Female Silences, Turkey’s Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey 1443894362, 9781443894364

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Female Silences, Turkey’s Crises

Female Silences, Turkey’s Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey By

Özlem Güçlü

Female Silences, Turkey’s Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey By Özlem Güçlü This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Özlem Güçlü All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9436-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9436-4

To Serhan ùeúen (1982-2008) and Onur Bayraktar (1979-2010)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures .......................................................................................... viii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... ix Notes on Translations ................................................................................. xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 And Silence Enters the Scene Chapter One ............................................................................................... 30 New Cinema of Turkey and the Novelty of Silence Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 67 Silent Confrontation with Masculinities in Crisis Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 110 Silent Confrontation with the National Order in Crisis Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 142 Silent Return of the Past Conclusions ............................................................................................. 178 Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises Bibliography ............................................................................................ 187 Filmography ............................................................................................ 201 Index ........................................................................................................ 208

LIST OF FIGURES

2.1: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997) ........................................................... 72 2.2: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997) ........................................................... 72 2.3: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997) ........................................................... 87 2.4 and 2.5: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997) .............................................. 91 2.6: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997) ........................................................... 92 2.7 and 2.8: The Bandit (Turgul 1996) ...................................................... 94 2.9: Distant (Ceylan 2002) ...................................................................... 101 2.10, 2.11, 2.12 and 2.13: Merry Go Round (Baúarr 2010) .................... 103 2.14: Love in Another Language (Baúarr 2009) ..................................... 106 2.15 and 2.16: Love in Another Language (Baúarr 2009) ....................... 108 3.1: On Board (Akar 1998)...................................................................... 117 3.2: On Board (Akar 1998)...................................................................... 118 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6: 9 (Ünal 2002) ......................................................... 128 3.7: 9 (Ünal 2002).................................................................................... 130 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10: The Shadowless (Ünal 2008) ...................................... 138 3.11: The Bandit (Turgul 1996) ............................................................... 141 4.1: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan 2011) ................................. 157 4.2: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan 2011) ................................. 157 4.3: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan 2011) ................................. 160 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6: Pandora’s Box (Ustao÷lu 2008) ................................... 163 4.7: Waiting for the Clouds (Ustao÷lu 2003) ........................................... 170 4.8: Waiting for the Clouds (Ustao÷lu 2003) ........................................... 171 4.9 and 4.10: Waiting for the Clouds (Ustao÷lu 2003) ............................ 173

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my sincere gratitude, first and foremost, to my PhD supervisor, Dr. Isolde Standish, for her excellent guidance, encouragement and mentoring. I would also like to thank my examination committee members, Prof. Benjamin Fortna and Dr. Eylem Atakav, for their valuable comments, suggestions and encouragement. And I would also like to thank my PhD supervisory committee members, Dr. Georges Dedes and Dr. Rachel Harrison, for their intellectual support and friendship. I would like to thank the American Research Institute in Turkey for granting me a doctoral fellowship, which provided great encouragement and acted as a considerable catalyst for finalising my study. A great debt of gratitude goes to people who contributed to this study with their valuable comments and suggestions: Agah Özgüç, Ahmet Boyaco÷lu, Dr. Ahmet Gürata, Alin Taúçyan, Burçak Evren, Derviú Zaim, Frat Yücel, Giovanni Scognamillo, Dr. Gül Yaúartürk, ølksen Baúarr, Melek Özman, Mert Frat, Mustafa Turaç, Nejat Gökçe, Prof. Nejat Ulusay, Prof. Ruken Öztürk, Dr. Savaú Arslan, Prof. ùükran Esen, Dr. Umut Tümay Arslan, Ümit Ünal and Zeki Demirkubuz. The images in this book are used with the permission of: Hakan Karahan, ølksen Baúarr, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ömer Varg, Serdar Akar, Ümit Ünal, Yeúim Ustao÷lu, Zeki Demirkubuz and Zeynep Özbatur Atakan. I would like to thank them all for letting me use these images. Prof. Zeynep Tül Akbal Süalp was the very first figure who introduced me not only to the field of film studies in my undergraduate studies, but also to the silent female characters in the new cinema of Turkey. Her scholarship has deeply directed my thinking in the field and very much affected my method in this study. Her guidance, comments and suggestions regarding this study also acted as encouragement. My grateful and heartfelt thanks go to Dr. Sibel Yardmc, Dr. Emine Çakr and Dr. Cüneyt Çakrlar for their precious emotional and intellectual support. I would also like to thank Serdar Güçlü, Ufuk Güçlü, Bulutay

x

Acknowledgements

Güçlü, Melahat Bulutay, Kutay Can Do÷an, Nicole Butterfield, Murat Emir Eren, Barú Gö÷üú and ødil Akyol; without their help, this book would not have been possible. My heartfelt thanks also go to all of my beautiful and dearest friends and family, and to my colleagues in the Sociology Department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University for their support, love and existence. And lastly, I would like to thank to my M.A. supervisor, Prof. Jasmina Lukic, for her guidance, support and belief in this project when I first started it as my M.A. dissertation. I am dedicating this book to the memories of my two dearest friends, Serhan ùeúen (1982-2008) and Onur Bayraktar (1979-2010), whose untimely losses in the process of this study made everything unbearably hard. They would be the two people who undoubtedly would have been the proudest and happiest at the completion of this book.

NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS

Throughout the book, all translations from the original Turkish are my own unless otherwise stated. Regarding the quotations cited from the films, the subtitles provided in their DVDs are used except Shadow Play [Gölge Oyunu] (Yavuz Turgul 1993) and The Ivy Mansion: Life [Asmalı Konak: Hayat] (Abdullah O÷uz 2003).

INTRODUCTION AND SILENCE ENTERS THE SCENE

The cinema works to suppress discourse, to permit only certain “speakers”, only certain “speech”. —Ann Kaplan, Both Sides of the Camera

In the mid-1990s, Turkish cinema experienced a remarkable revival both through the box-office success of commercial films and through art house productions as they gained visibility and received critical acclaim at both national and international festivals (Suner 2004, 306). While the “new” formula of polishing the thematic binary oppositions of Turkish melodramas with Hollywood’s visual style (Dorsay 2004a, 11) was used by commercial films as the way to box office success, art house productions introduced new and diverse ways of filmmaking and storytelling to Turkish cinema audiences. However, what is really unusual about this revival is the emergence of a new representational form: silent, inaudible characters. In the new cinema of Turkey, we constantly encounter characters that, for some reason, do not or cannot speak. Equally unusual is the fact that this newness, this on-screen silence, has a gender(ed/ing) aspect, since, for the most part, the mute(d) characters are female. If we examine how women are absent from Turkish cinema screens after the mid-1990s, it is noticeable that female stories or female points of view are silenced; this invisibility is not specific to the new cinema. The Turkish cinema industry has always been a male-dominated cinema, and this has been discussed by several scholars (Abisel 2005; Suner 2006a; 2010; Ulusay 2004). However, the gender imbalance had never before been so intense in terms of the representations and stories. Gönül DönmezColin describes this period in Turkish cinema as “macho cinema” (Dönmez-Colin 2004). Nejat Ulusay calls some of the examples in the new cinema “male films” (Ulusay 2004), while Z. Tül Akbal Süalp uses the term “male weepy films” to define and describe a group of films in the new cinema of Turkey (Akbal Süalp 2009). Thus the new cinema is differentiated from other decades in Turkish cinema by its mostly male-

2

Introduction

centred stories and male points of view that are narrated by and/or through the male characters, their lives, problems, conflicts, feelings, anxieties and fantasies (Akbal Süalp 2009; Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008; Ulusay 2004). In this atmosphere, women are cast either as “morbid provocateurs and seducers who lead men to commit crimes, violence and irrational acts and who, of course, then become the victims of these brutalities” or are completely excluded from the narrative (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008, 92). Furthermore, as Akbal Süalp argues, “women have taken their part as the unknown, threatening other and stand for all ‘Others’” and represent both the fantasies and fears of the wounded male egos’ (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008, 92). In these narratives, women are muted: “Women have gradually faded from the scene as characters and have become backdrops in most dramas. No meaningful dialogue has [been] written for them” (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008, 92). In her book New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory, film scholar Asuman Suner also suggests that “the absence of women is one of the characteristics of the new wave cinema. Again and again, we encounter mute women in these films” (Suner 2010, 163). Moreover, how they are “inaudible”, how they are made mute on the screen has also some “specificity” to Turkish cinema after the mid-1990s. As a part of this current gender(ed) picture of the new cinema of Turkey, a new female representational form emerges: the silent, inaudible female. Even though there are a few examples of silent female representations in Turkish cinema before the 1990s, from 1993 onwards (particularly between 1996 and 2004), we encounter silent female characters in films that are not specific to a single genre. In fact, the films that can be considered as the most powerful examples of the new cinema of Turkey, one from the commercial side, The Bandit [Eúkya] (Yavuz Turgul 1996), and the other from the art house side, Somersault in a Coffin [Tabutta Rövaúata] (Derviú Zaim 1996), involve two silent female characters: respectively, Keje (Sermin Hürmeriç), who chooses not to speak in response to her forced marriage with a man she does not love, and the Junkie Woman (Ayúen Özdemir), who is mostly depicted looking out of the window in silence. As film scholar Ulusay argues, these male films exclude female characters, and if they cannot cast women completely out of the narration they make them mute instead (Ulusay 2004, 154). In the background of the increased “voice” of the male stories, the audience is faced with these female silences that function in various ways and arise from various reasons: mute characters who are unable to speak such as Yusuf’s sister (Nihal G. Koldaú) in Innocence [Masumiyet] (Zeki Demirkubuz 1997) and Francesca (Beatriz Rico) in Istanbul Under My

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Wings [østanbul Kanatlarmn Altnda] (Mustafa Altoklar 1996); the characters who become mute as a consequence of a trauma, such as Nazmiye (Müge Oruçkaptan) in Propaganda (Sinan Çetin 1999); voluntary mutes who chose not to speak, such as Keje in The Bandit and Yasemin (Yasemin Kozano÷lu) in Romantic [Romantik] (Sinan Çetin 2007); the characters who are reluctant to speak, such as Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) in Climates [øklimler] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2006); and forced mutes who are made inaudible by the writer and director and cannot be heard by the audience even though they are actually able to speak, such as the Woman (Ella Menae) in On Board [Gemide] (Serdar Akar 1998), Spiky (Esin Pervane) in 9 (Ümit Ünal 2002) and Mahmut’s lover (Nazan Kesal) and the women Yusuf stalks (Ebru Ceylan) in Distant [Uzak] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2002). In the end, as Suner states, “new Turkish cinema speaks over female silences” (Suner 2010, 174). Being motivated by the “scream” of this ongoing silence, this book will attempt to go beyond just naming the silence to explore the operations and functions of these mute representations of the feminine, and their relation to the historical and industrial contexts in which they were produced and consumed. Therefore my central questions are: Why did this silent female representational form emerge specifically in this time frame? What are the functions of the silent female characters in these films? What is the relationship between this “new” – silent – form of female representation, the “new” cinema of Turkey, and the “new” socio-political climate in Turkey in the post-1980s and in the 1990s in particular? In my opinion, exploring the formations, operations and functions of gendered divisions of silence and speech on screen will reveal not only gender constructions in and through cinematic discourse, but also the possible relation of these constructions to both the historical, political, economic, social and cultural context of Turkey and to the Turkish cinema industry, since cinema constitutes and is constituted by the other discursive and non-discursive practices specific to the context of time and space. Obviously, the silent form of female representation is not uniquely specific to the new cinema of Turkey. There are also some examples in Turkish cinema from other decades that involve silent female characters. Berivan (Melike Demira÷), who refuses to speak in The Herd [Sürü] (Zeki Ökten 1979), would probably be the first one that comes to mind. Berivan, who is a Kurdish girl, given in marriage to the enemy tribe’s son as blood money [kan bedeli] or as a token of peace, becomes “mute” after her third miscarriage. Berivan, who is continuously accused by her father-in-law of being the source of every trouble they have been through, even though she

4

Introduction

has done nothing, does not say a single word throughout the film. Reddish Coloured Grape [Knal Yapncak] (Orhan Aksoy 1968) and Love Convict [Aúk Mahkumu] (Nuri Ergün 1973) are both typical examples of Turkish melodrama and share almost the same scenario. These films involve female characters who become mute after the sudden death of their parents in an accident. Each of the women has to move to her distant relatives’ house after the accident; she falls in love with the handsome and spoiled son of the family, and is raped by him. In Reddish Coloured Grape, we do not hear a word from the silent female character, Leyla (Hülya Koçyi÷it), until she regains her voice after a “new” shock – a traffic accident. However, in Love Convict, we hear the mute female character’s (Hale Soygazi) voice-over throughout the film in the scenes where she writes a journal. Another example involving a mute female character is Aliúan (ùerif Gören 1982), where the central theme is the impossible love of two people from different classes. The silent female character, Asl (Yaprak Özdemiro÷lu), is the daughter of a rich family, while the leading actor is a poor construction worker. Even though Asl does not talk throughout the film, she uses writing as a way of communicating with the male character. As can be seen from the limited number of these examples, the silent representational form was rarely used in Turkish cinema before the mid1990s. There are only a few isolated examples simply because the silence of a character, if it is not momentary, was contradictory to the classic narrative patterns of earlier Turkish cinema, which for the most part depended on dialogue and talking. In other cinemas, there are various examples of silent female characters from various countries, from various times: deaf and mute Belinda (Jane Wyman) in Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco 1948) from the U.S.; the silence of Elisabet (Liv Ullman), who becomes mute during a performance, in Persona (Ingmar Bergman 1966) from Sweden; Marlene (Irm Hermann) in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant [Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1972) from Germany; the mute girl (Kiti Manver) in Speak Little Mute Girl [Habla, Mudita] (Manuel Gutierrez Aragon 1973) from Spain; voluntary mute Christine M. (Edda Barends) in A Question of Silence [De Stilte Rond Christine M.] (Marleen Gorris 1982) from the Netherlands; deaf and mute Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) in Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines 1986) from the U.S.. After the 1990s, we are again faced with examples of silent female representations in other cinemas: the silence of Ada (Holly Hunter) in The Piano (Jane Campion 1993); the mute woman (Samantha Morton) in Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen, 1999); Rivka (Yael Abecassis) who slides into silence because of the strict rules of religion in Sacred

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[Kadosh] (Amos Gitai 1999); the silent body of Alicia (Leonor Watling), who is in a coma in Talk to Her [Hable Con Ella] (Pedro Almadovar 2002). Nevertheless the distinctive feature of the female silences in the new cinema of Turkey is that these are not isolated examples; rather, the usage of this representational form gained frequency at this historical juncture. Therefore, what this study is primarily concerned with is that silence emerged as a new female representational form in a specific historical time frame, in a specific country, and was frequently used in both art house and commercial productions. Studies in Turkish academia or mentions in the media of this newly emergent representational form do not adequately address the questions of how and why these silences have emerged on screen during this time period. While female silences dominate the Turkish screen, local cinema authorities continue to be silent about this ongoing silence. Most of the research or critiques on the new cinema of Turkey leave the silenced representations of women outside their scope of reflection (Ayça 20032004; Dorsay 2002; 2004a; 2004b; Evren 2003a; 2003b; 2005; Güven 2004; Maktav 2001-2002; Kraç 2000a; 2000b; 2008) while trying to define the Turkish cinema in terms of the emerging changes in the industry, narration, style and box-office or festival success after the mid1990s. The researchers or critics who are not gender blind to the changes in Turkish cinema (Dönmez-Colin 2004; 2008; Evirgen 2006; Eyübo÷lu 2001; Koç 2004; Oktan 2009; Özgüç 2006) are for some reason “deaf” to the silences of female characters: they overlook this emergence of the silent female representational form, although they focus on the representations of gender and sexuality in the new cinema from different angles. The few studies that acknowledge the presence of women’s silences as far as the characters, stories, and narratives are concerned (Öztürk and Tutal 2001; Suner 2010; Ulusay 2004), need to be critiqued and should be elaborated on. Even though these studies name the problem, pointing out the female silences, the scope of their research does not include the question of the functions of these silences and/or why this representational change appears in this specific time period. Ulusay argues that in these films, silent female characters are one of the symptoms of masculinity in crisis (Ulusay 2004). According to Ulusay, after the 1980s, masculinity in Turkish cinema started losing its power, which paved the way for male bonding films that aimed to reassign the myth of masculinity through male chauvinism and gun-fetishism

6

Introduction

(Ulusay 2004). The overemphasised virility in these narratives, Ulusay argues, very much points to a crisis in masculinity; that is, the anxiety of not being or being seen as manly enough (Ulusay 2004, 160). Most female characters in these films are thrown to the edges of the narratives, and the ones that cannot be completely excluded from the narratives are made mute instead (Ulusay 2004, 154). Ulusay suggests that the ongoing silencing of female characters in these films might be read as a manifestation of this masculinity crisis and as a response to the second-wave feminist movement in Turkey (Ulusay 2004, 157). However, since the main focus of his article is about the representations of masculinities, Ulusay does not make a detailed analysis of female silences. Suner provides a detailed analysis of identity and belonging in the new cinema of Turkey from a film studies perspective, mindful of contextual “specificities” (Suner 2006a, 2010). However, she does not put forth a comprehensive textual analysis of female silences in the chapter called “Women’s Silences”, and does not go beyond pointing out the problem that was previously set forth by Akbal Süalp. Film scholars S. Ruken Öztürk and Nilgün Tutal’s article, “Female Characters’ Silences in Cinema” [Sinemada Kadn Karakterlerin Sessizli÷i] (2001), where the different “meanings of female silence in films” (Öztürk and Tutal 2001, 101) are explored through various films that were produced in different countries at different times, is one of the most important works on female silence in cinema written in Turkish. However, it does not focus on the female silences in Turkish cinema after the mid-1990s, and considers only one film, The Bandit, from the new cinema of Turkey. Thus, in the mid-1990s and 2000s, this striking change in female representation did not receive scholarly attention, while the revival of Turkish cinema and the return of audiences have been reported. Even if these silences spoke, they were definitely not heard. On the other hand, Akbal Süalp not only points out the issue of the increasing number of silent female characters on screen (Akbal Süalp 1999) and poses very important questions seeking to understand the function(s) of these silences (Akbal Süalp 1998), but also sets forth a sound argument that associates the mute(d) female characters with the increasing “glorification of male lumpen attitudes” along with the emergence of the male weepy or arabesque-noir films (Akbal Süalp 1998; 1999; 2004; 2009; 2010a; 2011; Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008). This book aims to bring further discussions and analysis, following in the footsteps of Akbal Süalp who posed a crucial question for the purpose of this study: “Which unspeakable words and unarticulated dilemmas are represented by silent women, or what is the director unable to say?” (Akbal Süalp 1998, 13). This study

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argues that silent female characters, which have a close relation to the historical and political contexts from which they emerged, provide a representational form that reveals or hints at “unspeakable words and unarticulated dilemmas”, namely the crises in the hegemonic power positions in the realms of gender, nation and the past. The following chapters provide a detailed discussion of this silent female representational form. Its repeated association with the tropes of scapegoating, shame, victimisation, trauma, secrets and wounds provides a unique articulation of the silent trauma, shame, and crises of Turkey’s post-junta era. If one takes a look at female representational forms in Turkish cinema before the new cinema, the angel-devil dichotomy characterised the 1950s’ and 1960s’ melodramas.1 The home and the family were the main interest of Turkish melodramas. The “outside” was always considered as the source of trouble and of “threat” in these films. In terms of female characters, the woman “inside”, namely the mother and/or wife or the woman looking for eternal love, was always depicted as “good” and reached a happy ending that she deserved, while the woman from “outside”, namely a prostitute or the woman engaged in extramarital sexuality, was depicted as “bad” and found the trouble she deserved at the end. Beneath these dichotomies, the female characters, as well as Turkish melodrama as a genre itself, speak of and accord with the needs and characteristics of Turkish society after the 1950s, namely the conservative lifestyle and the changing social life due to the country’s opening to the “outside”2 world, and the need to ease the growing social anxieties as a consequence of that opening out. In the 1970s, female nudity entered the scene with the emergence of erotic films, which were designed to re-attract 1

In Turkish cinema, melodrama was the main genre until the mid-1970s. Moreover, it is seen as the main form that defines the Turkish cinematic tradition, especially in terms of narrative patterns. The angel-devil and also the rich-poor and the urban-rural oppositions are not specific to the female representations; rather, they are the characteristics of the Turkish melodrama as a genre. These oppositions can be considered as an articulation and a response to the widening gap between the social classes and the increasing internal migration in Turkish society after the 1950s as a result of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, and of the consumer culture project of the Democratic Party government. 2 With the Democratic Party government, Turkey experienced a great change from the Republican Party’s policy of national isolation, and underwent a huge economic “opening out”. For the first time in the history of Turkey, foreign aid and foreign loans were received. The government reduced the state’s role in the economy and encouraged foreign investments. The United States Army was permitted to situate a military base on Turkey’s territory.

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Introduction

the attention of audiences lost to television at the end of the 1960s. The 1980s witnessed a diversity and depth in the representations of femininities with the emergence of women’s films that were affected by the second wave feminist movement in Turkey. Just after the decade of women’s films, where the female characters, narratives and points of view gained “voice” and increased visibility, the silent female representational form emerges with the new cinema of Turkey.3 As film theorists Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue with regard to popular Hollywood films in their book, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, the changing dynamics of the different periods, the emergent developments and crises in society, not only affect the collective psychological state but also change the narrative and representational strategies of the films (Ryan and Kellner 1990). Therefore, newly emerged representational forms, or changes in representational forms, might be considered as a response to the changing dynamics of the society, since the existing forms were no longer sufficient to construct the changing world on screen. It might be read as a cinematic way of accommodating the changing order of society. This study accepts and starts from the proposition that every period produces its own specific representational form(s) and/or narrative strategies, or modifies existing forms, as a projection and as a response according to its needs and dynamics. However, Western studies on female voice and/or female silence in cinema (Dittmar 1998; Lawrence 1998; Rhodes and Sparrow 1990; Santaololia 1998; Silverman 1988) attempt to theorise female voice and/or female silence via various types from different regional cinemas, from different time frames without taking into consideration the possible differences of the formations and functions in relation to these time-space variations. Therefore, this book proposes to fill these gaps and to overcome the possible shortcomings of the theories on female voice and female silence on screen by focusing on contextual specificities and effects of the given time period in Turkey. It will be argued that the silent female characters on the new cinema’s screen have a very strong relation to the socio-political context of Turkey in the post-September 12, 1980 military coup, within which the changing divisions of “voice” and “silence” in various domains, namely the changing order of discursive authority, was the key issue (Gürbilek 2011).

3

The changing female representational forms, the changing gender orders of Turkish cinema in different decades, and their relation to the historical context will be discussed in detail and in comparison in the second chapter.

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Since the silent female representational form appears consistently in a specific time-space, the question has to be posed as to what specifically in this historical juncture opened the way for the emergence of this form. The 1980 military coup4 produced the biggest silencing of the dissident voices in every domain in Turkish society and irreversibly violated freedom of expression. Moreover, Turkey then underwent a massive economic liberalisation, and the period after 1980 was marked by privatisation and the rise of the consumer society. In the name of full integration into the global economy, a number of reforms in the information and communication sectors were also made, which turned the media into a real power in Turkish society, one that created the “Speaking Turkey” [Konuúan Türkiye] and defined what should be spoken while silencing politicised “voices” (Gürbilek 2011). Repression in the political sphere in the 1980s was accompanied by increased freedom of expression on the cultural and personal front. Cultural critic Nurdan Gürbilek argues that the 1980s in Turkey was a period when two seemingly opposed cultural strategies – repression, assimilation and annihilation, on the one hand, and provocation and incorporation on the other – came together (Gürbilek 2011). It was a period when the voices of Islamists, Kurdish people, women, feminists, gays and lesbians, and the lower classes entered the public sphere, while political voices were suppressed, through torture and imprisonment (Gürbilek 2011). As Ayúe Gül Altnay argues: The military intervention of 1980, the re-writing of the constitution by the military regime in 1982, and the internal war between PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) and the state security forces in the 1990s significantly militarized Turkish political discourse and practice. Characterized by polarization, antagonism, “win or lose” logic, the normalisation of violence, and ethnic nationalisms (both Turkish and Kurdish), this militarized political space left little room for voices of democratization and

4 September 12, 1980 was the third coup d’état in the Turkish Republic. As a result of the military coup, the Parliament and the political parties were immediately closed down; 650,000 people were arrested; 1,683,000 cases were prepared; 230,000 people were tried by court martial; 517 people were sentenced to death, and 50 of them (18 from the left wing, 8 from right wing, 23 judicial criminal, 1 Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia militant) were carried out; 98,404 people were on trial for “being an organization member”; 300,000 people died dubiously; it has been documented that 171,000 people died because of torture; 937 films were banned. (“Darbenin Bilançosu” [Balance Sheet of the Military Coup] from Cumhuriyet Newspaper, 12 September, 2000).

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Introduction pluralism to articulate themselves. Still, the same period witnessed a proliferation of political organizing against militarization, nationalism and discrimination of all sorts. Feminist movements, human rights activism, gay and lesbian organisations, conscientious objectors, nonviolence training groups, and peace initiatives challenged the existing political discourse and proposed a new language to approach difference in the context of democratic polity. (2007; quoted in Suner 2010, 11-12)

As such, the post-1980s witnessed the second wave feminist movement in Turkey based on the discourse of the “personal is political”. Issues related to the personal sphere such as domestic violence, abortion rights, or rape moved to the public sphere. The feminist movement revealed the operation of power relations between men and women, and “opened up a route for women to become social actors” (Göle 1996, 82). Simultaneously, the headscarf dispute, together with the Islamist feminist movement, came out from mahrem, the private realm or the domestic sphere, and entered the political sphere. The post-junta period became a period when women began to be the subject of politics, rather than the object of political struggle, as in the past (Göle 1996, 82). The rising voice of women affected discourses on gender and the gender order of society. On the one hand, as part of the political silencing after the military coup, assimilation policies accelerated, with the aim of sustaining the national unity and cohesion of the country. Following this, beginning in 1984, Turkey witnessed the rise of the Kurdish movement and an undeclared civil war between Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish Army, characterised by harsh state violence, evacuations, village burnings and the disappearances and deaths of thousands of people in extra-judicial killings (Keyder 2004). The rise and effectiveness of such an ethnic movement disrupted the foundational ideas of the Turkish nation-state – national unity, territorial integrity and perpetuity – that do not recognise any ethnic or national identity other than Turkish (Barkey 2000; Bozdo÷an and Kasaba 2000; Bulut 2006). Furthermore, this movement called into question the official discourse of cultural homogeneity and coherence (Bozdo÷an and Kasaba 2000). On the other hand, the effort to achieve European Union candidacy re-provoked a love-hate relationship with the West. After the official candidacy for EU membership was granted, the reform process started, and the demands of the European Union with regard to human and minority rights, the Kurdish question, the Cyprus question and the issues around the Armenian genocide conflicted with official history. Turkey was harshly criticised by the European Union because of human rights abuses in the form of unsolved killings and

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disappearances in the mainly Kurdish populated regions. The demands of the European Union, especially with respect to the Kurdish question, were commonly perceived as an intervention in Turkey’s domestic affairs and triggered suspicion of Western intentions toward Turkey (Gürbey 2006) for dividing the country, causing a sense of a loss of sovereignty (Bulut 2006) and a threat to territorial integrity. In addition to the Kurdish movement, the post-September 12, 1980 period witnessed the rise of Islam in the mainstream political space where it was used as a buffer in the struggle against leftist ideologies (Keyder 2004). Turkish national identity had been officially devoid of religious influence because of the foundational principle of secularism, but that position started to be shaken during the 1980s. However, in the aftermath of a right-wing Islamist party’s coming to power in 1996, this rise of the voice of political Islam opened up the public space for the thus-far denied identities not only to articulate their demands (Yavuz 1997) and their very existence, but also to play a pivotal role in the political system. These developments in relation to the principle of secularism profoundly affected the stability of the foundational elements and the order of national discourse. While the increased voice of non-Turkish ethnicities and of religious groups in the social and political realm, and the EU pressure to make Turkey conform to European human rights standards and to meet the demands of the Kurdish population and minorities in Turkey posed a challenge to the hegemonic discourses of the constitutive foundation of the Turkish nation, the political scandals that were revealed in the mid-1990s disrupted the discourse on the peace, unity and coherence of the national community by unveiling the violent, arbitrary, corrupt and criminal activities of the deep state organisations of the nation-state. The revelation of deep state relations, together with the injunction of the counter-discourses and suppressed voices in the public sphere, induced debates around the national history and resulted in both a questioning of the dominant voice of the official history, and an increasing articulation of the suppressed memories in the history of Turkey. Thus Turkey began to experience a return of the past (Gürbilek 2011), and memory studies and oral history research gave voice to the heretofore silenced experiences and identities (Neyzi 2010). Turkey’s points of silence began to be revealed in the public realm in this period. As a result, in the 1990s, in the background of the emergence of the new cinema of Turkey, the Turkish nation-state experienced a growing nationalism and militaristic discourse on the one hand, and more visible religious and ethnic identities on the other, which led to a crisis in the collective and previously stable set of identities. These changes, I would

12

Introduction

suggest, can be detected in various characteristics of the new cinema from the themes to the narrative patterns. Turkey has been through various military coups throughout its history; however, none of them left such a remarkable trace regarding the changing divisions of silence and voice in the public space, because of which, I argue, this specific historical juncture produced textual effects on cinema, the silent female representational form constituting one of the most apparent. The silent form must be considered as an epiphany in the struggle over authority in the changing orders of discourses on gender, nation and the past, rather than a rupture from the hegemonic discourses, since it becomes a representation of both the nonhegemonic voices and of the continuing points of silence in Turkey in different but interrelated domains. In this respect, the silent form reveals not only the silent trauma of the military coup itself, but also the trauma of the changing order of discourses and of the changing positions of discursive authority. Apart from the socio-political developments at this historical juncture, the changes and transformations in the cinema industry after the military coup give an important answer to the question of why the silent female representational form emerged in this specific time frame. The September 12, 1980 military coup deeply affected the cinema industry in Turkey. Because of the severe censorship, the detention of certain filmmakers and the confinement of the Turkish cinema syndicate Sine-Sen after the military coup, film production substantially decreased and audiences almost stopped going to the theatres (Arslan 2011; Kara 2012). The crisis led to various changes and transformations in the cinema industry (which will be discussed in detail in the following chapter), one of the most important of which was the demise of the Yeúilçam system and the emergence of the new cinema. The cinematic revival with the new cinema, along with other transformations, came along with the advancements in film technology and the emergence of aesthetic styles that prioritise cinematography. The fundamental characteristic of Yeúilçam cinema, dubbing, was abandoned, causing sound design and sound technology to gain more importance. That change played a part in the emergence of the silent form, as silence can only be present and be heard in the diegesis on the condition of the existence of the sound. On the other hand, newly emergent art house productions, in contrast to the classical Yeúilçam narrative that was based on the verbal, introduced a new cinematic language and aesthetic prioritising the visual before the verbal. That opened the way for the use of silence in various forms and functions as a complementary tool of aesthetic style. In this respect, the emergence of the silent female representational form would not have been possible after any

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of the other military interventions before September 12, 1980, since, above all, the traditional Yeúilçam filmmaking style and narrative patterns which were heavily based on dialogue and the verbal persisted and proceeded, even though the themes and genres were adjusted according to the needs and necessities of the eras following the interventions. By being very much aware of the striking tendency in Western criticism to insist on a contextual analysis for examples of “non-Western” productions, I am not blindly proposing a contextual reading; rather, the above-mentioned features of the historical conjunction make it indispensable. From this point of view, this study not only focuses on the representations of femininity in silent forms, but also premises more layers of analysis related to these silent representations in these films. The crucial and interrelated layers for the purpose of this study are gender and sexuality, national or ethnic identity, and the (traumatised) past and memory for the following reasons: the silent characters are for the most part female and subjected to gender-based violence; they are either foreign or of non-Turkish ethnicity; and/or their silence has a close relation with a traumatic past. This study must be considered as an attempt to understand why the silent representational form insistently appears in relation to certain themes, figures and narrative patterns. It explores the possible anxiety/anxieties behind this insistent relatedness, and how it is coped with in and through the films themselves. In order to discuss the silent female form in its relation to gender, nation and the past, this study provides combined analyses of plot, character development, mise-en-scène and narrative structure, that set forth the various filmic devices, the causeeffect links of events and the organisation of the mise-en-scènes in the narratives developing the silent female character in association with these interrelated layers. On the other hand, it is important to indicate that even though silent female characters in the new cinema share similarities in terms of their relation to the abovementioned components, in terms of the projection of an anxiety, those similarities may manifest different functions or operations within the narratives. These silences have highly complex, sophisticated and multidimensional relations and structures: Ayúe/Eleni’s (Rüçhan Çalúkur) Greek heritage-based silence in Waiting for the Clouds [Bulutlar Beklerken] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2003) and the silence of the foreign prostitute in On Board have different reasons and functions even though neither woman is Turkish. Keje’s silence in The Bandit and Yasemin’s silence in Romantic have different formations even though they both “chose” to be silent. Yusuf’s sister’s muteness in Innocence, which is caused by an honour crime, cannot be considered as

14

Introduction

identical to Bahar’s (Nurgül Yeúilçay’s) comatose silence in The Ivy Mansion: Life [Asmal Konak: Hayat] (Abdullah O÷uz 2003). In these respects, this study will argue that the silent female characters emerged as a symptom of crises in traditional power positions, or of the fear of losing these positions because of new developments in the transition period in Turkey. The silent female representational form is a kind of cinematic response to these developments in the country, and it reveals more about the “other” than about itself. In all of the films – except the contradictory example of Waiting for the Clouds – that involve a silent female character, there is more about the anxieties and fears of the masculine voice than there is about the female voice, more about the anxieties and fears about “Turkishness” than there is about foreigners or non-Turkish ethnicities, and more about the anxieties and fears of the collective memory than there is about the individual’s memory. In most cases, the cinematically muted female characters, as a symptom of fears and anxieties of a country in transition, become the medium, and they function as a mirror for the other characters, who are male and Turkish, to confront (but not necessarily come to terms with) the other, themselves, their (traumatic) pasts, and the changing world. As Gürbilek argues, every piece of art was born with an anxiety; however, only some of them manage to translate the source of the anxiety into a “scene” for the piece, i.e. to problematise the anxiety, while the rest make do with being a “certificate” of the anxiety by projecting it to the other (Gürbilek 2007, 13). Even though these female silences share an anxiety or anxieties about the changing order of gender, nation and collective memory, the films differ in their ways of coping with these anxieties. Some of the films manage to translate the anxiety into a scene for the film, and therefore open a space to criticise it, while others project anxiety onto another character in order to avoid it. But in the end, in both cases, these films have the potential to expose a male character’s own “hoarseness” and anxiety about losing a power position in (the order of) gender, nation and collective memory realms by insistently associating the silent female characters with certain themes and patterns. In most of the examples, via female silences, male characters reveal and speak of the silenced, the secret, the trauma and the wound; thus the films articulate the unspeakable and make the inexpressible visible in these three realms. By making the unspeakable visible, the silent female representational form is supposed to both reveal the power loss and expose the crises in the order, as well as to become the medium through which the order is reassigned in favour of the males.

