Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art

Cinema Beyond Europe

Nilgun Bayraktar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ay?e Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutlu? Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavu?o?lu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

Part I
Transnational Flows in Cinema

1 Cross-Border Mobility and Confinement in Turkish German Cinema

Countess Sophia Hatun and The Edge of Heaven

In their 1975 book A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe , John Berger and Jean Mohr documented the early years of massive labor migration from “underdeveloped” countries such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and parts of North Africa to industrially “advanced” areas of Europe. They titled this project “A Seventh Man” because at that time one in every seven laborers in Germany and Britain was an immigrant.¹ Europe increasingly relied on imported foreign labor in the second half of the twentieth century as the growing industrial economy placed new demands on the workforce. A Seventh Man ’s explicit political commitment was to demonstrate the interdependency between the violent exploitation these laborers endured and the global forces of modernization and industrialization their toil supported.

Berger’s narrative and Mohr’s black-and-white photographs tell the story of a highly disenfranchised group: first-generation migrants who left their homes, mainly in rural areas, for employment in western Europe as unskilled or semiskilled workers in fields that require heavy manual labor, shift work, and repetitive production methods. A Seventh Man shows us a worker suffering double alienation as the result of the loss of familiar cultural codes and the difficulty of adapting to life within the context of the industrial metropolis. Berger notes that the alienation experienced by the newly arrived immigrants was different from that of “a long established, ‘indigenous’ proletariat or sub-proletariat.”² The social identities of migrant workers were circumscribed by the contested rhetorical figure of the “guestworker,” a term that quite literally defined the hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers according to their economic utility and insisted on the temporary nature of their stay.

The central character of A Seventh Man is “HE”—an archetypal migrant worker. The narrative is structured around his subjective experience as he follows a cycle of Departure–Work–Return. As Berger noted, “To re-become a man (husband, father, citizen, patriot) a migrant has to return home .”³ In poetic language with a clear Marxist undercurrent, Berger’s narrative characterizes labor migration as a one-way transition, a form of economically forced exile. Mohr’s photographs capture migrants in transitory spaces such as train stations, barracks, recruitment offices, compartments, shantytowns, and construction sites. The representation of migrant bodies in the act of physical, cultural, and socioeconomic border-crossing displays not only their liminal status but also their sense of alienation as they leave their homeland behind to rebuild their lives in a new country. As Levent Soysal has observed, the archetypal worker in A Seventh Man is characterized by “disturbing absences of speech and gesture. There, the migrant is not heard and seen, remaining invisible beyond walls that separate him from European imagination.”⁴ Today, 40 years after Berger and Mohr created their literary and visual representation of migrancy, it is worth asking how the figure of the speechless and alienated male Gastarbeiter (guestworker) has changed. Indeed, it could be said that the view of migrant identity captured in A Seventh Man , an existence Katrin Sieg has characterized as “located in a twilight zone of ‘in betweenness,’”⁵ has given way to a multisited and mobile sense of migrant identity.

This chapter explores the relationship between migrancy and cinematic production since the late 1990s in the context of Turkish German migration. I discuss Kurdish German director Ayşe Polat’s experimental short film Gräfin Sophia Hatun (Countess Sophia Hatun, 1997)—a relatively early example of what Rob Burns has defined as “cinema of cultural hybridity”⁶—alongside a more recent box office success: Turkish German director Fatih Akın’s feature film Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007). These films inscribe multidirectional mobilities and moorings at the level of both content and form. They intertwine the stories of subjects with different ethnicities, affiliations, and cultural backgrounds by drawing from various film genres and styles that are not immediately associated with migrant and diasporic cinema, enabling us to draw connections across seemingly unrelated notions, such as the European national past and the multicultural present. They also pluralize and diversify the singular “other” of John Berger’s A Seventh Man , so that different histories and mobilities may be connected to each other without collapsing into singular figuration.

