Turkish Cinema - Case Study Example

The Author’s Name] [The Professor’s Name] [The Course Title] [Date] Turkish Cinema Introduction It has generally been argued by scholars that the founders of the Turkish Republic saw the Turkish film industry as an apparatus to be employed in supporting the homogenizing, unifying, and transcendent notion of nationalism they had idealized (O¨ zo¨n, 324). After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the independence war, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk performed the leading role in the formation of the modern Turkish nation-state. As the Kemalist1 legislators tried to formulate a homogeneity and unity within the Turkish nation-state, they saw cinema as a tool for further expanding their reach and strengthening their claims. The censorship system always worked towards the objective of instituting a singular vision of a Turkish nation. However, filmmakers have to a great extent rejected this role assigned to them by the nation-building legislators and Kemalist elites. Consequently, along with many other cultural producers, filmmakers in Turkey attempted to unravel the pluralities and diversities within the society despite the pressures persuading the Turkish film industry to produce films that emphasised the homogeneity and unity of the nation. When talking about critical approaches to Kemalism in regard to cultural products, it is essential to highlight the uniqueness of the conjuncture within which the texts have been produced. As a reaction and resistance to the rise of globalization and the effects of global culture, there has been a rise in nationalist tenets with an increasing intensity throughout the world. Turkey is one of the countries in which issues such as nationalism, national identity and national culture are highly charged and sensitive. The legacy of the multicultural Ottoman society for the modern Turkish Republic is a people with diverse cultural, ethnic and religious references. Currently, 20 per cent of the overall-approximately 72 million-population in Turkey are Kurds, with small Greek, Armenian, Arabic and Jewish communities. ‘According to the principles of race, religion, language and sect there are 4250 Greek Orthodox, 75000 Armenian Orthodox, 3000 Armenian Catholics, 15000 Syrian Orthodox, 50 Armenian Protestants, 1500 Protestants of different origins and 25000 Jews living in Turkey’ (Cano 73). Particularly with the turn of the 1980s and the effects of globalization taking its toll on Turkish society, there has been a visible revival in ethnic, religious, and nationalist tides, which have come to be labeled as the return of the repressed in Turkey. It is also important to mention at this juncture, that the unifying and transcendent notion of national identity and culture imposed on the society in order to make a rupture with the Ottoman era and to formulate a national consciousness, has in many ways provoked an often-factional anti-Kemalist Islamic and ethnic resurgence. Within the post 1980 conjuncture, the disturbance felt from the ethical and cultural effects of modernization, nationalization and excessive Westernization has called upon national conservatives. Turkey also liberalized its media sector, which had been a monolithic, state-run enterprise. In 1982 Turkey had a single state-run television channel, in 1989 three state-run channels, and in 1992 six television and four radio channels, all operated by the state (S¸ahin & Aksoy 1993, pp. 31–32). Beginning in late 1992, within a matter of months the state channels had lost most of their viewers to satellite channels beamed into Turkey, unlicensed, from Germany by a Swiss company, and by the late 1990s satellite and cable television offered Turkish viewers hundreds of channels, new and glitzy programs, foreign football matches, political parody, and Turkish and foreign sitcoms and talk shows. Media globalization had a homogenizing effect, forcing Turkish programs to take their cue from international broadcasts. But it was also particularizing, breaking up the official, unitary national identity and presenting instead a postmodern, ‘anything goes’ media landscape made up of Islamic sermons, lascivious advertisements, Greek songs, and eventually, under pressure from the EU, programs in Kurdish. Westernization in Turkish Media The emergence of Turkish journalism was a kind of opposition movement to limit the Ottoman Sultan's absolute power. They were the forerunners of modernization and advocated westernization as well as gave time to the education and promotion of popular masses against the absolute monarchy. The establishment of the modem Turkish republic was parallel to the easy journalists' aspirations for modernization and westernization. In that regard, the founders of the Republic regarded religion as a barrier before development'^ and promoted a wholesale westernization for development. Secularism constituted the major pillar of development as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's reforms such as the abolition of Sharia courts, the Caliphate and Sufi orders to privatize and disestablishment religion can be regarded’ in that regard. The single party rule during the first half of the twentieth century left a legacy of rational democracy'"(Bulaç 215) among the journalists as these rational democratic ideals continued during the multi-party period where the journalists mostly advocated the state elites against the elected political leaders." Along with the ideological orientation, the Turkish media were also negatively affected by the structuring of the media market as two main media corporations (namely, Dogan and Sabah) controlled the market during the early years of the twenty first century.' (Bulaç 215) Media corporations have strong interest in government contracts and privatization as they are also a part of corporate business.'