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Theoretical and Conceptual Framework In order to draw a theoretical framework for the study of silent female representations, I will firstly define the word “silent”. Even though in various examples female silences share similarities, they may have different functions and formations. What I mainly propose to focus on in this book is the female characters who do not or cannot speak, or who are made mute for various reasons (not speaking Turkish, muteness, choosing not to speak). Therefore, silence refers to the characters that we, the audience, do not hear either throughout the film or in some part of the film (in some examples characters regain their voices). There are also some female characters who can be considered as “silent” since they do not have many lines or are not talkative. However, the silence of these characters is not distinctive, since the same kind of silence might be encountered in relation to male characters in some art house productions. Silence, in this research, condenses these issues: the woman’s voice-loss, her relation to language or verbal discourse, her possession of an authorial point of view, and her instrumentality in the narrative. In order to theorise silence, I will draw upon Michel Foucault’s conception of “discursive authority” and the “order of discourse” (Foucault [1971] 1981), since these concepts will highlight the power relations behind the division of silence and speech and how this division serves certain knowledge productions and the production of “truth”. As Stephen Whitehead explains, following on from Foucault: Discourses are the means by which we come to “know ourselves”; perform our identity work; exercise power (in contrast to “holding” power); exercise resistance; pronounce or deny the validity of knowledges and “truths”; communicate with others and “our selves”. (Whitehead 2002, 103)

According to Foucault, discourse production and distribution are highly regulated and subjected to certain procedures in every society (Foucault [1971] 1981). There is control over what can and cannot be said and over who can and cannot speak. Foucault suggests three sets of procedures that limit discourse and regulate its production (Foucault [1971] 1981). The first set comprises the social procedures of exclusion: prohibition, the division between reason and madness, and the distinction between true and false. Prohibition refers to the constraints surrounding the way that we talk about certain subjects, such as sexuality. The division between true and false is seen in the speaking positions, those that have the authority to

16

Introduction

speak about a certain subject. The authority of the speaker attributes truth to the subject. Therefore, I draw upon Foucault’s arguments on the procedures that limit and produce discourse, in order to reveal that discourse in the new cinema of Turkey also has an order. Not everything can be said; not everyone has a right to speak. Indeed, certain statements are circulated while others are excluded. Certain characters have the exclusive right to speak, while others are not listened to even when they do speak. As Foucault’s theory on discourse analyses the processes, the regulatory mechanisms whereby discourses are brought into being, it provides a toolbox for this study that allows exploration and analysis of the formations, functions and associations of female silences, rather than their meanings. As opposed to previous eras in the history of Turkish cinema, female characters in the new cinema of Turkey have a limited access to speech; their words are excluded from cinematic language. Foucault’s framework for discourse that focuses on the order of discourse, which is not fixed but which changes according to the needs and necessities of the context, enables an analysis that associates the silent form with the historical context of Turkey in the post-September 12, 1980 period, where the prohibitions, the points of speech and silence, and the roles of the speaker and the spoken-of, the regulatory mechanisms of discourses, have changed remarkably (Gürbilek 2011). Foucault indicates in The History of Sexuality Vol.1: Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (Foucault [1976] 1998, 100-1)

In this respect, I intend to use political theorist Wendy Brown’s conception of silence in “Freedom’s Silences” (Brown 2003). In this work, Brown “[rethinks] the powers and potentials of silence” (Brown 2003, 84) through a problematisation of “the compulsory discursivity and presumed evil of silences” (Brown 2003, 85): by avoiding a dualistic approach, “[it] interrogates the presumed authenticity of ‘voice’ in the implicit equation between speech and freedom entailed in contemporary affirmations of breaking silence” (Brown 2003, 84), while suggesting that silence is

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neither more nor less truthful, neither more nor less regulatory than speech is (Brown 2003, 83). As Brown suggests, “if discourses posit or organise silences, then silences themselves must be understood as discursively produced, as part of discourse” (Brown 2003, 87). Brown’s conception of silence, breaking the dualistic approach, allows analysis of silent female characters as constitutive of and constituted by the changing discourses on gender, nation and the past in Turkey in the given time-frame. In my view, following in Foucault’s footsteps, Brown’s argument that silence, which is not the same as not speaking and is also discursively produced (Brown 2003, 87), is extremely important for this study in order to provide a framework in which silence is not positively or negatively valued, but rather considered as a representational form that has formation(s) and function(s) in the changing orders of discourses. Yet, paradoxically, silence that is produced within the discourse may function as a source of protection from power. It indicates “a particular relation to regulatory discourses, as well as a possible niche for the practice of freedom within those discourses” (Brown 2003, 87). In this respect, female characters’ silences can also function “as a scene of practices that escape the regulatory functions of discourse” (Brown 2003, 88). Their silences may position them, to a certain extent, in an unknowable place so that they may escape the regulations that are imposed by discourse to “know the truth” about them. As Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests, “silence as a refusal to partake in the story does sometimes provide us with means to gain a hearing. It is a voice, a mode of uttering, and a response in its own right” (Minh-ha 1989, 83). However, Brown also points out that “it would be a mistake to value this resistance too highly”, since the silence provides a niche for protection from power, “one to which, however, she is also condemned” (Brown 2003, 97): … emancipated into silence – no longer a subject of coerced speech, no longer invaded in every domain of her being, yet also not heard, seen, recognized, wanted as a speaking being in the public or social realm. (Brown 2003, 97)

Minh-ha also indicates the paradoxical/dualistic nature in the use of silence: On the one hand, we face the danger of inscribing femininity as absence, as lapse and blank in rejecting the importance of the act of enunciation. On the other hand, we understand the necessity to place women on the side of negativity (Kristeva) and to work in “undertones” (Irigaray) in our attempts at undermining patriarchal systems of values. Silence is so commonly set

18

Introduction in opposition with speech. Silence as a will not to say or a will to unsay, a language of its own, has barely been explored. (Minh-ha 1991, 150-151)

As the authority to speak is attributed to male characters, what they say about female characters becomes “truth”. We “know” female characters and their stories through male speech. This way of “knowing” or “making knowable” is quite different from the more customary knowledge that comes through the images of women being depicted in a male-dominant film. In this case, the main tool is not the gaze, but rather the speech. What makes this research interesting is the focus on films where a gender hierarchy is being built mainly on/through the authority to speak, not to look or “to-be-looked-at” (Mulvey [1975] 1989). In most of the films, there is at least one scene where the male character reveals the “unknown” story or “secret” of the silent female character. Thus, the female characters that are positioned to some extent as “unknowable”, and so “uncontrollable”, are made “knowable” again. As film critic Pascal Bonitzer argues, this “knowledge” is the essence of power since if the voice “knows”, it knows for someone who does not or cannot talk, both for someone and also instead of someone. Bonitzer claims that the voice speaking for the Other dominates, registers and fixes the Other with knowledge: “The power of the voice is a stolen power, stolen and extorted from the Other” (Bonitzer [1976] 2007, 30). On the other hand, the “made known” story or secret of the silent female generally also reveals the male character’s relation to her and/or his inability to control her. Therefore these sequences expose not only the female character, but also the male character’s impotency. In this respect, silence becomes both the domain of power and the medium of the redistribution of power positions. This two-way relation between silence and power introduced by Foucault and Brown will allow me to fill the gap in many feminist film scholars’ studies on female silence, which are not sufficient per se to describe, critique and understand the functions of silences in the new cinema of Turkey, since they treat silence either from an oppressive or a resistive stance (Doane 1980; Kaplan 1993; Kozloff 1988; Lawrence 1991, 1998; Silverman 1988; 1990). Linda Dittmar suggests in her article “The Articulating Self” that if we think about voice “as a vehicle of human utterance – of expressed opinion, judgement, and will – the notion of birthright holds little sway” (Dittmar 1998, 391) and the ability to use it, rather than innate ownership, becomes the issue. According to Dittmar, in society, the voice is an instrument used to position the self and be positioned by others (Dittmar 1998, 391).

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Silence, which is not necessarily the opposite of voice, might also be a vehicle of expression, judgement, and will. And in the society, silence might also be an instrument to position the self and be positioned by others. In order to reveal the functions of the silent female representational form, it is useful to draw upon film scholar and director Michel Chion’s comprehensive work on mute characters’ function in film. In The Voice in Cinema, Chion claims that the mute character, a character without a sound, serves the narrative and plays a subservient role. He or she is an instrument “to disturb, catalyze, or reveal” (Chion [1947] 1999, 96). In the same vein, almost all the silent female characters in the new cinema function as instruments for the male characters’ speeches, for revealing their stories, fears and fantasies. Furthermore, Chion argues that the mute character has a very close relation to knowledge and power as “we rarely know for sure whether he cannot speak or will not speak” (Chion [1947] 1999, 96), and what is more, s/he is not only “unknowable”, but we also do not know how much s/he knows: “We might think of him as the place where the story’s crucial knowledge is lodged and which can never be wholly transmitted” (Chion [1947] 1999, 97). Moreover, according to Chion, the role of moral conscience is often attributed to the mute: s/he harbours the great secret; next to him/her, everyone feels unsure and guilty (Chion [1947] 1999). Hence, alongside acknowledging the instrumentality of muteness in the narration, Chion also attributes a power position to muteness that is in accordance with Brown’s argument that it provides both a shelter from power and a shelter for power. Chion’s concept of the mute as a generator of doubt is highly important for this study since it leads me to wonder if the uncanny effect of the silent female form triggers the attempts to control her and to make her knowable. Female silences bring back into the filmic text what male characters try to avoid: the possibility of a crisis in the order where they are holding power positions. Even though Chion’s theory is the most significant and comprehensive work on mute characters on screen, it can be considered as gender blind since it does not reflect upon the possible differences in terms of the usages, functions and effects of these silences in relation to the gender of the owner of the discursive authority. In “Aural Objects”, film theorist Christian Metz suggests that we experience sound as an attribute or characteristic of an object; the sound is understood in terms of the object that creates it (Metz [1980] 1985): “The recognition of sound leads

20

Introduction

directly to the question: ‘A sound of what?’” (Metz [1980] 1985, 155). Metz’s argument can be useful in understanding the formation of the speech-silence division in the new cinema. If we recognise the sound only in relation to the object, then it is not the sound, but to whom it is attributed – both literally and symbolically – that becomes important. Therefore, who is put in the speaking position, who is given the authority to speak, and who is made mute on screen are crucial questions. In order to fill in the possible gaps of Chion’s gender-blind approach, it is relevant to refer to feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman’s comprehensive work on the representation of the female voice on screen. In The Acoustic Mirror, Silverman highlights the importance of the female voice in her critique of Hollywood’s representations of women. Silverman’s claim about Hollywood cinema is also valid for the new cinema of Turkey as she argues that in cinema the male subject has the “discursive power” while the female subject is excluded from it (Silverman 1988, 164). Moreover, female subjectivity has a “receptivity” to the male voice as well as to the male gaze, which keeps her under double surveillance (Silverman 1990, 312). This means that what we literally do not hear in the film represents the successful suppression of the feminine by reducing women to muteness and to the position of an object by the male subjects who control the discursive power. According to Silverman’s theory, while the male subject is ideally achieved when he is heard but not seen, when the phallus is left in unchallengeable possession of the scene, to permit the female subject to be seen without being heard would be to activate the hermeneutic and cultural codes that define woman as a dark continent, inaccessible to definitive male interpretation, and positions her away from male control (Silverman 1990, 312-313). In the same vein, in “The Voice in the Cinema”, Mary Ann Doane suggests that the silent cinema’s uncanny effect emerges from the separation of the actor’s speech from its image (Doane 1980, 33). She argues that the cinema based on a “material heterogeneity” – image and sound duality – takes the risk of exposing itself as not unified. For that reason, sound has to be “married” to the image in order to conceal its duality. She claims that cinema’s repressive patriarchal politics can only be broken by breaking this unity (Doane 1980). Silverman’s argument about positioning the female away from male control by permitting her to be seen without being heard accords with Brown’s claims on silence as a “shelter from power” (Brown 2003) since silence prevents her from being “known” completely. Likewise, Dittmar suggests that accessing the voice does not necessarily bring a power

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position since most of the female characters’ speeches are cast “as corporeal, subjective, and unreliable” throughout the history of cinema (Dittmar 1998, 393). She gives the 1970s and 1980s feminist cinemas in the West as examples for the oppositional usage of silence, and suggests that the silent female form can be the clue for “a holding of oneself apart, a resistance that cherishes one’s inviolability” (Dittmar 1998, 393). However, Amy Lawrence criticises Silverman, stating that the disembodied voice is not “always potentially good for women” (Lawrence 1998, 408). Doane herself indicates that the image and sound unity confirms the status of speech as an individual property right (Doane 1980, 34), and this is important if the individual is for the most part male. For this reason, even though Silverman’s and Doane’s claims are partly significant to the usage of silence, how the female subject is permitted to be seen without being heard, and how the unity of image and sound is broken should be taken into account. Silence, depending on its use, does not always challenge male control over females because voice in cinema operates together with other elements, such as camera angles, framing or mise-en-scène; “a film is not a simple juxtaposition of sensory elements but a discourse, an enunciation” (Doane 1980, 49). In this regard, I shall mainly apply the theories of Chion and Silverman in order to analyse the silent female characters in the new cinema while attempting to fill in the gaps and inadequacies by being mindful of the reciprocal nature of the silent female form: it is both a shelter from and a niche of power; the attempt to establish control over the silent female character is maintained on both the verbal and visual levels; it navigates constantly in between the unknowable and the knowable.

Methods Foucault suggests questioning discourses on sex on two levels: their tactical productivity and their strategic integration (Foucault [1976] 1998, 102). He says it is necessary to focus on “what reciprocal effects of power and knowledge they ensure … what conjunction and what force relationship make their utilization necessary in a given episode of the various confrontations that occur” (Foucault [1976] 1998, 102). In this respect, I intend to question the silent form of female representation on these two levels and to try to answer how and at what point the silent female representational form functions as a guarantor of the order of cinematic discourse and why it emerges, i.e., why it is necessary, in this historical time period. In this direction, if a representational form emerges in one specific country, in a specific time frame, and has a frequency in

22

Introduction

both art house and commercial films, then it can be considered as an expression of the correlation of various conditions arising from the changing dynamics of the cinema, the cinema industry, and the society. Therefore, it is important to explore the silent form in relation to these changing dynamics. In order to do so, I have conducted my research on three complementary levels: The first level is the critical research on the collective of films, including both film and content analysis to reveal the statements, rules and regulations of the discourse produced on gender, nation and the past through the silent female forms in the new cinema of Turkey. As the theoretical accounts of silence and silent characters in film demonstrate, silence requires an analysis that not only focuses on the verbal or the aural; it also contains the visual and the narrative levels. To this end, my analysis of the silent form also includes the analysis of miseen-scène, character formation and narrative structure, and by doing so, I aim to reveal how the plot and character development along with the organisation of the mise-en-scène use, describe and make accessible the silent characters in the filmic space. As silence by nature is very much amenable to analysis or interpretation that focuses initially on meaning, the choice of a method that combines these three forms of analysis, I believe, allows this study to prioritise the formal strategies that enclose the silent characters, rather than attaching a positive or a negative value to them. On the other hand, as the films involving a silent female character are not homogeneous in terms of style, aesthetics and narrative structure, the compositional and contextual features of the silent form vary among these examples. The emphasis on the silent character is achieved in some examples mainly through the plot, in some through the character development, and in others mainly through the mise-en-scène, or through the combination of all these elements. In this respect, an analysis that brings together the roles of plot, character and mise-en-scène is requisite to examining the form and to revealing the shared tendencies as well as the differences. The second level of research is into the historical context. I explore possible connections of these discourses with other discourses in Turkish society in the given time period, since this representational form emerged in a specific historical context and extended beyond genres, auteurs, and art house/commercial cinema divisions. The third level of research is the industrial context that focuses on structural changes in the industry that may produce textual effects, since this representational form emerged in a specific cinematic context. Due to the priority I have given to filmic functions and their relation to the historical context, I have not

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discussed in any detail the critical reception of these silent characters in Turkey. 5 The book is interested in exploring this newly emergent and frequently used female representational form at a textual level in a specific time of “crises” in Turkey, in the context of a specific historical and cinematic juncture. For the purpose of this work, research in the film archives and interviews with Turkish film historians were conducted in order to prove the specificity of the silent form to the cinema after the mid-1990s, and to find out if there are silent characters in other decades in Turkish cinema and how gender representations have changed. Moreover, both commercial and art house productions from 1993 until the present were examined. Three intertwined main components – gender, nation and the past – that are related to silent female representations were identified. In each chapter, deep detailed film analyses of representative examples are provided in order to elaborate on the functions, formations and operations of silent female characters in a comparative way. Analyses of plot, miseen-scène and character formation reveal how the silent female characters are developed and function in the narrative, how they are shown in the mise-en-scène, spoken of on the verbal level, repeatedly associated with certain themes in the narrative, and designed with certain visual and verbal filmic devices. In this way, the gendered/ing role division between the speaker and the spoken-of, and the (re)attribution of discursive authority on the verbal, visual and narrative levels that are sustained through the silent form are set forth. Besides that, the silent character in the majority of 5

To explore the female audiences’ reception of female silences in the new cinema of Turkey, I conducted an exemplary film reading workshop in October, 2009. The outcomes of group discussions that the five female participants from Istanbul had after viewing of the five selected film (The Bandit [Eúkya] (Yavuz Turgul 1996); Innocence [Masumiyet] (Zeki Demirkubuz 1997); On Board [Gemide] (Serdar Akar 1998); 9 (Ümit Ünal 2002) and Waiting for the Clouds [Bulutlar Beklerken] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2006) are published as an article: (2010a). “Breaking the Female Silences in the New Cinema of Turkey: A Case Study of Film Reception”. øleti-úim vol. 12, 57-77. The most important outcome of this research is that the silent female characters in the selected examples became the medium for the female audiences through which they speak of what they (do not) want to see on screen in terms of female characters. However, the outcomes of the research was not incorporated in this study as it was an exemplary work and does not represent the reception of the female audiences in Turkey, or even in Istanbul, as it lacks diversity in terms of age, educational background and participants’ relation to cinema. Instead, it must be considered as a first step towards understanding and discussing the female audiences’ reception of the on-screen silences.

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Introduction

the examples has an instrumentality that points to the other characters. Not only the silent character but also the other characters that are developed in relation to the silent characters through various filmic devices are discussed by character analyses and mise-en-scène analyses. Complementing the film analysis, the historical context in which the silent female representations emerged is analysed in association with major issues that set the agenda in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s – such as rising nationalism, the Kurdish movement and the Islamist right and conservatism; the second wave of feminism; political silencing after the 1980 military coup – in order to make use of the multiple references that may have a connection with the (gendered) division of speech and silence, either in the society or in cinema. Through combined analyses of plot, character development, mise-en-scène and narrative structure, the filmic devices – such as dialogue, allegorical features, monologue, voice-over narration, cross-cut editing, flashback, and close-ups – and the cause-effect links of events in the narratives embracing the silent female character in association with the interrelated layers of gender, nation and the past are set forth. Through film and content analysis of silent female representational forms in relation to their historical context under the rubric of three chapters, I aim to explore the “tactical” and “interrogative” (Foucault [1976] 1998) relation of female silence in the new cinema and the “explosion of speech” and the “repression of speech” (Gürbilek 2011) in post-1980s Turkish society. The methodology that I present here is an attempt to apply what Susan Sontag suggests for a function of criticism: “to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (Sontag 1983, 104).

Chapter Plan The first chapter, “New Cinema of Turkey and the Novelty of Silence” is designed to give the background of the new cinema of Turkey in order to situate the silent female representational form in the cinematic context in which it emerged. First, a discussion of the innovations and changes that the new cinema introduced is presented. I provide the concept of “new cinema of Turkey” along with a discussion on the usefulness of the concept of “national cinema” in the context of new cinema. In the second part of this section, after a brief discussion of the history of Turkish cinema in relation to its contexts, the “newness” of the new cinema and its multifaceted picture in terms of content, style and filmmaking modes is provided. These discussions are pivotal for presenting the heterogeneous

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structure of the new cinema, which is very much manifested in the various uses and formations of the silent form, along with their shared tendencies. In the second section, the use of sound and voice, dialogue, and the place of silence in the new cinema are compared with those from previous periods in order to situate female silence in its cinematic context and prepare the reader for the detailed discussion about the relationship between text and context, which will come up in the following chapters. In the second chapter, “Silent Confrontation with Masculinities in Crisis”, I discuss the silent female representational form in the context of the masculinity crisis, which has been precipitated by the changing gender order in Turkish society, which started in the 1980s due to the effects of the second wave feminist movement. I argue that the changing gender order in Turkish society in the 1980s is closely related to the emergence of the silent representational form; while the pervasive male points of view, male protagonists and male narratives of the new cinema should be considered as a projection of a “crisis” in the traditional gender order and the result of the increasing “voice” of women in Turkish society and in women’s films. Drawing upon relevant theories, the silent female form’s relation to gender and sexuality, and her instrumentality are discussed and analysed through representative examples and through a deep, detailed analysis of the film Innocence in terms of mise-en-scène, character development and the cause-effect links between events in the narrative. This section argues that the silent female form serves essentially as a medium through which the crisis in the gender order reveals itself and is to some extent allayed. I demonstrate, through the analysis of mise-en-scène, how there is an attempt to reduce the female character to a suffering and/or eroticised body, which is subjected to gender-based violence in most examples in order to avoid the fears and anxieties, i.e. the crises, of the male character. I discuss, through the analysis of character development and mise-en-scène, how her silent presence becomes both a battlefield for the male characters’ power struggles, through which a division of roles is attributed to the speaker and the spoken-of, and becomes a medium through which the male character has to confront himself. These analyses reveal that the function of instrumentality in relation to the role division between the speaker and the spoken-of provides a space that allows the male characters to express themselves and, moreover, to prioritise male points of view that mainly register and fix female characters in a denunciatory or accusatory tone. However, I also indicate that there are some examples and some instances in which the silent female character escapes the verbal and visual control and is able to speak and signify herself, rather than just being a medium. In the last part of the chapter,

26

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Shadow Play [Gölge Oyunu] (Yavuz Turgul 1993) is analysed in depth, in relation to both content and form, in order to present in depth the different manifestations of thematic and formal conventions, along with the similarities. In the same vein, the male mute character in Love in Another Language [Baúka Dilde Aúk] (ølksen Baúarr 2009) is the focus of a comparative analysis that allows me to distinguish the features of the female silences more clearly. The third chapter, “Silent Confrontation with the National Order in Crisis” is devoted to the discussion of the silent female representational form in relation to national and ethnic identity, language and national anxieties and fears, which are prevalent in the country. The transition period that the Turkish nation-state has experienced, which provides the background of the new cinema – such as the political scandals, the rising Kurdish movement and the Islamist political movement – has led to a crisis of Turkish national identity, which can be detected in the various specificities of the new cinema, from the themes to the narrative patterns. Drawing upon relevant examples and theories, the representations of silent female characters in relation to these anxieties and fears, are explored through the analyses of the various filmic devices that make these associations possible in the filmic space. I argue that the silent female form, “her silent/silenced presence and language”, projects a dual anxiety regarding not only the gender order but also the national order. In these films, the crisis in the gendered national order is revealed and the male character(s) has (have) to confront the Other, through her silent presence. “Her silent/silenced Othered body” becomes the arena in which the male character(s) confront(s) the Other and himself and battles to (re)gain a position of power in the gendered and nationalised order. The silences of the female characters in the provided examples offer a means by which not only is the Other defined as a threat, but also the Other’s language is silenced, and therefore the division between the speaker and the spoken-of is sustained in favour of the Turkish male. In order to present different cinematic ways of coping with these gendered national anxieties, in-depth analyses of On Board and 9 are provided. While the analysis of On Board provides an example that is in line with the general tendency of (re)attributing a discursive authority on the verbal, visual and narrative levels to the Turkish male character, 9 becomes an exceptional example that opens up a critical space, mainly through its narrative structure and cross-cut editing style, that calls into question the authority of the hegemonic discourses on the national identity formation that define the female Other, rather than fixing her.

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In the fourth chapter, “Silent Return of the Past”, the relationship between the traumatic past and the silent female representational form is discussed because the silences of the female characters are presented, in most of the examples, either as a consequence of a traumatic event in the past or as a key that gives voice to a “silenced” event from the male characters’ pasts. Therefore, in the context of an “obligatory” confrontation of Turkish society with the past, both in the socio-political and cinematic realms in the 1990s, the silent characters and their relation to the past and memory, “the silent/silenced story”, are discussed by drawing upon various examples, such as 7 Courtyards [7 Avlu] (Semir Aslanyürek 2009), The Ivy Mansion: Life and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011). Through the analyses of plot, cause-effect relations in the narrative structures, and the role of the silent female characters in the character development of the main male characters, the crucial role of the silent female characters for making visible and audible the traumatic pasts of the male characters and their points of view is presented. In this chapter, I argue that the silent female characters in the examples of the new cinema mostly serve to reveal the male characters’ trauma, shame and guilt regarding the past. Though the silent female characters cannot escape their function as pure vehicles for prioritising the male character’s words and point of view, hence “his-story”, in these individual narratives, they also carry the possibility of opening up a critical space in which the male characters confront their guilty consciences and/or traumas. However, there is an exception, Waiting for the Clouds, where “her-story” is not only told from her point of view, but presents a counter discourse by revealing the unspeakable in history. At the end of the chapter, through the analysis of The Mud [Çamur] (Derviú Zaim 2004), which involves a male character who loses his voice because of a traumatic event, the similarities and differences between the male and female silences in relation to the representation of the past are discussed. The choice of the films for detailed analyses was made for a number of reasons: The first and most important reason is that the silence of the character is raised as an issue in all of these films. Therefore, the silence of the character and its importance is articulated, i.e. “spoken of”, in the film. In addition, the silent female character either is one of the main characters, or has a crucial role in all of these narratives. Yet, the examples in which silent female characters have a secondary role, and/or their silences are not raised as an issue, will be used so as to support the main analyses. The second reason is that the films that have been chosen carry both similar and different features of female silence and their relation to other

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components, providing a complex picture of the web of relations that the silences reveal. The third reason is that they present similarities and differences in terms of thematic and stylistic features in the new cinema of Turkey. The fourth reason is that all of these films achieved success and critical acclaim, either at the box office – The Bandit and The Ivy Mansion: Life, for example – or in the international arena – Innocence, On Board, 9, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Waiting For the Clouds, for example – and success is one of the important components of the new cinema’s discourse of revival. And lastly, these films are referred to by critics and scholars as representative of the art house and commercial productions of the new cinema of Turkey, as all were made by prominent directors of the movement (Dorsay 2002; Dönmez-Colin 2008; Erdo÷an and Göktürk 2001; Güven 2004; Maktav 2001-2002; Suner 2010). On the other hand, the two films that involve a silent male character, Love in Another Language and The Mud, will be analysed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 respectively. Actually, it is possible to assert that the inclusion of these specific films was not really based on a choice but mostly an obligation because there are only a few examples that involve a silent – mute or not speaking for some reason – male character who has a crucial role in the narrative and/or the silence is raised as an issue in association with male characters. And both for their thematic and formal features, these two films are the ones that can provide a comparative reading. In The Technology of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis argues that gender is a representation: “the construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation” (de Lauretis 1987, 5). It is the product and process of various social technologies, one of which is cinema (de Lauretis 1987, 2). Therefore, representations are not independent but participate in certain power relations through which discourses around sexual difference and the subjects of these discourses are produced (Kuhn 1997, 204). In this sense, representations can be regarded as strategies of normalisation and as forms of regulation (Kuhn 1997, 204). Therefore, representations of women that are produced in films – through cinematic “technology of gender [which is] the techniques and discursive strategies by which gender is constructed” (de Lauretis 1987, 38) – cannot be considered only as “harmless” images; rather they set in motion certain power relations through which discourses around sexual differences and gender roles, along with national identity and the past, are (re)produced. It is thus crucial to analyse representations of femininity in relation to silence in the new cinema of Turkey, since, as this study demonstrates, these reveal and (re)produce prevailing gender distinctions and hierarchies. With the theoretical framework and the methods that are presented here, this book is

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not only the first comprehensive work on the silent female representational form and its relation to gender, nation and past in the new cinema of Turkey, it also provides a basis for future research on female silences in cinema. Moreover, by breaking the dualistic approaches of “oppressive vs. resistive” with regard to female silences, and by taking into consideration the contextual specificities, this book premises a significant contribution to the existing literature on silent representations of women in cinema.

CHAPTER ONE NEW CINEMA OF TURKEY AND THE NOVELTY OF SILENCE

Silence is not a unitary phenomenon; there are, rather, a plurality of silences. —Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body

In this study, the term “new cinema of Turkey” is used to refer to cinema in Turkey after the mid-1990s. The term implies one of the most important novelties of the new cinema, namely its hybrid identity in that it now represents a diverse range of opinions, voices, genres, styles, themes, narrative forms and filmmaking modes in contrast with the cinema associated with Yeúilçam.1 Yeúilçam was Turkey’s national and nationalist cinema, which was made by Turks, watched by Turks and depicted Turks, which failed to reflect the multitude of voices in the country but which made films in a coherent style, narrative and production mode. As most directors do not want to be categorised as a movement under the term “new cinema”, since their films, narratives and cinematic languages are so different from one another, the definition of the term “new” and the emphasis on the multifaceted nature of examples of the new cinema become even more important, in view of the multifaceted functions and formations of the silent female representations in various examples. Considering the fact that library research and interviews held with scholars and critics reveal various ranges of opinions relating to the “newness” and the “national” aspect of the new cinema, it becomes necessary to dedicate a section to its definition and to discuss the problematic elements of this term at the beginning of this chapter. To this end, the usefulness of the concept of “national cinema” in the context of the new cinema of Turkey is discussed at the beginning of this chapter, drawing upon the relevant theoretical discussions. Subsequently, the newness of the new cinema in terms of industrial, stylistic and thematic changes, in 1

Yeúilçam [Green Pine] is the name of the street in Beyo÷lu, Istanbul where many production companies resided, especially in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It also refers to a mode of film production – “Turkish Hollywood” – and to specific narrative and stylistic formulae.

