Fatih Akin's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe

Berna Gueneli

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780253037886
• eBook ISBN: 9780253037916
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Europäische Kunst

In Fatih Ak?n's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German filmmaker and auteur Fatih Ak?n. The first minority director in Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Ak?n makes films that are informed by Europe's past, provide cinematic imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and multilingual European citizenry. Through detailed analyses of some of Ak?n's key works—In July, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, among others—Gueneli identifies Ak?n's unique stylistic use of multivalent sonic and visual components and multinational characters. She argues that the soundscapes of Ak?n's films—including music and multiple languages, dialects, and accents—create an "aesthetic of heterogeneity" that envisions an expanded and integrated Europe and highlights the political nature of Ak?n's decisions regarding casting, settings, and audio. At a time when belonging and identity in Europe is complicated by questions of race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, Gueneli demonstrates how Ak?n's aesthetics intersect with politics to reshape notions of Europe, European cinema, and cinematic history.

CHAPTER 1

Mapping Europe

THE ROAD MOVIE GENRE AND TRANSNATIONAL EUROPEAN SPACE IN FILM

WHO AND WHAT defines Europe?¹ Various disciplines, organizations, and interest groups such as the EU, political parties, and academic disciplines have repeatedly constructed and defined Europe and things European. The building ban on minarets in Switzerland (2009), the outlawing of the hijab (veil) in French schools (2010), and the increasing numbers of refugees coming to Europe after the Arab Spring and the long war in Syria (post-2011) warrant once again a reevaluation of the changing sights and sounds of Europe. Cinema provides one way of imagining concepts of the continent, and Akın’s films offer contemporary, popular examples for cinematic evaluations of Europe and Europeanness. Turkey’s role in this new Europe is also important, especially considering Turkey’s aspirations to become an EU member state.²

This chapter examines Akın’s construction of an alternate filmic Europe. To this end, I discuss the intrinsically related specificities of European mobility, spaces, and sounds in his film In July. In particular, I highlight the role of the road movie genre for the construction of this filmic Europe in addition to foregrounding the politics of Akın’s setting, casting, and soundtrack choices in In July, all of which impact the film’s construction of Europe and Europeanness. The structure of this chapter is organized as such: Following an initial discussion of In July’s articulation of Europe, I provide a definition of the road movie genre, which helps Akın map his cinematic vision of Europe. The film uses this genre to destabilize a nation-centered map of Europe and its Others, and to create a porous and cosmopolitan Europe. I pay particular attention to the feature of mobility and the figure of the traveler from road movies. Cinematic mobility provides a mode of navigation through European spaces, and the film’s figure of the traveler assists in mapping Europe for the viewer just as much as it portrays new, diverse European citizens as its navigators. Once the European navigators are clearly presented, I discuss the film’s creation of European spaces in more detail. I analyze the depiction of borders, landscapes, and city spaces, which feature as stops in this European road movie. Finally, a discussion of the European sounds in In July complements, on the acoustic level, our understanding of the spatial construction of a filmic Europe.

The chapter thereby positions Akın and his cinema in a European context while attempting to decipher his audiovisual visions of Europe as expressed through elements of the road movie. Focusing on In July’s conception of Europe, this chapter thus lays the foundation for the next two chapters, which will offer a more detailed analysis of the aural composition in Akın’s Head-On and The Edge of Heaven by discussing their transnational soundtracks.

In July’s Europe

With In July, Akın sets the tone for his future films in his Turkish German entanglement period. The film showcases how Akın, with this very early feature film, has already begun to map Europe as a transnational space extending beyond existing EU borders. With the help of the road movie genre, the director subtly shifts geopolitical borders, depicts the arbitrariness of national borders, and creates a flexible, enlarged cinemascape of Europe.

