Table Of ContentTurkish German Cinema in
the New Millennium
Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context
Series Editors: Hans-Michael Bock (CineGraph Hamburg);
Tim Bergfelder (University of Southampton); Sabine Hake
(University of Texas, Austin)
German cinema is normally seen as a distinct form, but this series
emphasizes connections, influences, and exchanges of German cinema
across national borders, as well as its links with other media and art
forms. Individual titles present traditional historical research (archival
work, industry studies) as well as new critical approaches in film and
media studies (theories of the transnational), with a special emphasis on
the continuities associated with popular traditions and local perspectives.
The Concise Cinegraph: An Belá Balázs: Early Film Theory.Visible
Encyclopedia of German Cinema Man and The Spirit of Film
General Editor: Hans-Michael Bock Belá Balázs, edited by Erica Carter,
Associate Editor: Tim Bergfelder translated by Rodney Livingstone
International Adventures: German Screening the East: Heimat, Memory
Popular Cinema and European Co- and Nostalgia in German Film since
Productions in the 1960s 1989
Tim Bergfelder Nick Hodgin
Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Peter Lorre: Face Maker
Presence in German and Austrian Stardom and Performance between
Film, 1910–1933 Hollywood and Europe
S.S. Prawer Sarah Thomas
Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Turkish German Cinema in the New
Divided Germany Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and
Edited by John Davidson Screens
and Sabine Hake Edited by Sabine Hake
and Barbara Mennel
A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s
American Films Postwall German Cinema: History,
Gerd Gemünden Film History and Cinephilia
Mattias Frey
Destination London: German-
speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian
1925–1950 Cinema: Nationhood, Genre and
Edited by Tim Bergfelder Masculinity
and Christian Cargnelli Maria Fritsche
Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic The Emergence of Film Culture:
of the Image Knowledge Production, Institution
Catherine Wheatley Building, and the Fate of the Avant-
Garde in Europe, 1919–1945
Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel,
Malte Hagener
Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture
Barbara Kosta
Dismantling the Dream Factory:
Gender, German Cinema, and
the Postwar Quest for a New Film
Language
Hester Baer
T G C
urkish erman inema in
n m
The ew illennium
Sites, Sounds, and Screens
Edited by
Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First edition published in 2012 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2012, 2014 Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel
First paperback edition published in 2014
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turkish German cinema in the new millennium : sites, sounds, and screens /
edited by Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel. -- 1st ed.
p. cm. -- (Film Europa: German cinema in an international context ; 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85745-768-4 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-665-0
(paperback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-769-1 (ebook)
1. Motion pictures--Germany--History--21st century. 2. Motion pictures,
Turkish--Germany--History--21st century. 3. Foreign language
films--Germany--History--21st century. 4. Stereotypes (Social psychology)
in motion pictures. 5. Culture in motion pictures. 6. Motion pictures and
transnationalism. 7. Motion picture audiences--Germany. I. Hake, Sabine,
1956- II. Mennel, Barbara Caroline.