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comparison with the classical Turkish national cinema, Yeúilçam, is provided in order to contextualise the theoretical discussions. And finally, the developments in the realms of sound and voice are set forth in order to situate the silent form in the sites of production that have affected its emergence. The new cinema’s hybrid identity both in terms of its production, distribution and reception and its thematic and stylistic features, makes it indispensable to first ask whether “Turkish cinema” is still an appropriate term to define it. In his article, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”, Andrew Higson reconsiders the use and questions the usefulness of the concept of national cinema through the British context (Higson 2000, 64) for the reason that contemporary filmmaking, distribution and reception practices go far beyond national borders. According to Higson, the problem with the concept originates in the tendency to describe a national cinema as a pure, stable and limited space to which identities other than the national identity are closed off (Higson 2000, 66). He argues that this stance causes the national to be fetishised rather than merely described (Higson 2000, 64). Though this kind of framework is appropriate for discussing the specificity of a national cinema, and therefore cannot simply be dismissed altogether, Higson suggests, it does not acknowledge the transnational dimensions of cinema production, distribution and reception, and overlooks “the degree of cultural diversity, exchange and interpenetration that marks so much cinema activity” (Higson 2000, 64). In opposition to the limited image that is set forth by the concept of national cinema, Higson notes, the cinematic community is merely local or transnational and is hardly bounded by the limits of the national (Higson 2000, 73). Higson’s reconsideration of the concept of national cinema that reveals its limits shall illuminate discussions about how to name the period of the new cinema in Turkey and whether it is still useful to call this cinema by the rather limiting term, “Turkish.” Suner defines the emergence of the new cinema at the intersection of two main parameters: the national frame which is indicated by the word “Turkish” and the time frame which is indicated by the word “new” (Suner 2006a, 28). The first parameter includes the significant impact of the economic, social and political contexts on cinema, while the second parameter takes into account the beginning of a new era, with significant changes in the national cinema’s style and narration (Suner 2006a, 29). Though Suner draws attention to the limited and problematic nature of the “new Turkish cinema” as a concept (this will be discussed further below), she still finds it necessary to use the

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term in order to make it visible and significant in the international, namely Western, cinematic arena (Suner 2006a, 41). However, Savaú Arslan suggests in his article “The New Cinema of Turkey” that what is needed is “an alternative framework which reflects the multitude of voices and viewpoints in the contemporary cinema of Turkey” (Arslan 2009a, 83) and proposes the term “new cinema of Turkey” instead of “new Turkish cinema”. By withdrawing emphasis from the word “Turkish”, this kind of framework manages to release cinema in Turkey from national(ist) boundaries. Arslan explains this as crucial not only to portray the diversity and heterogeneity of the voices and viewpoints in the contemporary cinema of Turkey, but also to acknowledge the diverse range of new themes, styles, representations and forms of filmmaking, and to consider their relations to the cinematic and historical contexts of their production and reception. As Higson suggests, “to identify a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings” (Higson 1989, 37). Indeed, as in the era of Turkish classical and national cinema, Yeúilçam, Turkish cinema also had a distinctive production and consumption model, a specific film language, and distinctive and coherent cinematic forms and narrative models manifesting in different films (Arslan 2011, 17). On the other hand, as film scholars Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen suggest, “films are the cluster of historically specific cultural forms the semantic modulations of which are orchestrated and contended over by each of the forces at play in a given geographical territory” (Vitali and Willemen 2006, 7). Every film operates within a field of “transpositions” (Kristeva 1984, quoted in Fuery 2000, 55), which not only include cinema, but also the social, political and cultural contexts of a given time and place; and “this continuous unrolling of transpositions actually constitutes that which we call ‘cinema’ in a given place” (Fuery 2000, 55). In this regard, as is noted by Higson, these transpositions are not limited to the boundaries of the nation-state (Higson 2000). Indeed, the productions of the new cinema of Turkey and their reception within the territory might have some similarities due to the historical, social, cultural and political contexts of a given nation-state. Furthermore, the box-office success of local productions in the domestic market, measured against Hollywood productions, or the success of the art house productions in international festivals, might still constitute a form of self-definition, underlining a cultural specificity and producing a resurgence of national pride. In addition, the term “new cinema” suggests coherence in terms of the style of the directors, like Iranian or French new wave cinemas. Nonetheless, that does not necessarily mean complete coherence or unity, since “cultural formations are invariably hybrid and

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impure” (Higson 2000, 67) within national borders, and the same context has been producing different results or effects on different modes of production and distribution and on the readings by different audience groups. In fact, the new cinema of Turkey, as well as having numerous common threads, has a heterogeneous nature, multifaceted tendencies and diverse tracks (Akbal Süalp 2008; 2009; 2010a; 2010b; 2010c; 2011; Arslan 2009a; Zaim 2008), such that director Derviú Zaim proposes the term “alluvionic” to refer to the new cinema’s directors and their cinema in order to indicate “the dynamics and diversities that abide in this group, which boasts different styles and different forms of production, financing and distribution” (Zaim 2008, 91). Moreover, as in the example of Distant [Uzak] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2002), which was viewed by around 50,000 people in Turkey while 150,000 people watched it in France, some films of the new cinema did mostly appeal to foreign audiences whilst they did not attract much local attention, namely a national audience. On the other hand, as Higson notes, national reference is not necessarily the best tool to understand and address cultural specificity (Higson 2000, 72) as it leaves the national itself unquestioned, and, moreover, neglects a transnational perspective. In this respect, “Turkish” cinema becomes a problematic category once the transnational practices to which it has been subjected after the 1990s are considered. Cinema in Turkey is subjected to the regulations and legislations of the nation-state: “specificity thus becomes a territorial-industrial matter, and coincides with the boundaries of the nation-state” (Vitali and Willemen 2006, 33). It is at the same time subjected to transnational practices and international market regulations since “the cinemas established in specific nation-states are rarely autonomous cultural industries and the film business has long operated on a regional, national and international basis” (Higson 2000, 67). In contrast to Yeúilçam, which depends merely on national production, distribution and exhibition chains, the examples of the new cinema of Turkey have an unavoidable transnational aspect. In terms of film production, most of the examples are co-productions with different nationstates and/or produced with the support of Eurimages2 and international funds. As for distribution, most art house productions rarely achieve boxoffice success in the national market and appeal mainly to international festival audiences, and are therefore subjected to international market regulations. For commercial productions, most of the domestic blockbusters 2

Eurimages: Council of Europe, European Cinema Support Fund. Turkey became a member in 1990. The material conditions and transnational practices to which the new cinema is subjected will be discussed in detail later in this chapter.

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Chapter One

are distributed by foreign companies – such as Warner Brothers and UIP – and the majority are released in European countries where there has been a considerable Turkish diaspora. In this regard, following Higson’s criticism, it is problematic to persist in using the term “new Turkish cinema”, which thus resonates with the concept of national cinema. Instead, it is deemed necessary to use the term “new cinema of Turkey”, which allows in this study not only a consideration of the diversities as well as the specificities of the collective of films that this era embodies, but also a recognition of the “degree of cultural cross-breeding and interpenetration” (Higson 2000, 67) across and within borders. Moreover, contrary to Yeúilçam cinema’s tendency to portray Turkish national identity as fixed, coherent and uniform, the new cinema of Turkey creates, in terms of its content, a problematic, ambiguous and sometimes critical relation to the homeland, to identity, belonging and “Turkishness.”3 Therefore, it would be reductive to limit the contemporary cinema of Turkey to the national through the term “Turkish”. Besides, in most of the films, female silence is explained either by the foreignness of the female character or by her belonging to a “non-Turkish” ethnic group. As such, “Turkishness” once more becomes a problematic category for this study and needs to be questioned. In this regard, Arslan’s proposition of adopting the concept of the “new cinema of Turkey”, with its release of nationalistic connotations and its stress on geography and temporality, is better suited to the purpose and method of the present study as it allows us to relate to the films’ cinematic and historical contexts whilst being mindful of a need to problematise Turkishness. To conceptualise the cinema produced in Turkey after the mid-1990s, some authors use the term “Turkish cinema in the 1990s” (Kraç 2000a; Onaran and Vardar, 2005; Pösteki 2005a). However, this term refers only to the time frame and does not reflect the “newness” of the new cinema. Also, by using the term “Turkish”, it fails to overcome connotations of unity and coherence and to indicate the relations of the new cinema to 3

The official definition of “Turkishness” stresses the unity of language, history, culture, ethnicity and religion; thus it overlooks the presence of different ethnic groups in Turkey. Legal minority status in the Turkish Republic has been given only to Jews, Greeks and Armenians, and is defined on the basis of religion. In Article 66 of the Constitution, it is declared that “each person bound to the Turkish state through the bond of citizenship is a Turk”. Even though the bond is defined through citizenship, “Turk” still carries connotations of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and historical unity.

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“Turkishness”. I have chosen to use the term “the new cinema of Turkey” in the sense of the period, which not only indicates the time frame, but also the (relative) rupture with the previous period, the change in filmmaking modes, historically specific cinematic forms and narrative models that suggest new and various styles and/or story formulae in the film narration, which are not necessarily bounded by the national. Accordingly, I will make use of the alternative framework suggested by Arslan, which notably avoids the limits of national cinema that are set forth by Higson. First, the term “new cinema of Turkey” is sufficient to reflect the transition from Yeúilçam, an exclusively “Turkish” cinema, and the new cinema’s transnational character. Second, Arslan’s proposed terminology also allows for the differentiation between the contemporary cinema of Turkey, which is relatively successful in portraying ethnic and regional diversity, and Yeúilçam, which reflected the official discourse by “producing an image of a single nation and a single language without accents and dialects” (Arslan 2009a, 85). Although Suner, like Arslan, acknowledges the changes in visual style, forms of narration and filmmaking by using the term “new”, her chosen terminology does not reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of this “newness”; moreover, her insistence on the use of the term “Turkish” resonates with the idea of unity and coherence. My understanding and use of the term “new cinema of Turkey” projects a diverse form – as suggested by film scholar Tom O’Regan’s framing for Australian cinema: It is a naturalized part of the international cinescape … It is a social bond uniting (and excluding) diverse people … [It] serves as … a forum for telling uncomfortable truths about its society. Australian films and film institutions negotiate cleavages of ethnicity, gender, race, class and nation. It is an object of knowledge which narratively and discursively connects Australia, society, the cinema, genre and various cultural differences … It is a social fact, a figure of discourse, a site for a range of actions and the domain of a range of problematizations. (O’Regan 1996, 10)

The term “new cinema of Turkey” does not presuppose a concrete, unique, stable national identity or a unified producer or homogenous audience of films. It recognises the diverse character of contemporary cinema in Turkey, but takes into consideration that in some cases there are things that are specific to cinema in this location – for instance, silent women as one of the main female tropes. Nevertheless these particularities are considered as a consequence of the interaction between the cinema and historical context, not of a national specificity. It is a cinema that has certain specificities, especially in terms of knowledge production relating

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to gender; and those specificities are at the same time constituents of the cinematic discourse in a given geography and time. I am aware of the difficulties of using a new term, as this cinema has been named and known as “Turkish Cinema” to date. “Turkish Cinema” refers to a history, carries meaningful baggage, and therefore implies knowledge and a way in which the public have come to know it. Nonetheless, I still find it important to use a new term to draw attention to the differences in cinema knowledge and production: these are both changeable and historically constructed. As O’Regan argues, cinema is not only a site where filmmakers, critics, policy makers, distributors, politicians and the public organise relations between themselves and things; it is also a site in which these agents produce a way of knowing, reading and appreciating these films, genres, movements, things and histories (O’Regan 1996, 25). “Turkish Cinema” is discursively and historically constructed, and the framework that it proposes is no longer sufficient to reflect the changing knowledge and the ways of knowing, reading and appreciating the films that the cinema in Turkey has been producing since the mid-1990s. Even though the problematic parts of the concept of the “new Turkish cinema” are addressed, the term “new” is also partially problematic. At the beginning of the “Introduction” of their book, New Cinema, New Media: Reinventing Turkish Cinema (2014), Murat Akser and Deniz Bayrakdar point out this problem and ask various questions regarding the criteria for the definition of “new” in cinema.4 How can we define “new” in cinema? Is it creating a new film movement where a new group of filmmakers emerges to call themselves the next independent movement? Is it a new cinema in an age when every day some new technological delivery system (3D, Blu-ray, VOD) changes methods of distribution and exhibition? What about a sudden shift in production economies of a nation’s cinema that goes from no film-audience to millions in dollars and audience attendance a year later? … Yet how does one define the novelty of a group of films? Should there be a manifesto appealing to an audience? Should it be accompanied by new modes of

4

Murat Akser and Deniz Bayrakdar use the term “new Turkish cinema” for the cinema in Turkey after the mid-1990s. Following the articles in their edited volume, they suggest ten vital propositions, many of which are also discussed in this book in the relevant sections (mainly in “Novelties of the New Cinema of Turkey”), regarding the characteristics of the new cinema. However, it is important to note that even though they discuss the definition and content of the “new”, they do not question the use, definition and content of “Turkish”.

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production? Who decides and defines a new cinema: filmmakers, critics or the audience? (Akser and Bayrakdar 2014, xi)

Whilst there are enough indicators in terms of filmmaking conditions, narration models and visual styles to call contemporary cinema in Turkey a “new” system, this “newness” should not be understood as a clear-cut rupture with Yeúilçam. To emphasise the point that the change was not entirely outside traditional patterns, as well as to acknowledge the emergence of the new formation, some authors prefer to use “postYeúilçam” to refer to the cinema in Turkey after the mid-1990s (Evren 2005). In this respect, it is crucial to mention that the term “new” is used to indicate the contemporary cinema’s difference from Yeúilçam, but mindful that there are also convergences and clashes between these two filmmaking practices. For instance, Yeúilçam’s melodramatic modality continues to provide the grounds for the narrative and thematic patterns of most of the new cinema’s commercial films that involve and revolve around binary oppositions, intrigues, misunderstandings and stereotypical representations. In addition, Yeúilçam clichés are parodied in some commercial productions, such as Perfidious Byzantium [Kahpe Bizans] (Gani Müjde 1999), which became box-office hits. Moreover, some art house productions, such as Innocence [Masumiyet] (Zeki Demirkubuz 1997) and Three Monkeys [Üç Maymun] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2008) use Yeúilçam themes and features, but in a way that subverts and rethinks them, and/or “produces a metafictional layer in the narrative” (Suner 2010, 133). Another characteristic and new division that the new cinema of Turkey proposes is “popular” and “art” cinema (Arslan 2009a; 2010; Suner 2006a; 2010) which is formulated in different ways by different scholars and critics: “mainstream/alternative” (ùirin 1999), “commercial/independent” (Evren 2003a; 2003b; 2005; Güven 2004; Kraç 2000a; Pösteki 2005a), “popular/independent” (Pösteki 2005b). I will make use of the commercial/art cinema division in this book, since all other formulations are problematic. I have chosen to use “commercial cinema” instead of “popular” or “mainstream” on the following grounds: in Turkish cinema there is no studio system. The financial resources of contemporary Turkish cinema are made up of sponsorships, support from television channels, the Ministry of Culture, Eurimages’ funding and co-productions. Therefore my use of the term “commercial cinema” refers to the desire for box-office success, to cinematic strategies and techniques (themes, narration, soundtrack, actors, lighting) and to marketing strategies (promotion campaigns, widespread distribution) that are used to “sell” a film. As

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Dönmez-Colin argues, because of the severe crises that Turkish cinema suffered, the main reasons of which will be discussed in detail henceforward, some directors decided to use the Hollywood formula to appeal to a large group of audiences: In addition to technical improvements comparable to the standards of the West and the casting of celebrities, distributors adopted Western-style publicity (CDs of the theme song, t-shirts, TV commercials, websites and the eventual VCD/DVD), ensuring maximum visibility, which contributed to box-office success. (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 211-212)

In Turkey, from the mid-1990s, box office success has been the ultimate aim of these productions. This aim has always been expressed in the newspapers and cinema magazines by the producers and directors. Moreover, box office success or expected box office success is always used as a marketing strategy. Box office success, or commercial success, is considered to be the most important proof of success. Hence, I consider it apt to use the term “commercial cinema”. In addition, use of the term “popular cinema” is highly problematic if we consider the high-low culture connotations it involves. I have chosen to use the term “art cinema” instead of “alternative cinema” or “independent cinema”. First, the word “independent” has financial connotations and therefore overlooks “independence” in terms of an alternative to the dominant cinema. In the case of the cinema of Turkey, most art house productions are low or mid-budget productions. However, in the distribution and screening stages, all of these films are dependent on a distribution company. Secondly, art cinema productions cannot easily be called “independent”, particularly considering the fact that it is hard to describe independent cinema in the age of transnational distribution networks, international co-productions, marketing through international festivals and prizes, and the network of journals and newspapers. Since most art house productions in this era have participated in and gained acclaim at international festivals and since this critical success is seen as an important characteristic of these productions, it is hard to call these films truly independent: they are dependent on an international art cinema market. Besides, some of the films’ post-production, sound editing, editing or special effects are done abroad, which suggests that they are not independent, but transnational. Thirdly, film theorist Susan Hayward defines art cinema as experimental in technique and narrative (Hayward 2006, 26). In this regard, “art cinema” is appropriate terminology for the new cinema of Turkey since these productions present an independent

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position in the dominant understanding of national cinema in terms of themes, narration, technique, production and cinematography. Therefore my use of “art cinema” implies alternative productions without necessarily implying financial independence. Finally, the term “art cinema” also indicates the acclaim received in prestigious international festivals. The awards received, participation in these international festivals, and success in the international arena, suggest that these films are “approved” as art.

Crises and the Way to the New Cinema Turkish cinema has experienced several short-term crises throughout its history, yet has managed to find appropriate solutions in each case. The first and most notable crisis was witnessed after Turkish cinema had enjoyed its most effective period, from the 1960s until the mid-1970s. Turkish cinema started to decline in the late 1970s. According to Suner, the main reason behind the decline was the weakness of the Turkish film industry, despite the commercial vitality of popular cinema: During the heyday of Yeúilçam cinema, profit-minded producers invested film revenues not in the film industry, but in other sectors in order to increase their personal wealth. As a result, while the commercial success of cinema made certain individuals rich, the foundations of the film industry remained vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy. (Suner 2010, 6-7)

Moreover, the political climate of the era prevented women and families – who made up the most significant part of Turkish cinema audiences – from attending public events because of the right wing/left wing armed conflict and violence on the streets. The emergence of a state-run TV channel in 1974, providing a “safe” entertainment option in a turbulent atmosphere, also contributed to the decline. In the late 1970s, following international trends, Yeúilçam tried to solve the crisis with the production of soft porn films that were not allowed to be shown on television, in order to attract male and mainly lower or lower-middle class audiences to film theatres (Evren 2005, 271). The September 12, 1980 military coup could be considered another crucial moment in the history of Turkish cinema; it caused an irrecoverable crisis as a result of various negative effects on individual and collective rights and liberties. Following the coup, the military regime brought extreme restrictions, including closing political parties and syndicates, burning books and films, and banning any kind of involvement in politics. Thousands of people were arrested, tortured and condemned.

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Hundreds of people disappeared (“Darbenin Bilançosu” September 12, 2000). During and following the years of the military regime, filmmaking was severely restricted. Films with political content were subjected to rigorous control and censorship: 937 films were banned due to their “unfavourable” content (Kara 2012, 83), the Turkish syndicate of cinema Sine-Sen was closed and the chairmen were tried, tortured and jailed from 6 months to 2.5 years (“Darbenin Bilançosu” September 12, 2000; Kara 2012, 92). In this turbulent atmosphere of violence, repression, prohibition and censorship, film production decreased (Kara 2012, 90), and the video boom, which dominated the film exhibition scene in Turkey until the late1980s, took place instead: Spectators, who in the late 1970s had already started to watch films on television and video instead of going to the theatres, almost stopped going to theatres altogether during and after the military intervention. In the video boom of the 1980s, the main demographic comprised the middleclasses and workers in Europe, both of whom could afford to buy VCRs and regularly rent videotapes from the rental stores that popped up throughout the country. (Arslan 2011, 203)

From the repressive political regime of the 1980s and the feminist movement, a new sub-genre, women’s films, or loosely called “films about women”, emerged, partly due to the consideration that the movement – and the films’ contents – were “harmless”, namely non-political. These films, which are characterised by a female protagonist narrating women’s issues, were made mostly by male directors who were influenced by the second wave feminist movement in Turkey 5 , which was the first democratic movement that emerged after the military coup and developed 5

The reason why the 1980s women’s movement is referred to as “second-wave feminism” is because the women’s movement in Turkey from the late 1910s to the 1930s is referred to as the “first-wave”, due to the fact that it had the shared aim of acquiring the civil and political rights of the Anglo-Saxon first-wave women’s movement (Tekeli 1998). The Kemalist ideal of constructing a modern society made several reforms during and after the foundation of the Republic that targeted legal and civic equality among citizens. Women’s role in the modern society and gender equality was considered as the main indication of modernization (Arat 1991). Even though women’s organizations worked for women’s rights in the given time period, women’s rights to education, to work, to vote and to be elected were considered and articulated by the official Kemalist ideology as “given” to women by Atatürk (Tekeli 1998). This reformist approach and this “statesanctioned feminism” (Kandiyoti 1990) are criticised in the works of many prominent feminist scholars (Arat 1989; 1991; Kandiyoti 1995; Tekeli 1998) and by second-wave feminism itself (Tekeli 1998).

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as a consequence of the changing position of women in society. The director considered to be the pioneer of this genre is Atf Ylmaz, whose films Vasfiye is Her Name [Ad Vasfiye] (Atf Ylmaz 1985), Oh! Belinda [Aah! Belinda] (Atf Ylmaz 1986) and How Can Asiye be Saved? [Asiye Nasl Kurtulur?] (Atf Ylmaz 1986) became the best-known examples of this genre. There were other sub-genres that had relatively critical stances, but did not set forth a controversial stance and so remained examples that conformed to acceptable “harmless” images. For example, September 12 Films, one of these sub-genres, neither directly questions the military regime nor directly depicts what people had been through. Instead, these films usually depict the alienation of a character after his release from prison, his exclusion from society and his inner questionings. Hunting Time [Av Zaman] (Erden Kral 1988), Sing Your Songs [Sen Türkülerini Söyle] (ùerif Gören 1986), The Voice [Ses] (Zeki Ökten 1986), and The Fog [Sis] (Zülfü Livaneli 1993) can be cited as the most well-known examples. Another sub-genre of the period was “social comedies”. These depict funny stories of ordinary citizens trying (and mostly failing) to adapt to the changing social conditions in 1980s Turkey. In an atmosphere of political silencing, it is noteworthy that these films successfully portray the negative effects of the rapid changes on individuals’ lives. However, they never directly criticise the political reasons behind these rapid and unexpected changes. Such films functioned as a “safety valve” by articulating suppressed feelings of opposition instead of transforming them into an oppositional voice (Krel 2010, 20). This genre includes The Naked Citizen [Çplak Vatandaú] (Baúar Sabuncu 1985), Billionaire [Milyarder] (Kartal Tibet 1986), Honest [Namuslu] (Ertem E÷ilmez 1984) and The Broken Landlord [Zü÷ürt A÷a] (Nesli Çölgeçen 1985). Turkish cinema entered the 1990s in a severe crisis, called the “years of decadence” by one of Turkey’s most eminent film critics, Atilla Dorsay (Dorsay 2004b). Although there was no single reason behind this crisis, it was very much related to the transition resulting from Turkey’s integration into the global capitalist economy in the 1980s. Changes in the Foreign Capital Law [Yabanc Sermaye Yasas] in 1987 allowed foreign companies, especially American ones, to found companies or open branches for distribution and exhibition in Turkey (Dorsay 2002; 2004b; Esen [2002] 2010; Evren 2005; Maktav 2001-2002; Onaran and Vardar 2005; Pösteki 2005a; Scognamillo [1998] 2010; Teksoy 2008; Ulusay 2008; Vardar 2007). As a result, foreign films, mostly American, which had previously been imported and screened by Turkish companies, now started to be imported and distributed by foreign distribution companies. In 1989,

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Warner Bros-Turkey was founded, and United International Pictures opened a branch in Turkey shortly thereafter. With the arrival of these two big companies, known as “majors”, in Turkey, a new epoch in distribution began: American films were screened in Turkey at the same time as in the other parts of the world, films were promoted by large scale marketing campaigns, and cinemas were renovated (Dorsay 2004b, 12). Whilst twenty percent of the cinemas in the big cities were closed (Segrave 1997; quoted in Ulusay 2008, 109), the survivors, owned or partnered by foreign companies, were divided into multiple spaces in order to screen a large number of American productions whilst being closed to domestic films: Within this process, places vacated by Turkish films were filled by foreign, mainly American films. The changes referred to in movie theatres soon enveloped larger cities throughout Anatolia, establishing a kind of monopoly. Larger numbers of film copies were made, indeed on a scale unprecedented in our cinema world and the same film simultaneously screened in a number of cinemas in the same district, this being a new and entirely different screening policy. (Evren 2005, 349)

After the establishment of the American “majors” in the film sector, the number of films produced by Turkish filmmakers declined from over one hundred films a year to around ten, with only one third of these films being screened (Evren 2005, 314; Onaran and Vardar 2005, 4). New cinema venues that conformed to Western standards were opened in the big cities. As a result of this “gentrification”, ticket prices also became more expensive. Even though there was a significant increase in the number of spectators, cinema in Turkey no longer referred to Turkish cinema, but rather to Hollywood cinema (Maktav 2001-2002, 228). Yet, it is also important to note that the involvement of “majors” in the Turkish distribution market also “led to upgraded projection equipment, better sound systems and other amenities, all of which allow for a higher quality viewing experience” (Arslan 2009a, 87). Mehmet Soyarslan, past chairman of the Association of Cinema Theatre Employers, suggests that the “pirate videos phenomenon” was another factor that reinforced the negative effects of the Foreign Capital Law: Turkish films cannot find cinemas willing to screen them because our film producers no longer choose the cinema screen as their aim. They have chosen the video screen, and have surrendered to it completely. Of course, there are reasons for this, one of them being the small number of cinemas. Another reason is the fact that our producers acquire their financing from

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videos, which means that they cannot make independent films. Films can only be made within the limits of the financing obtained from the video distributors. (Quoted in Evren 2005, 348)

Changes in the Foreign Capital Law were considered as one cause of the crisis; another was Turkish-owned incipient private channel broadcasting, which brought about a new understanding of “entertainment” into people’s homes (Dorsay 2002; 2004b; Onaran and Vardar 2005; Pösteki 2005a; Scognamillo [1998] 2010; Ulusay 2008): Audiences who all of a sudden had access to a much freer, more fun and popular face of private channel broadcasting instead of the serious, high brow, gently authoritarian, normative and conventional face of the state channels broadcasting, shut themselves away in their houses and began to consume the blessings of this new TV understanding. (Dorsay 2004b, 12)

According to film critic Uygar ùirin, the domination of Hollywood productions and production companies was not the only cause of the crisis (ùirin 1999, 88). ùirin suggested that the real problem was the low cinematic standard of Turkish film productions in the 1990s and the fact that the films that were produced under the artificial rubric of “art cinema” did not appeal to the majority of audiences (ùirin 1999, 88). As a result of Hollywood’s domination in cinemas, private channel broadcasting and pirate videos as well as the low cinematic standard of the domestic productions, Turkish cinema productions declined. Only a few of the films produced during this period had the opportunity to be screened, and the ones that were screened rarely appealed to audiences. Moreover, the national cinema or Yeúilçam audience turned into the TV audience, and the audience who had been watching foreign films became the audience for American film (Ayça 2003-2004, 27).

Novelties of the New Cinema of Turkey Though the solutions to save Yeúilçam from the crises in the 1970s and 1980s brought some novelties to the Turkish cinema screen, regarding genre, audience profile and exhibition, they did not lead to a total change in the traditional production and distribution systems. As Arslan argues, they “recycled [Yeúilçam’s] generic constants through melodramatic storylines, typecasting, and low-budget filmmaking” (Arslan 2011). However, it is possible to argue that the major crisis at the beginning of the 1990s led to the dissolution of the Yeúilçam system and the emergence of the new cinema. After the crisis years, Turkish cinema entered the mid-

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1990s with renewed energy. The revival might have been related to the commercial films that started achieving local box-office success and the art house productions that started receiving acclaim and awards at national and international festivals (Suner 2004, 306). For what reasons did this revival of Turkish cinema take place? From a commercial perspective, one could claim that the revival was driven by the use of Hollywood’s weapons in the battle with Hollywood: collaborating with the new big distribution companies, promoting films with huge campaigns, using media as a marketing tool, casting TV celebrities, and thus attracting the existing TV audience and existing advertisers. As for art house productions, the increasing financial support of the Ministry of Culture, membership in the European co-production fund, Eurimages, and the increasing acclaim at international festivals can be considered to be the three determining factors. The opening of several film schools, advancements in film technology, recognition of the importance of cinematography and the considerable relaxation of censorship regulations can also be considered as contributing factors. In the Yeúilçam period, Turkish cinema had its “golden years” with the production of around two hundred films a year. During this period, a unique mode of production, essentially determined by regional distributors, was generated. The plots and stars of the films were determined by regional distributors according to the local audience’s tastes; distributors could even ask for a revision of the plot or casting to better suit local audiences (Erdo÷an and Göktürk 2001). With the demise of Yeúilçam and the withdrawal of established producers, directors had to look for new financial resources. As a result, new modes of production emerged and film production diversified, reflecting the integration of Turkish cinema into the global market. The collapse of the mentor/apprentice system of Yeúilçam and the variety of sources of funding allowed more new directors to enter the sector. The financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Eurimages, as well as Eurimages’ contribution to the visibility of Turkish films in the international arena, resulted in an increase in the quantity and quality of feature films. Even though there seems to be a division between the commercial and art house productions in terms of filmmaking modes, it is important to mention that both commercial and art house productions sometimes benefited from the same financial resources, such as loans from the Ministry, while major production companies that produced commercial films sometimes got funding from Eurimages, which was usually given only to art house productions (Zaim 2008, 91). In the early-1990s, the state started to finance films for the first time. However, it is important to mention that this support was not systematised until 2004. In 1990, Turkey

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became a member of the Council of Europe Fund, which has contributed significantly to the new cinema. Between 1990 and 2006, Eurimages subsidised fifty-two Turkish films (Ulusay 2008, 145) and provided over eight million Euros of support to Turkish films (Yurdatap and Yavuz 2004, 24). With the help of loans from the Ministry and Eurimages’ funds, filmmakers not only managed to complete their projects, but were also in contact and in exchanges with their European counterparts (Arslan 2009a, 88). In addition to Eurimages, filmmakers benefited from other foreign funds, such as the World Cinema Fund and the Hubert Bals Fund associated with the Rotterdam Film Festival. Another novelty in terms of financial sources was the sponsorship from big companies. For the first time in the history of Turkish cinema, cinema received support from other financial sectors. Other than the financial support from the Ministry and Eurimages, some of the most significant films of the new cinema – both commercial and art house productions – were shot with the sponsorships of Efes Pilsen Beverage Group. Many of the directors also became the producers of their films (by necessity) and shot films using their personal savings. Some of the directors continued their careers in advertisement and/or in television and started filmmaking with the money they earned from these sectors. Though these films were shot with financial limitations, they were, on the other hand, relatively free in their choice of subject matter and style, as they had no financial dependencies. This contributed to the emergence of the new art house cinema that challenged the narrative patterns of the classical Turkish cinema. Improved financing ushered in a new epoch during which the cinema industry in Turkey managed to get over its industrial crisis, especially through commercial productions which “[were] stylish, technically polished, and promote[d] themselves with American-style marketing glitz” (Dorsay 2004b, 11). Accordingly, the revival of “Turkish” cinema occurred through the films’ enormous domestic box office success due to a formula reflecting Hollywood standards. As Higson argues, for a cinema to appeal to local audiences, it must achieve Hollywood standards and conform to the “Hollywood system of funding, production control, distribution and marketing” (Higson 1989, 16). In the same vein, one can claim that this commercial cinema, distributed by American companies and funded by both local and international capital, did not create a new style but a new formula, which was a combination of classical Yeúilçam themes (love versus money, personal integrity versus material success), with Hollywood’s polished style (Suner 2004, 306), to make Turkish cinema popular once again in the local market. In addition to this, following the Hollywood standard regarding marketing, they introduced