Central features of Akın’s filmic Europe are its multiethnicity and polyphony. This lighthearted road movie is different (in terms of genre, plot, and style) from Akın’s later, critically acclaimed feature films such as Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, and Soul Kitchen. Yet In July’s visions of Europe are very similar to those later films. These films offer a coherent narrative of a connected and diverse cinematic Europe. Frequently such experiences of ethnic and linguistic diversity have been linked to experiences of cities that are under the influence of globalization.³ Yet, in In July, such diversification is considered to be already in place throughout both the rural and urban settings of Europe. A combination of transnational sounds and visuals construct a fluid, almost borderless imagination of the European space, which explicitly includes pre-EU eastern Europe and Turkey.

European places figure prominently in In July, marking the film’s setting immediately as European. The beginning of the film highlights eastern Europe with the title “somewhere in Bulgaria.” The narrative begins with a young, dark-haired, mysterious-looking man, Isa (Mehmet Kurtuluş), getting out of his Mercedes, which has a Berlin license plate in pre-EU eastern Europe. This opening sequence introduces the audience to the main character, Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu), who in travel-worn clothes tries to get a ride from Isa. After Daniel explains that he is on the way to find his love interest, Melek (Idil Üner), the story continues with Daniel’s flashback narrative. The flashback explains why the teacher in training came from Hamburg to Bulgaria and is on his way to Istanbul. Starting in Hamburg and moving further southeast, Daniel travels through a Bavarian town, Vienna, and various eastern European locations. Eventually, the frame narrative continues with Daniel and Isa at the Bulgarian-Turkish border. From here, the last sequences portray Daniel on his way to a desired meeting spot in Ortaköy-Istanbul, where he hopes to see Melek. Instead, he encounters his former travel companion Juli (Christiane Paul), and both confirm their mutual love. The film ends with the continuation of their travel into the “shitty south.”

Beginning “somewhere in Bulgaria” and ending on the way to the “shitty south,” In July is both a European road movie and a politically conscious movie that makes deliberate choices to underscore the porousness of borders. The spatial continuity among the cityscapes and landscapes replaces previously established and commonly accepted geopolitical concepts of Europe, especially outside the Schengen zone (typically fortified through ritualized, politicized acts of border crossings). In Akın’s film, this continuity is best symbolized by various characters traveling throughout post-1989 Europe. Akın connects iconic European cities such as Hamburg and Budapest with Istanbul. At the same time, rural landscapes in central and eastern Europe are linked to these cities in fluid continuity. Yet man-made borders interrupt and oppose the connections between these spaces. Thus, while thematizing the connectedness of European space, the film addresses the issue of borders explicitly by presenting them as complicated, metaphorical antagonists to the continuity of landscapes.

As the analysis of the road movie genre and the audiovisual dimensions of In July will demonstrate, Akın constructs cinematic imaginings of a diverse yet connected Europe. In this European space, multiethnicity and multilingualism are prominent in a variety of regions. Yet Akın’s principal settings, like post–Cold War western and eastern Europe, as well as contemporary Turkey, are places that have often been seen as historically and politically distinct. Fatima El-Tayeb reminds us that a multiethnic and multireligious Europe has still not been accepted in contemporary conceptualizations of the continent.⁴ In 2015, for example, when Europe began to experience a new “refugee crisis,” widespread unfavorable opinions toward non-Christian, non–western European refugees and migrants in Europe epitomized the persistence of xenophobia across Europe. Such expressions reduce the idea of Europe to a one-dimensional, homogenous notion of the continent, which, in reality it has never been.