PN1993.5.G3T86 2012
791.43094309’05--dc23
2012024973
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN 978-0-85745-768-4 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78238-665-0 paperback
ISBN 978-0-85745-769-1 ebook
C
onTenTs
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
I. CONFIGURATIONS OF STEREOTYPES AND
IDENTITIES: NEW METHODOLOGIES
1. My Big Fat Turkish Wedding: From Culture Clash to Romcom 19
Daniela Berghahn
2. The Oblivion of Influence: Mythical Realism in Feo Aladag˘’s
When We Leave 32
David Gramling
3. The Minor Cinema of Thomas Arslan: A Prolegomenon 44
Marco Abel
II. MULTIPLE SCREENS AND PLATFORMS: FROM
DOCUMENTARY AND TELEVISION TO
INSTALLATION ART
4. Roots and Routes of the Diasporic Documentarian:
A Psychogeography of Fatih Akın’s We Forgot to Go Back 59
Angelica Fenner
5. Gendered Kicks: Buket Alaku¸s’s and Aysun Bademsoy’s
Soccer Films 72
Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey
6. Location and Mobility in Kutlugˇ Ataman’s
Site-specific Video Installation Küba 84
Nilgün Bayraktar
7. Turkish for Beginners: Teaching Cosmopolitanism to Germans 96
Brent Peterson
8. “Only the Wounded Honor Fights”: Züli Aladag˘’s Rage and the
Drama of the Turkish German Perpetrator 109
Brad Prager
vi Contents
III. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS: STARS,
THEATERS, AND RECEPTION
9. The German Turkish Spectator and Turkish Language Film
Programming: Karli Kino, Maxximum Distribution, and the
Interzone Cinema 123
Randall Halle
10. Mehmet Kurtulus¸ and Birol Ünel: Sexualized Masculinities,
Normalized Ethnicities 136
Berna Gueneli
11. The Perception and Marketing of Fatih Akın in the
German Press 149
Karolin Machtans
12. Hyphenated Identities: The Reception of Turkish German
Cinema in the Turkish Daily Press 161
Ayça Tunç Cox
IV. THE CINEMA OF FATIH AKIN: AUTHORSHIP,
IDENTITY, AND BEYOND
13. Cosmopolitan Filmmaking: Fatih Akın’s In July and Head-On 175
Mine Eren
14. Remixing Hamburg: Transnationalism in Fatih Akın’s Soul
Kitchen 186
Roger Hillman and Vivien Silvey
15. World Cinema Goes Digital: Looking at
Europe from the Other Shore 198
Deniz Göktürk
Notes on Contributors 213
Works Cited 218
Index of Names 243
Index of Films 247
l i
isT of llusTraTions
1.1 Dirk’s family visiting Özlem’s home in Evet, I Do! 26
1.2 Ian Miller (John Corbett) is baptized in My Big Fat
Greek Wedding 27
1.3 Dirk (Oliver Korittke) and Özlem (Lale Yavas) in Evet, I Do! 28
1.4 Berlin Cathedral and television tower in Evet, I Do! 29
2.1 Cem (Nizam Schiller) in When We Leave 35
2.2 Gül (Nursel Köse) and Umay (Sibel Kekilli) in When We Leave 41
3.1 Can (Tamer Yigit) in Dealer 51
3.2 Any-Spaces-Whatever in Dealer 51
4.1 Fatih Akın in We Forgot to Go Back 64
4.2 Mustafa and Hadiye Akın in We Forgot to Go Back 67
4.3 The Black Sea in We Forgot to Go Back 70
5.1 Hayat (Karoline Herfurth) and Toni (Ken Duken) in Offside 78
5.2 Turkish woman looking through fence in Girls on the Pitch 80
6.1 Installation view of Kutlugˇ Ataman’s Küba, The Sorting
Office, London, March–June 2005, commissioned and
produced by Artangel, photo courtesy Artangel 87
6.2 Installation view of Kutlugˇ Ataman’s Küba, The Sorting
Office, London, March–June 2005, commissioned and
produced by Artangel, photo courtesy Artangel 90
7.1 The Öztürk-Schneider blended family of Turkish for Beginners 100
7.2 Yagmur (Pegah Ferydoni) and Costa (Arnel Taci) in Turkish
for Beginners 104
8.1 Simon (August Zirner) in Rage 114
8.2 Can (Oktay Özdemir) in Rage 117
9.1 Education Level of the Participants 132
9.2 How Frequently Do You Go to the Movie Theater? 133
10.1 Dylan (Mehmet Kurtulus¸) and Charlotte (Nina Hoss)
in Naked 141
10.2 Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 142
viii List of Illustrations
10.3 Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) and Molly (Claudia Cardinale) in
Fitzcarraldo 145
10.4 Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Maren (Catrin Striebeck) in Head-On 146
12.1 Attitude toward EU Accession in the Turkish Press
(above) and Nationalist Tone in the Turkish Press (below) 163
13.1 Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu), Juli (Christiane Paul),
and Fatih Akın (cameo) in In July 180
13.2 Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) in Head-On 183
14.1 Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu) in Soul Kitchen 187
14.2 Ali Davidson (Bülent Celebi) in Soul Kitchen 188
15.1 I Passed Through with Songs: A Film for Kazım, courtesy
Kalan Müzik 200
15.2 Black Sea Files, 2007 installation, Peacock Visual Arts,
Aberdeen, courtesy Ursula Biemann 208
15.3 Nejat (Baki Davrak) in The Edge of Heaven, courtesy 209
corazón international
i
nTroduCTion
Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel
When Yasemin Samdereli’s Almanya–Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya:
Welcome in Germany, 2011) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival 2011,
with the German President and the Turkish Ambassador in attendance,
it also served as a celebration of fifty years of labor migration from
Turkey to Germany. This historical moment confirmed the status of
culture, particularly film, as both object and subject in the history of
labor migration and its aftereffects. The 1961 labor recruitment agreement
between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Turkey
had launched a migration flow that changed individual and familial
lives and transformed the social and cultural landscapes of both nations
in unforeseen ways. Fifty years later, as Almanya retells the story of labor
migration in a comedic vein, the resulting social conflicts and cultural
clashes and often heated debates about integration, multiculturalism,
and ethnic and national identity have produced a diverse body of films,
television series, and multi-screen installations that we evoke here under
the heading of Turkish German cinema.