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big-budget productions, celebrity actors, intense promotion in the media, and widespread distribution in the domestic market (Suner 2006a, 33). In terms of visual style, the prominent directors of the commercial cinema, including Mustafa Altoklar (1958), Sinan Çetin (1953), Ylmaz Erdo÷an (1967), Ça÷an Irmak (1970), Ömer Faruk Sorak (1964) and Yavuz Turgul (1946), made films that sought to achieve Hollywood standards, rejecting Yeúilçam’s tendency toward non-realism (Arslan 2011, 266), technological inadequacy and low-budget production values. The commercial side of the revival began with Mustafa Altoklar’s historical drama Istanbul Under My Wings [østanbul Kanatlarmn Altnda] and Yavuz Turgul’s epic drama The Bandit [Eúkya] in 1996. While Istanbul Under My Wings sold over five hundred thousand tickets and was the first commercial success after the crisis years, The Bandit shattered box-office records by selling more than two-and-a-half million tickets. The Bandit is also important from another aspect: it was seen as the ideal combination of Hollywood standards and local themes with sentimentalism and also sensitivity towards social problems (Maktav 2001-2002, 230). In terms of genres, commercial cinema embraced a diversity of genres – action, drama, romantic comedies, youth films, historical dramas, melodramas – even though the majority of the box-office hits were comedies. However, an important novelty in the comedy genre was registered by a group of films that mocked prominent Hollywood genres, and parodied famous Hollywood blockbusters. The collaboration of writer and star Cem Ylmaz, and director Ömer Faruk Sorak, introduced this subgenre with their sci-fi parody G.O.R.A. (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2004) and Western parody The Ottoman Cowboys [Yahúi Bat] (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2010). These films, which based and nurtured their comedy on the vernacularisation of the Western elements of the genres, revealed and eased the anxieties that rearose from the sharpened division of East and West, partly due to Turkey’s negotiations with the EU and partly due to Turkish cinema’s competition with Hollywood in the local market (Ulusay 2008). Other examples that mock Hollywood blockbusters include: The Holy Carboy [Kutsal Damacana] (Kamil Aydn 2007), the “Turkish” parody of The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973), which tells the story of a Turkish man becoming a false priest to take advantage of the church’s facilities to do exorcisms; The Holy Carboy 2: It Men [Kutsal Damacana 2: It Men] (Korhan Bozkurt 2010), which parodies werewolf films; and Destere (Gürcan Yurt and Ahmet Uygun 2008), a parody of the horror/thriller film Saw (James Wan 2004). Ulusay argues that these films are a kind of response to Hollywood not only because of the technically sophisticated production values, proving their capacity to compete with

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Hollywood, but also because their approach proves them to be superior in this competition by mocking Hollywood and prominent Hollywood genres (Ulusay 2008, 112). Another novelty among commercial productions was the emergence of horror as a new genre. Even though Yeúilçam produced a few examples in the horror genre, it never initiated a trend or appealed to commercial cinema audiences. In 2003, School [Okul], directed by the Taylan Brothers and produced by Sinan Çetin and Plato Film, paved the way for films of this genre by achieving success in the box-office and drawing attention in the media. Dark Spells [Büyü] (Orhan O÷uz 2004), Gene [Gen] (Togan Gökbakar 2006), Dabbe (Hasan Karacada÷ 2006), The Abortion [Araf] (Biray Dalkran 2006), Gomeda (Tan Tolga Demirci 2007), Haunted [Musallat] (Alper Mesçi 2007), Semum (Hasan Karacada÷ 2008) and The Voice [Ses] (Ümit Ünal 2010) are some examples of this genre. Arslan notes that this newly emergent genre can be considered in relation to the metaphorical horror of a country in transition, namely Islamicisation (Arslan 2011). These films, the majority of which utilise Islamic tropes and introduce a central female character who is associated with monstrosity, “inscribe an ongoing struggle between Islamism and secularism” (Arslan 2011, 258), that deepened with the resurgence of the Islamist right in Turkey in the mid-1990s. Though the new examples of horror films combine local themes with global visual vocabulary, most of them are also criticised because they do not achieve the standards of international examples due their lack of sophisticated special effects and make-up. Another emergent genre is that of nationalist adventures (Köstepen 2007, 10). According to film critic Berke Göl, there are two distinct tendencies in this genre: one is heroic action films, and the other is comedy films that present pure entertainment with nationalistic elements (Göl 2007, 24). Valley of the Wolves [Kurtlar Vadisi Irak] (Serdar Akar 2005) led the heroic adventure field, with its ultra-nationalist and antiAmerican stance; moreover, it reached an almost four and a half million strong audience in Turkey and was the most expensive Turkish film ever made. Wildheart: Hell of Boomerang [Deli Yürek Bumerang Cehennemi] (Osman Snav 2001) and The Last Ottoman: Yandm Ali [Son Osmanl Yandm Ali] (Mustafa ùevki Do÷an 2007) are other heroic adventures. European [Avrupal] (Ulaú Ak 2007), Masked Quintet: Iraq [Maskeli Beúler: Irak] (Murat Aslan 2007) and Yes Sir! [Emret Komutanm: ùah Mat] (Taner Akvardar and Mustafa Altoklar 2007) are examples of the nationalist (and militarist) comedies. Though “in both categories,

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nationalist ideology becomes manifest sometimes through the glorification of protagonists, sometimes through plot development or didactic dialogues” (Göl 2007, 24), depiction of heroes in most of these films resonates with their Hollywood counterparts. This not only represents the anxieties within the borders that are due to the transition in Turkish cinema (and in Turkey) from a tradition that produces and promotes a single nation, single language and single historical perception by a single film language and filmmaking mode, to a more hybrid and interpenetrated mode of filmmaking, but also reveals Hollywood’s, or the global cinema market’s, influence on the new cinema’s commercial examples. There is also a group of films in commercial cinema that deals with Turkey’s traumatic past. These films, including Ça÷an Irmak’s My Father and My Son [Babam ve O÷lum] (2005), Tomris Giritlio÷lu’s Mrs. Salkm’s Diamonds [Salkm Hanm’n Taneleri] (1999) and Pains of Autumn [Güz Sancs] (2008), Sinan Çetin’s Propaganda (1999), Ylmaz Erdo÷an’s Vizontele Tuuba (2004) and Murat Saraço÷lu’s Sons of a B… [O…Çocuklar] (2008) are called popular nostalgia films by Suner (Suner 2010). These films do not directly address the traumatic events in Turkey’s recent past. Rather, merging melodramatic elements with comedy, they tell their stories with these events as their background. Therefore, it is possible to suggest that even though these films make the audience remember the silenced past of the country, and imply “a subtle critique of state authority in Turkey” (Suner 2010, 29), they never make the audience question history. In the meantime, the changes in art house cinema productions began with films that had simple styles, and narrated ordinary lives of ordinary people and marginalised lives along with silenced topics such as Kurdish identity, and the state’s discrimination and assimilation policy for minorities. Akbal Süalp suggests that the stories of the new cinema are “based on the horizons of all diverse forms of survival, struggle, resistance and negotiating the experiences of everyday life” (Akbal Süalp 2009, 222). During this era, art cinema witnessed the emergence of new and young directors, most of whom directed their first films in the second half of the 1990s. Celebrated directors of the art house cinema are Nuri Bilge Ceylan (1959), Zeki Demirkubuz (1964), Reha Erdem (1960), Semih Kaplano÷lu (1963), Yeúim Ustao÷lu (1960), Ümit Ünal (1965) and Derviú Zaim (1964). Most of these directors perform multiple roles in the production process, such as writer, director, and sometimes actor. Art cinema, which is characterised by small budget productions that have limited distribution and promotion opportunities, initiated a new epoch in the national cinema

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industry through its breakaway from the classic Turkish cinema patterns in terms of filmmaking modes, form and content and through its critical success in the international arena:6 In the Yeúilçam period, [Turkish cinema] could not develop a particular film language, intellect and perception, and rather produced and maintained a narrative and production mode in a homogeneous Yeúilçam fashion. It proceeded by instinct and in a collective trial-and-error mode. Its compass was the reaction of the audience. The new period following Yeúilçam is a process of creating a cinema that opens up to the world, seeks for a personal creation, and brings personal discourse, horizon and narration forward. (Ayça 2003-2004, 28)

While Yavuz Turgul’s The Bandit was the celebration of the commercial wing, in the same year, Derviú Zaim’s Somersault in a Coffin [Tabutta Rövaúata] (1996) began the revival of art cinema by winning twenty-one awards in national and international festivals. This success in festivals enabled art cinema to become visible. In addition to its visibility, this film, with its simple, unique and powerful style foreshadowed a new type of narration both in the art cinema and in Turkish cinema in general. As opposed to Yeúilçam conventions, art films offer highly aesthetised cinematic language, plan sequences, static shots, and open narratives, resulting in almost documentary-style realism. However, these films, compared with world cinema examples, did not appeal to a large number of spectators at home and did not receive much local media attention until the 2000s, when Turkish films began to win a considerable number of awards at international festivals. As Higson notes, the content, the dominant narrative discourses, the style and the world-view expressed in a particular body of films need to be examined in order to reveal the cultural identity of a particular national cinema (Higson 1989, 43). While the directors of art house productions share the abovementioned features in terms of form, content and filmmaking modes, as Akbal Süalp proposes, there are diverse “tracks” and tendencies in the new cinema (Akbal Süalp 2008; 2009; 2010a; 6

Somersault in a Coffin [Tabutta Rövaúata] (Derviú Zaim 1996) won the FIPRESCI Jury Award. Demirkubuz’s second feature Innocence [Masumiyet] won the Angers Film Festival Award; the Georges Sadoul Best Foreign Movie Award; Grand Prize Films From South, Oslo; the Special Jury Prize, Mediterranean Film Festival, Brussels; the Public Prize, Innsbruck; the Grand Prize and Best Actor Awards, Tebessa. On Board [Gemide] (Serdar Akar 1998) was included in the Cannes Selection Officielle Semaine Internationale de la Critique.

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2010b; 2010c; 2011), which accentuate its hybrid identity. One of these tracks reflects “the look of the outsider” (Akbal Süalp 2009, 223) that is related to “the situational stand made in the life experience of these particular time and space relationships, which create an eye-level look at people walking on the streets” (Akbal Süalp 2009, 223). The films belonging to this track reveal the stories of alienated or marginalised people without taking a critical stance (Akbal Süalp 2011). In this respect, as Akbal Süalp suggests, the “outsiderness” comes from the directors’ standpoint of detaching themselves from the recent traumatic past (Akbal Süalp 2011). Akbal Süalp argues that this track has two sub-categories: one is “arabesque-noir” which glorifies male lumpen attitudes and depicts verbal and physical violence towards the (female) “other” with no selfcriticism. The second is “melancholic rural escape films”, which tell the stories of miserable, self-pitying, lonely, incurably melancholic male characters who escape from the city and go back to their home town; films that glorify rural life without depicting the reasons behind these desperate escapes (Akbal Süalp 2011). While Fate [Yazg] (2001), Confession [øtiraf] (2001), Waiting Room [Bekleme Odas] (2003) and Destiny [Kader] (2006) by Zeki Demirkubuz; On Board [Gemide] (1998) and In Bar [Barda] (2006) by Serdar Akar; A Madonna in Laleli [Laleli’de Bir Azize] (1999) by Kudret Sabanc; Climates [øklimler] (2006) and Three Monkeys (2008) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan can all be cited as important examples of the arabesque-noir category, Rza (2007) and Haze [Pus] (2009) by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu; Away From Home [Herkes Kendi Evinde] (2001), Egg [Yumurta] (2007), Milk [Süt] (2008) and Honey [Bal] (2010) by Semih Kaplano÷lu; Small Town [Kasaba] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 1997), Clouds of May [Mays Sknts] (2000) and Distant and Climates by Nuri Bilge Ceylan are examples of the second category. However, it is important to note that there are also differences in terms of style and narration among these films. For instance, while Ceylan’s cinema accentuates long takes of poetic landscapes, Demirkubuz rarely uses exterior scenes and sets his films mostly in tight interiors with “a strong sense of claustrophobia in the mise-en-scène” (Suner 2010, 125). While there is very little action happening in Ceylan’s or Kaplano÷lu’s films, Demirkubuz’s films “always draw upon highly dramatic and violent events” (Suner 2010, 113). The second track suggested by Akbal Süalp is composed of the group of films that search for new and innovative modes of narration and style (Akbal Süalp 2009; 2010a; 2010b; 2011). The films in this track matter as they not only question the historical, social and cultural realities of Turkey, but also look for new ways to display these questions on the

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cinema screen. Examples of this track are as follows: Derviú Zaim’s films that study the archaeology of history, society, time and space in a specific film poetry that applied traditional Turkish art forms to the form of film; for example, paper marbling in Elephants and Grass [Filler ve Çimen] (2000); miniatures in Waiting for Heaven [Cenneti Beklerken] (2006); calligraphy in Dot [Nokta] (2008). Ezel Akay’s Killing the Shadow [Hacivat Karagöz Neden Öldürüldü?] (2005) and Hürmüz with 7 Husbands [7 Kocal Hürmüz] (2009) both question all official storytelling and the dominant narration of cultural history. Ümit Ünal’s 9 (2002) and The Shadowless [Gölgesizler] (2008) set forth powerful and sophisticated allegories of the socio-political context of the country through their innovative visual styles and editing. Reha Erdem’s My Only Sunshine [Hayat Var] (2008), Kosmos (2009) and Jîn (2013) introduce the soundscape as a crucial layer of meaning; and Ahmet Uluçay’s Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds [Karpuz Kabu÷undan Gemiler Yapmak] (2004) displays two young boys’ passions for cinema in an extremely plain and enchanting cinematic language. According to Akbal Süalp, these films are all prominent examples for this track. It is possible to consider Onur Ünlü’s films – Police [Polis] (2006), The Son of the Sun [Güneúin O÷lu] (2008), Five Cities [Beú ùehir] (2009), The Extremely Tragic Story of Celal Tan and His Family [Celal Tan ve Ailesinin Aúr Ackl Hikayesi] (2011) and Thou Gild’st The Even [Sen Aydnlatrsn Geceyi] (2013) – in this track due to their innovative and idiosyncratic narrative language, atmosphere and characterisation. The films of the third track, which can be seen as a response to Higson’s criticism of the accounts of national cinemas that do not problematise the national identity and nationhood (Higson 1989, 2000), are distinguished by their highly developed political consciousness. The prominent examples of this track were developed, according to Akbal Süalp, by leading women directors Yeúim Ustao÷lu – Traces [øz] (1994), Journey to the Sun [Güneúe Yolculuk] (1999), Waiting For the Clouds (2003) – and Handan øpekçi – Dad is in the Army [Babam Askerde] (1994), Big Man Little Love [Hejar] (2001), Hidden Faces [Sakl Yüzler] (2007). These films make their audiences confront Turkey’s traumatic past and question “otherness”, official history and nationalism (Akbal Süalp 2008; 2009; 2011). The fourth track is the political cinema of a generation of young directors emerging in the 2000s (Akbal Süalp 2009; 2011): Özcan Alper, Autumn [Sonbahar] (2008), Future Lasts Forever [Gelecek Uzun Sürer] (2011); Kazm Öz, Photograph [Foto÷raf] (2001), The Storm [Bahoz]

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(2008); Hüseyin Karabey, My Marlon and Brando [Gitmek] (2008); ønan Temelkuran, Made in Europe (2007), Bornova Bornova (2008); Özgür Do÷an and Orhan Eskiköy, On the Way to School [2 Dil 1 Bavul] (2009); Miraz Bezar, The Children of Diyarbakir [Min Dît] (2009). The films of Sedat Ylmaz, Press (2010); Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Do÷an, Voice of My Father [Babamn Sesi] (2012); Emin Alper, Beyond The Hill [Tepenin Ard] (2012), Frenzy [Abluka] (2015); and Erol Mintaú, Song of My Mother [Annemin ùarks] (2014) can be considered as recent examples of this track. These directors made films that focus on the traumas and conflicts of the recent past, tell the stories of others hitherto silenced by the official history, and/or depict the current political milieu of the country. Moreover, what makes these new political films distinctive is not only their ability to be critical about Turkey’s recent history, but also their capacity to question national identity and belonging with an innovative visual style.7 Even though there are many differences between commercial and art house films in terms of style and production, it is important to mention that there is a point of connection: thematic continuity “characterized by an obsession with the tropes of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’” (Suner 2004, 307), which may seem to be a kind of cinematic response to a growing anxiety around identities in transition because of the political, economic, and social changes in Turkey. In this respect, film theorist Hamid Naficy’s concept of “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001) might also be relevant if we consider the “ambiguous” relation between the films and the imagined homeland in the new cinema of Turkey. Naficy’s accented cinema theory 7

Following the 1960 coup d’état and the 1961 Constitution that introduced new rights and freedoms to Turkish society, some filmmakers in Yeúilçam, too, began making films about social problems, such as class struggles, internal migration and labour rights, and produced the first “social realist films” in Turkish cinema. The most significant examples were Dry Summer [Susuz Yaz] (Metin Erksan 1963), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1964; The Bus Passengers [Otobüs Yolcular] (Ertem Göreç 1961); Those Awakening in the Dark [Karanlkta Uyananlar] (Ertem Göreç 1964); Birds of Exile [Gurbet Kuúlar] (Halit Refi÷ 1964); and The Law of Borders [Hudutlarn Kanunu] (Lütfi Akad 1966). However, even though these films dealing with alternative and politically charged themes were novel in terms of the subject matter, they continued to use Yeúilçam narrative conventions and filmmaking modes. The only controversial exceptions in Yeúilçam that might be considered as having foreshadowed the examples in these “political” tracks of the new cinema were Ylmaz Güney’s films portraying the daily lives of ordinary people in a realist style, which was different from Yeúilçam’s thematic and narrative tradition.

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is based on his perception of films that are heavily informed by their directors’ “(dis)location as interstitial subjects within social formations and cinematic practices” (Naficy 2001, 34). Naficy distinguishes three types of directors according to their relation to their displacement: exilic, diasporic and ethnic (Naficy 2001). Suner claims that even though the directors cannot be considered as diasporic or exilic, the cinematic styles and themes associated with “accented filmmaking” also consistently appear in the examples of national cinemas, and in the examples of the new cinema of Turkey in particular (Suner 2006b, 364). The major accented themes (journeying, issues of territoriality, rootedness and geography, home-seeking, homelessness and/or homecomings (Naficy 2001)) and the characteristics of the accented style (the representation of an idealised homeland by fetishised objects and icons of the past; stressing claustrophobic interiors; the homeland’s landscapes; the utilisation of transitional sites such as hotels, trains and borders (Naficy 2001)) can also be considered as characteristics of the new cinema of Turkey. From box office hits to art house productions, these features occur in most of the examples. Moreover, in my opinion, considering the political, economic and social climate of Turkey, the directors and people of a country in the midst of a huge transition can be considered to be in an exilic and/or diasporic position within their homeland. Of course, I do not use the term “exile” in its conventional connotations; rather, I want to employ the term in relation to the question of adaptation, alienation, restlessness and the inbetweenness that is evoked by changes in the perception of homeland and fixed identity categories. Most of the examples of the new cinema, from horror films to historical dramas, from rural escape films to nationalist adventures, can be cited as films that represent the gendered, national, mnemonic anxieties that pervade the homeland in the post-junta period. Furthermore, in accordance with this innovation in terms of the content, the films of the new cinema introduced a more realistic, genuine and credible representation of life that projects the anxieties of the homeland to the Turkish cinema audience, who used to see the dreams and illusions of the homeland in an escapist and exaggerated mode in Yeúilçam films. In addition to the above-mentioned features, developments in sound design can be cited as one of the most important innovations brought about by the new cinema. Indeed, radical changes have taken place in the fields of sound technology, dialogue, dubbing and film music, reflecting the change from a national(ist) cinema to a more hybrid cinema. On the other

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hand, in contrast with Yeúilçam, silence is now used on screen as a new aesthetic choice, a means of articulation and a form of representation.

Sound, Voice and Silence in the New Cinema The classical Turkish cinema’s structure, defined by film scholar O÷uz Adanr as an “audio-visual” structure (quoted in Krel 2005, 261), was predominantly verbal rather than visual. Film scholar Nilgün Abisel also argues that everything was told verbally in this branch of Turkish cinema. The images were secondary and served to illustrate the action: these films could “talk” without the images (Abisel 2005). As scriptwriter Bülent Oran states, Turkish audiences watched these films with their ears (quoted in Arslan 2011, 121). Accordingly, the dialogues were descriptive and even instructive. Nevertheless, they did not reflect colloquial speech, employing instead either hyperbolic slang or lexiphanicism adapted from popular novels (Krel 2005, 254-255). If the dialogue was not a specific foreign or ethnic representation, such as Greek, accents and dialects that might be seen as a key to class, ethnicity and national identity were also removed. In Yeúilçam cinema, no matter where the film was set, a mainstream Istanbul accent was used (Arslan 2009a, 85). Therefore, it might be argued that the (verbal) base of classical Turkish cinema was built upon “the examples of a formalist language use that was not colloquial” (Krel 2005, 254) and failed to reflect the multitude of ethnic and regional voices and identities in Turkish society (Arslan 2009a, 85). Moreover, dubbing was a standard practice for these films, reflecting the single nation–single language assumption of classical Turkish cinema. Films were shot without sound and dubbed in post-production by dubbing artists. Oran states that “silent shooting is easier and more feasible. It saves time and therefore cuts down the production costs. Also, it offers the possibility of casting good-looking actors with bad diction” (quoted in Erdo÷an 2002, 237). The prominent genre of Yeúilçam was the musical melodrama in which the leading female actor sang. However, like their spoken dialogue, their songs were also dubbed by other voices. Moreover, there were only a small number of dubbing artists, so that most of the lines were spoken by the same ones; even though the actors were different, the voices, intonations and laughs were the same (Krel 2005, 261). Also, as Arslan notes, in several cases, the same stars were dubbed by different dubbing actors, yet the fact that these stars spoke and sang with different voices never threatened their unique star image (Arslan 2011). In fact, it

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helped to create a sort of familiarity illusion in these films (Krel 2005, 261). As film scholar Nezih Erdo÷an argues: An actor in Yeúilçam, I maintain, is “be-spoken”. This is why almost all of the dialogue, instead of functioning as the indices of a character’s interior psychological situation, transforms all the characters into a set of statements. (Erdo÷an 2002, 243)

Ambient sound was rarely used and the soundtrack failed to reflect the space of the image track: “even when the bodies are clearly placed outdoors, ‘their’ voices come from an interior” (Erdo÷an 2002, 239). In fact, the audio-track of Yeúilçam was extremely poor and unsatisfactory. On the other hand, one of the crucial changes that the new cinema introduced in the 1990s was in the realm of sound design. Unlike Yeúilçam, the new cinema emerged as a cinema that is mindful of the importance of the audio-track. The characteristic feature of the classic Turkish cinema, dubbing, was abandoned gradually in the mid-1990s, and filmmakers moved to shooting with sound. As film scholars Alim ùerif Onaran and Bülent Vardar assert, this shift must be considered as a continuation of the search and demand in this time period for the shooting of more qualified films (Onaran and Vardar 2005, 6). As post-dubbing was abandoned, one of the major problems in Yeúilçam cinema, the nonsynchronisation of the sound and movement, also ceased, and sound design gained more importance. Hard sound effects, including common sounds such as doors slamming or weapons being fired, started to be heard in natural and synchronised ways. Atmospheric sound or background sound effects, such as a forest, the wind or the sound of an empty street, became more prominent, particularly as their sounds were more important in art house productions that used long exterior shots to create a pastoral atmosphere. Apart from the importance of exterior shots, sound design began to be appreciated and used as a crucial and defining element by directors. In Zeki Demirkubuz’s cinema, for instance, a disruptive and uncanny effect is created by the repetitive and disturbing use of the sound of a television screen, which heightens the claustrophobic visual atmosphere in his films (Suner 2010, 127). Likewise, in Rza, the director Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu uses the distinct sound of loud truck engines passing by as a crucial element to relate to the story, which is of a violent crime committed by a truck driver in order to cover the expense of repairs to his broken truck. In the sequences where we see him wandering through the streets of the city and thinking in silence, the loud background sounds of the truck’s howl register as an element that remind us of his guilty

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conscience. In Reha Erdem’s film My Only Sunshine, a film about the harsh life of a teenage girl, Hayat (Elit øúcan), who lives with her father and bedridden grandfather in a riverside shack near the Bosphorus, the loud off-screen sounds, such as ferry hoots, planes passing overhead, sirens, windows breaking, and screams, which dominate the frame are used in a repetitive and disturbing way, and this serves both to constantly remind the audience of the dangerously dark life waiting for her outside (Çakrlar and Güçlü 2013) and to increase the sense of despair that pervades the film from content to visual style. Likewise, in Erdem’s film Jîn, which tells the story of a young female guerrilla, Jîn (Deniz Hasgüler), who escapes from the organisation and journeys to the city, sound design has a crucial and defining role in the narrative. The diegetic, as well as the character Jîn, is “haunted” – mostly – by the off-screen sounds of gunfire, passing helicopters and explosions which indicate that the war will not leave Jîn (meaning “life” in the Kurdish language) in peace, wherever she goes. Moreover, directors of commercial productions began to use and understand the importance of design sound effects in the more recently emergent genres of action, crime, horror, nationalist adventures and science fiction parodies to compete with their Hollywood counterparts in the local market. Design sound effects became one of the main indicators of the quality and success of the commercial films of these genres. For example, the science fiction parody G.O.R.A., directed by Ömer Faruk Sorak, was noted by the press as being as good in terms of sound effects as the well-known Hollywood science fiction films. In order to meet the requirements and expectations of this newly emergent field, the sound design of most of the box office hits were made by well-known foreign sound designers, such as Alan O’Duffy, Samir Foco and Hans Schumann. Moreover, various foreign sound editors, sound mixers, Foley artists and sound recordists worked on these films in the sound departments. On the other hand, while the directors of the art house productions are very aware of the creative potential of sound and use it in their films as a component of content and visual style, they avoid applying design sound effects due to the minimalistic style of their films. Semih Kaplano÷lu suggests that sound effects manipulate the reality of sound; hence, he uses only unprocessed real natural sounds in order to give a sense of location in his films. In fact, musical scores were rarely used in art house productions to better suit the content, aesthetic choice and the sense of art applied by the directors. While Kaplano÷lu does not use music at all in his internationally acclaimed Yusuf trilogy, the main source of music used by

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Ceylan in Three Monkeys is the leading female actor’s cell phone melody. Regarding the use of music in film, Ceylan states that he does not like to use music as it feels like a crutch for a director who cannot express what s/he wants to show through cinematic means (Andrew 2009). In fact, Ceylan says that he uses sound in the atmosphere instead of music, as he deems it the nicest sound in cinema, whilst he suggests that music can kill things (Andrew 2009). Nonetheless, the music score continues to be considered of absolute importance in commercial productions, following the classical Turkish cinematic tradition that uses the music score as a crucial tool to create a sense of pathos. Moreover, music has started to be used as a marketing tool to attract the attention of the audience and to contribute to the commercial success of the film. The majority of the boxoffice hits work with popular singers, bands and/or composers to appeal to a wider audience. Soundtrack albums of commercial films began to appear in music stores after the 1996 film The Bandit, which is remembered for its soundtrack. In contrast to the previous periods, dialogue is spoken in a colloquial manner with the inclusion of various accents and dialects. In most commercial productions, the legacy of classic Turkish cinema, the importance of the verbal continues, but in a more sophisticated way. As the new cinema – both art house and commercial productions – emerges and distinguishes itself with a more realistic, natural and credible mode of representation, the dialogue has also changed. Characters have started to talk in street language, and lexiphanic dialogue has been completely abandoned. In classic Turkish cinema, only the villains and “bad” characters used vulgar language, while in the new cinema, most of the characters use slang and/or swear words, thus depicting the ordinary life of ordinary people in a more realistic way. Whilst an illusory life was created by Yeúilçam through characters who talked in a formal, “as it should be” manner, in the new cinema, dialogue reflects speech “as it is in real life”. The representations of various accents and dialects on screen resonates with the hybrid identity of the new cinema and might be considered as another rupture from the “as it should be”, namely the single language illusion of Yeúilçam cinema. However, languages other than Turkish, such as Kurdish, Greek, Armenian, Arabic and Russian, are usually only depicted in art house productions. It is possible to argue that while art house productions for the most part overcome the single-nation/singlelanguage image of Yeúilçam, commercial productions only partially manage to represent the country’s ethnic, regional and national diversity because they continue to produce films only in Turkish. For example, even though the box-office hits Vizontele (Ylmaz Erdo÷an and Ömer Faruk

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Sorak 2001) and Vizontele Tuuba take place in Hakkari, where the population is mainly Kurdish, there is no Kurdish dialogue in the film even though most of the population does not speak Turkish. Besides, in opposition to classical patterns of Turkish cinema, art house productions introduced a cinema language that places the emphasis on the visual above the verbal. Unlike characters who “constantly” speak in commercial productions, dialogue is kept to minimum and long silences are used in many art house productions, consistent with the minimalistic style of these films. In fact, film critic Ali Murat Güven calls the films of Ceylan, Demirkubuz and Kaplano÷lu “cinema of quietude” [sükunet sinemas] due to the fact that these directors prefer to express their characters’ feelings through visual style rather than verbal language, a style which introduces an inner world via silence to the audience (Güven 2009). Ceylan confirms this when he states that he tries to convey the meaning of the film without dialogue, and instead through situation and gestures, so that he uses dialogue only if the characters talk nonsense or about something unrelated to the film’s secret (Andrew 2009). Regarding the ever-decreasing dialogue in his films, Kaplano÷lu states that there is not that much to talk about in film (quoted in Ergülen 2010). Even though Güven’s analysis is sound, it is important to indicate that Demirkubuz’s cinema in its relation to the verbal might be positioned differently from that of the other two directors. While Demirkubuz’s films are noted for their unique visual language, the use of intense dialogues and lengthy monologues are verbal characteristics of his films. Unlike Ceylan or Kaplano÷lu’s films, in Demirkubuz’s films the monologues are crucial to the narration, providing off-screen plot developments in characters’ lives or revealing their inner selves through confessional elements that tend to halt the story and interrupt the flow (Suner 2010, 136). Accordingly, one can argue that silence has a dominant role in art house productions, complementing their visual style and narrative content. In addition, long pauses and awkward or uncomfortable silences between characters are frequently used in art house films. As film critic Frat Yücel argues, even though art house directors of the new cinema introduce diverse aesthetics and themes, they are similar in “vocalizing and visualizing the unspoken, especially those feelings that the commotion or monotony of everyday life make difficult or impossible to articulate” (Yücel 2009, 12). Ceylan is best known for using silence as a way of complementing his long takes of landscapes and photographic images, which always feature unspoken words between the characters. Regarding Distant, film scholar Mahmut Mutman argues that Ceylan’s visual style

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narrates what “cannot be put into words, [what] cannot be brought back in speech, the singular event as it occurs in everyday life … there is always a silence of the image” (Mutman 2006, 106). In terms of the film’s content, the differences, similarities and unspoken words between a commercial photographer and his cousin from the provinces who temporarily moves into his house, are best understood in the sequences that use long silences and pauses. Likewise, in Climates, a film about a couple undergoing a painful break-up, silence characterises the image and narrative flow of the film. Silence is one of the main tools, complementing the frequently used, long, still close-ups of faces that assert and underline the suffocation of the female character and her emotional distance, and also suggest the words that remain unsaid between the two characters. In his Yusuf trilogy, Egg, Milk and Honey, Kaplano÷lu uses silence to complement his sense of cinema, which he defines as “spiritual realism” [manevi gerçekçilik] (Özbudak 2010). Kaplano÷lu states that “cinema should pave the way to intermingle reality with spirituality and help the audience feel that this world does not consist merely of what is visible” (Özbudak 2010). According to Kaplano÷lu, cinema should liberate us from the limits of language, which separates us from ourselves and from others (Karahan 2010). In Kaplano÷lu’s films, the world and word beyond the visible is not “told” by characters’ talking; rather, it is “felt” by their silences and by their silent gestures, the looks and expressions that momentarily freeze on their faces. In Milk, the main character, Yusuf, is disconcerted when he learns that his mother is having a secret affair with the town’s railroad stationmaster. The close-up of Yusuf’s face and the expression (of his speechlessness) that freezes on his face in the scene when he comes back home with a fish that he has caught for his mother and he sees her plucking the duck that was apparently brought by her lover is one of the best examples of what Kaplano÷lu implies by “the limits of language in film”. Another prominent art house director, Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu, used long silences and pauses between characters and very little dialogue in his last three films, Rza, Haze and Hair [Saç] (2010). According to Pirselimo÷lu, his use of uncomfortable and long silences in Haze is related to the “essence” of his film, which depicts the themes of death, pain, unemployment, deprivation and poverty in a simple, minimalistic and dark visual style (Aúar 2009). Moreover, Pirselimo÷lu reveals that instead of creating a narrative in which two characters talk in order to make a third party, namely the audience, understand the flow of the events, he prefers

