Fatih Akın's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe by Berna Gueneli (review)

Fatih Akın's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe expands on the author's 2011 dissertation, Challenging European Borders: Fatih Akın's Filmic Visions of Europe. The study focuses on three films that are meant to represent the director's "first period" (6) or "Turkish German entanglement period" (45): his second feature film Im Juli (2000) and the first two parts of the trilogy "Liebe, Tod und Teufel," Gegen die Wand (2004) and Auf der anderen Seite (2007). Gueneli characterizes this first period as a "meticulous choreography of European heterogeneity" (5), reflecting "on the level of form the heterogeneity of Europe and its inhabitants that dominates the content level" (21). She argues that "these films aurally diversify Europe" (9) in a manner that "normalizes today's hybrid, diverse, transnational communities" (12). For Gueneli, this is part of a larger trend, and she therefore concludes her study with two chapters situating Akın's œuvre in the context of European cinema and transnational film.

In the first chapter, Gueneli explores Im Juli as part of Akın's effort to "map Europe as a transnational space extending beyond existing EU borders" (45), to "unmask the border as arbitrary and manmade" (57) and to thereby "break stereotypes about both German and Turkish German characters" (55). She contends that this message also resonates in the film's soundscapes, as they "reflect a vast and complex polyphony, which prior to this film was often excluded from conventional depictions of Europe" (47). This includes the languages spoken and experienced by the protagonists travelling through Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, as well as the soundtrack featuring "Turkish pop music, Spanish-language songs from Hamburg, Canadian pop songs on the Danube, and German psychedelic music" (66).

Multilingualism plays a similarly prominent role in Gueneli's analysis of Gegen die Wand in Chapter Two. Here she suggests that "the act of code-switching diversifies categories such as 'German,' 'Turkish,' and 'European'" (76), leading to "a normalization of multiethnicity and multilingualism in Germany and Europe" (78). In contrast to "earlier one-dimensional cinematic depictions" (86), Turkish and German no longer appear as the language of oppression and freedom, respectively. However, while "Akın's polyglot characters become a version of the multilingual Europeans that the EU envisions" (93), Gueneli explains that this "portrayal of a flexible, mobile Europe avoids depicting an idealized, unproblematic multicultural world" (92).

The third and final case study focuses on the transnational soundscapes of Auf der anderen Seite, exploring their potential "to make alternative conceptions of Europe (aurally) palatable for the viewers and listeners" (123). In detail Gueneli discusses Akın's cooperation with DJ Shantel to create an original soundtrack including musical traditions from across the continent, and she suggests that "Akın was the first within the cinema sector to productively incorporate such links to Turkish musical and cinematic traditions within a popular format without exoticizing or romanticizing the artistic product" (109). She also highlights the linguistic polyphony of Auf der anderen Seite, arguing that the film's "diversified linguistic sounds allow for an aural experience of Akın's vision of a multiethnic and contemporary Europe" (120).

The concluding chapter sets Akın's thematic and formal innovations in context with concurrent developments in transnational European cinema. In a series of brief case studies, Gueneli compares Akın's works to those of Philippe Lioret, Mathieu Kassovitz, Yamina Benguigui, Michael Haneke, Stephen Frears, Emir Kusturica, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The reader learns, for instance, how "Kusturica's audiovisual depiction of travel, movement and migration through the Balkans, like Akın's, creates an entry point into the 'new' sights and sounds of European cinema for a larger European/global audience" (139); how Frears's characters, too, "diversify and ultimately highlight a multilocal and decentralized Europe" (142); and how "Ceylan's films...