An integral part of the cinema’s own history of defining peripheries and
centers and constructing images of self and other, Turkish German cinema
is often associated with a particular sensitivity toward national belonging
and ethnic embodiment and an acute awareness of the politics of identity
and place. However, this body of work has more recently been associated
with attempts to complicate and destabilize discourses—of social realism
and identity politics—no longer found adequate to the multiple affiliations
and fluid attachments in a globalized world. The films made since the
1990s tell stories about the problems of dislocation and integration; yet
they also open up new ways of thinking beyond fixed categories of identity
and the binary logic of native and foreign, home and abroad, and tradition
and modernity. Against this backdrop, the volume at hand maps the
emerging field of Turkish German film studies in relation to contemporary
German and European culture and society, the transformations of filmic
conventions and audiovisual styles in the age of digital culture and
2 Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel
multimedial platforms, and the authorial strategies and performative
styles that at once mediate, resist, and illuminate the dynamic and fluid
positions marked by the qualifiers “Turkish” and “German.”1
The individual contributions presented here engage productively with
the methodological approaches and theoretical inquiries on hyphenated
identities, transnational cinemas, and new approaches to documentary,
genre, and art film. As editors, we have consciously chosen not to gloss over
the contradictions that situate this growing field of inquiry within specific
discursive traditions, scholarly debates, and institutional contexts. On the
contrary, our decision to leave out the hyphen signifies our unwillingness
to reduce the remarkable productivity of Turkish German filmmakers to
the easy logics of compatibility and commensurability implied by it. Thus
it is the purpose of the introduction to demarcate the field in which the
films circulate, beginning with a brief overview of the history of postwar
migration and the politics of social, political, and legal integration that
found expression in the first wave of films about Turkish Germans that
continue to inform the filmic imagination in the new millennium.
A Brief History of Labor Migration: From Guestworker
to Fellow Citizen with Migration Background
Labor migration has been central to West Germany’s economic development,
definition of citizenship, and self-understanding as a western nation and
Judeo-Christian culture (Göktürk et al. 2007). Postwar labor migration
began with the first recruitment treaty signed with Italy in 1955, six years
before the treaty with Turkey. These treaties responded to the shortage of
working-age men after World War II and played a key role in the Economic
Miracle and, by extension, the geopolitics of the Cold War; the building
of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the resulting stop of refugees from the East
only exacerbated the situation. The so-called Gastarbeiter (guestworker)
program presumed that these largely manual workers constituted a
temporary labor force without immigrant status. In fact, the very term
reflects the assumption of temporariness and the reduction of human
beings to their labor power (Chin 2007). Its legacy continues to haunt
the critical reception of films thus reduced to unmediated reflections of
ethnic identities and histories of migration. We revisit the history of labor
migration here to open up lines of inquiry into the reconceptualization
of filmmaking as artistic labor and of German cinema as a long tradition
of creative exchanges, cultural contacts, international and transnational
relations, with film professionals as the quintessential guestworkers and
the cinema as the very model of cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism.
The unexpected consequences of the early labor migration program
found expression in a problematic discursive construction, the use of Turks
as the embodiment of the guestworker and the immigrant. The doubling