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to make the third party exert some effort to understand the silent conflict or harmony among characters (Taúçyan 2010). The diversity of narrative styles among the directors of the new cinema also registers in the ways they use silence. If Ceylan’s use of silences draws out unbridgeable gaps and distances between people, Kaplano÷lu’s use makes the limits of language visible. Besides, silence seems to be related to the dark themes and style that Pirselimo÷lu prefers to project on screen. However, the silences in Demirkubuz’s cinema spring from a strong disbelief in the word and in human communication which is so prominent in his films. Silences take place in his films as an indicator of the slipperiness, unreliability, unsoundness, and violence of the characters’ words (that come before or after the silence). Waiting Room tells the story of a director, Ahmet, played by Zeki Demirkubuz himself, his problems in his personal life, and the arbitrariness of his apathy, which is the main motif of the film. The main character’s portrayal is most strongly revealed and sensed in the repetitive long pause sequences just before he utters baseless lies. The audience comes to expect lies each time the main character meets a question with a pause, with a silence, highlighting the impossibility of genuine and reliable communication. On the other hand, in Confession, the main character, Harun (Taner Birsel), suspects his wife, Nilgün (Baúak Köklükaya), of having an affair and forces her to confess. The long and disturbing silences between the two characters are broken with long psychologically and physically violent outbursts from Harun. The silence foreshadows not only the confession, but also the confession’s verbal violence. Confession, like almost all of Demirkubuz’s films, ends with a long silence between the two main characters. The silence of this characteristic ending creates the open-endedness of visualizing “beyond words” and therefore manifests, once more, the slipperiness and unreliability of words. Apart from these prominent art house directors, Mahmut Fazl Coúkun, a member of the new generation of the new cinema, also uses large blocks of silence as a component of his visual style and content in his feature debut, Wrong Rosary [Uzak øhtimal] (2008). The film tells the story of a young muezzin’s (Nadir Sarbacak) naive affection for his Catholic neighbour (Görkem Yeltan) who works in the nearby church. Coúkun uses a minimalistic style, and in order to create a serene atmosphere for this minor story, the recurrent use of silence between the two main characters serves to emphasise the regrets, secrets and unsaid feelings that form the base of the story. Coúkun notes: “Albert Camus said: ‘A man is human not with what he says, but with what he hides.’ When we were writing our

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film, that has been our ‘tagline’. And instead of a series of dialogues as in every Turkish film, we used the silence” (quoted in Dorsay 2010, 297). This is especially true of the last scene, in which the muezzin goes to the train station with the intention of revealing his true feelings to Clara before she leaves to go to the Vatican to become a nun, but finds that he cannot utter a word. The silence becomes visible in his affect and signifies the words that remain unsaid. The second dominant use of silence in art house productions is as a means of articulation. In this sort of usage, an otherwise silenced event or topic in the official history is articulated through silence that registers and draws attention to a gap or absence in the story. This form of silence is prevalent in the films of Yeúim Ustao÷lu. Journey to the Sun tells the story of two young men, Mehmet (Nevruz Baz) and Berzan (Nazmi Krk), who struggle as lower-class Kurdish or Kurdish-looking citizens in Istanbul. In a routine police check on a minibus, Mehmet, coming from the western region of Turkey, is arrested and treated by the police as a Kurdish suspect because of his physical appearance. After his release, he loses his job and home because he has been marked as Kurdish – he finds a red X written on his door. His friend Berzan finds him a job and shelter. However, Berzan is found dead after having been arrested by the police in a demonstration against the hunger strikes in prisons. Berzan had once told Mehmet of his desire to return to his native village, and so Mehmet begins a journey to bury his friend in his village in South-Eastern Turkey. In the scene where the two new friends sit on a bench and talk about where they have come from and why they have ended up in Istanbul, the long pause just before Berzan reveals that his father, like many others in his region, was caught and shot, serves to emphasise not only the importance of the words being uttered, but also the difficulty in articulating these events on screen, as they thus far have been silenced. Likewise, in the scene where the police interrogate Mehmet, the police officer asks him where he is from and is dissatisfied with the answer “Tire”, because the policeman suspects that he is from the South-Eastern Turkey rather than the western region. When the officer asks Mehmet if his father is also from Tire, Mehmet meets the question with a long silence, an expression of confusion and pain on his face. The gaps in the official history are inscribed in the film through these moments of silence, in which Mehmet, as well as the audience, is made to confront the unspoken social realities of Turkey and the marginalisation and discrimination of Kurdish people. In the second half of the film, when we see Mehmet’s journey with Berzan’s coffin, the silence increases. The viewer begins to see, from Mehmet’s long point-ofview shots, towns whose inhabitants have been evicted and flooded

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villages, scenes that have never before been shown on screen, in the cinema or on television. The use of silence while Mehmet looks around in shock and confusion emphasises the shock experienced by Mehmet and the audience, who are seeing these so-far “silenced” images for the first time. Waiting for the Clouds, which will be analysed in depth in the fourth chapter, tells the story of a silenced woman who goes on a journey to find her suppressed voice. Ayúe/Eleni (Rüçhan Çalúkur) has kept silent about her Greek origin and her true identity for half-a-century because of assimilation policies. The long blocks of silences used in the film are very much related to, and point to, her silenced past. When her sister dies, she unlocks memories of her family’s forced deportation, starts speaking in her own language, and embarks on a journey to find her long-lost brother. The story of suppression and assimilation in Turkey is told through her silenced language, identity, and religion. Therefore, Ayúe/Eleni’s silence serves to articulate her unspoken language and suppressed ethnicity. In his feature debut Autumn, Özcan Alper uses silence in the same vein. The film relates the story of “Operation: Return to Life” [Hayata Dönüú Operasyonu], which was conducted by Turkish security forces against the hunger strikers who were protesting against F-type prisons. Yusuf (Onur Saylak), the main character, has just been released from prison and returns home on account of his deteriorating health, which was caused by the hunger strike. The film starts with archival footage of the Operation, which is recurrently shown throughout the film. The loud voice of a police officer, along with a mechanical cacophony, announces that human life is the most precious thing. The contrast between this official, authoritarian voice announcing the value of life at the beginning of the film and Yusuf’s silent presence as he waits for death throughout the film, against the backdrop of the immense landscape depicted in extreme long shots, signifies the gap in the official history. This contrast forces acknowledgement of the Operation itself, but also reminds us of the unknown or ignored effects that it had on individuals. As film scholar and critic Övgü Gökçe argues in her article on Autumn, “as opposed to the rigid and dominant discourse that assimilates Yusuf’s and many others’ experience, the open and empty landscape suggests a surface where alternative narratives can be inscribed” (Gökçe 2009, 277-278). In this respect, these films not only articulate the topics that had up until now been silenced on screen, thereby making the unspoken/unspeakable visible, but they also make the audience confront “the problem of the culture of silence in contemporary Turkish society” (Robins and Aksoy 2000, 219).

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Even though there are crucial differences in terms of the use of sound, voice and silence among commercial and art house productions, they share a common trait, as previously mentioned: they both do silence female characters. Since most of the protagonists in these selected films are male, it might seem that the silences manifested in the new cinema are, in fact, male silences. However, as mentioned above, even though there is an undeniable absence of dialogue in most of the examples of art house productions, these silences do not belong to male characters alone, but are related to the visual style and aesthetic choice of the director. Besides, even though male protagonists of art house films are usually less talkative, they are actually able to speak and do speak in the diegesis; even if we suggest that they are silent, that silence is never made into a narrative device in the film. Contrary to the majority of the films involving a silent female character, these films actually “speak of” their male characters’ stories: their points of view, and their actions, silent or not, are the ones that motivate the action of the narrative. In this respect, it is possible to argue that there is no verbal control or discursive authority, in a Foucauldian sense, over these male characters, even in the few example of muteness. On the contrary, the silence in all of these examples serves to open up a new and different way of narrating these characters’ lives, feelings and stories beyond the verbal.8 On the other hand, it is crucial to discuss the examples of children’s silences in the new cinema as they either share a thematic and/or formal association with silent female characters. In four of the nine films that feature the silence of children – Innocence, Love Lorn [Gönül Yaras] (Yavuz Turgul 2005), My Only Sunshine and I Saw the Sun [Güneúi Gördüm] (Mahsun Krmzgül 2009) – the silence of the female child character is depicted primarily in relation to issues of gender. In Innocence and Love Lorn, the aural castration of female children is the result of gender-based violence. In the first example, the child (Melis Tuna) is born mute because her mother was beaten by her father during her pregnancy, and in the latter, the child becomes mute with the fear and shock of seeing her mother being lambasted by her father. In these two examples, the silent children literally follow their mothers, like shadows, in the filmic space. Moreover, after scenes in which we learn the causes of their muteness, the children’s shadow-like presence throughout the film reminds the audience of the gender-based violence that they inherited from their mothers. Another example of these little shadows of violence is Hayat (Elit øúcan) 8

Two examples of male mutes will be compared with the female mutes in detail in Chapters 2 and 4 in order to analyse representational differences and similarities.

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in My Only Sunshine, the eponymous fourteen-year-old protagonist whose transition from childhood to adolescence is related in the dark atmosphere of the film. The contrast between the loud background sounds of the outside world dominating the narrative and Hayat’s silent presence, even before the rape and abuse that she is subjected to, serve to remind and emphasise the gender-based threat that awaits girls outside the house. On the other hand, her repetitive murmurings, which sound like a combination of intakes of breath and mumbling, become a form of expression, a way of saying “Life [Hayat] exists!” – which is the literal translation of the Turkish title Hayat Var. Moreover, in I Saw the Sun, the female child’s (Tu÷se Gökhan) muteness, a defect caused by intermarriage, a prevalent practice in the rural parts of Turkey, is again caused, in a broad sense, by the order according to which gender relations are managed. In Three Monkeys and Everything About Mustafa [Mustafa Hakknda Herúey] (Ça÷an Irmak, 2004), silent children appear as ghosts. In both films, the ghost of the other male child of the family, who died because of other family member(s), represents the dark secret of an ordinary family, and is repeatedly seen by the characters who feel remorse regarding his death. Three Monkeys tells the story of a family that festers with lies, secrets, betrayal and guilt, and the ghost of the little child of the family is seen twice: once by his brother, øsmail (Ahmet Rfat ùungar), and once by his father, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl). øsmail learns that Hacer (Hatice Aslan), his mother, is having an affair with his father’s boss, Servet (Ercan Kesal), but he cannot bring himself to tell his father. Just after this scene, øsmail comes back home and the ghost of his little brother appears in front of him. Therefore, the remorse caused by the situation unveils other unspoken and silenced crimes (Yldz n.d.). In the same way, Eyüp sees the ghost of his little child after he learns of his wife’s betrayal. The fact that the ghost appears to the brother and father in the moments of heartsearching and the fact that he does not appear to his mother, suggests that the ghost serves not only to reveal the strong feelings of guilt that the brother and the father share, but also to make the female character’s betrayal, which is the main axis of the narrative, equate to the other lies, secrets and crimes of the male characters. Likewise, in Everything About Mustafa, the main character, Mustafa (Fikret Kuúkan), loses his wife in a car accident and finds out by accident that she had been having an affair with a taxi driver for some time. Mustafa holds the taxi driver captive, and beats and tortures him in his suburban villa in order to take revenge and also to learn the story of the affair. Mustafa’s brother’s ghost first appears as a remembrance in a flashback while the taxi driver talks about his relationship with Mustafa’s wife. The timing of the first appearance, in a

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moment of confrontation with his past, his wife and himself, serves to reveal that the main character is not innocent and to signal his possible crime and guilt. In the course of the film, the brother’s ghost comes back in nightmares and Mustafa’s whole forgotten story of crime comes to light close to the end of the film. In a long flashback scene, he remembers that he was the one who killed his brother. I would suggest that the remorse is visualised through these little silent ghosts of memory in order to remind the male characters of their own guilt and to make them confront their silenced past. Yusuf (Bora Altaú), the protagonist of Kaplano÷lu’s Honey, is a sixyear-old child who has just begun primary school and who has a problematic relationship with speech. Yusuf suffers from a stutter when he is asked to read out a text in front of a class, and he stops speaking completely after his father leaves. In this film, the formation of Yusuf’s silence is broader than the examples given above as it is related to both the aesthetics and the content of the film. It is the manifestation of the “spiritual realism” that the director applies in his films. Yusuf’s silence, contrary to the other children’s silences, reveals his own story in accordance with the director’s sense of cinema. It serves to make the audience sense, rather than hear, a six year-old boy’s feelings before he separates from his father. From these examples, it is clear that these changes in the use of sound, voice and silence emerged along with the new cinema, and regardless of the technical, stylistic or aesthetic reasons behind them, they should also be considered as a way of projecting a reciprocal change in the realms of “speech” and “silence” in Turkish society after the September 12 military coup. As Gürbilek argues, everyday life in Turkey in the 1980s consisted of an “explosion of speech” and a simultaneous “repression of speech”: political repression together with the glamour of the consumer culture; tortures together with the calls for individualism; the obligation of being silent together with the desire to speak were all on the same stage (Gürbilek 2011). This dual picture of the society – the incitement of speech vs. silencing – is projected in the work of these new directors who experienced the junta either when they were young, or as a child. As Akbal Süalp argues, most of the examples in the new cinema, from what she calls “the tunes of a sensitiveness in a bell jar” to “the glorifications of lumpen attitudes and nothingness”, are the films that not only traverse the shame, rage, denial and nothingness that the September 12 military coup evoked, but also involve the repressed trauma and shame of the coup (Akbal Süalp 2008, 47). Following Akbal Süalp’s lead, it could be argued

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that the repetitive use of silence as an indicator or reinforcement of the unbridgeable gaps between the characters, the violence of words and the things beyond words, and the crime, guilt and shame emanating from a traumatic past are all indirect implications of this historical context, full of silenced and suppressed memories with regard to the September 12 military coup. However, I argue that the traces and cries of the traumatic past of the country, which cannot be represented directly in the films of these directors, become most obvious and find an “adequate” and “tolerable” way of representation in the apparent and persistent use of the silent female representational form. In the following chapters, I argue that the newly emergent silent female representational form of the new cinema is not only a cinematic symptom of the historical context from which it has emerged but also becomes, in itself, the adequate, acceptable and tolerable form of representation of that historical context full of silences, repressions, secrets and crises. They offer a more sophisticated relation of causality as they are representations prevalent in both commercial and art house productions; they are not specific to a genre or a style, and are striking in the number of examples that share thematic and formal representational features in close relation to the historical context of postSeptember 12, 1980. Most importantly, these multifaceted female silences, reflecting the diverse cinematic voices in the new cinema, are deeply embedded in a masculine, traumatic voice, that can be considered as a kind of cinematic response to the changing order of Turkey and of Turkish cinema in the realms of gender, nation and the past.

CHAPTER TWO SILENT CONFRONTATION WITH MASCULINITIES IN CRISIS

What the hell have I done to you? You mute bitch! You whore! You’ve been the death of me. You ruined me! Destroyed me! You’ve killed me. You buried me alive. What have I done? —The Brother-in-Law, in Innocence What, then, is so perilous in the fact that people speak, and that their discourse proliferates to infinity? Where is the danger in that? —Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse”

As discussed in the previous chapter, Turkish cinema since the mid-1990s has been through fundamental changes and developments in terms of filmmaking, film culture, film language and visual style. The developments in film technology, together with the emergence of art house productions that prioritise the visual over the verbal, led to frequent, though varying uses of silence in the films of the new cinema. However, the newly emergent silent female representational form manifests a more complex and multifaceted relation between the cinematic and historical context of Turkey after the 1980s than do the male counterparts discussed in the previous chapter. Thus, in this chapter, the silent female form will be discussed and analysed in relation to gender roles and the attributes that it inscribes on thematic, verbal, visual and narrative levels, within the context of the changes in the social and cinematic gender order. While the gendered/ing role division of the speaker and the spoken-of and its possible functions in the narratives will be set forth through the analyses of plot, character development and mise-en-scène, the gender roles and attributes in relation to the visual designation of the “spoken-of”, which occurs mainly through either voyeurism or off-screen space, will be examined through the analyses of mise-en-scène. The gendered and gendering functions of the form will be argued by drawing upon examples from different strands of the new cinema of Turkey in order to present not only the parallels but also the diversity in use of the form. It will be argued that the silent female form functions mainly as a tool through which male

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characters’ experiences and anxieties are revealed and made visible to the audience. Moreover, it provides a medium through which male characters confront themselves and the crisis of their masculinities, thus reassigning their discursive authority. However, there are some controversial instances and examples in which the mastery of the male characters fails to be reinstated. These examples will also be analysed in order to demonstrate how some female silences open up a gap in the narration and illustrate “her” experience. Finally, I will discuss a different uses of silence and the silent character, and an inscription of an alternative language and voice in terms of the gendered discursive authority in the new cinema of Turkey. According to Michel Chion, silent characters in films raise three main issues: a body without a voice (visual authority); the final word that supposedly closes the narrative (narrative authority); and the status of speech and voice (verbal authority) (Chion [1947] 1999). It is therefore important to discuss the silent female form in relation to its gendered/ing function, drawing upon theories on both female voice and image. Although the functions and formations of female silence vary in the new cinema, the visual control over the silent female image and the representation of her silent body are similar in the majority of cases. On this point, feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey’s concepts of voyeurism and fetishism (Mulvey [1975] 1989) are applicable in order to reveal how the visual authority of male characters over the silent female characters is maintained and actually doubled through the eroticisation, victimisation or punishment of the female body. Mulvey argues that there are two ways to escape from the castration anxiety that images of women always threaten to evoke. The first way is through voyeurism, which is the eroticising of women, the investigating of women, or the portraying of women as victims, and then either punishing, demystifying or saving women in order to affirm the mastery of the male character (Mulvey [1975] 1989). The second way is through fetishism, the showing a woman’s body in a state of extreme aesthetic perfection (Mulvey [1975] 1989). Therefore the female character is valued for her erotic appearance, beauty and desirability. Mulvey’s argument is very much applicable to the new cinema even though her objects of study are classic Hollywood films. Indeed, these two forms of escape have found expression in Turkish society since the 1980s: from box-office hits to art house productions, from prime-time news to television commercials, women are represented as threats, victims and erotic images. This can be considered as a kind of response to the effects of the change that Turkish masculinities have undergone in the economic, social and cultural fields since the 1980s. As Akbal Süalp argues:

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Traumas over a long period with no mourning nor healing after each leftist turn or opposition, and the brutal fall of the left after coups, followed by profound stillness, are one of the main effects we even hesitate to question. Moreover, the strapping and economic crises one after another followed by a high unemployment rate and rapidly mounting poverty, bringing about feelings of hopelessness and helplessness among mainly male silent majorities, are all crucial ... The male ego has to deal with unemployment and confront this newly-shared space with others. Fear and fantasy restore the forms of representation of specific genres and aesthetics. (Akbal Süalp 2009, 228)

Moreover, in the 1980s, the second wave of the feminist movement blurred the cultural representation systems that supported traditional gender roles, and led to a crisis of masculinity that can be considered as the reason behind the prevalence of male narratives, male characters and male points of view in the new cinema (Oktan 2009; Ulusay 2004). In most of the films, in order to comfort this wounded male ego, silent female characters are represented as objects of the male gaze, objects of crime, objects of punishment and objects of desire, and are subjected to genderbased violence mostly because they pose a threat to the male order. Extending Mulvey’s theory on the male gaze, Kaja Silverman indicates that images of women are mostly subjected to control as a guarantor of a male subjectivity that is always at risk, not only through fetishisation of the female body and voyeurism, but also through the construction of a female voice that is linked to the female body through the synchronisation of sound and image (Silverman 1988). She explores the female voice in classical Hollywood cinema and argues that women’s voices have little or no narrative authority: just as in the visual realm, where male characters are the bearers of the look and female characters are the object of the gaze, on the verbal level female characters are overheard whilst male characters master speech and hearing (Silverman 1988). Drawing upon several examples, Silverman reveals that women’s voices are used to affirm male mastery over the narrative and thus to erase female subjectivity. One of the ways to escape this mastery is to permit female characters to be seen without being heard, as this would make them “inaccessible to definitive male interpretation” (Silverman 1988, 164), and the other is to allow them to be heard but not seen, which “would put her beyond the reach of the male gaze (which stands in here for the cultural ‘camera’) and release her voice from signifying obligation which that gaze enforces” (Silverman 1988, 164). However, though this double surveillance suggested by Silverman very much applies to the majority of the silent female characters, as previously mentioned, the silence of the female character

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does not always release her from the (narrative and visual) control of male characters. As will be discussed later in this chapter, in most of the examples, the silence of the female character that makes her inaccessible to male interpretation also becomes a medium that allows her story to be spoken by male characters: a tool that provides a male verbal and narrative point of view that restores and reaffirms male discursive and narrative authority. It is possible to argue that what Silverman neglects is the silent female characters’ relation to male characters on a verbal level. The issues of speech and voice – that is, how she is spoken of and what her silence allows to be made verbal by male characters – might very much (re)affirm male discursive authority. This neglected point is fundamental to this study, since this chapter aims to reveal how the silent female form functions to (re)distribute a role division between the speaker and the spoken-of in favour of men who were at risk of losing their discursive authority in the 1980s, both in the social and cinematic contexts. Innocence [Masumiyet] (Zeki Demirkubuz 1997) tells the story of Yusuf (Güven Kraç), who is released from prison after a ten-year sentence for killing his sister’s lover. After his release, he decides to go to Istanbul to find the father of an old prison mate who might help him to find a job. Before travelling to Istanbul, he goes to a small town to visit his brother-in-law (Ajlan Aktu÷) and his sister (Nihal G. Koldaú) at their flat. In that small town, Yusuf stays in a cheap hotel where he meets a couple, a bar singer woman, U÷ur (Derya Alabora), and her guard and pimp, Bekir (Haluk Bilginer), and befriends them. In the course of the narrative, it is revealed that Bekir is in love with U÷ur; however, she is in love with Zagor, who is seen in the film only in a photograph. After Bekir commits suicide, Yusuf takes on his role, not only becoming U÷ur’s guard and adopting Bekir’s bullying attitudes but also falling in unrequited love with U÷ur. The scene about Yusuf’s visit to his sister’s flat opens with his brotherin-law who is shown going down the stairs in a static shot, and as he goes out of the frame, Yusuf appears at the top of the stairs looking very anxious and moving slowly and reluctantly. Then the camera cuts to a two-shot of them, from the front, from the position of the door. Both the position of the camera and its focus on Yusuf underscores his anxiety and prepares us for the disturbing things which await him and the audience behind that door. The anxiety in relation to Yusuf’s sister is established with a cutaway to his sister opening the door in a tight three-shot sequence in which his sister does not give any reaction or say a word as she sees Yusuf at the door. The camera, depicting Yusuf’s sister in between Yusuf

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and his brother-in-law from behind them (Figure 2.1), creates a triangular image, which not only underscores her unresponsiveness, but also identifies a relation between her reaction, Yusuf’s anxiety and her husband. The eerie diagetic music coming from the television show dominates the next cutaway to the kitchen, where Yusuf sits at the kitchen table and keeps on glancing anxiously at his sister while she is preparing dinner without facing or talking to him. This sound, establishing a clear conflict with her silence, serves to underscore the tensions between them. As Yusuf’s sister leaves the room after setting the dinner table, again without saying a word, the tension rises. Chion suggests that one of the main functions of the mute character is to serve as a generator of doubt in the narrative arising from the question of whether s/he can or will speak (Chion [1947] 1999, 96). Here in this case, Yusuf sister’s silence, too, functions as a generator of doubt, in Chion’s terms (Chion [1947] 1999). When Yusuf and his brother-in-law sit down to dinner, the Brother-in-Law slowly slips into a long monologue, complaining that neither his child nor his wife are nice to him. The tension and doubt raised by the sister’s silent presence is relieved in the long monologue scene in which the Brother-inLaw rants that “everything is because of her!” and that she is responsible for his, as well as Yusuf’s, troubled life and on-going suffering. The Brother-in-Law: It’s been like this for years. I’m treated like an enemy. I come at night, and one goes to her room, the other watches TV. Does anyone ask how I am, if I am hungry or sick? No, never. I may as well be a dog. You know. What I have done to them? Don’t get the wrong idea, but you were much better off inside ... She made life worse for me, I was accused of being a pimp, a whoremonger ... Look at her. It’s like you killed her mother, not her lover!

His rage rises with every moment and at the end he starts shouting, “This is your brother. He spent years inside because of you”. The camera cuts with a reverse-angle on Yusuf, underscoring his angst, while he is saying “Don’t” as opposed to his brother-in-law’s accusation and rage. Then the Brother-in-Law starts weeping (Figure 2.2): The Brother-in-Law: Whatever I tried, I couldn’t tame her. The number of times I contemplated suicide. Tell me if I’m being wrong, Yusuf. What have I done to her? It’s me who had my pride hurt. Me who was cheated on. I haven’t been able to face my relatives for years. I’m asking you, what have I done wrong? I’ve acted like a human being and taken care of her. Is that it? What have I done to make her treat me like an enemy?

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2.1: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997)

2.2: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997)

The camera cuts back to Yusuf hanging his head. His non-reaction, setting a clear conflict with the earlier shot showing his angst, also prepares us for the next shot where the Brother-in-Law takes a sip from his rak in anger and gets up from the table. He starts yelling, facing the room in which his wife is sitting:

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The Brother-in-Law: You ignorant bitch! What the hell have I done to you? You mute bitch! You whore! You’ve been the death of me. You ruined me! Destroyed me! You’ve killed me. You buried me alive. What have I done?

In these scenes, the depiction of Yusuf’s sister as a generator of doubt and anxiety, positioning her as a kind of threat on the visual level and then demystifying her on the verbal level, attributes an authority to the male character. Moreover, as Anneke Smelik argues, a monologue highly subjectivises verbal and visual levels as it directly addresses the audience, and therefore “places them in a position of identification with the character” (Smelik 2001, 69). Moreover, the tight shots of the Brother-inLaw in this monologue scene strengthen the effect of his lines and serve to emphasise his entrapment in his ruined life. Furthermore, the silent female character is excluded from the filmic text both on the visual and verbal levels as she is in the off-screen space after preparing the dinner and she does not/cannot talk throughout the whole scene. This exclusion serves to prioritise what is spoken about her. In this respect, from the beginning of the film, the scapegoating of Yusuf’s sister through the monologue of her husband contributes to the portrayal of the female character as an “improper” woman, a threat, trouble, and contributes to the inducement of empathy, if not sympathy, with his suffering and victimhood. Her silent presence becomes an instrument, in Chion’s terms, to register his experience from his point of view. Furthermore, her silence and her visual absence in the off-screen space during his accusations continuously raise the expectancy of a reply; however, that is also defused as the Brother-inLaw articulates that she is mute. Her exclusion from the filmic text along with the use of monologue serves to produce knowledge about her from a male point of view. Later in the film, Yusuf reveals, again in a long monologue, how he shot his sister and her lover in an honour crime, how her lover had died and she had become mute when the bullet injured her tongue. Chion argues that the power of the mute comes from the fact that the crucial knowledge of the story is mostly lodged in herself/himself (Chion [1947] 1999). In the same vein, Silverman suggests that to permit the female character to be seen without being heard would make her inaccessible to male interpretation and therefore to male control (Silverman 1990). However, contrary to Chion’s and Silverman’s arguments, here, in this example, her silence becomes the tool that functions as “a niche of power”, in Brown’s terms (Brown 2003), through which she is kept under verbal control: her story and the knowledge about her are revealed only by the male characters’ monologues, and that withdraws the possibility of her

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having a power position and constrains her to their points of view on the verbal level. Moreover, in the larger context, the use of the female character as a scapegoat and speaking of her as a troublemaker or “bitch” in Innocence are supposed to serve what Claire Johnston and Pam Cook argue, following Levi-Strauss’ theory of exchange: Depicted as only having an existence within the discourse of men: she is “spoken”, she does not speak. As an object of exchange between men, a sign oscillating between the images of prostitute and mother figure, she represents the means by which men express their relationship with each other, the means through which they come to understand themselves and each other. (Cook and Johnston 1974; quoted in Creed 2004, 20)

Therefore, the overtones of the scapegoating in this scene not only serve to assign a role division between the troublemaker female and wounded male characters by representing her in terms of a sign, it also “specifies her place (as object) and their place (as subject) within a phallocentric culture. Man ‘speaks’, woman is ‘spoken’” (Creed 2004, 20). As Pascal Bonitzer argues, the voice speaking for and on behalf of the silent character dominates, registers and fixes her (Bonitzer [1976] 2007). Frat Yücel suggests that the use of female silence can be considered as one of the consequences of the “style of confession” that dominates the films of the new cinema of Turkey: [T]he directors who make films in an individualistic style … by means of their films, make confessions about their lives and their view of life. … Woman is often presented as an object of confession. Either a striving confession is made possible through her … or she herself becomes the person to whom the confession is addressed. … The same tendency can be seen to a certain extent in films that use a conventional narrative style. … It is possible to argue that silences of the female characters are related to the narratives that are designed to set the scene for male characters’ confessions. Female characters are included in the narrative in order to reveal male characters’ weaknesses, dilemmas and loss of power.1

It is possible to argue that the male characters not only confess and assign the silent female character as the object of confession, but also that they mostly fix her by speaking on her behalf and by providing knowledge about her, which creates a role division between the speaker and the

1

Frat Yücel, personal interview, May 29, 2010.