^ This led to the emergence of the mass media as a major political actor in Turkey. Moreover, political instability during the 1990s helped the media to assume a more prominent role in Turkish politics. Some even argued that the Turkish media rose to the status of the first estate from the fourth estate due to the serious flaws in the functioning of the political system.' Within this context there has been an incline in both the varieties of nationalisms and the concept of nationalism itself. It has also been mainly within this period that the Turkish nation-state has experienced the rise of Western, modern, national tenets on one hand, and the ethnic, cultural, more conservative, and isolationist trends on the other. According to Kasaba (1997: p16), ‘putting together the nostalgic turn in tastes, the declining hold of secularism on everyday life and politics, and the growing precariousness of national unity, it is hard to avoid the impression that Turkish modernization reached some kind of turning point in the early eighties’. The resurfacing of these repressed diversities within the nation has in many ways found its reflections within different layers of cultural production including cinema. Hence, this conjuncture reached in the post-1980s/1990s prepared the ground for dismantling criticisms of the official Kemalist nationalism, modernism and Westernization ideologies. The concepts of Kemalist modernization, Kemalist nationalization/ nationalism, which until 1980s were, to a great extent, perceived as flawless ideologies carrying Turkey to the status of contemporary civilizations, started to be openly criticized. The Ottoman Empire consisted of a rich combination of ethnic, religious and cultural origins. With its collapse it left behind a society that held diverse ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds from which the Turkish nation has been formulated. During the establishment of the Republic maybe the most important of the reactions to and breaks with the Ottoman era can be seen as the transition from a multicultural, ethnic and religious society to a homogenizing, transcendent national identity. This in turn emerged as a serious obstacle before the formation of a unifying national identity, which was envisaged for the modern Turkish nation-state. The expectations of the founders of the Republic were for the minorities to come to terms with and adopt the unifying ideology of the new Republic. Consequently, as means of homogenizing the nation, various policies were introduced for enforcing Turkish attributes on minorities. A strong Turkish bourgeoisie was always thought of as one of the most essential factors for modernizing and developing Turkey. According to Ataturk, one of the most important conditions that needed to be fulfilled in order to reach the level of Western nations was to strengthen the bourgeoisie. Thus, ‘westernization’ according to Ataturk meant the application of the results of the Western enlightenment and the industrial revolutions. ‘This in return meant the formation of a nation-state, and its backbone the bourgeoisie’ (Kongar p.18). Durmus¸, within this text, represents the to-be-created/strengthened Turkish bourgeoisie, who as a result of the wealth tax law takes over the economic wealth from the non-Muslims and becomes rich, wealthy and strong. With these developments in the narrative of the film, we are also provided with an argument on the ethnic tendencies of the official nationalist ideology of the Republic during those early years of its establishment. Another scene in which the audience encounters the ethnic characteristic of Turkish nationalism in the film is the one in which Durmus¸, Nimet, Bekir and Levon are having dinner in Durmus¸’s house. In this scene a dialogue passes amongst the four, which clearly articulates how non-Muslims had been perceived as the other. In this dialogue at the dinner table, Durmus¸ makes clear how ambitious he is by arguing with Bekir that only one shop will not be enough for him to fulfill his ambitions. (Kongar p.18) Writing about American cinema in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s, Ahmed Gurata has demonstrated how Turkish distributors, exhibitors and audiences constructed a middle ground on which they made sense of Hollywood according to their own cultural points of reference, domesticating