the subjects of fati̇h akin's melodramas

214 Pages·2016·1.4 MB·English

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Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses
March 2016
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Emir O. Benli
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Benli, Emir O., "THE SUBJECTS OF FATİH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL READING THROUGH
THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY AND ATIF YILMAZ" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 550.
https://doi.org/10.7275/7944321.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/550
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The Subjects of Fatih Akın‘s Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through the Films of
R.W. Fassbinder, Yılmaz Güney and Atıf Yılmaz

A Dissertation Presented

by

EMĠR BENLĠ

Submitted to the Graduate School of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

February 2016

Comparative Literature
© Copyright by Emir Benli 2016
All Rights Reserved
The Subjects of Fatih Akın‘s Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through the Films of
R.W. Fassbinder, Yılmaz Güney and Atıf Yılmaz

A Dissertation Presented

by

EMĠR BENLĠ

Approved as to style and content by:

Catherine Portuges, Chair

Don Eric Levine, Member

Ela Gezen, Member

Asuman Suner Zontul, Member

Edwin Gentzler, Program Director
Comparative Literature Program
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

William Moebius, Chair
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Throughout the process of writing this dissertation and during my time at UMASS
Amherst, I have been very fortunate to be guided and helped by many wonderful scholars
and friends. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Catherine Portuges, for her patience
and guidance, from the very inception of my ideas for the dissertation to the final line
edits of the text that has evolved. The times I have worked on this dissertation have been
immensely formative, thanks to her example at every step of the way. Without her
support I am not sure this dissertation would have come to its conclusion. Don Eric
Levine has been a mentor, dare I say a friend, whose ideas shaped this dissertation
throughout my graduate life. I feel very lucky to have been his student and his assistant
over the past 10 years. My work with Asuman Suner has also been key in shaping this
dissertation, as well as in my decision to return to academia in Turkey. Though having
met towards the end of my graduate studies, I am grateful to Ela Gezen for her thorough
comments and helpful feedback on all stages of this dissertation.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to the many academic mentors I had at
UMASS Amherst who have inspired me in different ways and encouraged me to follow
through with my scholarly work. From my program, Comparative Literature, I especially
would like to thank David Lenson who has been and continues to be a source of
inspiration as to how I should live my life as an academic. James Hicks and María
Soledad Barbón's help and patience in the past years have also been crucial in helping me
along in my studies. I would be remiss not to mention Jean Fleming and Linda Papirio at
whose door I always found a helping hand. I also would like to thank Barton Byg and
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Sarah Lennox, from the German and Scandinavian Studies Program, for their support and
intellectual guidance both in and outside of the classroom.
I have also been very fortunate in being surrounded by a close-knit body of
friends from all corners of the globe and the campus. My time at UMASS and in the US
has been profoundly unforgettable thanks to the memories these friends impart. Most
deeply and most directly, I feel I have been very lucky to have been a student and close
friend of Mithat Alam whose guidance, in subtle ways, has always helped me overcome
all obstacles I have faced in life, in and outside of academia.
I am indebted to my brother, Ali Emre Benli for keeping me in line since the
moment we realized we are so much alike, my mother Zeynep Erengül, without whose
presence and love everything in my life would come tumbling down, her husband Ali
Erengül, and to my late father, Cem Benli whose intellectual influence, for better and
worse, still continues to shape me. I thank both my mother and father for supporting me
in treading the paths that I have chosen for my life.
Finally, I thank Bade Uysaler for her patience and support at every step in all the
different spaces we have occupied together, for the hours of conversations we had that
rendered everything around us more lucid and more ambiguous at the same time, and for
the dreams we shared and realized together.

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ABSTRACT

THE SUBJECTS OF FATĠH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL
READING THROUGH THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY
AND ATIF YILMAZ