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spoken-of and, therefore, assigns discursive authority to the male characters. The gendered/ing technologies (de Lauretis 1987) of Innocence on thematic, verbal and visual levels are also seen in various ways in other examples. Portrayal of women as scapegoats and portrayal of female sexuality as troublesome on a thematic level; revealing the knowledge about her and/or her story from male character’s point of view and assigning a role division between the “speaker” male and “spoken-of” female on a verbal level; and portrayal of the female character as a threat that is then put in a “safe place” on a visual level are used, in one way or another, in almost every film that involves a silent female character. These gendered/ing functions of the silent female form, I argue, have a very close relation to the changing social and cinematic gender order in Turkey in the 1980s. Until the 1980s, female characters in Turkish cinema, where melodramatic modality constitutes the founding element, were defined in a strict dichotomy of “pure” vs. “evil” femininities that were determined according to their relation to family and to extramarital sexuality. In terms of gender roles and attributes, melodrama as a genre portrays heterosexual love and family in favour of the gender status quo (Gledhill [1987] 1994), and the melodramatic mode values moral order (Brooks, 1976). Therefore, the relation between female representations, family and conservatism might be seen as a consequence of the fact that melodrama, as a dominant mode in classical Turkish cinema, was employed in all genres and narrative patterns. There were two major female representational forms that went through all genres in classical Turkish cinema: the virtuous and the vicious. Whilst the virtuous female characters were portrayed as mothers, wives or innocent girls (meaning virgins) waiting for their happy ending (meaning marriage), the vicious ones were the prostitutes, femmes fatales, temptresses and/or “fallen” women who posed a threat to the virtuous or sacred family (Abisel 2005; Dönmez-Colin 2004; 2008; Esen 2000; Kaplan 2004; Suner 2010). Yeúilçam endorsed the conservative values of society and [the] sacrosanctity of marriage. Sexuality was reserved for “bad women”. The vamps and prostitutes could kiss, undress and make love, but innocent “family” girls never took off their clothes and never went to bed, and “fallen” women, although honourable, never found happiness. As social evils they had to be eliminated. (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 143)

In classical Turkish cinema, as mentioned above, female characters were generally defined in a binary opposition: either as faithful, obedient,

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altruist and passive, i.e. “pure”, or as dangerous, seductive, unfaithful and destructive, i.e. “evil”. Moreover, these rules applied to the narrative: if a virtuous woman’s husband is unfaithful, she accepts the situation and waits for him to come back. If she is not married, she dreams about a family. If she is a mother, she makes sacrifices for her family’s sake (Abisel 2005). By virtue of this feature of poetic justice in the melodramatic mode, female characters who have a proper position in the gender order/scenario are always rewarded with a happy ending, while the evil women are always punished with death or unhappiness. Accordingly, as film scholar Nilgün Abisel argues, Turkish cinema produced and reproduced definitions of femininity that were reduced to passivity, altruism or evil, in accord with the needs of the gender order (Abisel 2005, 139). Female characters’ obedience to the rules and roles of the gender order were represented as proof of being “pure” and “acceptable”. In fact, the unbalanced role division in the gender order of the society and the discrimination against women in social, political and economic realms are normalised in these films (Abisel 2005; Kaplan 2004; Krel 2005). On the other hand, the 1980s witnessed a shift in the representations of women in Turkish cinema. A new image of women, in opposition to the classical gender order of Turkish cinema, emerged through a new subgenre called “women’s films”. In her book, Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation, film scholar Eylem Atakav focuses on the changing representations of women in Turkish cinema after the September 12, 1980 military coup. Atakav argues that the shift in the representations of women was due to the forced depoliticisation following the military coup that prompted directors to focus on individuals (Atakav 2013): This shift was from one dimensional and artificial to multi-dimensional characters. Until this point, “good and bad” qualities were never found together within a single character. Despite sporadic early attempts it is really only from the 1980s that film characters were freed from simple binary oppositions and allowed to move from superficiality to a greater degree of depth and complexity. Hence, the cinema began to liberate itself from the portrayal of conventional female characters and started concentrating on the human woman. (Atakav 2013, 3)

Even though this group of films is called women’s films, it is important to remark that they were not necessarily feminist films and were directed mostly by men. In her article “Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film”, Maria Laplace argues for a feminist film analysis that focuses on the text in association with the historical context in order to

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situate female subjectivity and desire in the complex relations of patriarchy (Laplace [1987] 1994). According to Laplace, the typical women’s film in Hollywood cinema is “distinguished by its female protagonist, female point of view and its narrative which generally revolves around the traditional realism of women’s experience: the familial, the domestic, the romantic”; while the dominant view is that the main problem with these films is that “masculinist discourses inevitably (re)position the women’s film for the patriarchy” (Laplace [1987] 1994, 139). In the same vein, at the beginning of her article “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address”, where she analyses women’s films in terms of the persistent use of certain registers in association with female characters, Mary Ann Doane also notes the masculinisation of these texts: Given the apparent “masculinisation” of the very process of looking in the cinema, these films often manifest a certain convolution and instability in their attempted construction of female fantasy. The narratives assume a compatibility between the idea of female fantasy and that of persecution – a persecution effected by husband, family or lover. There is an almost obsessive association of the female protagonist with a deviation from some norm of mental stability or health, resulting in the recurrent investigation of physical mechanisms frequently linked with [the] “feminine condition” – masochism, hysteria, neurosis, paranoia. It is as though the insistent attempt at an inscription of female subjectivity and desire, within a phallocentrically organised discourse such as the classical Hollywood text, produced gaps and incoherences which the films can barely contain. (Doane [1987] 1994, 285)

Along the same line, Atakav argues that even though there was a profound shift in representational forms, “films [mostly] continued to objectify women; to present them as having a necessarily limited range of choices in a patriarchal society; and to remain ambivalent about whether women are ultimately capable of exercising independent agency” (Atakav 2013, 3). Nevertheless, as Laplace argues, it is possible to trace a female discourse by considering this genre as the intersection of different discourses bearing on women, such as women’s associations, articles in women’s magazines and mass female audience novels (Laplace [1987] 1994, 139). In the context of Turkish cinema, where these women’s films can also be considered as both the reproduction and the repositioning of a masculinist discourse, Laplace’s suggestion of a historical reading of these films is extremely important and useful as a means to interpret these films in the specific historical context of the second wave feminist movement in Turkey in the 1980s. These films, which were produced and written by men, may sustain the masculinist discourse on the one hand, but on the

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other, they carry the potential to reveal and criticise the male domination and suppression prevalent in Turkish society. And this shift in the cinematic gender order was triggered, for the most part, by the impact of the second-wave feminist movement in Turkey (Atakav 2013; DönmezColin 2008; Erdo÷an and Göktürk 2001; Suner 2010). As Atakav argues, “cinema acted as a political tool representing the issues dealt [with] within feminism” (Atakav 2013, 52). Several themes such as female sexuality and domestic violence were brought on to the agenda by this movement and thus were also projected onto the screen. As the first democratic opposition rose after the military rule, the second-wave feminist movement started with small groups, which had no relation to the state, where the primary aim was the recognition of women’s multiple oppressions. “The personal is political” became the motto, and the issues relating to the “personal”, such as domestic violence, sexual harassment, sexual independence and abortion rights, were brought onto the agenda of Turkish society, where women of all classes were suffering different oppressions: Marriage was seen as the only legitimate way of life for women; the right to work remained in the abstract; there were inequalities in professions and wages; domestic violence, about which discussion was taboo, was widespread; and male dominance was the most unquestioned and normalised social rule (Tekeli 1995, 36). With the second wave, gender discrimination was problematised at various levels, including the legislative, political, cultural and discursive. In fact, the most important gain of all was the raising of public attention and the increasing support against the oppression of women in Turkey. [The] new feminist movement was perhaps the first authentic example of a democratic movement in Turkey; despite the smaller number of its activists, the movement was able to mobilize a broad women’s movement in society. Political parties, classical women’s organisations and the press were among the first to be influenced by the movement and finally the small activist groups were successful in bringing women’s issues to the head of the political agenda by the end of the decade. (Tekeli 1995, 15)

Even if the aim of reshaping the gender order of the society could not be fully realised, it definitely caused a “crisis” in the gender order, as women gained greater visibility and a “voice” in all realms of society. The issues brought forth by feminists appeared in all aspects of cultural life, especially in cinema. A new female image appeared, characterised by independence, awareness of sexuality and her conscious struggle against the sexist norms of society. Along with this new female image and the increase in the number of films that deal with women’s issues, “the

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audience is given the opportunity to empathise with the characters’ situations and experiences … and, consequently … consciousness is raised in the audience in relation to these topics” (Atakav 2013, 51). Moreover, some films brought a self-reflexive stance to the narration, and therefore presented a critique of the cinematic gender order produced by Yeúilçam. Vasfiye is Her Name [Ad Vasfiye] (Atf Ylmaz 1985) is the most referenced film among the examples of this sub-genre, not only because it is a cult classic film, but also because it adopts a self-reflexive stance to stereotypical representations of women (Akbal Süalp 2006; Dönmez-Colin 2008; Gökçe 2004; Suner 2010). The film revolves around the female character, Vasfiye (Müjde Ar), whose “real” story is claimed to be told from the perspectives of five different male characters in the course of the narrative. The film reveals and criticises the male point of view that is dominant in the narratives of Turkish cinema. The film opens with two men talking in front of a wall covered by the posters of a female singer. One of them is a writer (Erol Durak) complaining about not being able to find a muse for his next novel. The other one says that anything can be a subject for a novel, and points out the posters on the wall while asking, “Who knows what her real name is?” As the writer starts looking more carefully at the poster, we hear a male voice in the background saying, “Vasfiye is her real name”. The man introduces himself as Vasfiye’s husband and says that he will tell the writer her real story. In the course of the narrative, the writer meets three other men who claim that they are Vasfiye’s husbands and that they will tell him her real story. Each story, sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradicting one another, is told through a flashback sequence. At the end of the film, the writer is shown in the same place where he first saw Vasfiye’s posters. His friend again comes into view and asks him whether he has found her. The writer says, “Vasfiye is her name”, and then his image cracks like a mirror. According to Z. Tül Akbal Süalp, whilst four of the male characters represent four dominant Yeúilçam male stereotypes, the film as a whole mirrors the male directors’ narration of women in Turkish cinema, and it should be considered as a film that has self-conscious awareness (Akbal Süalp 2006, 128). It is obvious that women’s films projected the increased voice of women in society onto the screen, and brought about a change in the cinematic gender order through their female characters. Furthermore, the topics related to women’s conditions in Turkey were opened to debate in the juxtaposition of women’s films and the feminist movement. Apart from the changes in the content and narration, it is possible to suggest that these films also disrupted the gendered voice regime of Yeúilçam. What

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Silverman suggests about the examples of classical Hollywood cinema (Silverman 1988), in terms of the female voice, is also valid for the voice regime of classical Turkish cinema, even though there is not a significant study on this issue: the female voice is kept in the diegesis and under the narrative control of the male character. While their voices are tied to bodily spectacle, such as crying, screaming and murmuring, their speech is also characterised as “unreliable, thwarted, or acquiescent” (Silverman 1990, 309). Whilst female characters either weep with pain or scream with fear as part of their emotional expressiveness and excessiveness, the male voice becomes informative, corrective and determining, and bears the aural authority. On the other hand, female laughter, which might have a subversive potential, is an attribute of the “evil” woman in Turkish cinema. Although its “threatening” voice opens a momentary gap in the narration in some classical films, it is definitely punished in the end, usually by death. If women’s films disrupted this gendered voice regime to some extent, it might have happened through the female scream that is not of horror or shock, but rather of rebellion. Chion defines the term “screaming point” as something that generally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman ... which above all must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point a maximum impact. (Chion [1947] 1999, 76-77)

Chion notes the screaming point with an emphasis on its placement, and indicates its function as a revelation of the “unthinkable inside the thought, of the indeterminate inside the spoken, of unrepresentability inside representation” (Chion [1947] 1999, 77). He argues that the scream of a woman in a male-directed film inscribes a moment beyond his mastery as it attracts everything into itself with its fascination and centripetal force (Chion [1947] 1999, 79). Accordingly, the female scream has a lot of potential to present a female discourse in the narrative. In almost every film of this sub-genre, there is a point where the female protagonist screams when she can no longer stand the conditions surrounding her. In Secret Intentions [Gizli Duygular] (ùerif Gören 1984), the protagonist (Müjde Ar) comes to the screaming point when she cannot stand the traditional gender roles and positions attributed to a single woman. She screams “Go away!” to the neighbours coming to her door to complain when she, as a single woman, brings a man to her house. In Oh! Belinda [Aah! Belinda] (Atf Ylmaz 1986), the female character, Serap (Müjde Ar), screams “Enough!” towards the end of the film when she cannot take

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it anymore, playing the hard role of a middle-class housewife. In The Escape [Firar] (ùerif Gören 1984), the protagonist (Hülya Koçyi÷it) cannot stand not seeing her children while she is in prison and screams just after the delirium that “These walls will not allow me out!” All of these screams are rebellious, cries of resistance and expressions of oppression. After the decade of women’s films and after the women’s movement opened up a gap in the dominant fiction in terms of gender representations, the mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of films that addressed masculinity more than ever before, directly or indirectly, and from various aspects, particularly by placing male subjectivity at the very centre of the narratives. This emergence is argued by some Turkish film scholars as a “response” – indicating a crisis in masculinities – to the women’s films of the 1980s and to the changing gender order in Turkish society (Çetin Özkan 2009; Oktan 2009; Ulusay 2004). Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue: Feminism troubled the system of cultural representations that imposed male norms on women, and thereby troubled the constructions of male sexual identity, inasmuch as that depends on idealized representations of males as agents and of women as passive objects of pursuit and as tokens of male prestige. (Ryan and Kellner 1990, 150)

Among these “reactionary” male narratives, a number of films praise the hyper-masculinity of male bonding as a barrier against the “bad world outside”; such that film scholar Ahmet Gürata suggests applying Freud’s term “regime of brothers” to understand the recent epoch in the cinema of Turkey: “Regime of brothers is a state where the paternal authority lacks and therefore, a kind of solidarity is constructed among men in order to substitute it. … [I]t includes crime, violence and vigilantism.”2 As Roger Horrocks argues, exaggerated demonstrations of manhood very much indicate that masculinity is under threat (Horrocks 1994, 89; quoted in Ulusay 2004, 160). The “excessive” representations of masculinity and/or male bonding must be considered as compensation for lost, or at best, wounded, discursive authority, regenerating the myth of masculinity on screen (Oktan 2009; Ulusay 2004). In the same vein, regarding male films and the masculinity crisis in the new cinema, film scholar Ahmet Oktan suggests that the exaggerated machismo on screen can be considered as a kind of projection of men’s insecurity in the social realm (Oktan 2009, 204). 2

Ahmet Gürata, personal interview, May 14, 2010.

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To consider these male-centred narratives of the new cinema with their attendant male bonding/machismo as a reaction to the rising feminine voice on screen and in society is quite logical. However, significant numbers of male characters in the new cinema are depicted as good-fornothings, imprudent, unsuccessful, weak, fragile, clumsy and impotent: characters that are far away from the ideal or hegemonic masculinity – something very controversial in the dominant fiction and representations of the classical Turkish cinema (Arslan 2009b; Çetin Özkan 2009; Kabaday 2009; Oktan 2009; Ulusay 2004). The lost or wounded authority of male characters is represented by disability, mental disorder, memory loss, impotency and/or abasement and despair (Kabaday 2009, 170). Following her article, “Masochism and Subjectivity”, in which Silverman denotes male masochism and male lack as a “cultural secret” (Silverman 1980), she argues, in her book, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, that the masculinities that are positioned as “marginal” to the conventional or normative definition of masculinity point out the hole and lack at the heart of male subjectivity (Silverman 1992). She suggests that the normative fiction of masculinity is built upon the denial of lack, wound, passivity and masochism (Silverman 1992). This denial is shaped by what she calls the “dominant fiction” – the images and narratives through which society configures a consensus. Dominant fiction identifies the male subject with power, control and mastery (Silverman 1992). In his article focusing on the discursive changes regarding male subjectivity in the new cinema, Savaú Arslan argues that the “examples of the new cinema in Turkey present us with ‘deviant’ masculinities which put classic masculinity into a process of crisis and reappraisal” (Arslan 2009b, 259). Following Silverman’s theory on the “dominant fiction”, which lives on a faith in proper/adequate masculinities and “forms the stable core around which a nation’s and a period’s ‘reality’ coheres” (Silverman 1992, 41-42), Arslan suggests that examples of the new cinema, especially of art house productions, challenge so-far dominant representations of masculinity in Turkish cinema through “masochistic subtexts”, by putting male characters’ authority in danger (Arslan 2009b). However, as Arslan notes, it is the male subject, the victim, who writes the screenplay where he stages his own victimhood (Arslan 2009b, 263). Victimisation and male suffering become the main tropes that are associated with male subjectivity. Akbal Süalp argues that the dominant track of the new cinema that involves “male weepies” and “arabesque-noir” is centred around self-pitying male characters, none of whom take responsibility for their miserable lives or question the socio-political reasons behind it. Instead, these characters blame everyone else, especially women, for their

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oppressed positions and victimised roles (Akbal Süalp 1998; 1999; 2008; 2009; 2010a; 2011; etc.). Therefore, as Arslan and Akbal Süalp suggest, male characters realise themselves through the scenarios they put themselves in; they praise their victimised and suffering positions; thus, masochism forms one of the main manifestations of masculinity in the new cinema’s gender order. As Silverman notes, the dominant fiction can change and be contested, especially when radical changes and movements take place in society. In these times, male subjectivity projects its inadequacies on to the female in order to defuse or allay the masculinity crisis through disavowal and fetishism (Silverman 1988; 1992). After the decade of women’s films in which audiences watched various aspects of women’s oppression and suffering on screen, the mid-1990s witnessed the glorification of male wounds and suffering. These “wounded” male characters glorify their loss, realise themselves through appropriation of their positions of victimhood, and project the responsibility for their crisis on to female characters, so as to reveal, I argue, that men also suffer and are also oppressed. Therefore, instead of trying to regain or claim a position of power on the representational level, I argue, they regain a position of power on the discursive level. Actually, the representations of masculinities in the sub-genres of the 1980s foreshadowed these masochistic subtexts. As Ryan and Kellner argue in another context, films are the sites of a melee of representations over which the (changing) discourses of the social and cultural field are transcoded (Ryan and Kellner 1990, 12-13). According to them, the legitimacy crisis that the U.S. government went through in the 1970s due to widespread unemployment, corruption, and economic recession, had a major effect on cinema. Crisis either “promotes a regressive reaction, whereby more familiar and secure traditional social models and cultural representations are revived”, resulting in “a more conservative turn in the popular imaginary”, or leads to the emergence of new representational codes (Ryan and Kellner 1990, 49). Turkish cinema in the 1980s did not witness an increase in disaster films or horror films, as did Hollywood, since these were not prominent genres – they were not even present – in Turkish cinema. However, the conservative turn and/or the metaphors of fear and anxiety could easily be traced in the newly emergent genres as a projection of crisis in society, due to the massive and rapid social, political and economic changes that Turkey went through. The first epiphany of the crisis is that male characters in social comedies of the 1980s are frequently depicted as going insane. Övgü Gökçe argues that male characters’ loss of power is linked to the emergence of women’s films, because liberation tends to be represented through the female characters, suggesting that the

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male characters start losing their minds along with their power (Gökçe 2009). According to Gökçe, this representation is the projection of a crisis that middle-class families experienced due to the neo-economic reforms in the 1980s, which triggered consumerism and a rapid move up the social ladder (Gökçe 2009). Furthermore, Gökçe points out a gendered tendency in these films: There is always a housewife who wants to have a brand new washing machine, television and a diamond ring from her husband, and a malcontent mother-in-law who reminds the male character of his disappointment, inefficacy and incompetence (Gökçe 2009). In her study focusing on one of these films, Honest [Namuslu] (Ertem E÷ilmez 1984), film scholar Serpil Krel indicates that such films produce a binary opposition between genders, through portrayals of “honest” male characters who desperately struggle within the wheels of the neo-liberalist system (in which their honesty is tested so that they become insane at the end) because of their “greedy” wives or mothers-in-law, who represent the dominant values of the capitalist system, such as greed, lust and desire for material wealth (Krel 2010). She argues that women’s stances vis-à-vis socio-economic changes are overlooked in these films (Krel 2010). It is possible to argue that these films both reveal and try to avoid the crisis caused by the increasing voice of women in the society, by attributing negative values to female characters and by holding them responsible for the “poor” condition of men. A different projection of a change in the gender order is seen in September 12 films, a sub-genre focusing on the traumatic effects on individual male lives after the September 12, 1980 military coup and the subsequent regime of the junta. These films mostly tell of male characters’ alienation and internal feuds after their release from prison. In most of the films, either the male protagonists have problems in their relations with women (Gökçe 2009) or the female representations are problematic. The films revolve around male characters, as if only men were tortured or convicted in the junta’s regime. As in the social comedies, the traumatic experiences of women are mostly not articulated in these films. Female characters in secondary parts have no agency or voice and are portrayed as unsympathetic and disregardful of what the male characters have been through. In this context, Asuman Suner, for instance, criticises the gender politics of Yol [The Way] (Ylmaz Güney and ùerif Gören 1981) because it denies the agency and voice of the female character, who is punished for her adultery in a voyeuristic style (Suner 1998). Another popular genre of the 1980s was arabesque films, named after the popular music genre that “emerged in Turkey at the end of 1960s and

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that captured the passions of rural migrants living in gecekondus, or urban squatter settlements” (Özbek 1997, 211). In her study on arabesque music in Turkey, Meral Özbek argues that arabesque music lost its subversive content in the 1980s because of its adaptation to a neo-liberal economic restructuring (Özbek 1997, 212). Özbek argues that the changing nature of arabesque music in the 1980s is relevant to the content of the arabesque films, in which music stars act and sing the songs: “During the 1980s, although the theme of love remained a dominant feature of arabesk [sic] music, the political protest of earlier songs evaporated, as did the tension in the music between grief and hope” (Özbek 1997, 221). Through male weeping, crying and singing, arabesque films told the stories of “poor” – financially broke and lonely – rural men, who suffer in the city because of the class, region and social divisions between “us and them”. Although they might seem to expose male vulnerability, therefore an “ambiguous male ethos” (Özbek 1997, 223), they also reproduce a male-dominant gender order, which recalls traditional gender roles by using melodramatic forms: women as either innocent, faithful and good housewives, or as vicious, over-sexualised home-wreckers (Kaplan 2004, 99). As the narrative of arabesque films is always told from the perspective of the poor, suffering rural man, its main motif is man’s cry against an unjust world (alienation in the modern city) and against his destiny [kader]. This motif is usually told through a love story, with female characters designed in accord with this class-gender-region intersection. Whilst rural female characters, representatives of traditional values and “pure” womanhood, are sublimated, the urban independent women and those who adapt to city life are stigmatised as representations of degeneration. In terms of the use of voice, arabesque films painted an unconventional picture, for it was the male character’s voice singing and crying about his suffering. In fact, this male cry was inscribed in the highly virile arabesque culture with female attributes, “such as ‘passive’, ‘depressed’ and ‘yelling’” (Özbek 1997, 223). These male characters took the place of the weeping, screaming and singing female characters in the classical Turkish cinema, with one difference: His cry was not because of love. Though love is the main subject of arabesque films, the crying, weeping and singing of the male character is caused by the “system” itself, which is charged with a severe sense of injustice that makes love impossible. Representations of victimised/wounded masculinity central to narratives are, of course, not specific to the Turkish cinema or to the new cinema of Turkey – for instance, traumatised veterans or unemployed male forms are frequently seen in the films of post-war and post-industrial eras. However,

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the peculiar feature of the victimised masculinities of the new cinema is that the reasons behind the wounds and the damage are not questioned or brought forth; “we do not know why they are so angry, so lost” (Akbal Süalp 2009, 230). If there is any reason set forth, it is mostly associated with female characters rather than the socio-political context. Female characters, who are depicted as vicious – if not femmes fatales – and portrayed in groundless evilness, are the scapegoats held responsible for the tormented lives of men (Akbal Süalp 2008; 2009; 2010a; 2011). These women are the bad fate of the male characters who are wretched and lost. Yet, what is more problematic is that the only fixed variant of cause and effect relationship in these films, where no social analysis or social context is provided, is these femmes fatales, or at best vicious, women. (Akbal Süalp 2010a, 113)

In the context of Hollywood, Ryan and Kellner argue that the increasing rage towards women and use of women as scapegoats in the male-centred narratives must also be considered as a part of the reaction to the impact of feminism and women’s films (Ryan and Kellner 1990, 150). In the same vein, Oktan also suggests that the increasing representations of vicious women are indicators of a crisis in confidence towards women (Oktan 2009, 197). On the other hand, these masochistic manifestations of masculinities through self-pitying and self-victimization go hand in hand with “sadism”, if we can call it such. Moreover, expressions of sadism, graphic physical violence, abuse and humiliation are directed for the most part at female characters. Female characters are both subjected to and responsible for “wounded” men’s violence. In this way, the scapegoating of women predicates the justification of male suffering, their wounds, impotency and violence: These women are portrayed “as morbid provocateurs and seducers who lead men to commit crime, violence and irrational actions and, of course, become the victims of these brutalities and violence” (Akbal Süalp 2011) as an atonement. In this way, the lost authority of male characters is reassigned over female characters, with overtones of justified violence. The abovementioned scene in Innocence continues with the Brother-inLaw’s yelling turning to weeping, and then he takes off his belt, goes to the other room where his wife sits, and starts beating her with his belt (Figure 2.3). In this scene, the camera shows him beating her in the background through a window opening to that room, while Yusuf is watching

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2.3: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997)

them from his chair in the foreground. Though the beating shown behind the window detaches the violent punishment from Yusuf, it also emphasises the point that he is just watching, thus condoning. As the long monologue of the male character justifies the gender-based violence, not only is the rage and violence towards the woman justified by a causal relation, but also any possibility that her silence might open a gap in the narrative is annihilated. Furthermore, while the male character is beating his wife, he deliriously says, “What have I done?” Actually this line displaces “What have I not done?” The male character’s “manly” fears and anxieties of “not being masculine enough” are avoided by projecting the “blame” onto the female character, without losing his raison d’être, namely his victimhood. In feminist psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s views, a man’s fear of a woman is very much connected with the feeling of not being “man enough”, seeing as within the script of traditional gender roles, men are expected to be powerful and in control and therefore, any kind of failure might suggest that a man is not man (quoted in Ussher 1997, 89). Here, the husband’s violence can be seen as a response to his wife’s uncontrolled sexuality, which evokes his manly fear of rejection and inadequacy. The fear of not being man enough can be considered as a kind of castration anxiety, from which the male character in this example escapes through the use of off-screen space and monologue: Though her body is kept off-screen, the monologue serves to remind us of the wife’s presence. In this way, the male character’s mastery is affirmed again. Her threatening sexuality, her deviance as the reason for his fears and

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anxieties, is spoken of, then destroyed and rendered impotent through symbolic and physical violence. As Smelik indicates, “[sexual] violence, then, is an experience that can in no way constitute subjectivity. On the contrary, it undoes and destroys the speaking subject; the violated subject can only be a ‘non-subject’” (Smelik 2001, 88). The silent female character of the film is a non-subject as she is destroyed and violated on verbal and visual levels by being positioned merely as an object of accusation, punishment and violence. Again, she functions as an instrument to strengthen the male character’s experience and feeling. Chion’s argument about the mute character’s power, which is derived from her unlimited knowledge and vision, “potentially omniscient, panoptic and omnipotent” (Chion [1947] 1999, 97), does not apply in this example. In Innocence, her presumably undeterminable power and her possibility of being the subject of the gaze and speech – therefore holding a discursive authority – are made almost impossible by keeping her under control on thematic, verbal and visual levels. In The Waterfall [ùellale] (Semir Aslanyürek 2001), the silent female character also functions as an instrument to prioritise the male experience and male point of view. In the course of the narrative, a man, Sami (Ege Aydan), is occasionally seen in the streets of the village, going after his wife, Nergis (Nurgül Yeúilçay), for an unknown reason, with a cleaver in his hand. During these tag scenes, he constantly yells at her, “Do not run!”, “Stop!” and “I will kill you!” in outbursts of anger; but with an “evil” smile on her face, his wife does not say a word. It is understood from the other characters’ conversations that “he went mad because of love”. Contrary to other examples, even though she is threatened by the cleaver, she is not depicted as vulnerable or suffering; rather, the close-ups of her face indicate that she seems to enjoy driving her husband mad, which somehow reveals his suffering because of her “evil” self, and might justify the man’s going after her with a cleaver and any further violence that she might be subjected to later in the narrative. Furthermore, in a later scene when Sami weeps and gives his reasons for going after his wife with a cleaver, he cries: “Nergis! You bitch! I’m gonna die before I have a child! Couldn’t hold her even once since we got married! She will cause my kin’s extinction!” Like the monologue scene in Innocence, here, the silent female character is made knowable from the male character’s point of view with a high tone of accusation. This scene both presents her as the reason for his crisis (on the verbal level) and the vehicle (on the narrative level) through which his sufferings and anxieties are articulated.

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On the visual level, the silent character’s body is often put in a safe place through various devices that are related to gender-based violence and voyeurism. Sometimes they are rendered weak and impotent, as in The Ivy Mansion: Life [Asmal Konak: Hayat] (Abdullah O÷uz 2003), and The Messenger [Ulak] (Ça÷an Irmak 2007); sometimes they are dead, raped or badly wounded, as in On Board [Gemide] (Serdar Akar 1998) and Istanbul Under My Wings [østanbul Kanatlarmn Altnda] (Mustafa Altoklar 1996); sometimes they are under the threat of a gun/knife/cleaver, as in The Waterfall. On the other hand, it is possible to argue that some of these films may open up the possibility for subversive readings by exposing, voluntarily or involuntarily, the gender order’s violent control over women through the shocking explicitness of the gender-based violence and the self-destructive agency of female characters. Therefore, these may also serve to expose the horrors perpetrated on women, by revealing the gender based-violence that is usually hidden behind the thick walls of the personal sphere. These films might involve the possibility of being read as the reflection of heterosexual male control over women’s bodies and lives, of the marginalisation of women and of disorder in the gender order of the society. These may in turn function as an unmasking of the male-dominant system, as the female characters’ silences make visible the silenced women in Turkey from different perspectives (Güçlü 2010b, 83). However, in all of these films, even though the characters differ in the ways in which they are associated with silence, overemphasised accusation and/or gender-based violence mostly serves to put women’s silent presences into a safe or “proper” place by naming them as troublemakers and rendering them in weak and suffering bodies, therefore minimizing the possibility that these female silences might have a voice on their own and signify themselves on the thematic, verbal and visual levels. Instead, the silences of female characters contribute as vehicles in the narration. As Chion argues, mute characters play subservient roles, as instruments to reveal and generate doubt or catalyse action in the narrative (Chion [1947] 1999). In Innocence, even though the silent female character is then put in a safe place on the thematic, verbal and visual levels, she also becomes the one who serves to reveal and make visible male characters’ anxieties and fears. Moreover, the silence of the female character makes the husband confront his guilt, fear and anxiety, and therefore himself. Chion argues that everyone feels unsure and guilty next to the mute character since the role of moral conscience is attributed to her/him (Chion [1947] 1999). In the monologue scenes in Innocence, Yusuf’s brother-inlaw manages to avoid the feeling of guilt by accusing and blaming his wife for his suffering. However, Yusuf is shown to be disturbed and anxious

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from the earliest scenes. The tension between Yusuf and his sister is emphasised in two subsequent scenes when Yusuf goes to his sister’s flat again, one after the middle of the film and the other towards the end. Yusuf’s second visit to his sister’s flat is designed in a similar mise-enscène, while underlining a clear contrast with the first visit. The camera, set again in place of the door, shows Yusuf knocking at the door in a tight medium close-up of his anxious face. Then it cuts to his sister opening the door in a two-shot. Yusuf is framed from behind in the foreground, which again emphasises his sister’s flat facial expression. Then it shows Yusuf, sitting in the same place as before, in the same position, and watching his sister in the other room behind the window. However, the same frame is shot from a closer angle and that arouses an expectation of a reaction from him. He goes to her room, and the camera shows his sister looking down, again with a flat expression, while we hear Yusuf saying, “Sister” (Figures 2.4 and 2.5). Then the camera cuts away to Yusuf in a park, sitting alone on a bench and thinking. This cutaway maintains his sister’s silence in relation to Yusuf, as a generator of doubt and as a means of revealing his guilty conscience. On the occasion of his third visit, the camera, positioned behind the window, shows Yusuf approaching his sister, who is sitting in her room. Yusuf sinks to his knees and in tears, begs her, “Forgive me!” (Figure 2.6) In this scene, although the camera shows Yusuf’s regret and apology behind the window’s tulle curtain, thus segregating or setting a distance from Yusuf’s point of view, the tension is released when the scene cuts to his sister looking sadly on while he is crying and grovelling, and that arouses a feeling of empathy in the audience. The silence of the sister that thus far functions as a generator of doubt in relation to Yusuf is displaced, leading Yusuf to confront his guilty conscience and himself. Yusuf visits his sister three times in the whole narrative and the timing of these scenes is suggestive in relation to Yusuf’s guilty conscience: one is after his release from the prison, the second is just after taking up Bekir’s role, and the third is after getting into trouble with the police because of U÷ur. Whenever Yusuf has to have a confrontation with the Janus-face of his conscience, and therefore with himself, he returns to his sister’s flat. While he injured his sister and killed her lover in the name of honour, he takes up the role of a pimp and gets in trouble with the police for the sake of his love for a prostitute. However, this narrative function is nothing to do with the female experience, point of view or subjectivity. Even though momentary gaps open up the possibility of recognition and acknowledgement of her experience, acknowledgement does not “gain a hearing” in Minhha’s terms (Minh-ha 1989) as these gaps/doubts function as a vehicle through which male characters’ inner selves are opened up. As Suner argues,

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2.4 and 2.5: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997)

muteness in Innocence does not function as an articulation of the mute character (Suner 2006, 199). Rather, female silence, I argue, is a narrative tool that makes male anxieties and masculinities in crisis seen and heard on screen, and that allows the fear of losing “voice” to be allayed by projecting it onto the female characters.

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2.6: Innocence (Demirkubuz 1997)

In the same vein, in The Ivy Mansion: Life, which will be discussed in depth in the fourth chapter, Bahar’s (Nurgül Yeúilçay) silence, due to her being in a coma, is not only used as a generator of doubt but also as a means to reveal and to open to empathy Seymen’s (Özcan Deniz) anxieties and sufferings. Especially in the therapy scenes, where he speaks mostly in monologues, the things that happened to Bahar are heard and seen from his point of view. In these scenes, close-ups of his weeping face directly looking at the camera subjectivise his speech and underscore his pain and his expression of guilt. Moreover, the cutaways to his flashbacks also establish Seymen’s point of view and prioritise his mental subjectivity. Even though she is spoken of and she is the subject of his monologue, she serves as the vehicle by which he confronts himself and reveals his experience. Likewise, in The Bandit [Eúkya] (Yavuz Turgul 1996), the voluntary muteness of the main female character, Keje (Selmin Hürmeriç), functions as a tool that reveals the things that happened between the two male characters – Baran (ùener ùen) and Berfo (Kamuran Usluer) – as a consequence of which Keje chose to be mute, and that allows the narrative to be told from the male characters’ points of view. In the scene where Baran calls Berfo to account for his betrayal, namely his stealing Keje from him, Berfo says: Berfo: Betrayal? You call this betrayal, do you? I give up. Now if I say to you: I did all of that because I was in love. I was dying from love. Who could possibly say anything to me? What the hell is “betrayal”? I did it for

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love, damn it. Yes, I did. I am a man who has informed on his closest friend. Could you have done that? Betray your most beloved friend? Could you steal his gold and use it to buy the woman your friend loves? Could you send your friend to death? I did do it. For love. Now tell me. Which one of us loved Keje more? You, or I? Which one of us dared to sin like that? I am ready to burn in hell for this love. Are you?

This sequence, starting from a medium shot, very slowly tracks-in into a close-up of Berfo’s face so that his gradually rising temper and facial expressions are stressed. This mobile framing not only establishes the importance of what he says, but also traces a movement into Berfo’s point of view, which also opens Berfo to the empathy, if not the sympathy, of the audience. His weak and impotent depiction in the wheelchair, constantly coughing, with oxygen tubing in his nose, strengthens the effect of his monologue by providing a contrast to his unrepentant attitude. After he finishes his monologue, the camera cuts to Baran’s grim face in a fast track-in, and then again pulls away to a close-up of Berfo’s face from the side. As Berfo continues, the camera slowly tracks from a side angle to his front: (Figures 2.7 and 2.8) Berfo: Keje didn’t want me though. Granted when I paid her father, Keje curiously gave in. She followed me. But never spoke a word since. Not to me, not to anyone else. For thirty-five years now, she has kept silent, Baran. I begged her to speak, I beat her, threw her out in the street. I wept at her feet, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t speak and she didn’t give me children. Still, I wouldn’t give Keje up. I didn’t remarry and I didn’t ask for children.