the America of their imaginations. Films were re-titled, scenes were cut, additional scenes with local stars were added, and speech was dubbed - Laurel and Hardy were very popular on Turkish screens in the 1930s, speaking broken Turkish with an American accent. (Kongar p.18) Stars were even imaginatively relocated; for example, in a popular fiction, the Marx Brothers 'lived' in Istanbul {some local people claimed to be 'relatives' of Groucho). Similarly, Charles Ambler describes the way that young urban audiences in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s used 'the often disjointed and exotic images' of low budget Westerns to 'develop a lexicon of modernity ... reinventing the films in their own cultural and political terms,' and investing their characters and action with indigenous qualities in an interpretive process too complex and contested to be represented within a theoretical model of media imperialism. (Gerard 199-213) To make sense of these movies, at almost the farthest extreme of the global distribution chain, local audiences had to reconfigure them into patterns of symbol and behaviour which meant something in the context of their viewing. The Media Coverage of the Adultery Debate in Turkish Press As an initial level of analysis we have summarized each news account and opinion column as negative, neutral, or positive. Earlier studies well established that the rational democracy approach is prevalent in the Turkish media manifesting itself as a resistance to the influence of religion in politics. When it comes to secularism, the Turkish media assumes a role of wolf, rather than a watchdog. As Tiffen puts it, the watchdog metaphor denotes that the interests of the media and the public are identical, whereas the wolf metaphor implies that the media show eagerness, or reluctance, to cover certain issues according to their interests with a "failure to give equal weight to counter-examples, flawed conceptualization or positing ideological explanations when alternatives are more plausible". (Gerard 199-213) Not surprisingly, the common theme frames in both the news accounts and the opinion columns was that banning adultery was not an acceptable action as the media criticized the Government, the Opposition, and even the European Union for supporting or tolerating the proposal. The most frequent frame observed in the mainstream press was that the ban would not suit the European standards. The frame was an influential and strategic one because it both rejected the idea of banning adultery without directly antagonizing the AKP government but also implied that the proposal is against the modernity represented by Europe. The newspaper articles with this frame generally cited or quoted negative news and commentaries in European press."*^ For example, a news account reported that the proposal provided an excuse to those who oppose Turkey's membership in the EU." (Todd 7) This view was more frequently repeated in the opinion columns. Many warned that this policy would hinder the prospect for Turkey's membership in the European Union.'" Not surprisingly, the government's claim that the proposal would not harm the EU membership did not find enough room in the mainstream media. (Todd 7) On the other hand, it might be claimed that, in spite of its anti-colonial stance. Ingiliz Kemal has been colonized by Hollywood conventions not only in its casting, but in its construction that largely derives from the western. In the meyhane scene for instance, the patrons express their appreciation for the belly-dancer's routine by firing their pistols into the air. The fight scenes incorporate familiar moments such as a bottle being smashed over one man's head, while the bartender cowers behind the bar clutching the case box to his chest. Once Ahmed Esat has taken his leave of his girlfriend Lenian at the end of the film, he climbs on his horse and rides off into the desert as the credits roll. However, it is important to remember that, unlike Hollywood, the Turkish film industry was still in its infancy in the early ‘50s. (Todd 7) Women in Turkish Media Members of secular feminist and Islamist women’s movements have developed perceptions of each other which are informed considerably by depictions of secular feminist and Islamist women in the secular and Islamist media. The secular print media has given conflicting signals in depicting secular feminists. On the one hand, they condemn secular feminists for being men haters and radicals who are sexually deviant and hostile to the institution of family. On the other hand, they applaud these same feminist activists as modern progressive women who stand up for women’s rights. The secular print media depict Islamist women as radical militants whose use of the Islamic head cover is a symbol of a backward social order. They also portray these women as dupes who are under the influence of Islamist men. Here, the assumption is that Islamist men use women as tools to achieve their aim of establishing shar’ia, a social system in which women are kept under the veil and at home. (William 285) Islamist media ubiquitously