FEBRUARY 2016

EMĠR BENLĠ

B.A., BOĞAZĠÇĠ UNĠVERSĠTY

M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Catherine Portuges

Fatih Akın's feature films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007)
resonated strongly with Turkish, German and Turkish German communities, albeit for
diverse reasons, opening spaces for debate with regard to subjectivites that foreground
their alterity and redefine readings of national identity. This dissertation addresses ways
in which the melodramatic modality of Akın's films partake in such debates by presenting
a dialogic genealogy of melodramas from Turkish, German and Turkish German
contexts. An analysis of Fontane's novel "Effi Briest" and of R.W Fassbinder's Fontane
Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Atıf Yılmaz's O Beautiful Istanbul; and Yılmaz
Güney's The Herd suggests ways in which these texts and films inscribe different aspects
of alterity, situating the subjects of these narratives in disruptive relationships with
national and transnational identitarian discourses.
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I examine these melodramatic narratives and the impasses they constructfor their
subjects together with the relationship of the films' uses of mise-en-scène to further
complicate notions of ethnic and other modes of belonging. Divergent modes of
distanciation and identification from different filmic traditions in Turkey and in Germany
constitute a multivalent nexus through which I approach Akın's films. The ambivalence
of the protagonists' affective states sets up another point of critical inquiry from which I
utilize notions of performativity to critique interiorized and exteriorized readings of
affect. I trace articulations of the realistic registers in these works, seeking the fissures
where the melodramatic modality reveals itself to allow the directors to leave open the
subjects' alterity. Finally, I link certain plot-lines to the "stranded objects" of Turkish and
German national histories, including histories pertaining to the Nazi past in Germany, the
erasure of the Ottoman cosmopolitan cultural nexus and the nomadic modes of existence
of the Kurdish population in Turkey. I then posit ways in which these objects come to
interact with transnationally determined subjectivities in the films of Akın. The dialogic
genealogy I propose intervenes in current critical debates on melodrama as a trans-
generic mode and on transnationality in cinema that look beyond paradigms of
nationalism(s) towards a diverse articulation of subjectivities that resist reification by
dominant identitarian discourses.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………iv

ABSTRACT ........………………………………………………………………………...vi

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION ………………...………………………………………………………1

I. DISRUPTING THE GERMAN NATIONAL NARRATIVE: FASSBINDER's
MELODRAMATIC OTHERS…………………………………………………………...24

A. Depictions of Alterity from Realism to Modernism: A Reading of
Theodore Fontane's "Effi Briest"………………………………………….24
B. Adaptation as Critique: Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest
and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul ...……………………………………………..44

1. Responding to German History (of Cinema) ………………...….....44
2. Adapting A Novel, An Author's Point of View and
A Society's Weltanschauung: Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest …...49

a. Cinematic Realism and National Cinemas …………………..49
b. 19th Century Realist Novel and Fassbinder's Response …..…50
c. Fassbinder's Style: Departures from the Realist Register ……52
d. Locating the Melodramatic in a Realist Costume Drama ……61

3. The Conundrum of the First Generation Gastarbeiter:
The Case of Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Sou l…………...……..66

a. The Double Register of Identification/Distantiation…………68
b. Kif-Kif: The Dialectics of Alterity and Victimhood in
the Characters of Ali and Emmi ……………………………...80

II. ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME PATHOS: MELODRAMA AND
DISPLACEMENT IN ATIF YILMAZ's AND YILMAZ GÜNEY's FILMS …………...88

A. Breaks and Continuities in Yeşilçam's Melodramas: An Overview
of Context, Content, and Form ……………………...…………………….88
B. Melodramatic Istanbul and Its Displaced Subjects: A Reading of
Atıf Yılmaz‘s O Beautiful Istanbul ...…………….……………………….91
C. Nomadic Kurdish Subjectivity at the Juncture of Realist and
Melodramatic Modalities: Yılmaz Güney's The Herd and
the Ideological Borders of the Turkish Nation State ..………………..…110
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1. Alternative Paths to Yeşilçam: The Neorealist Turn of
the 1970s ………………………………………………………….110
2. Transitions between Realism and Melodrama: A Quest
for the Moral Legibility of Alterity...... ..……………………..…...112
3. A Marxist Perspective and Its Conundrums.... …………………...128

III. ELUSIVE ALTERITY: TURKISH GERMAN SUBJECTS IN FATIH AKIN‘s
MELODRAMAS ……………………………………………………………………….132

A. A Critical Overview of Turkish German Studies ………………………..132
B. Representational and Affective Ambivalence in Fatih Akın's
Head-On …………………………………………………………………………139

1. The Narrative and Thematics of Head-On: Affinities and
Divergences……………………………………………………….139
2. The Precarious Representational Ground of the Musical
Interludes………………………………………………………….145
3. Affective States as Boundaries: A Reading of Emotions in
Three Scenes.....…………………………………………………...150

C. Lost and Found in the Transcultural Space of Fatih Akın's
Edge of Heaven ...…...…….……………………………………………..164

1. Intergenerational Conflict in the Turkish German Domestic
Sphere: The Case of Ali and Nejat ……………………………….168
2. Intergenerational Conflict in the German Domestic Sphere:
The Case of Susanne and Lotte …………………………………..176
3. Transcultural Reconciliations in Istanbul - Delocalized
Reconciliations in Trabzon ……………………………………….181

CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………………190

BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………………………199

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