuality to honor killings); it touches on ethnic minority matters. It also talks of important female stars (Türkan Şoray), of German-Turkish diasporic filmmaking, of new wave directors, and of the troubles affecting the industry related to Turkey's contested ascension to the European Union. Dönmez-Colin dedicates a separate chapter to the life and times of the legendary "ugly king" of Yesilçam, Yilmaz Güney, a larger-than-life proletarian entertainer who is extremely popular in Turkey.

With such a large variety of themes, the author's decisions about structure and approach remain somewhat concealed. Some chapters focus on directors or trends, some on history and social discourse. At moments it appears that there is no unifying principle in the selection of themes or films. Yet when a lesser-known cinematic tradition comes to the attention of a wider international audience, this is precisely the type of book that is needed. Other studies may go deeper analytically and approach the material more systematically, yet general questions about Turkish cinema would still linger. Dönmez-Colin, an independent scholar who lives in France and Quebec and who attends a range of international film festivals, addresses most of these disparate questions and makes an important contribution. Written from a Western point of view for Western readers, her volume manages to address a range of complex issues and perceptions related to the discourses that dominate Turkey's cultural reality in a clear and succinct manner. One needs books like this in order to establish basic knowledge of lesser-known cinemas, and it's good that the book appears at this point in time before other studies that use a more advanced theoretical apparatus.

Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging is comparable to the pioneering work of Antonin and Mira Liehm on Eastern European cinema, or to Roy Armes's writing on African film—classic texts that remain indispensable introductory reading and reliable reference sources. These books are more preoccupied with the way national self-perception has evolved than with the history of cinema. Similarly, Turkish Cinema explores mostly how cinema reflects the nation's identity discourse. There is little on style, little on industry, and next to nothing by way of textual analysis. The volume is more about Turkey's anxious reconciliation with its complex multicultural history, about various aspects of internal and international migration and their intersection with the patriarchal tradition, and about ideological splits, political dissent, and exile, as revealed on film.

At the same time, perhaps because the focus is kept on the films, key stages in Turkey's political evolution remain blurred. Most other books that explore cinema through its link to social discourse tie developments in film to prevailing political regimes: colonialism, state socialism, dictatorship, and so on. This book, however, does not explicitly correlate the turbulence in Turkish politics of recent decades to the politics of filmmaking in Dönmez-Colin's narrative. Still, the analysis traces the genesis of various national identity narratives (e.g., the Kara Murat films) and the...