Six Turkish Filmmakers by Laurence Raw (review)
- Six Turkish Filmmakers by Laurence Raw
Upon receiving best director award at Cannes Festival for his Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys) in 2008, a somber Nuri Bilge Ceylan dedicated the award to his "lonely and beautiful country."1 Since then, Ceylan went on to win Palme d'Or for his Kış Uykusu (Winter Sleep) in 2014, becoming the first Turkish film director do so. (In 1982, Yılmaz Güney's Yol had shared this award with Costa-Gavras's Missing.) Ceylan and his contemporary, Semih Kaplanoğlu, are well known among film festival circuits within and outside the Middle East. They are considered transnational auteurs who can transcend the cultural specificity of Turkey and appeal to the human condition anywhere. Yet there are around 8,000 feature films produced within the last 50 years and hundreds of film directors actively making films in Turkey, very few of whose names are known outside their home country. Laurence Raw's Six Turkish Filmmakers is an important step in filling that gap. In addition to Kaplanoğlu [End Page 518] and Ceylan, he includes Derviş Zaim (originally from Cyprus), Zeki Demirkubuz, Tolga Örnek, and Çağan Irmak.
A dedicated and self-taught expert, Laurence Raw has long been known in Turkish studies circles as a scholar who has studied popular culture in Turkey, ranging from humor to literature, for over 20 years. In this book, Raw offers a new and detailed study of Turkish cinema that builds upon his previous works. Six Turkish Filmmakers is an in-depth contemplation of his personal life, as well as of cinema in contemporary Turkey. Raw's choice of films reflects on his personal encounters with the cultural history and social politics of Turkey. Full of personal insights, the book functions as a cultural commentary as well as a study of film directors. In discussing each director, Raw takes a chronological approach, grouping films by common themes. The most important qualities of the book are its historical research, its literary references, the author's personal reflections, and his insights about how contemporary Turkish filmmakers deal with issues of identity.
The title of the book is itself meaningful, as it refers in spirit and practice to one of the early books written in Turkish as an auteur director study, Türk Sinemasında Altı Yönetmen (Six directors in Turkish cinema) by Italian/ Levantine film critic Giovanni Scogonamillo (Türk Film Arşivi, 1973). Back in 1973, when Turkish cinema did not command much respect at the time at home or abroad, Scogonamillo's book was a fresh breath of hope for the six directors whose work it covered. As Scogonamillo had done over four decades ago, Raw makes six new directors in Turkish cinema the focus of his thematic study.
An overarching theme of the book is its subjects' preoccupation with urban identities. He concentrates on Derviş Zaim's Tabutta Rövaşata (Summersault in a Coffin) and Zeki Demirkubuz's films, all of which explore Turkish people's reactions living in anonymous urban spaces in Istanbul, a megacity that is both historical and transnational. Similarly, Raw identifies the shifting positions of masculinity within this urban landscape in both Tolga Örnek's Kaybedenler Kulübü (Losers' Club) and Çağan Irmak's Issız Adam (Alone).
Another theme Raw identifies is a nostalgia for the past, which he spotlights in his discussion of Derviş's Cypriot film, Örnek's Devrim Arabaları (Cars of the Revolution), and Irmak's Babam ve Oğlum (My Father and My Son). Raw indicates that these directors are trying to anchor their memories of the past into film, especially under the post-2003 governments of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, from the Turkish Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), with rapid modernization and urbanization changing daily lives.
Raw also observes that some of the films by these six directors are either very personal or universal. Semih Kaplanoğlu's trilogy—Yumurta (Egg), Sut (Milk), and Bal (Honey)—all contain reminiscences of his childhood, teenage years, and young adulthood. As a...
