Gönül Dönmez-Colin,
Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging.
London: Reaktion, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-86189-370-3
US$35.00 (pb)
268pp
(Review copy supplied by Footprint Books
http://www.footprint.com.au/)

Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging provides an historical overview of Turkish cinema from the perspective of the framework indicated by the book’s subtitle. While identity is a broad concept, the author has developed it into workable categories: the representation of minorities, especially the Kurds; the changing representation of women, as their status within Turkish society changes; the impact of internal and external diasporas; and the impact of the East-West tug on Turkey through religion, politics, and economics; and so forth. Through such structuring, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging holds together as an engrossing introduction to a national cinema that has received little English-language attention.

Although a book soon to be available, Asuman Suner’s New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory, would seem to cover similar ground, its product description suggests that it restricts itself to the most recent renascence of Turkish cinema. Dönmez-Colin explains that her book “seeks to explore the representations of various identities in Turkish cinema as well as the identity of Turkish cinema itself for a better understanding of Turkish identity” (p. 18). In the process, she does an excellent job of providing a sociopolitical context for Turkish filmmaking and positioning the films she discusses within that changing context. The films and directors she discusses are chosen in light of her thesis, of course, but if there are significant omissions, they are more than compensated for by the graceful coverage of complex and challenging social, economic, and aesthetic issues capable of engaging readers both new to, and familiar with, Turkey and its cinema.

Dönmez-Colin’s history begins at the beginning, which sounds like the beginning of many national cinemas. A Lumière cameraman came along in 1896 and captured some actualités, Pathé sent in a representative early on, and the French maintained an influence for some time to come. Then, like Germany, Turkey responded to the Allies’ use of film for propaganda during World War I by developing institutionalized film production with the support and encouragement of the army (p. 23). Curiously, Pathé’s representative was “Sigmund Weinberg, a Polish Jew of Romanian nationality” (p. 22), who was appointed head of the Central Army Office of Cinema when it “was set up in 1915” (p. 23). The presence of this undoubtedly extraordinary character suggests the unexpected ethnic anomalies to come. “Several ethnic minority personalities made their mark in the industry, but often their identity had to be masked. In the beginning, when Muslim women could not be actors, non-Muslim minorities assumed the female roles” (p. 109). Armenian actors, male and female, have played a large role in Turkish cinema; significant directors and other crew members have also come from ethnic minorities that receive no official acknowledgment (particularly Kurds but even Greeks), leading these people either to hide or downplay their origins.

Perhaps the best-known such figure is one of Turkey’s most influential twentieth century artists, writer and director Yilmaz Güney, who appears inexplicably in the index as “Yilmaz Güney” rather than “Güney, Yilmaz” – indicative perhaps of his mythical status (p. 118). “According to Kazim Öz, the most prominent Kurdish filmmaker living and working in Turkey, … ‘even the filmmakers and the actors who had worked with Yilmaz Güney and gained their identity with him still do not accept that he was a Kurd’” (pp. 94-95).

Such a degree of repression suggests the difficulties within Turkish cinema of addressing pertinent social issues, and while Dönmez-Colin touches upon governmental censorship, she is even more concerned about aspects of self-censorship that she detects. One of her more interesting topics is the impact of funding from European rather than Turkish sources, particularly the impact on subject matter that funding sources arguably have. In fact, while not focusing on economic aspects of film production per se, Dönmez-Colin manages to outline 1) what funding sources have been for Turkish cinema over its history, 2) a history of which aspects of Turkish population have made up film audiences at various points in time (providing some correlation between changes in subject matter and audience), and even 3) a glimpse of what budgets have been like at times. At its prime, she tells us, the Turkish film industry was producing roughly 300 films per year (p. 41), dropping down to only 10 in the 1990s (p. 45), but more recently those numbers are rising significantly, at least in terms of percentages (p. 211).

Although Dönmez-Colin discusses Yesilçam, Turkey’s parallel to Hollywood, it is largely as a source of the standard fare against which more alternative types of filmmaking can be measured. Dönmez-Colin gives examples of how this popular cinema has presented marginalized members of the Turkish community, how it has represented the status of women in Turkish society, and how it has represented Turkish national identity, and in doing so she touches on the balancing act in Turkish society between the European and Asian pulls on the country. Is it not peculiar, after all, for an imitation of Hollywood to be considered a nonwestern country’s national cinema? Yet if it has the greatest popular appeal, then how do alternative cinemas claim to be national? It isn’t Dönmez-Colin’s object to sort out definitions of “national cinema” from within an international debate about the phrase, but rather to look to how Turkish artists and intellectuals have themselves considered the issue.

Dönmez-Colin’s discussion of genre is casual, although she gives some indication of which types have flourished. She pays more attention to themes, given her theoretical framework. In particular, she is interested in the internal migration of Turkey’s population, sometimes in response to war or government policy, especially the movement of rural communities into the cities for economic reasons. She quotes Said, Naficy, Stam, Bhabha, Jameson, etc., as appropriate, but the emphasis is on the films, and how their narrative and filmic qualities (for example, their camerawork and the use of sound) reflect changes in Turkish society. Chapter three, for example, deals in its last sections primarily with the representation of Kurds on screen as well as the development of something like a Kurdish cinema, and then with the representation of non-Muslim members of Turkish society, building up to a chapter on Güney, who has been a constant reference point throughout the book.

Dönmez-Colin has previously published books on Muslims and cinema, including Women, Islam and Cinema. There is a consistent attention to the representation of women in Turkish Cinema, along with women’s involvement in film production. Chapter five, “Gender, Sexuality and Morals in Transition,” deals largely with female audiences, actors, and other aspects of women and film. Dönmez-Colin’s discussion of women directors is interesting, although it would be good to know how unusual it has been for women to direct. The impression Dönmez-Colin gives, though, is that women have been involved in Turkish film production longer and more robustly than one might imagine.

In fact, what Dönmez-Colin has successfully achieved is to present a cinema full of interest and surprises. She has done so in a way that has contextualized individual films while indicating their uniqueness. A small glossary might have been helpful, but the publisher has been remarkably generous in providing 111 illustrations. Nearing the end of her book Dönmez-Colin addresses the relation between Turkish production and international distribution; as with the rest of her book, this material raises complex issues, many of which apply to other, lesser-known national cinemas. The main point, unfortunately, is that Turkish films do not have a wide distribution. Perhaps Dönmez-Colin’s Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging will help, since above all it presents Turkish cinema as interesting in general while helpfully singling out specific films that seem like must-see items for any reasonable cinephile’s wish list.

Harriet Margolis
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Created on: Thursday, 10 December 2009