Both Polat and Akın began their film careers by making experimental short films and documentaries and moved on to making feature-length narrative films later. In a sense, Akın’s The Edge of Heaven can be considered an experimental film owing to its fractured, nonlinear narrative and multiple interlocking storylines. Yet unlike Polat’s Countess Sophia Hatun , Akın’s experimentation joins a growing trend in both mainstream and independent cinema that celebrates fragmented and multilayered storytelling, as seen in films such as Wong Kar-wai’s Chong qing sen lin (Chunking Express, 1994), Code Inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000) by Michael Haneke, Babel (2006) by Alejandro González Iñárritu, and The Tree of Life (2011) by Terrence Malick. In this context, exploring a unique experimental film made in 1997 alongside a recent one made in 2007 provides historical depth to the unconventional filmmaking practices of second-generation Turkish German directors who deviated from the dominant narrative paradigm.

Film scholar Hamid Naficy’s notion of “accented cinema”—defined as films made since the 1960s in Western countries by exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial directors—runs through this chapter, informing my discussion of claustrophobic/agoraphobic spaces in Polat’s film and homecoming journeys in Akın’s film. According to Naficy, accented films share specific stylistic and thematic features such as narrative hybridity (the juxtaposition of multiple voices, spaces, and times) and a specific visual style of expressing nostalgia for the homeland. Evoking the deterritorialized conditions of the filmmakers, these films are preoccupied with journeying and displacement. Both Countess Sophia Hatun and The Edge of Heaven expand and complicate this genre: Polat’s film integrates Turkish German migration and German high culture in a critical form by taking us into an aristocratic German space, where a story of confinement and displacement unfolds. The Edge of Heaven , in contrast, portrays multidirectional journeys between Germany and Turkey undertaken by various characters for different reasons, expanding beyond urban spaces such as Hamburg and Istanbul into rural parts of Turkey. Analyzing these films next to each other allows for a rethinking of the binaries of home and travel, mobilities and moorings, inside and outside within a critical framework. The first part of the chapter reveals mobility and fissure amid the heritage film’s apparently inert conventions of home and landscape, whereas the second part finds fleeting but tangible anchors, longing for home and connection within the apparently fractal, mobile conventions of dispersed, deconstructed film.

Both Countess Sophia Hatun and The Edge of Heaven feature performances by well-known Turkish actor Tuncel Kurtiz, who plays a first-generation migrant in both films. Best-known for his key roles in Zaza and Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney’s political films of the 1970s, Kurtiz had an impressive acting career in Turkish theater and cinema as well as in international productions in Germany and England. Today he is a celebrated figure in Turkish cinema whose presence in these films was used by Akın and Polat to evoke the history of political filmmaking in Turkey. Yet this is not a story of men. Although the development of Turkish German cinema has been discussed mainly in relation to the works of male directors, Turkish German women directors have also made significant contributions to cinema.⁷ This paired analysis of films directed by a woman (Polat) and a man (Akın) deliberately disrupts the extensive focus on internationally successful male directors in both scholarly and popular discourses. Both films show that presenting the story of migration as a one-way movement from home to host country is somewhat outdated in the global era. They problematize and transcend binaries of guest-host, Turkish-German, and migrant-citizen, moving beyond national and cultural boundaries to evince a transnational and global-cultural frame of reference.

