Notes on Turkish film

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

While none of the other films I saw during the Fourth Annual Turkish
Film Festival achieved quite the artistic level of the comic masterpiece
"Sergeant Shakespeare," all of them were useful windows into the complex
reality of a country that stands right now as a crucible between two
powerful cultures on a collision course. With the USA representing
itself as the vanguard of a new Crusade, it is understandable that the
question of Turkish identity--either European or Mideastern--will come
to the fore.

With the Islamic-oriented (but not Islamic fundamentalist) Justice and
Development Party poised to take power in Turkey, these sorts of
question are posed even more sharply than ever. While little more than a
travelogue, Binnur Karaevli's 37-minute documentary "Cenneti Ararken"
(Searching For Paradise) addressed them from a personal angle. Karaevli
is a 30 something woman who learned English in Turkey to prepare her for
either a job in Europe or the USA. Departing from her home in Los
Angeles, she flies back to Istanbul visit her family and to search for
Paradise Gardens, which epitomized the city of her youth and all that
was exceptional about her country. At the conclusion of the film, she
learns that the gardens have been razed in order to make space for a
restaurant and residential buildings. Only the name remains.

She walks around the city asking people if they are "European" or
"Asian". To a one, they insist that they are European. Only
intellectuals like the novelist Orhan Pamuk reply in a more ambivalent
manner. In a March 27, 1995 Nation Magazine review of his "The Black
Book," one understands where Pamuk is coming from:

"Hoja, having learned Western engineering from his slave, becomes
obsessed with making a huge weapon for the Turkish Sultan's military
campaign in Europe. But once constructed, it gets stuck in a swamp at
the base of a gleaming white fortress in Poland, which the Turks fail to
take. Surely a statement against the abuse of knowledge and the forceful
taking of other cultures, this defeat also reflects the real failure of
the Ottoman Turks to conquer the West in the sixteenth century, when
their armies were stopped at Vienna."

Indeed, although Turkey never continued its march across Europe, only
leaving traces of its relatively benign precapitalist Empire in the
Balkans, Europe did eventually sweep across Turkey. The challenge that
European hegemony mounted was so overwhelming that the Turkish elite was
forced to transform the country in order to remain viable. Mustafa Kemal
tried to eliminate all of the Islamic and Ottoman traces in the country
and model the country along modern European lines.

Today, as cat's paw of US imperialism in it's pending war against Iraq,
we are constantly reminded that Turkey is a "good" Islamic country as
opposed to Saudi Arabia and all the rest. Set in 1960 and openly
gainsaying the benefits of westernization, Semir Aslanyurek's "Sellale"
(Waterfall) focuses on the ancient Anatolian town of Antioch, where life
appears to be the same as it was a thousand years earlier. People depend
on the waterfall to drive the stone mill for turning grain into flour.
When local officials bring in a US engineer (a Turk pretending to a
Western "expert") to supervise the modernization of the wondrous
waterfall along the lines of ambitious projects like the Boulder Dam,
their version of Paradise Garden is destroyed. Only a trickle can be
seen after the rocks above the falls are dynamited. The local power
structure is revealed to be as inept as the Westernizing officers in
Pamuk's novel.

Two films both seemed to consciously reject the kind of optimism
projected by the Turkish elites as it lurches uncertainly toward
assimilation with the West. Orhan Oguz "Hersye Ragmen" (In Spite of
Everything) is an unsparing look at a recently released prisoner who
lives on the fringes of Istanbul society in a ramshackle apartment
shared with an alley cat. With few personal and social skills, he ekes
out an existence as a hearse driver. When a woman recently returned to
Istanbul from a stint as "guest worker" in Germany tries to develop a
relationship with him, he can barely sustain a conversation let alone
open himself up to intimacy.

In Umit Unal's "9", nearly the entire action takes place in the
interrogation room of a police station where residents of a
"respectable" Istanbul neighborhood point fingers at each other during
the investigation of the murder of a young female "street person". The
director implies that the murder is emblematic of a deeper malaise in
Turkish society that would explain the acceptance of authoritarian rule
by large sectors of the middle-class.

Unfortunately, both "Hersye Ragmen" and "9" are somewhat lacking in
entertainment values. While it is commendable that filmmakers put
forward such an unstinting view of their society, you cannot do this at
the expense of what makes film work as an art form. You need plot,
dialogue and inventive cinematography, which no amount of honesty can
make up for.

Perhaps it was the example of such films that made "Sergeant
Shakespeare" director Sinan Cetin attack the notion that "Hollywood
imperialism" was responsible for the decline of the Turkish film
industry. He stated that if you make films that engage an audience, they
would succeed commercially. Needless to say, this is a universal
challenge to filmmakers of any nationality.

Although Cuneyt Arkin's 1982 "Dunyaya Kurtaran Adam" (The Man Who Saved
the World--also commonly referred to as "The Turkish Star Wars") was not
part of the festival, it was shown at a Halloween fundraiser party and
dance for the sponsoring Moon and Stars Project. Whatever else one wants
to say about this film, nobody can ever accuse it of not wanting to
entertain.

Best described as a cheap imitation of the George Lukas "classic", it is
not above including footage from the original, throwing all copyright
considerations overboard. Arkin also borrows/steals from "Raiders of the
Lost Ark" as well, spicing up his film with musical passages lifted
directly from the Indiana Jones movie.

It is a masterpiece in the same sense that Ed Wood's "Plan Nine From
Outer Space" is. It mixes together conventions from science fiction
serials of the 1940s and 50s (as Lucas did) with Hong Kong martial arts
action conventions. Made on the ultra-cheap, the villains are dressed in
fuzzy pink costumes of the sort worn by baseball park mascots or appear
to be improvised from whatever was lying around the wardrobe department.
The net effect is comic, just as was Jackie Gleason in his appearance in
the Honeymooners "Man from Outer Space" Halloween costume cobbled
together from household appliances, etc.

The plot is completely Byzantine, as befits the culture that Mustafa
Kemal tried so hard to stamp out. It mostly consists of one kung fu
fighting sequence after another as the two heroes of the film, including
Arkin in a Han Solo type role, dispatch their evil enemies. Obviously
lacking a penny for special effects, the film uses a trampoline to
propel the actors over the heads of their antagonists.

Adding to the overall sense of temporal and geographical displacement,
the battles are staged on location in the ruins of Cappadocia, an
ancient Anatolian region that was a center of the early Christian church
and Zoroastrianism as well. The space warriors chase each other from one
12th century crypt to another without any attempt to explain the
Christian relics on display. The final half-hour of the film is a
delirious mixture of crudely choreographed kung fu fighting scenes,
slapdash "death rays", slices of "Star Wars", fantastically costumed
extras who appear on their way to Mardi Gras.

"Dunyaya Kurtaran Adam" can be seen online at:
http://www.showtvnet.com/turksinemasi/film/dunyayi_kurtaran_adam.shtml.
Just click "Izleyin" (play) to start the movie. It is not subtitled, but
believe me, you won't need them to enjoy this Turkish delight.

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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