Akın’s cinema imagines Europe as a changing entity with various dynamic interconnections. Hence, Akın presents European space not as a clear-cut, organized entity with centers and margins that can be firmly defined. Similarly, in the field of cultural geography, Doreen Massey conceptualizes space as a perpetually changing entity, which comes into being through multiple interconnections of people, places, and things material.⁵ Akın’s films reflect this interconnectedness of a formerly (sociopolitically) divided European North/South and East/West through his aesthetics of heterogeneity. That is, Akın’s cinematic space regularly depicts interrelational, heterogeneous local sights and sounds across Europe. For example, he juxtaposes the sounds of global electronic dance music with decidedly localized Black Sea folk music from northeastern Turkey. He similarly intertwines Hamburg-based Brazilian-German reggae bands with the voices of Islamic prayers in his films. As a result, Akın’s soundscapes reflect a vast and complex polyphony, which prior to his films was often excluded from conventional depictions of Europe. Languages such as English, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian, as well as local idioms such as Hamburgisch, Bavarian, and Black Sea dialects, further enrich the new sonic heterogeneity of Europe. Ultimately, Akın’s cinema portrays networks of European landscapes, city spaces, and sounds with links between local places in Turkey, eastern and western Europe, and South and North America. These transnational connections in Akın’s cinematic Europe represent a sometimes polemic challenge to existing geopolitical, national European borders, which, as In July depicts, often enough impede transnational interactions beyond the Schengen zone in the lived European reality.

A central feature of this European space is its reliance on movement and mobility. Eventually, the travelers link local places and help create the filmic space of Europe. Similar to Doreen Massey’s concept of space, Akın’s cinematic visions of Europe are reflected in the interrelations of the people, places, and entities in his films. Massey proposes a progressive and “global sense of place.” She suggests that a place comes into existence through the multiple connections it has to other places; it consists of networks of social relations, which are constantly in flux.⁶ Through these networks, the specificities of places are perpetually reinvented. The connections in Akın’s films are shown, for example, through landscapes that continue seamlessly across borders, parallel city spaces, and cosmopolitan travelers who cross each other’s paths.

Such connections are also exemplified through Akın’s soundtrack. A specific sound is not bound to a particular place and is capable of creating a link between geographically distant places. Within film sound studies, this detachment of sound recalls Michel Chion’s elaborations on the “audiovisual scene.” While the image refers to the frame and therefore has a “container,” according to Chion, there is no “auditory container for sound.”⁷ “Film sound is what is contained or not contained in an image; there is no place of the sounds, no auditory scene already preexisting in the soundtrack—and therefore, properly speaking, there is no soundtrack.”⁸ This characteristic of cinematic sound makes it easy to demarcate flexibility and mobility. Chion further elaborates on his notion of the “acousmatic” to theorize sound.⁹ Acousmatic sound, a sound, for example, that is recorded—or offscreen and nondiegetic sound in film—does not depict its place of enunciation. Such sound is therefore not bound to a specific body. It travels through space but carries with it the characteristics of the space from which it emerges. Looking at recorded sound, for example, it can clearly be dislocated in two ways—both by being detached from its space of enunciation (playback may happen at a different time, in another part of the globe) and within cinema, by being attached to or detached from specific bodies depicted in the film. That is, at all times, the viewer must be engaged in “mapping” the sound. In In July, sound maps Europe.

The following sections on the road movie genre and mobility, as well as on European spaces and sounds, provide more detailed insights about Akın’s audiovisual conceptions of a connected Europe.

The Road Movie Genre

A widely popular genre, the road movie has been regarded as quintessentially American by some scholars,¹⁰ while others have questioned the uncritical assumption of its “inherent Americanness” or highlighted the long traditions of road and travel movies in other geographies, such as in Europe.¹¹ In general, the road movie genre entails a variety of specific thematic, stylistic, and filmic components—and combinations thereof. Some of the prominent features of road movies include the depict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fatih Akın: A Contemporary Filmmaker from Germany
• 1. Mapping Europe: The Road Movie Genre and Transnational European Space in Film
• 2. The Sound of Polyphony: Multilingualism, Multiethnicity, and Linguistic Empowerment in Head-On
• 3. The Sound of Music: Transnational Soundscapes
• 4. Expanding the Scope of European Cinema: Akın’s Cinematic Imagining of a Diverse Europe in Context
• Conclusion: Intertextual Film—Transnational Film—Transnational Film History
• Filmography/Discography, Bibliography, and Online Sources
• Index
• About the Author