I. Exilic and Diasporic Heritage Cinema Countess Sophia Hatun (1997)

Ayşe Polat was born to a Kurdish family in Malatya, Turkey, in 1970, and moved to Germany as a child in 1978. Countess Sophia Hatun (1997) is one of several experimental short films that she made early in her career. All of her projects from this period, including Fremdennacht (Stranger’s Night, 1992) and Ein Fest für Beyhan (A Feast for Beyhan, 1993), deviate from the conventions of mainstream cinema, whether for their nonlinear, fragmented narratives; their impressionistic visual style; or their subversive use of popular genres. The formal experiments of these short films do not merely concern cinematic aesthetics as such but also work to convey the multifaceted experience of migration and cross-cultural contact.⁸ The feature-length narrative films, such as Auslandstournee (Tour Abroad, 2000) and En Garde (On Guard, 2003), that Polat began making following these experimental shorts extend her interest in issues of traveling, displacement, and border crossing. But it is her earlier projects that stand out within her oeuvre devoted to these subjects. Countess Sophia Hatun is particularly notable for its inventive reinterpretation of heritage film, a genre inherently tied to a romantic notion of high European culture. British and German practices of heritage cinema attracted critical attention and appealed to wider audiences in the late 1980s and 1990s by providing high production values, international visibility, and high marketability. Significantly, critics have seen a link between the popularity of heritage films and the rise of multicultural societies in 1990s Europe, arguing that heritage films provided an escape from the frustrations of increasing cultural diversity and evoked a sense of nostalgia and longing for a lost national past.⁹ Although both British and German heritage films present the past as a site of spectacular splendor, they display differences in their attitudes toward the national past and the multicultural present. As many critics have observed, British heritage films often center on upper-middle-class and aristocratic characters and produce an elitist vision of Englishness marked by imperial grandeur. Even though these films often have progressive narratives that counter hegemonic views of gender and class, their critical edge tends to be curtailed by their visual magnificence.¹⁰ German heritage films also employ aestheticized spectacle, but they reconstruct the traumatic past, specifically the Nazi era, as a site of multicultural connection and German-Jewish reconciliation.¹¹

Polat’s film, made in the late 1990s, specifically refers to the popular heritage costume dramas of that period by adopting many of that genre’s particular features—such as an emphasis on lavish mise-en-scène over narrative development. Countess Sophia Hatun also incorporates the formal and thematic preoccupations of accented cinema, especially in its treatment of agoraphobic and claustrophobic spaces that result from experiences of exile and displacement. As Naficy has established, accented films resignify “prevailing cinematic modes” through their artisanal and collective means of production.¹² Countess Sophia Hatun destabilizes and reworks both genres in a highly stylized and self-reflexive manner. By pushing beyond inherited themes and structures to employ new forms of filmmaking and storytelling, Polat allows for a rethinking of the center from the perspective of the margin.

Figure 1.1 Still from Countess Sophia Hatun by Ayşe Polat (1997)—The unnamed migrant worker from Turkey (Tuncel Kurtiz).

In her 16-minute film, Polat tells the story of a seventeenth-century German aristocrat, Countess Sophia (Sabine Wolf), who was imprisoned by her husband for several years in a castle in Northern Germany after having a love affair with another man. In the film, this historical event provides a basis for the fictional relationship between an upper-class German woman and a lower-class migrant from Turkey (Tuncel Kurtiz). The film’s narrative revolves around these two exilic characters, who experience confinement for different reasons. The Countess, an exile within her husband’s castle, strives to establish a personal connection with her Turkish servant, who is escaping from war in his native country. The Countess talks only with him because she believes that the other servants are her husband’s spies and, moreover, because she feels that she shares a common experience of entrapment and restlessness with the Turkish servant. Every day she invites the servant to her room and tells him her story, yet the servant continues to rebuff this imposed friendship. One day his enigmatic silence and short, evasive answers annoy the Countess. She believes that he should be with his family in Turkey instead of living in a foreign land and decides that since he is free to leave the castle, as she is not, he should go back to his homeland. The fact that the servant does not see his newly gained freedom as bliss extremely disturbs the Countess, and she expels him from her property. Abandoned in the open fields with nowhere to go, the servant freezes to death, and his body is later ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cinematic/Artistic Takes on Migration and Mobility in Contemporary Europe
• PART I Transnational Flows in Cinema
• PART II Fragmented Journeys in Moving-Image Art
• Afterword: Points of Departure
• Bibliography
• Index