Like Yusuf’s sister, Keje’s experience and silence are again revealed in the long monologue of the male character. Suner argues that when silence appears as a form of choice, resistance and/or challenge to the male dominated language – that is, when female characters, by remaining silent, speak the untranslatable to the male dominated language – then silence turns into a form of expression (Suner 2006a, 200-201). Suner suggests that, in Innocence, Yusuf’s sister registers “a potential resistance, silent challenge” (Suner 2006a, 201) by acting unresponsive to her husband. In the same vein, Keje’s silence might be read as a form of subversion. However, Suner neglects the point that while silence in these examples might inscribe a form of resistance and/or challenge on the thematic level due to their sources or reasons, this resistance is only momentary and is repeatedly broken by the (re)sustaining of male discursive authority on the verbal, visual and narrative levels. Even though Keje’s voluntary silence as a response to her forced marriage with Berfo might have a potential to

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2.7 and 2.8: The Bandit (Turgul 1996)

inscribe resistance on the thematic level, her silence serves as a vehicle through which the experiences and feelings of the male characters are revealed. She is still the object of their speech. Her silence allows these characters not only to speak on her behalf, but also to describe, even confess, their own feelings, sufferings and experiences; while they establish their own points of view both on the verbal and visual levels. Even though her constant silence of thirty-five years carries the potential to represent a voice and a female point of view at the level of discourse, such a voice is against the “unspeakable” rules of the gender order that are prewritten for her, “thus allow[ing] for the unspoken to be spoken, for unrepresentable experience to be communicated” in Smelik’s terms

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(Smelik 2001, 88), the role division of the speaker and the spoken-of in the filmic space, I argue, remains the same. Regarding the possibility of resistance contained in silence, Wendy Brown argues, “it would be a mistake to value this resistance too highly” (Brown, 2003: 97). In the same vein, since Keje is made known only from a male character’s point of view, it would be a mistake to value this resistance too highly. Also, later in the course of the narrative, when she meets her lover, Baran, she breaks her silence, following which she is excluded from the filmic text by being kept mostly on the edge of the narration. Similarly, the voluntary muteness of Yasemin (Yasemin Kozano÷lu) in Romantic [Romantik] (Sinan Çetin, 2007) shares the same filmic destiny as Yusuf’s sister, Keje and Bahar. In Romantic, just after the first sequence, in which the main male character Ömer (Okan Bayülgen) and Yasemin are first seen waiting at a bus stop and Ömer tries to approach her but does not receive any answer to his questions or comments, the knowledge about the silence of the female character is revealed in the next sequence by the other main male character, Gökhan (Teoman), while two friends are watching her pass by in front of them at the beach: Gökhan: Is that why you are silent? You are right. She is pretty. Ömer: So pretty, but mute. Gökhan: Not mute but she does not want to talk. Ömer: How do you know that? Gökhan: I just know. Don’t try, you can’t get her talk. Ömer: She comes to the bus stop every morning. Gökhan: Don’t buy her coming to the bus stop. She is very rich. She is Mazhar Baba’s daughter. The guy runs the entertainment business of the country. He is mafia. Stay away from her! Ömer: How do you know that? Gökhan: … (Does not answer)

Throughout the dialogue scene, the use of intercuts of Yasemin walking on the beach, from a point of view shot of the male characters, also inscribes visual authority over her silent image and serves to strengthen the effect of verbal control over her silence. With this dialogue scene, the possibility of

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her silence functioning as a generator of doubt, in Chion’s terms, comes to naught. Not only because the knowledge about her silence is revealed by the male character, but also because the motivation of her silence remains the knowledge of the male character. The function of being a generator of doubt is transferred to the male character as he stays silent in response to Ömer’s question, which generates the feeling that he knows the rest. Moreover, if Yasemin’s voluntary silence has the potential for resistance on the thematic level, it also breaks down in the next sequence when she starts speaking due to Ömer’s attempts. As Ömer is underscored in the narrative by being “the only man who gets her [to] talk”, which is also articulated in the following scenes by Yasemin’s father, Yasemin’s possible agency regarding her silence once again turns to dust. Hence, even though these characters’ silences open up the possibility of resistance, producing, momentarily, a female point of view, silence once again becomes the condition to which they are also condemned. In this regard, Shadow Play [Gölge Oyunu] (Yavuz Turgul 1993) presents an exceptional example. Although it uses the silent female form as an instrument to underscore male characters’ experiences and feelings in a male bonding narrative of two close friends, it leaves the silent female character inaccessible to the male characters’ interpretations. Abidin (ùener ùen) and Mahmut (ùevket Altu÷) work as comedians in a nightclub, Rüya 3 Pavyon, in Istanbul. Their lives are changed by their encounter with a young mute woman, who is named by the main characters as Kumru (Larissa Litichevskaya). The film opens with a shot of the band at the nightclub lined up on a platform covered with white cloth. The use of low-key lighting enables their shadows to fall on the background and suggests that they are in a timeless and spaceless place. The camera pans slowly over the band members as they look directly at the camera and stops on one of them, who introduces the band members as the narrators of a story that was rumoured to have happened in that night club: “We will both tell the story and perform the music of this small film”. While he starts to introduce Abidin and Mahmut, the camera cuts to the street where the nightclub is located, and the introductory information about the main characters becomes a voice-over: Narrator 1: In this nightclub, there were two comedians. They were getting on stage and performing gags. They were not very good at it. One of them was Mahmut and the other was Abidin. Mahmut was a nice guy.

3

Rüya means “dream” in Turkish.

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He was good by nature. However, Abidin was a snake. He was a robber, a liar. He was unreliable.

When his voice-over comes to an end, the camera pans left down to the entrance of the club and moves closer to the pictures on the board in the club’s entrance to introduce Mahmut and Abidin visually. As stated above, in most of the examples, the female character’s silence serves as a scapegoating tool for male characters. However, although Abidin on several occasions accuses the silent female character of ruining his and Mahmut’s male bond and their lives in the course of the narrative, this introductory scene inscribing Abidin as unreliable, closes him off to identification or sympathy and therefore prevents her from being fixed by his words. Moreover, any implication about her being a troublemaker fails, due to her positive portrayal in proceeding scenes: miraculously, she heals by touching a pigeon that was badly injured by a cat, and she cures the landlady’s chronic insomnia. Female silences are the indicators of the “non-being of [a] woman” that is “constantly spoken of but [is] itself inaudible and inexpressible” in de Lauretis’ terms (De Lauretis 1990, 115), in the examples of the new cinema of Turkey. Even though silence has a potential to assign a “shelter from power” (Brown 2003), in this case, it is used in such a way that it serves as a niche of power, namely a tool for reassigning the lost discursive authority of the male characters. As it is used as a vehicle – which is also supported on all thematic, verbal and visual levels – to reveal/confess male experience and male suffering from a male point of view, it creates a role division between the speaking subject and the spoken-of in order to project the anxieties of losing voice onto female characters. Nonetheless, silence is such a tool that always evokes, by nature, an ambivalence and obscurity. Following Roland Barthes’ description of a third meaning that is “the filmic in the film which cannot be described, the representation which cannot be represented” (Barthes 1977; quoted in Smelik 2001, 125), Smelik notes that she uses the term “excess” in order to “refer to all those qualities of the visual image which construct the narrative but which also always carry a meaning in excess of the film’s story” (Smelik 2001, 125). The excessive feature of the silent female representation stands in its capacity to produce meanings beyond the narrative. Even though the threat that the silence of female characters poses is rendered harmless in most of the examples, Shadow Play as an exception to this rule, indicating that there are still some instances that evoke contradictory and multiple meanings.

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Like most of the other examples, the silent female character in Shadow Play functions in the narrative as a generator of doubt. However, the doubt is not relieved; rather she is positioned as an enigma at the end of the film. The beautiful female character is brought in – actually sold – to the boss of the nightclub as a new hostess. However, after a short time, it is understood that she is deaf and dumb. As it is understood that she cannot work as a hostess, the boss throws her into the street out of anger. Mahmut pities her and offers to take her home with him and Abidin. Although Abidin does not want her, he is convinced in the end. Later in the course of the narrative, she manages to tell them that she is searching for her mother. At the insistence of Mahmut, they go on her mother’s trail and find out that she is in prison. With Abidin and Mahmut, she visits her mother, who is also deaf and dumb, in prison. After the visit, the next day when they wake up, they discover that Kumru has gone. They think that she has gone to see her mother, so they go to the prison to find her. When they ask for Kumru’s mother, the clerk tells them that even though he has been working there for about twenty years, no prisoner with such a name has ever been there. When they go to the nightclub and ask where she is, no one knows or recognises her, even the boss who threw her out. When they look at the group photograph that they have taken together, people do not see her there. Then, in a confused state, they start talking: Abidin: They do not see what we are seeing! Mahmut: I’m gonna lose it! Do you think everything that has happened is a dream? Abidin: How could two people see the same dream? Mahmut: Where is she? Abidin: Who knows? How weird!

The camera cuts to the photograph on the table. As it zooms in, she slowly disappears from the photo, suggesting the impossibility of fixing her as an image. The silent female character as an ultimate generator of doubt is thus inscribed. In support of her position, the narrators in the band, again lined up on the platform, end the film with the following lines: Narrator 1: Either Mahmut and Abidin lived and saw something incredible that we could not see...

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Narrator 2: Or, they both saw a dream and thought that it was real. Who knows? ... Narrator 1: What is real, anyway? Is this nightclub real? Does it exist? Us? Are we real? Do we exist? Who knows? Narrator 2: Who knows?

Both Chion’s ([1947] 1999) and Silverman’s (1990) argument on the power of the silent female character that is generated from her unlimited knowledge and/or being inaccessible to knowledge, exceptionally, applies to Shadow Play, though it is not valid for most of the examples of the new cinema. She is inaccessible not only to the male characters’ interpretation, but also to the audience’s, which assigns an indefinite power to the silent female character. Moreover, she is presented as the one who becomes the “ultimate secret” of the film. She not only preserves her position as an enigma, since she and her story are not revealed or made known within the narrative, she might also open up a space for multiple meanings. Furthermore, her power on the narrative level is not withheld from her on the visual or verbal levels either. Contrary to the other examples, she is not reduced to a suffering or eroticised body, even in the scene where she has sex with Mahmut. In most of the scenes, including the sex scene, she is depicted in close-ups of her face rather than other parts of her body, and that serves to highlight her facial expressions, not her sexuality. In addition, even though the narrative revolves around the male characters, the introductory scene serves to assign an equal distance to each character, as they are all identified as the components of the story. Therefore, the narrative does not privilege the points of view of the male characters, thereby, in contrast with the other films, setting no hierarchy between speaking subject and spoken-of object. In this example, too, her silence serves as a narrative tool, as an instrument, through which male characters speak of their feelings, experiences and themselves in the course of the narrative. Her silence functions as a vehicle to make their wounds and voice heard. For instance, there are two scenes in which Abidin and Mahmut articulate their feelings and traumas in long monologues over her silence, because, as they say, “she looks as if she hears and understands them”. In the first scene, Abidin tells her, thus also revealing to the audience, about the unforgettable love of his life. In the other scene, Mahmut talks about his acquaintance with Abidin and his trauma at a childhood orphanage after confessing that he

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cannot approach women and has never had sex with a woman. In both scenes, the camera, which slowly zooms-in to close-ups of the male characters’ faces, underscores their facial expressions and opens the male characters’ feelings and experiences to identification on the visual level. However, the unique feature of this film among its counterparts is that even though the male characters reveal and confront themselves through the female character’s silent presence, she remains inaccessible to their, therefore our, knowledge. As they cannot “solve” her mystery, they cannot speak of her or on her behalf. Therefore, though the male characters’ perspectives are prioritised in the monologue scenes, the assignment of a role division between the speaking subject and the spoken-of object in favour of the male characters is partially avoided: She cannot be registered, fixed or defined. Her silent being, signifying only her enigmatic presence, provides her with both a “shelter from power” and a “niche of power”, in Brown’s terms (Brown 2003). Distant [Uzak] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2002) shares the tendency to have a gender imbalance, which is prevalent in the new cinema of Turkey as “none of the female characters appears on screen [as] anything but a supplement in the portrayal of the male character” (Çakrlar and Güçlü 2013). Regarding the issue of female silence, it is possible to argue that the female characters are also silenced on the verbal, visual and narrative levels in this example. At the beginning of the film, after the credits, the camera cuts to a dark room. The shot that focuses on a man’s head in the foreground, while throwing out of focus the figure of a woman who slowly removes her shirt in the background, is like a statement about the film’s narrative and the verbal exclusion of women (Figure 2.9): She is like a fever dream in the background, nothing but an object of a male character’s desire. Apart from the visual level, some of these characters are literally silent in the film: Both Mahmut’s (Muzaffer Özdemir) lover (Nazan Kesal) and the woman whom Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) follows and spies on (Ebru Ceylan) do not have even one line of dialogue. It is possible to argue that these female characters are wrapped up with silence and do not have any function in the narrative other than serving to highlight the male characters’ experiences and feelings, namely their crises of belonging and their problematic relations with women. On the other hand, Suner suggests that the silence or absence of the female characters in the new cinema’s male dominated discourse may contain “a critical self-awareness about [its] own complicity with patriarchal culture” (Suner 2010, 21), where the silence or absence of female characters may add another dimension to the depiction and exposure of the crisis of masculinity. Nevertheless, this suggestion does not take into account the subject of

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masculinity in crisis and mostly turns its loss into a gain by the use of female silence as a means for prioritising the male experience and the male point of view. In this respect, Distant, I argue, has a critical stance, as the silence of female characters, contrary to other examples, is not used to provide a tool through which the male characters open themselves to identification. Even though both Yusuf’s and Mahmut’s relations with women are portrayed as very problematic, they are presented without a justification or through the scapegoating of women. Therefore, though the narrative is from the male characters’ points of view, the male characters neither speak of their wounds and pains over female silences, nor do they reveal any knowledge about the female characters.

2.9: Distant (Ceylan 2002)

The issue of incest is brought to the screen by ølksen Baúarr’s second feature, Merry Go Round [Atlkarnca] (2010). Erdem (Mert Frat) and Sevil (Nergis Öztürk) are living in a small town with their two children, Sevgi (Zeynep Oral) and Edip (Sercan Badur). After they receive the news that Sevil’s mother (Sema Çeyrekbaú) has been paralysed, they move to Istanbul to look after her. Sevgi has suddenly become aggressive and unhappy, and that leads Sevil to become suspicious about things that are happening at home. One day she comes home earlier than expected and discovers Erdem’s apparent abuse of their daughter. Sevgi has not told anyone, including her mother, about the family secret, nor does Sevil know how to cope with it. One day, after Sevgi comes back from the school, she starts reading a book to her paralysed, mute Granny. While reading, the story that she reads turns gradually into the story of her

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suffering because of incest. She reveals the incidents of incest in a long monologue scene (Figures 2.10, 2.11, 2.12 and 2.13). Sevgi: … [“]There was endless sorrow and despair, in the not-so-innocent smile left frozen on her pale lips. He knew this girl. There wasn’t a single definition a candle around the coffin. Nature did not hear. This girl had killed herself, drowning. She was just fourteen. But her soul had been smashed into pieces. A heart that ruined itself, a heart that had suffered an affront. This clean soul had been filled with a shame it never deserved, the cry was lost in a dark wet night, unheard by anyone…” Came to himself, got up from the bed and went to the window. He felt for the latch and opened it. The wind lashed furiously in the little room. Each time, the girl was looking at him with begging eyes, but the man’s hands never stopped. The girl was trying to get away but all her efforts were in vain. She was not able to understand, what she had done to deserve this. It was her father’s face, but it couldn’t be her father doing these things to her.

Sevgi slowly raises her eyes from the book to the Granny, as she says “her father’s face”, and bursts into heavy tears. She continues, “I was crying ‘Stop, please, don’t, I’m begging you.’” The camera cuts to the Granny for a second, and Sevgi’s line, “I said ‘Mum kill me if she comes’ but he didn’t listen”, is heard over the silent image of the Granny, and then it cuts back to Sevgi: Sevgi: He said we would love each other more. I was scared. I told him he was hurting me but it didn’t stop him. I hate him now. I don’t want to fall asleep at night. I don’t want to eat anymore. I just wish I didn’t grow up. I am so embarrassed. I can’t look at my mother’s eyes. I feel like everyone knows what’s going on. But it’s not my fault. I swear I didn’t do anything wrong. I want to go away. I want to go away.

The camera cuts to a two-shot of Sevgi and the Granny sitting in the room while Sevgi is crying and saying, “What should I do? I wish somebody would tell me what to do”. Sevgi holds the Granny’s hands and the camera starts dollying out. Sevgi says, “Should I go? Should I get away? Say something, please” and the secretly crying image of the Mother enters the frame. Though the incest is hinted at in earlier scenes, it is never directly verbalised until this scene. The silenced experience of the female character finds voice in front of a literally silent character. Carrying the function of instrumentality, in Chion’s terms (Chion [1947] 1991), Granny’s silence serves to prioritise the victim’s point of view and experience on the verbal and narrative levels and reveals the unspeakable

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2.10, 2.11, 2.12 and 2.13: Merry Go Round (Baúarr 2010)

in the narrative. As the witness of the confession is mute, the audience is left alone with Sevgi’s monologue, full of pain and despair that serves to keep the focus on Sevgi and subjectivises her feelings and her experience on the visual as well as the verbal level. Moreover, throughout the confession, the camera mostly shows Sevgi alone from a medium closeup with a single intercut to Granny. While Sevgi’s depiction in a medium close-up serves to reinforce the effect of the monologue, the use of intercuts also serves to point to the silent witness position. Thus, though the instrumentality function of the mute continues, the film reverses the gendered/ing role division between the silent, spoken-of female object and speaking male subject in the examples that were thus-far discussed. Furthermore, it was the first time in the cinema of Turkey that the feelings and experiences of an incest victim were not only sensed but verbalised and, therefore, were heard. As the articulation of the unspeakable happens in front of a silent figure, through whom the audience is put in the position of witness, it is possible to argue that the film, through the use of a literally silent character as the direct addressee of the revelation, generates a criticism of the silent witnesses and, therefore, the accomplices of the incidents of incest, and confronts the ongoing culture of silence about incest in Turkish society. It is important to note at the end of the scene, when the camera shows Sevgi and the Granny in a two-shot from the position of the door sill, which then dollies out while the image of the secretly crying Mother next to the door sill slowly enters the frame, that there is a tension that raises the question of whether the mother is going to maintain her silence and act like the mute and paralysed Granny. However, the silence is broken after this scene, and the mother firstly talks to her daughter about

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the incident, apologizes to her for not being able to notice it for so long, and then eventually takes action and kills her husband. It is possible to argue that these examples of female silence manage to present, in one way or another, a method of expression; however, Love in Another Language [Baúka Dilde Aúk] (ølksen Baúarr 2009) becomes an exception by inscribing a “silent” language to the filmic text. Love in Another Language is a love story between a deaf and dumb man who works in a library and a woman who works in a call centre. However, by addressing issues in a larger context, it offers more than a romance; it narrates communication problems in the modern world and problems of intolerance or dislike towards those who are different. Using parallel cuts, the film opens with shots of Onur (Mert Frat) and Zeynep (Saadet Iúl Aksoy) in their workplaces. They both receive an invitation from a mutual friend, Vedat (Tuna Kirli), to a party in the evening. Until the party scene, they are depicted in more parallel cuts, going back home in their shuttles, getting ready for the party. In the party scene, they are introduced to each other by Vedat. They drink at the bar together. Though Zeynep says a few things, Onur remains silent and communicates only by gestures. Then they leave the bar together with friends. While they are walking, Zeynep falls behind the group while she stops to tie her shoelace. She calls after Onur, but he does not turn back or reply. She and the audience do not realise that he is deaf and mute until the moment Vedat tells her that Onur cannot hear. The moment she learns that, she runs and hugs Onur, saying: “Hey, I’ve found the man of my life. He never speaks.” The parallel cutting of scenes from their lives at the beginning of the film actually gives us a clue about the stance of the film, which, throughout the narrative, continually sets an equal distance with regard to the experiences of both characters. Although the film is told from Zeynep’s point of view, both characters’ lives, experiences and feelings have an equal share in the narrative, contrary to most of the other examples involving a mute character. Onur’s life is portrayed in as much detail as Zeynep’s and from an equal distance: His experiences in the workplace, his rowing team training sessions, his relation to friends and his mother, are all depicted in the course of the narrative rather than being revealed through the other characters’ dialogue and points of view. Although the communication problems arising from Onur’s muteness form the crux of the narrative and his silence functions as a vehicle to catalyse the narrative, in Chion’s terms, his silence does not privilege Zeynep’s experiences or point of view. Indeed, both characters are equally opened to communication and identification (Figure 2.14). For instance,

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there are two scenes, shown from each other’s points of view, which convey to the audience how they experience the communication struggle in this romance. In the scene after Zeynep first introduces Onur to her close friends at a bar, we see from a long shot that Zeynep and her friends are sitting and chatting animatedly around a table. Onur seems disconnected because he cannot follow the conversation. The camera moves to a medium shot of Onur, who looks anxious and uncomfortable. Then the sound is muted for thirty seconds, and instead of the talking and the sounds of the atmosphere, the audience hears what Onur hears: a sharp resonance on the image of people talking and laughing. Indeed, that provides the soundscape for Onur and opens a momentary gap in the narrative that directly communicates his experience and feelings. When the sound is turned on again, Onur leaves the bar. Zeynep watches him leave with concern in her eyes. Though she cannot understand why he leaves, the audience is given a reason to understand his position. Later in the course of the narrative, Zeynep finds herself in a similar situation in the scene where she sits by the river among Onur’s deaf and mute friends from the rowing team. While Onur and his friends are talking in sign language and apparently having fun, Zeynep seems disconnected, because now she cannot understand the language going on around her. Accordingly, due to the balanced stance of the film, Onur’s silence signifies itself. Also, any possibility of implying a signification of silence in relation to gender hierarchies is avoided. In this case, the silent character presents a representational form that is not less dominant or controlling in the narrative.

2.14: Love in Another Language (Baúarr 2009)

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Moreover, the film provides the same equal distance on the verbal and visual realms. As in the introductory scenes, both characters have an equal domain in terms of compositions, frames, angles and shots. For instance, point-of-view shots are used to provide the viewpoints of both characters. They share equally in two-person shots. Furthermore, as opposed to silent female characters, Onur’s body is depicted as athletic and strong rather than vulnerable. From the beginning of the film he is portrayed as a sportsman, the scenes of his training suggesting that apart from his muteness he is actually not disabled. Yet it is possible to argue that he is not disabled even on the verbal level. Although Onur does not literally speak, he is not silent or silenced in the film. He uses written language and sign language to communicate with Zeynep, and so with the audience (Figure 2.15 and 2.16). He has language in his own way. He has a “voice”, and the whole narrative is adapted entirely according to this “other” language. The shooting plans and mise-en-scènes are designed in a way that prevents him from falling into silence and allows him to be always in communication with the audience. Since he has his own voice, it becomes impossible to suggest a role division between the speaker and the spokenof, so as to fix him and his muteness as a sign. At the beginning of the film, after their first misunderstanding due to miscommunication, Zeynep asks, while looking at their reflection in the mirror, “I wonder if we can get along without talking at all?” This becomes the motto of the film, which contests and re-signifies the meanings and perceptions attributed to muteness, by introducing alternative ways of speaking and communication both in the diegesis and non-diegesis. In the larger context, the film not only brings an alternative to the representation of muteness, but also changes the cinematic medium in terms of the use of language by screening the film with Turkish subtitles for the hearing-impaired for the first time in the history of Turkish cinema. In this way, it identifies sign language as another language in the Turkish cinemascape; moreover, it breaks the supremacy of talking in a conventional sense and inserts another level of communication on screen. In these respects, this film becomes an exception that proves the rule, which favours the use of female silence as a vehicle, through which the male characters express their feelings and experiences. Silent female characters must also be considered in the context of a response to the rising voice of women on screen and in society. It is part – or rather an instrument – of this sadomasochistic response that has been manifested in the form of wounded, victimised and violent expressions of masculinity. As Chion indicates, the mute character serves the narrative as an instrument

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2.15 and 2.16: Love in Another Language (Baúarr 2009)

to reveal, catalyse and disturb (Chion [1947] 1999); female silence provides a narrative tool for male characters not only to project their “voice loss” on to the other, but also to allow them to speak through their own wounds and sufferings from their own points of view. Moreover, silencing the female character, in most of the examples, I argue, contributes to establishing a role division between the speaking subject and the spoken-of object in favour of the male characters. Following on from Michel Foucault’s conception of the category of sexuality, which is

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not naturally given, but rather a name which is given to a historical construct (Foucault [1976] 1998, 105), Judith Butler claims that there is not a “real” or “true” gender or sex: They are both discursive constructions which impose themselves as “normal” or “natural” or “real” through repetitive acts (Butler [1990] 1999). Following Butler’s conception of gender as a “truth effect”, it is possible to argue that the representations of femininity that are in a “certain” form, in a “certain” time, in a repetitive way, constitute a femininity, and attribute a truth value to its own creation, and also set the rules for “proper” and “intelligible” genders. Characters on the screen, too, are expressions of gender, repetitive acts that are said to be its results. Therefore, the repetitive association of female characters with silence in certain patterns and with certain themes functions not only as a form of legitimisation or an embodiment of a (re)experienced set of meanings, but also as a vehicle to reattribute a truth value to the role division that it, by itself, sets between genders. However, the silence of the female character has an additional function: In most of the examples, the silence of the female character functions as a tool that makes the crisis of the male characters and of the gender order visible by making the male characters, and therefore the audience, confront their anxieties, fears and themselves. Yet, in most of the examples, it also becomes the tool through which the crisis is allayed.

CHAPTER THREE SILENT CONFRONTATION WITH THE NATIONAL ORDER IN CRISIS

The ship is like a country. Everything must be orderly and under control. Rules must be kept. Laws, regulations. For example, I’m like this country’s prime minister. Everything revolves around me. On heading out, this little vessel becomes a nation. —The Captain, in On Board [O]ne must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence. —Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”

In the previous chapter, the silent female representational form was analysed in relation to the gender roles and attributes that it inscribes on the verbal, visual, thematic and narrative levels, in the context of changes in the social and cinematic gender order in Turkey in the post-1980s. The gendered/ing functions of silent female characters were revealed in light of the relevant theories of Michel Chion, Kaja Silverman and Laura Mulvey. I argued that the silent female characters serve to underscore male characters’ experiences and feelings from the male points of view. In most of the examples, these female characters function as a means through which a role division is assigned between the speaker male and spoken-of female characters; moreover, the male character’s speech registers and fixes her as a troublemaker. On the other hand, the silence of the female character, I suggested, becomes a tool for the male characters to confront their fears, anxieties and masculinities in crises, and then to reassign their discursive authority on the verbal, visual and narrative levels. However, in some examples of the new cinema of Turkey, the silent female form not only functions as a gendered/ing tool, but it also resonates with national fears and anxieties arising from Turkey’s transition process in the post1980s. In these examples, the silences of the female characters are inscribed in close relation to their nationality and/or ethnicity as they are either foreigners or they come from non-Turkish ethnicities. It is not only their voices, but also non-Turkish languages that are muted. In this regard,

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these characters’ silences embody a clash of identities. Although Chion’s suggested function of the mute character – instrumentality – and Mulvey’s concepts of voyeurism and fetishism are still very much applicable to these examples, it is necessary to analyse the silences of these characters, mindful of the shared thematic and stylistic features and conventions regarding their national and/or ethnic identities that reveal a clash of anxieties and fears. Silverman argues that the female character is not only the object of the male gaze, but it is also used to affirm male characters’ mastery over speech and hearing (Silverman 1988). However, she neglects the point that the mastery over vision, speech and hearing includes, but is not limited to, gender. Film space, as Ann Kaplan suggests, permits only certain speakers and certain speech (Kaplan 1993, 12), and “women, in this regard, find themselves doing double duty when they are made to function both as members of the designated Other and as carriers of a supposedly female incapacity” (Dittmar 1998, 392). The visual, verbal and narrative regulations regarding the silent female character tend “to encode their problematic relation to speech as integral to their gender, and on top of that, as constrained by their position within race, class, ethnicity, and the like” (Dittmar 1998, 392-3). Hence, I will argue in this chapter that the silence of female characters, their silenced languages and mute bodies function as a repository of the gendered national fears and anxieties, and reveal and register the crisis in the unity of the national order by making the other characters, and therefore the audience, confront the silenced Other. The analyses of filmic devices such as allegorical features, voiceover narration and cross-cut editing, and their association with the silent female characters in the mise-en-scène and in the narrative will reveal the cinematic ways and means in which the silent characters, representative of the Other, are treated, and the points of silences that are unveiled or sustained. However, while the silent female characters in these examples open up a critical space to make the national fears and anxieties visible, they also become the battlefields to regain a position of power and a discursive authority, on the verbal, visual and narrative levels. The reasons for the muting of these non-Turkish female characters in the film space also reveal these characters’ relation to the historical and cinematic context from which they emerge. Apart from the previously mentioned developments that led to a crisis in the social and cinematic gender order after the 1980s, Turkey experienced very important socio-political developments that created a crisis in the supposedly unified national order. In the early-1990s, the official discourse of the single nation, single language, single land and secularism was thrown into crisis by the rise of the Kurdish nationalist

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movement and the violent struggle, which has continued since 1984 between the Turkish Army and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas, and by Islamist right wing parties becoming the senior partners in coalition governments for the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic. Moreover, the increasing demands of the European Union for accession negotiations were most often considered as an intervention into Turkey’s economics and politics, and threatened the homogenous and independent nation principle of Turkish nationalism (Keyder 1997). The supposed unity and coherence of the nation-state was threatened more than ever before. This period-specific chronotope of Turkey also projects itself onto and defines the cinematic time and space where male characters try to reestablish their authority by means of nationalism and misogyny (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008). Female characters in these examples “have taken their part as the unknown, threatening other, and stand for all ‘Others’ … [They] are also the fantasies and, at the same time, fears of wounded male egos” (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008, 92), and, apparently, of a wounded national ego. Hence, the silent female form, I will suggest, generates both the projection and the revelation of the voice loss of the supposedly unified body of the nation – single nation, single language and single land. Following Silverman’s argument that the voice and image synchronization “obliges the female voice to signify the female body, and the female body to signify lack” (Silverman 1988, 168), I shall argue that although a female character’s silence – making her seen without being heard (Silverman 1988, 164) – cannot escape signifying the female body, it calls into question the unity and coherence of the masculine and national voices in these films. The silent female in the film space provides a representational form for the crisis to be projected – and therefore controlled and allayed – onto the Other, as well as a medium through which the crisis is revealed and reinforced, thereby forcing a confrontation both with the Other and with the self. On Board [Gemide] (Serdar Akar 1998) is about the changing lives of four sailors aboard a harbour silt-cleaner after the arrival of a foreign prostitute on to their ship. For these four sailors – the Captain (Erkan Can), Kamil (Haldun Boysan), the Boxer (Naci Taúdö÷en) and Ali (Yldray ùahinler) – the only image of the outside world, and primarily, of malefemale relationships comes from the stories of the Captain. Their isolation is shattered one night when Boxer returns beaten up and robbed of their dinner money. Drunk and stoned, they hunt down the thieves, and the Captain accidentally kills one. The sailors “save” a foreign prostitute (Ella Manea), who was with those thieves, and bring her to the ship. Gradually, the order of the ship is ruined by her silent presence. Throughout the

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whole film, she does not speak, except in two instances when she speaks a few words in a foreign language, which are incomprehensible because they are not subtitled. The film opens with a voice-over prologue by the Captain in which an analogy between the ship and the homeland is presented: The Captain: The ship is like a country. Everything must be orderly and under control. Rules must be kept. Laws, regulations. For example, I’m like this country’s prime minister. Everything revolves around me. On heading out, this little vessel becomes a nation. In fact, I have more duties than a prime minister. He has people and the like. I don’t. I am in charge of security, training, health and entertainment. Kamil is like the deputy prime minister. You’re both citizen and civil servant. Therefore, we have to be pretty smart, disciplined and on our toes. We always have to look out for each other and ourselves.