describe secular feminists as enemies of the family and motherhood. They depict secular feminists as women who belittle the sacred connotations attached to virginity in an effort to achieve sexual freedom. They also stress that feminists try to create antagonism between men and women rather than to preserve the existing peace between them. While portraying secular feminists in negative terms, the Islamist print media give a picture of Islamist women as martyrs who, in their efforts to wear Islamic headscarves, are being oppressed by the secular state. (William 285) The portrayal of the secular feminist and Islamist women by the media affects how these activists perceive each other, as can be seen in their responses to my questions concerning the compatibility of Islam and feminism. The perceptions that Turkish secular feminist and Islamist women have of each other’s ideologies and movements and their approach to the compatibility of Islam and feminism can be classified into frames. The frame that best summarizes how secular feminists think Islam and feminism are incompatible is the frame of inequality. Islamist women use the frames of morality, true Islam, and authenticity to suggest the incompatibility of the two. While the frame of practical action explains how secular feminists think Islam and feminism are compatible, the frames of morality and authenticity explain how Islamist women think the two can be compatible. All these frames underline the cognitive reasoning of how Islam and feminism are compatible or incompatible as a strategic action. Whether they claim the compatibility of Islam and feminism or not, secular feminists use these frames to support their feminist ideology which has strong ties to secularism. Similarly, Islamist women use the aforementioned frames to support Islamist ideology. Conclusion Although filmmakers had been operating since the end of the First World War (most of them with a theatrical background), no one had either the resources or the talent available to produce work on a regular basis. However, in the post-1945 period the climate changed; the economy expanded rapidly, while the government introduced a tax of 25 percent on all cinema ticket sales, in an attempt to generate money for new films (Shaw and Shaw 4(K)-13). The benefits of this policy were rapidly felt; film production increased annually between 1950 and 1958, and new production companies came into being. Directors now had the freedom—and the financial resources—to discover a new cinematic language of their own dealing with topics of specific interest to Turkish filmgoers. In Europe and the United States postcolonial critics of Lawrence of Arabia have condemned the film for its unspoken association of the westerner with "productive, creative pioneering" compared to the Arab or the Turk, who are associated with "underdevelopment" (Shohat and Stam 148). Meanwhile several filmmakers have recognized Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's achievements in World War I—as. for example, in Carl Byker and Lyn Goldfarb's miniseries The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996)—where Ataturk was voiced by Rene Auberjonois, Perhaps in the future there will be another cinematic retelling of the events of 1916 and its aftermath which may take these changes into account. Works Cited Metin Heper, Tanel Demirel. The Press and the Consolidation of Democracy in Turkey," Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 32, no.2, 1996, pp. 109-123. .O¨ zo¨n, N. (1995). Karago¨zden sinemaya: Tu¨rk sinemasi ve sorunlari . Ankara: Kitle Yayinlari. Bulaç AH, (Is Adultery an Obstacle in the Road to EU)," Zaman, September 22, 2004 Cano, M. (2001). Non-Muslim Minorities Living in Turkey From the Standpoint of Nation State and Diversities, Their Problems and Suggestions For Solution. In Helsinki Citizens Assembly collected papers (pp. 72-77). Istanbul: I˙letis¸im Yayinlari. Fehmi Koru. We are Turks and do not Make a Mistake. Yeni Safak, September 22, 2004. Gerard Groe, "Journalists as Champions of Participatory Democracy," Politics in the Third Turkish Republic, Boulder (eds Heper, Metin, and Ahmed Evin), 1994, pp. 199-213. Kasaba, R. (1997). Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities. In S. Bozdog˘an & R. Kasaba (Eds), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (pp. 15-37). Washington: University of Washington Press. Kongar, E. (2000). 21. Yu¨zyilda Tu¨rkiye. I˙stanbul: Remzi Kitabevi. Regina G. Lawrence, The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality, Berkeley, 2000 Shaw. Stanford, and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Vo! ll: Reform. Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Shohat. Ella, and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Muhiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge. 1994, Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, Berkeley 1990, and p.7. William A. Gamson, David S. Meyer, "Framing Political Opportunity," Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (eds. McAdam, D., JD. McCarthy, MN. Zald.), Cambridge, 1996, p. 285. Read More