This book explores responses to authoritarianism in Turkish society through popular culture by examining feature films and television serials produced between 1980 and 2010 about the 1980 coup. Envisioned as an interdisciplinary study in cultural studies rather than a disciplinary work on cinema, the book advocates for an understanding of popular culture in discerning emerging narratives of nationhood. Through feature films and television serials directly dealing with the coup of 1980, the book exposes tropes and discursive continuities such as “childhood” and “the child”. It argues that these conventional tropes enable popular debates on the modern nation’s history and its myths of identity.
This volume compares the cinemas of Iran and Turkey in terms of the presence and absence of women on both sides of the camera. From a critical point of view, it provides detailed readings of works by both male and female film-makers, emphasizing issues facing women's film-making. Presenting an overview of the modern histories of the two neighbouring countries, the study traces certain similarities and contrasts, particularly in the reception, adaption and representation of Western modernity and cinema. This is followed by the exploration of the images of women on screen with attention to minority women, investigating post-traumatic cinema's approaches to women (Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey) and women's interpretations of post-traumatic experiences. Furthermore, the representations of sexualities and LGBTI identities within cultural, traditional and state-imposed restrictions are also discussed. Investigating border-crossing in physical and metaphorical terms, the research explores the hybridities in the artistic expressions of 'deterritorialized' film-makers negotiating loyalties to both vatan (motherland) and the adopted country. This comprehensive analysis of the cinemas of Iran and Turkey, based on extensive research, fieldwork, interviews and viewing of countless films is a key resource for students and scholars interested in film, gender and cultural studies and the Middle East.
This book uses visual psychological anthropology to explore trauma, gendered violence, and stigma through a discussion of three ethnographic films set in Indonesia: 40 Years of Silence (Lemelson 2009), Bitter Honey (Lemelson 2015), and Standing on the Edge of a Thorn (Lemelson 2012). This exploration “widens the frame” in two senses. First, it offers an integrative analysis that connects the discrete topics and theoretical concerns of each film to crosscutting themes in Indonesian history, society, and culture. Additionally, it sheds light on all that falls outside the literal frame of the screen, including the films’ origins; psychocultural and interpersonal dynamics and constraints of deep, ongoing collaborations in the field; narrative and emotional orientations toward editing; participants’ relationship to their screened image; the life of the films after release; and the ethics of each stage of filmmaking. In doing so, the authors widen the frame for psychological anthropology as well, advocating for film as a crucial point of engagement for academic audiences and for translational purposes. Rich with critical insights and reflections on ethnographic filmmaking, this book will appeal to both scholars and students of visual anthropology, psychological anthropology, and ethnographic methods. It also serves as an engrossing companion to three contemporary ethnographic films.
This edited collection takes a timely and comprehensive approach to understanding Turkey’s television, which has become a global growth industry in the last decade, by reconsidering its geopolitics within both national and transnational contexts. The Turkish television industry along with audiences and content are contextualised within the socio-cultural and historical developments of global neoliberalism, transnational flows, the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and Islamism. Moving away from Anglo-American perspectives, the book analyzes both local and global processes of television production and consumption while taking into consideration the dynamics distinctive to Turkey, such as ethnic and gender identity politics, media policies and regulations, and rising nationalistic sentiments.
This handbook explores anti-communism as an overarching phenomenon of twentieth-century global history, showing how anti-communist policies and practices transformed societies around the world. It advances research on anti-communism by looking beyond ideologies and propaganda to uncover how these ideas were put into practice. Case studies examine the role of states and non-state actors in anti-communist persecutions, and cover a range of topics, including social crises, capitalist accumulation and dispossession, political clientelism and warfare. Through its comparative perspective, the handbook reveals striking similarities between different cases from various world regions and highlights the numerous long-term consequences of anti-communism that exceeded by far the struggle against communism in a narrow sense. Contributing to the growing body of work on the social history of mass violence, this volume is an essential resource for students and scholars interested to understand how twentieth-century anti-communist persecutions have shaped societies around the world today. Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Tunç Okan (Bay Okan) is an independent emigrant filmmaker born in 1942 in Turkey. He started his filmmaking career in 1974 with his debut film The Bus, which he made in Sweden, and partly in Germany. He completed the film some seven years after he quit his short but hectic acting career in Turkey’s popular commercial cinema industry, Yeşilçam. A dentist by training, Okan’s cinema career started in 1965 after winning an acting competition organised by a popular film magazine. Starring in thirteen films in a period of less than two years, he achieved considerable fame. In 1967, Okan quit his career in Yeşilçam, which he accused of anaesthetising society, and immigrated to Switzerland.3 His debut film The Bus was followed by only three other films: Drôle de samedi (Funny Saturday, 1985), Mercedes mon Amour (The Yellow Mercedes, 1992), and Umut Üzümleri (Grapes of Hope, 2013). Okan’s films are products that can best be studied in relation to both the mainstream popular cinema of Turkey, Yeşilçam, in which Okan started his cinema career, and in relation to certain European filmmakers and cinema movements that have influenced his cinema. Naficy’s accented cinema concept ultimately focuses too much on Hollywood cinema, and for this reason, it is ill-equipped to study the cinema of filmmakers like Okan, whose works have little to do with Hollywood. Okan’s cinema requires a different approach and a vocabulary which will enable one to study his cinema in relation not only to Hollywood, but to a diverse group of personal cinemas and cinema movements. Okan is an eclectic filmmaker; his cinema is in constant flux. As I demonstrate in this study, Okan’s cinema is inspired by a diverse group of filmmakers and cinemas. In his films, one can find markers of, inspirations from, and references to a great variety of European filmmakers, ranging from Wim Wenders to Jacques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard to Jack Clayton, and cinema movements from Italian Neorealism to the Czechoslovak New Wave, French New Wave to British Free Cinema influenced New Wave kitchen-sink dramas. Although his films feature recurrent themes relating to im/migration, being the cinema of an independent filmmaker Okan’s cinema proves to be a difficult one to categorise because of the many neatly employed inspirations from, and references to, diverse sources. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it has thus far received so little attention. Okan is not a “typical” Turkish film director. Only half of his films take place in Turkey, and even those films feature parts that were shot abroad. More importantly, he is not a film- maker who uses themes, cultural icons, stereotypes, narration strategies, and filmic aesthetics that have typically been used by filmmakers in Turkey. He is also not a filmmaker who has attracted the attention of international critics. His cinema is a cinema in-between; it is a cinema of tensions and competing identities, visions, and interests. It invokes a split reception on the viewer. On one hand, his films can be read in relation/reaction to tendencies in national/Turkish cinema, and on the other hand, in relation to international, particularly the European, arthouse cinema. Given this, the best way to understand and appreciate his works is perhaps to read Okan’s films in dialogue with developments in both cinema of Turkey and European (art) cinema, for his “signature” derives influences from a variety of sources in these cinemas. Okan’s own words, identifying himself as a “European Turk” could be seen as legitimisation, and encouragement to discuss his works in relation to both cinema of Turkey and European (art) cinema. Okan is neither a one-issue director nor a filmmaker who restricts himself to one format or genre. On the contrary, his films are always on the road, sometimes literally; his third film, The Yellow Mercedes, is a road movie, and The Bus, though not being a road movie in the strict sense, generously exploits the conventions of the genre. Figuratively, all of Okan’s films are in search of new ways of expression. Indeed, they are the products of this very search. This constant search motivates him to challenge, and often cross, many established conventions and boundaries of cinema. Okan’s cinema is what I call “transboundary cinema”.
Contemporary screen industries such as film and television have become primary sites for visualizing borders, migration, maps, and travel as processes of separation and dislocation, but also connection. Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen pulls case studies in film and television industries from throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia to interrogate the nature of movement via moving images. By combining theoretical, interdisciplinary engagements with empirical research, this volume offers a new way to look at screen media's representations of our contemporary world's transnational and cosmopolitan imaginaries.
These essays survey the histories, the theories and the fault lines that compose the field of memory research. Drawing on the advances in the sciences and in the humanities, they address the question of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.
“Istanbul, Istanbul turns on the tension between the confines of a prison cell and the vastness of the imagination; between the vulnerable borders of the body and the unassailable depths of the mind. This is a harrowing, riveting novel, as unforgettable as it is inescapable.” —Dale Peck, author of Visions and Revisions “A wrenching love poem to Istanbul told between torture sessions by four prisoners in their cell beneath the city. An ode to pain in which Dostoevsky meets The Decameron.” —John Ralston Saul, author of On Equilibrium; former president, PEN International “Istanbul is a city of a million cells, and every cell is an Istanbul unto itself.” Below the ancient streets of Istanbul, four prisoners—Demirtay the student, the doctor, Kamo the barber, and Uncle Küheylan—sit, awaiting their turn at the hands of their wardens. When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humor, to pass the time. Quiet laughter is the prisoners’ balm, delivered through parables and riddles. Gradually, the underground narrative turns into a narrative of the above-ground. Initially centered around people, the book comes to focus on the city itself. And we discover there is as much suffering and hope in the Istanbul above ground as there is in the cells underground. Despite its apparently bleak setting, this novel—translated into seventeen languages—is about creation, compassion, and the ultimate triumph of the imagination.