The use of a voice-over at the beginning of the film establishes two crucial elements that are related to the silent female character: male discursive authority and the homeland allegory. Silverman argues that the male subject is ideally achieved when he is heard but not seen, when the phallus is left in unchallengeable possession of the scene, “attesting to an achieved invisibility, omniscience and discursive power” (Silverman 1988, 164). In the same vein, the voice-over talking about the rules, regulations and order on board assigns an authority and authoritative knowledge to the Captain, i.e., to the ruler of ship/homeland, both on the verbal and narrative levels, from the beginning of the film, whilst the only female character, i.e., the threat to the ship’s/national order, is muted throughout the film due to a language barrier and to the literal silencing of her. A role division between the speaker, the male character, and the silent (Other), female character prevailing in the film is registered and encoded in this voice-over. Furthermore, the content of the voice-over provides a pretext for the whole of the film to be read as an allegory of the homeland. Regarding the allegorical mode of narrative, Stephen Barney notes the major features of it as personification, reification and typology (Barney 1978). While the name Captain becomes a personification of authority and allegorises the character as the ruler of the homeland, the content of the voice-over articulating the duties of the crew, setting the hierarchy and noting how the order has to be sustained, provides a pretext, a typology, for the film’s allegorical framework. However, the Woman is not articulated in the pretext and therefore, from the beginning, she is excluded from the territory of the ship/homeland and is foregrounded as an outsider and threat to its order. Accordingly, the reliance of the allegory upon this

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authoritative pretext suggests a desire for unity (Madsen 1991) on the narrative level. Moreover, the lines of the Captain regarding how to sustain order support the desire for unity on the verbal level. In addition, the voice-over inscribing the territory of “us”, and advising everyone to “look out for each other and ourselves”, while casting the Woman as an outsider, reifies the metaphorical language of a nationalist division between “us” and the “other(s)”. In the 1990s, Turkish society went through a series of developments which shook the foundational ideas – national unity, territorial integrity, and perpetuity – of the Turkish nation-state (Barkey 2000; Bozdo÷an and Kasaba 2000; Bulut 2006; Robins and Aksoy 2000). The Kurdish movement’s armed struggle for recognition rose in the early-1990s, and gained support among the Kurdish population, especially after the Gulf War in 1991 (Barkey 2000; Bulut 2006). The constitutive principle of the unity and integrity of the Turkish nation-state depends on the nonrecognition of any ethnic or national identity other than Turkish in the public sphere: “Every person living within the borders of the Turkish Republic and accepting its basic principles could become a Turkish citizen. But becoming a Turk required the suppression of an individual’s ethnic identity” (Larrabee and Lesser 2003, 58). In line with this principle, “any intimation of Kurdish or any other separatism was ... strictly forbidden ... and the use of Kurdish language in public speech or education has been rigidly outlawed” since the foundation of the Republic (Keyder 2004, 71). Cultural suppression together with mass arrests and torture continuing in Kurdish provinces during and after the 1980s fed resistance (Keyder 2004). In response to Kurdish resistance, the state’s violence and repression increased and the armed struggle between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerrillas “was used to justify a gradual transition to a national security state” (Keyder 2004, 72). As Kurdish resistance grew stronger, large numbers of military and gendarmerie were sent to South Eastern Turkey. The Turkish state began to evacuate Kurdish villages on the grounds of national security (Ye÷en 2009, 604): “In the mid-1990s more than 1,500 rural settlements were evacuated as part of the military campaign against guerrilla forces, leading to a massive displacement of Kurdish peasants. The area had become a separate jurisdiction, governed by a law of exception” (Keyder 2004, 72). Moreover, disappearances and extra-judicial killings of people who were thought to be associated with the Kurdish resistance in the region increased (Barkey 2000). Rising Kurdish resistance in the 1990s fed the discourse of enmity, which has been one of the foundations upon which Turkish national identity has been built and maintains itself (Akçam 2003). The Kurdish resistance threw the

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constitutive principle of the unity of the nation into a grave crisis, while utilising violence in order to restore order and unity. Simultaneously, a rising Islamist movement posed a challenge to another foundational principle of the Turkish nation-state, namely secularism. Since the foundation of the Republic, not only had the cultural and political existence of ethnic identity groups been ignored, but also “Islam was rejected as a meaningful element of social and cultural life” (Robins and Aksoy 2000, 197) by the official national discourse, in favour of the ideal of a uniform and a monolithic national identity. However, after the military coup of 1980, Islam began to be seen as a buffer against communism and socialism, and was promoted by the military and the civilian governments succeeding the junta regime (Keyder 2004; Larrabee and Lesser 2003). In 1996, an Islamist political party, the Welfare Party, came to power under a coalition by winning twenty-one percent of votes. Yet, a year later, the National Security Council directed the party “to struggle against the Islamisation of the country and to strengthen its secular character” (Bulut 2006, 133), and later forced the government to resign. This period is often referred to as the February 28 Incident, and ended with the closing-down of the party and a political ban on its chairman and key figures. In the 1990s, Kurdish and Islamist movements as well as their demands were presented as an offshoot of the collaboration between internal and external enemies ... This interpretative framework is in keeping with the pattern of conspiracy theories, which evoke threats to national unity, territorial integrity and the principle of secularism. (Bulut 2006, 127-128)

Moreover, the prospect of joining the EU and the necessary reforms triggered the idea that the unity of the nation was falling apart and fuelled a suspicion of the West’s aims in Turkey (Gürbey 2006; Larrabee and Lesser 2003). The conditions raised by the EU for full membership, such as amendments in human and minority rights, the resolution of the Cyprus question, and recognition of the Armenian genocide, strengthened fears that “the EU, using the pretext of cultural rights, wanted to divide Turkey along ethnic lines” (Keyder 2004, 80), and generated feelings of loss of sovereignty (Bulut 2006). In this context, a populist nationalist discourse, which “imposed itself as a syntax of hegemony based on the imperative of national unanimity, the designation of an enemy and the denunciation of all protests as treachery” (Bulut 2006, 127), rose in response to the “wounded” national order and unity.

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The repeatedly underscored division between “us” and the “other(s)” and the striving for order and unity are foregrounded throughout On Board and register themselves on the visual, verbal and narrative levels. Attempts to silence the voices of “enemies” in the national context through violence, bans and repression, find their cinematic epiphany in On Board in the filmic treatment of the female character, who “stands for all ‘Others’” in Akbal Süalp’s terms (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008, 92). The Woman, who is cast as an outsider by her omission from the voice-over prologue, is subjected to visual control from the first scene where she, having fainted, is brought to the ship unconscious. In the sequence where the crew get back to the ship, the Captain is shown in a tight medium close-up lighting up a joint and passing it to Ali. Then the camera cuts to the Woman being dragged behind the staircase, framing only her legs. The framing through the staircase, which suggests both a jail cell and the fragmentation of her body, foreshadows the treatment of her body throughout the film. Her fragmentation continues to the next cut, which shows her on a bed, framing her legs in a close-up in the foreground while the Boxer is seen ogling and caressing her legs in the background (Figure 3.1). Then the camera cuts in a tight two-shot sequence as the Boxer is taking off her coat and trying to remove her dress, while the Woman, still unconscious, is lying in the foreground. Both the framing of her bodily parts and the position of the camera focusing on her unconscious body underscore the eroticisation and passivity of the female character. According to Mulvey, cinema reproduces the culturally built role division of the active male and the passive female through the use of the male gaze (Mulvey [1975] 1989). As the determining/active male gaze projects its fantasies and fears onto the female figure, her passivity and her receptivity to the gaze connotes only “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey [1975] 1989, 19). While male characters carry the narrative forward, make things happen and function as the representatives of authority and the bearers of the look, female characters are reduced to the position of passive spectacles (Mulvey [1975] 1989, 20). In addition, the strategy of fetishism, which sustains male mastery over the narrative, focuses on fragments of the woman’s body in close-ups and therefore reduces her to an erotic image of beauty and desirability (Mulvey [1975] 1989). In this regard, the depiction of the female body as silent, passive, unconscious and fragmented in the early scenes of On Board, communicates her powerlessness and suggests a way to allay the crisis raised by her involvement in the males’ territory. Depicting the female character as “to-be-looked-at” through fetishism both poses and resolves the threat she represents:

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In film, fetishism often takes the form of a sexualisation of women’s bodies or parts of their bodies, ascribing a phallic connotation to a female body part (legs, breasts) in order to reclaim the woman and rid oneself of the threat of otherness generally and the threat of castration specifically. (Walters 1999, 236)

3.1: On Board (Akar 1998)

However, it should again be noted that the female character not only represents a sexual Other, but also a national Other in the film’s allegorical framework. As an outsider, she not only passes into the male’s territory but also into the national territory. Therefore, scenes that reduce her to an erotic and passive spectacle ease not only sexual fears and anxieties but also national fears. After the abovementioned scene, the Boxer goes to join the others who are having dinner, but after a short while he leaves the room with the excuse that he needs to dry his clothes. The camera cuts to the Boxer entering the room where the Woman still lies unconscious. While he approaches the Woman, the camera cuts to her legs and then, in a close-up, the Boxer’s hands caressing her legs and stripping off her underwear. Then from a high angle frame, she is depicted lying unconscious on the bed, face to the camera in a medium close-up. The Boxer enters the frame, shown from behind, and lies on top of her. The framing and position of the camera establishes his superiority over her unconscious body and prepares us for the events awaiting her. In the meantime, she regains consciousness. While she is trying to push him back, she cries out in her own language, which is not subtitled. Then the

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Boxer takes the pillow and shoves it over her face in order to silence her. This scene serves to establish her filmic treatment at the intersection of gender and national identity. Not only is her female subjectivity silenced on the visual level by reducing her to an erotic spectacle, but also her language is symbolically silenced as she is literally silenced while speaking a foreign language in the diegesis. The articulation of her foreign language without subtitles momentarily inscribes her as a speaking Other, but it makes her inaccessible to the male character and the audience, and registers her language and the struggle between the “us” and the “other(s)” in the film space. However, as the female character does not utter a single word after this scene, the language of the Other is erased from the narration, establishing the role division between the speaker and the silenced at the intersection of both gender and national identities.

3.2: On Board (Akar 1998)

After the Boxer shoves the pillow on the female character’s face, the camera cuts to show him dragging her unconscious body, laying her on a desk, and raping her (Figure 3.2). In the most influential work on rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller argues that rape is a control mechanism of patriarchy that reproduces and, therefore, reinforces male domination. She defines rape as “the quintessential act by which [a] male demonstrates to a female that she is conquered” (Brownmiller 1975, 49). In this respect, rape in this scene becomes a means of sustaining complete control over female subjectivity by reducing

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her to a violated and vulnerable body. In “Rape versus Mans/Laughter: Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Feminist Interpretation”, Tania Modleski suggests that Blackmail raises the “issues of rape and the silencing of women with almost exemplary clarity” (Modleski 2005, 16). As Modleski argues, “rape and violence effectively silence and subdue the woman in film” (Modleski 2005, 15). Even though the focus of the article that is on Hitchcock’s film might seem irrelevant to a study of the Turkish context, Modleski’s account that relates rape to the silencing of women in the film text through an analysis of a highly misogynist film serves as a model to situate the rape of a silent character as an instrument to reduce the female character, both on the visual and narrative levels, to a silent object of exchange between male characters and to silence her both literally and symbolically. In this scene, while her unconscious body in the foreground underscores her vulnerability and passivity and her being silenced, the camera showing the Boxer from a low angle underlines the male character’s superiority. Moreover, on the visual level, the female character, who is depicted as unconscious, silent, still, and passive – almost like a “blow-up sex doll” (Algan 1999; Akbal Süalp 1999) – and the fragmentation of her bodily parts through close-ups in this and subsequent rape scenes secures male mastery over the female character by reducing her to a body whose function is “first and foremost to be seen” (Mulvey [1975] 1989) and turns this violent act into a spectacle. On the other hand, “the process of sexualization is always already ... a process of racialization” (JanMohemmed 1992, quoted in Smelik 2001, 73), or rather, as in this case, nationalisation. There is always an “open secret” in each racialised/nationalised sexual act, and that is the white/national male’s mastery over the Other woman, “and hence his violation of the racial border” (JanMohemmed 1992, quoted in Smelik 2001, 73). The Woman and her body extend to become a metaphor of a foreign land or nation in the film where the ship is the allegorical embodiment of the nation. In this regard, while the rape of the Woman in this and subsequent scenes can be read as a personification of the invasion of the foreign land/nation, the Turkish male rapist becomes the personification of the conqueror, in Brownmiller’s account. Therefore, the rape of the Woman, a means of resolving the threat, not only binds authority, desire and potency to the masculine on the visual level, but also assigns mastery and potency to the nation over the foreign on the allegorical level. However, as Stephen J. Greenblatt argues, “allegory arises in the periods of loss, periods in which a once powerful theological, political, or familial authority is threatened with effacement. Allegory arises, then, from the painful absence of that which it claims to recover” (Greenblatt 1981, viii). The important point is

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that the female character’s outsider presence is enough to pose a threat to the unity and order of the ship/nation, without regard to her holding any action. Accordingly, it is possible to suggest that the silencing of female subjectivity – that is, both literally and symbolically reducing her to a silent, passive, erotic and impotent body in the earlier scenes and, thus, establishing a discursive authority over and through the female character – reveals the loss, or rather the threatened paternal/national authority. The filmic treatment of the female character becomes the personification of the misogyny and xenophobia prevailing in the homeland (Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008) in the face of the shaken hegemony and unity of the Turkish (masculine) national voice, and mediates the Turkish national identity and masculinity in crisis in the changing historical situation of the country in the post-1980s. Akbal Süalp suggests that narratives register particular chronotopes (Akbal Süalp 2004; 2008; 2009; 2011; Akbal Süalp and ùenova 2008). She names the cinema of this specific chronotope of the 1990s in Turkey as “arabesque-noir” in that it presents film-noirish features like a selfpitying atmosphere and an allegorical framework (Akbal Süalp 2008; 2009; 2011). As discussed in detail in the previous chapter, this cinematic chronotope distinguishes itself through its masochistic and sadistic malecentred narratives that manifest rage and violence towards the female characters in order to restore wounded male egos. On the other hand, the narratives of the post-1990s present different projections of the wounded national ego and its accompanying crisis. While new political films, which were mentioned in the first chapter, “question the social conflicts and bravely dealt with the question of ‘others’ and nationalism” (Akbal Süalp 2011), they make the audience confront these silenced and marginalised identities and their experiences in the national structure. As Suner suggests: “These films problematize the question of national identity and belonging by directing attention to the multiplicity of the experiences of displacement, de-territorialization, and migration within the national formation itself” (Suner 2010, 73). In the climate of Turkey in the 1990s, when voices of non-hegemonic identities began to rise in the social and political realms, these films reveal a picture of the homeland beyond the hegemonic national discourses. Furthermore, the rise of Kurdish cinema along with Kurdish directors’ films in Turkey after the mid-1990s registers the voice of Kurdish identity and language in the filmic space of Turkey. As film scholar Ayça Çiftçi argues, the hegemonic national discourse on Kurdish identity either prefers not to articulate Kurdish identity, or denies its presence, and therefore suggests that there is nothing to speak of: “From its foundation until the 1990s, the Republic of Turkey was in a deep

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silence regarding the Kurdish case” (Çiftçi 2009, 273). Likewise, the representations of Kurdish identity in Turkish cinema before the new cinema’s emergence point to a connotation, rather than a direct representation (Çiftçi 2009, 267). Accordingly, these films, in juxtaposition with the rising Kurdish movement in Turkey, embody the experiences and points of view of the previously silenced Kurdish identity and language, and therefore challenge the discursive authority of the hegemonic Turkish identity and language. On the other hand, apart from the symbolic and/or literal violence and rage towards the Other manifested in different forms in the examples of the new cinema, from commercial films to art house productions, the wounded national ego and the projection of national fears and anxieties resonates with the novelties of the new cinema. The characteristic features of the new genres that are mentioned in the first chapter manifest these fears and anxieties. The newly emergent sub-genre of comedy films that mock prominent Hollywood genres and parody Hollywood blockbusters can be considered as a projection of a national anxiety that derives from the breakdown of the unity of the Turkish national order and of cinematic language. These examples not only Turkify and mock the Western elements specific to these genres, but also build their narratives on underscoring the “specificities” of Turkishness and Turkish cultural codes. For instance, the main characters of the well-known examples of this subgenre, G.O.R.A. (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2004) and Ottoman Cowboys [Yahúi Bat] (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2010), win against or get the better of the Other through their qualities that are attributed to Turkishness, i.e., quick-wit, foxiness and tender-heartedness. Thus they reaffirm the divide between “us versus the other(s)” and therefore restore the wounded national ego by establishing superiority. Furthermore, the hegemony of the Turkish language continues in these examples. It does not matter that the Others are from another planet or from another nation: They all speak Turkish. In Ottoman Cowboys there is a direct reference to this issue. The film tells the story of two Ottoman officers going to the United States to deliver the Sultan’s present to the President. The film actually starts with a bunch of con artists who are telling, or rather making up this story in order to sell a pair of boots as antiques. At the beginning of the film, the main characters speak in English with the foreign characters. However, after the tenth minute, one of the con artists intervenes and says that he does not understand what is being said. Then the image of a DVD menu appears and the spoken language is changed to Turkish from English, and the subtitles are turned off. This Turkifying cinematic device serves to restore the authority of the Turkish language.

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While the Turkification of Western genres and films might be considered as a response to the hybrid identity of the new cinema that no longer reflects a single nation, language and land, the prominent examples of the horror genre reveal the national fears and anxieties towards rising Islamisation (Arslan 2011), in opposition to which the Turkish nation-state was built. According to Arslan, the monstrous female characters in these films, “directly bearing the evil or becoming the victims of evil forces ... [indicate] an ensuing threat to the male-dominated, secularist ‘white’ Turk world” (Arslan 2011, 258). These possessed female characters represent both the association between religion and evil, and the struggle between secularism and Islam. Through their female characters these films restore the divide between “us versus the others”, on which the hegemonic national discourse built itself. Moreover, as the main motive of the narrative comes from the delivering of the possessed women from evil, the “possessed” national ego is also relieved through these films. Therefore, the monstrous female characters become not only the personifications of the national fears of Islamist “possession”, but also the means through which these anxieties are eased. The other newly emergent genre, nationalist adventures, can be considered as the most direct manifestation of a nationalist reaction towards the “invasion” of Turkey and Turkish cinema by foreign or nonTurkish voices. The didactic dialogues that carry highly nationalistic and militarist messages, the narratives based on the “us versus the others” divide, and the heroic figures that demonstrate the power of the Turk to the world by saving the unity and/or the honour of the nation – these features all serve to reaffirm the hegemonic national discourse on the unity, uniqueness, superiority and puissance of the nation. As Ryan and Kellner suggest regarding the changes in representations and the emergence of new genres in Hollywood cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, the shifts in the national mood and image following the transformations in the sociopolitical and economic contexts register in the characteristic features of the films of the period (Ryan and Kellner 1990, 7). The crisis in the national order projects itself in the emergence of the changes and novelties in the cinematic context. Thus, the striking effort to underscore the national voice in these examples of the new cinema points primarily to its lack or loss. From this point of view, the silent/silenced female characters, as another motif of the new cinema, could be considered as the cinematic symptoms of this crisis in the national order, which serves both to reveal its loss and to restore it.

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The manifestations of the crisis in the national order register on the thematic level as well in On Board. The representation of the only female character as a prostitute implies that she is readily available to all men: “As sexual object, the fucking machine, the prostitute ... is required to make her body available to men on demand” (Campbell 2006, 3). In “What’s Wrong with Prostitution?”, Carole Pateman critiques the justification of prostitution as a job as any other wage labour, suggesting that what is wrong with prostitution is that a prostitute cannot sell the sexual service alone; it is always with her body (Pateman 1988). She argues that prostitution is a part of the exercise of the law of the male sexright and one of the ways in which men are ensured access to women’s bodies (Pateman 1988, 194). In this respect, the narrative structure of On Board represents the prostitute’s body as always accessible to the male characters through the subtext that implies there is nothing wrong with raping a prostitute as she is readily available to all men. In doing so, it legitimises, to a certain extent, the rape and withdraws the violating and destroying nature of it. In Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in Cinema, Russell Campbell examines distinctive codes and narrative conventions regarding the representation of prostitutes and prostitution in feature films (Campbell 2006). As Campbell argues: The discourse of prostitution in patriarchal film thus speaks of erotic yearning, of emotional deprivation, and of a hostility to women that constitutes a social pathology. The prostitute is in varying proportions an object of desire, representing those qualities in life for which the male experiences an aching want, and an object of hatred, symbolizing everything in the female other he wishes to deny or destroy. With her seductive power and her marginal, semicriminal status she typically poses a threat to male peace of mind, a threat that must be neutralized in the unfolding of the narrative. (Campbell 2006, 27)

Both the existence of the rape of a prostitute in the narrative and the depiction of the rape as a highly eroticised spectacle annihilate any possible threat that her existence poses. On the other hand, the crucial point to note regarding the intersection of gender and nation is in the association of prostitution with foreignness. The representation of the foreign woman, the outsider, as a prostitute, and then rendering her as an eroticised and passive body, evokes the stereotypical codes and conventions that associate her with “deviant” sexuality, and emphasises the Other’s sexual availability. Her always beautiful and erotic image, and her unspoiled make-up and hairdo after each rape scene strengthen this effect. As Michael Pickering argues in his book Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation:

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The symbolic role that women occupy in ethnic and national processes reflects their appropriate place in the nation (Nagel 1998, 252). As the availability or protection of women’s sexuality registers a “crucial distinction between the nation and its ‘other(s)’” (Kandiyoti 1991, 430), the representation of the Woman as a sexual deviant sets a division line in the intersection of gender and nationality between the Other and us, and serves to inscribe the boundaries of the correct national sexuality. If one considers that the developments in the country in the 1980s led to a crisis in the gender order, the association of deviant sexuality with the foreign woman serves to avoid and externalise the threat, to reaffirm the norm and to restore the wounded Turkish male ego. After the rape, the next day, the Boxer tells Ali that he did not take her back as he promised the Captain, but hid her in the deck head. The camera cuts to Ali entering the dark deck head while the Woman’s rapid and terrified breathing dominates the diegesis in voice-off. Britta Sjogren, in her comprehensive work on the female voice, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film, argues that the female voice-off registers female subjectivity by “draw[ing] attention to itself”, and therefore “evokes a source of enunciation” (Sjogren 2006, 155). While the image of the female character is inscribed as a passive spectacle, “the female voiceoff asserts itself quite openly as a subject … [as] it implicates the viewer in a ‘direct-address’ relationship, invoking a discourse of ‘speaking to’ as well as of ‘speaking’” (Sjogren 2006, 155). The voice-off of the so-far visually and verbally silenced female character in On Board, therefore, manages to register her presence as a speaking subject in the filmic space. However, that fails to be more than momentary as the voice-off finds its vulnerable source when the camera tracks leftward along with Ali to rest on the tied-up body lying on the floor. As Doane suggests, although there is always something threatening about a voice that comes from a source outside the frame, the voice-off is always “submitted to the destiny of the body” because it belongs to a character who is confined to the space of the diegesis, if not to the visible space of the screen. Its efficacity rests on the knowledge that the

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character can easily be made visible by a slight reframing which would reunite the voice and its source. (Doane 1980, 41)

The momentary assuming of subjectivity of the female voice-off is immediately avoided through locking her voice to her image. This camera tracking, not only by unifying her voice and her image, but also by linking her voice to a vulnerable, passive body, serves to offer her image as a voyeuristic spectacle, and therefore silences her subjectivity. Moreover, the use of a single backlight in Ali’s entrance to the deck head changes into a top key lighting as the Woman appears in the frame. The contrast between the use of backlighting that leaves Ali almost invisible and the top lighting that reveals her body underscores the spectacle of her vulnerable body. On the other hand, though the threat, which is posed by the involvement of the female Other on board and in the filmic space, is restrained through reducing her to the silent, eroticised and vulnerable body in the earlier scenes, her presence keeps on suggesting a danger to the order/unity in the following scenes as she is not completely thrown out of the filmic space. After the Captain comes to realise that the Boxer is hiding her, the topic of the crew’s conversations and arguments becomes what to do with her. They put forward various plans to get rid of her, and therefore to reassign the order. While she becomes the one who is constantly spoken of and, therefore, is registered as an object of speech on the verbal level, she is left to silence and excluded from the subject position. She is the embodiment of the concept of the “non-being of woman”: [T]he paradox of a being that is at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken of, but of itself inaudible or inexpressible, displayed as spectacle and still unrepresented or unrepresentable, invisible yet constituted as the object and the guarantee of vision; a being whose existence and specificity are simultaneously asserted and denied, negated and controlled. (de Lauretis 1990, 115)

On the visual level, while the camera frames the members of the crew/nation together in the majority of these scenes, the Woman is mostly kept in the off-screen space. As the use of off-screen space serves to establish a separation between the interior and exterior, it simultaneously supports the threat of her presence to the unity of the members – us versus the other – and underscores her exclusion. Also, the contrast between the intercuts of the fragmented images of her tied-up mouth and hands, and the images of the crew members together, both separates her from the crew/us, and suggests her threat to them. The narrative that cannot manage to exclude the female Other entirely does include her only through

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silencing her on all levels. The female character is completely excluded from the filmic space towards the end of the film, when she attempts to commit suicide and the crew leaves her wounded in the street. At the beginning of this sequence, Ali is shown raping her, a knife held to her back. Then the Boxer appears and they start arguing. While they are arguing, the camera, with a cutaway, shows the Woman’s face desperately crying, and then cuts back to the Boxer and Ali arguing; however, their voices are muted, and the Woman’s sobbing is heard over their images. Then it cuts back to her intentionally pushing herself back on the knife to kill herself. In this sequence, the voice-off of the Woman’s crying over the Boxer’s and Ali’s muted images underscores her point of view and opens a gap in the narrative that registers her painful experience. Moreover, the suicide attempt is the only time in the narrative that the female character is shown as active, challenging the dominant passive and obedient, sex doll image. However, these remain momentary gaps in the narrative as the sailors leave her wounded body on the street and, therefore, manage to get rid of the threat entirely in the last sequence of the film. As Sara Ahmed suggests, “the abject relates … to what threatens the boundaries of both thought and identity. The abject is expelled – like vomit – and the process of expulsion seems to establish the boundary line of the subject” (Ahmed 2000, 93). The abandonment of the female Other manifests their separation from her, re-inscribes the division of us and the other, and therefore serves as closure at the end of the film by rebuilding the shattered order and restoring unity on board. Male subjectivity on the visual and narrative levels and national subjectivity on the allegorical level become complete, whole, united again, only when they manage the abjection of the female character. The medium-long shot of the crew sitting on the shore and congratulating one another – with the line, “We did the best!” – reaffirms their unity. On Board ends with the Captain saying, “Where were we?” which is the line that he repeats each time he delivers his sex stories. That might be read as the last and utmost silencing of the female Other, since it hints that she will become – or has already been – one of the stories told by the Captain, the representative of the nation, and she will therefore be locked up in his and the national point of view. On the other hand, it must be noted, contrary to most of the examples mentioned in the previous chapter, that the Woman’s silencing does not serve as a vehicle to open the male characters and their experience to identification. Rather, silencing the female character both on the verbal and visual levels serves to reveal the male characters’ crises. As Pickering argues, the representation of the Other reveals more about the self than the

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Other (Pickering 2001, 74). Following Chion’s argument regarding the instrumentality of the mute (Chion [1947] 1999), the Woman’s silent presence functions as a pure vehicle in the narrative, even without her having to take any action. The silent Other functions as a repository of the masculine and of national fears and anxieties in the narrative. However, the film that poses the female Other as a potential threat to the order of the ship/nation, and then escapes the danger through silencing her, does not question or point out the historical context that it allegorises and thereby fixes the female character as a threat simply to be excluded and silenced. In contrast to On Board, in 9, Ümit Ünal’s 2002 release, the muted female character serves to open up a critical space about the hegemonic discourses prevailing in the national imagination, whilst she remains an enigma that cannot be fixed on the verbal and narrative levels. The film manages to do that by means of the character formation, narrative structure, editing and visual style. In the film 9, each character comes into being as an epiphany of a hegemonic discourse in the Turkish national imagination while the mute character materialises as the ultimate Other to the national order. Through the editing and narrative structure, which underscores the gaps and ambivalences on the verbal level, the hegemony of these discourses against the Other is disrupted, and this eventually makes each character, and therefore their words, unreliable. In addition, the visual style that does not attribute any voyeuristic pleasure (neither by eroticisation nor by victimisation) to the mute character’s image opens up a critical space regarding the verbal, i.e., what is spoken of her as a female national Other. 9 tells the story of the interrogation of the suspects after the rape and murder of a homeless, foreign woman, Spiky [Kirpi] (Esin Pervane), in a conservative neighbourhood in Istanbul. The whole film takes place in a police interrogation room and is composed of cross-cut testimonies of the suspects (Figures 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6). The only outdoor shots come from one of the suspects’ hand-camera footage, which is found by the police. Spiky appears only in this footage from time to time and does not utter a word in the film. The film opens with an epigraph from In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka: “But there was no sound, not even a hum was heard. The apparatus was escaping your attention for it was working so silently”. After the roll-up captions, the first scene opens with a man, Salim (Cezmi Baskn), in an interrogation room saying, “I’ll tell you whatever there is to tell. But it is a dirty story”. While the epigraph establishes a pretext for the working order of the neighbourhood to be read as a metaphor for the country, Salim’s lines hint that this silent working of the order will be ruined and that there is something corrupt underneath. Then each suspect’s entrance is shown, one

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3.3, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6: 9 (Ünal 2002)

by one with cross-cuts. With cross-cuts, the suspects describe their neighbourhood: It is “like an oasis in the middle of Istanbul”; they have “very nice people”; “peace and quiet reigns”; “everybody minds their own business”; and “there is no riffraff” there; but the cutaways to the footage of the neighbourhood are in very bright colours, almost burning, and the eerie soundtrack in the background, establish doubt about the testimonials. Then one by one, with cross cuts, they start telling “everything” they know about Spiky and her violent death, and through that “everything”, they denote its irrelevance to the incident. In between the cross cuttings of the testimonials about Spiky and her death, footage from a handy cam is placed so that, at first, it might serve to link her image to the “knowledge” about her and, therefore, to fix her on the verbal and visual levels. However, the contrast between the testimonials of Tunç (Fikret Kuúkan) and the greengrocer (Fuat Onan) on how she is violently killed and how she “looked like minced meat”, and the cutaways wherein Spiky’s “whole” body and smiling face are shown (Figure 3.7), avoid her being fully locked up on the verbal and visual levels. After the suspects’ statements regarding how peaceful their neighbourhood is and how everyone likes one another, their conflicting testimonials on Spiky and about the other suspects are presented in crosscuts. While Tunç defines himself as a patriotic and decent guy, who has nothing to do with the murder, Saliha (Serra Ylmaz) says that Tunç is a vulgar troublemaker who could be involved in the murder. In contrast with Saliha, Salim and Firuz (Ali Poyrazo÷lu) reveal that Tunç has no reason to kill Spiky. The contrasting statements continue when they start speaking

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3.7: 9 (Ünal 2002)

of Kaya (Ozan Güven), of how he is funny and clever, and what a good guy he is. His mother Saliha’s statement that Kaya has not been home for a week because he went to see his fiancée cuts to his fiancée’s contradictory testimonial that she has not seen him for a year. Moreover, in contrast to the others’ statements regarding Kaya’s goodness, his fiancée says that he is a pervert. Salim reveals that Kaya was there in the neighbourhood and that he saw him passing by his shop. These contradictory testimonials imply that the neighbourhood is not a quiet and peaceful place, that not everyone likes everyone else, as was claimed, and serve to register the suspects’ words as equally unreliable. Their unreliable portrayal on the verbal level leaves the truth value of what is spoken of Spiky ambivalent; therefore, her silent presence as the subject matter of their speech and confessions cannot be fixed as knowledge about her. This ambivalence is supported by their contrasting testimonials on the identity of Spiky. Tunç says that Spiky came from a rich family and “went into drugs, lost it and ended up on the street”. When he adds, “plus she is a Jew”, the scene cuts to Firuz asking who can know she is Jewish, and then cuts back to Tunç, who reveals that she wears a Jewish star necklace. Firuz then says that everyone was wearing those necklaces, which sold for a dollar, and that she might be Greek or a Gypsy, or a Russian prostitute. The American (Rafa Radomisli) notes that he does not know where she came from since she never told him. Some say that she was beautiful and clever, while others say that she was mad. Some say that she was an angel, and some say that she was possessed.

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In the course of the narrative, each character confesses his or her hidden story, often in contradiction with earlier testimonials. Saliha runs Salim down in her statements, but later it is revealed that Salim and Saliha once had an affair and that Kaya is actually Salim’s son. In opposition to Firuz’s claims that he loves his children and his wife, it becomes clear that he is in love with Kaya. It turns out towards the end of the narrative that Tunç, who presents himself as a womaniser from the beginning of the narrative, was having sex with Firuz, for a fee, together with Kaya. While each character’s “secret” is revealed, Spiky remains an enigma, inaccessible to our knowledge. Her silence registers as an assertion of her difference in the face of the confessions. Though she is muted in the narrative, and her silence has an instrumentality, serving as a means to reveal the other characters’ secrets, she is not fixed on the verbal and narrative levels, as is the case in other examples. In addition, as she is rarely shown in the diegesis and is not reduced to an erotic and/or vulnerable look, as is the case in On Board, she is not fixed on the visual level either. For instance, even though rape is a common theme, which is associated with the silent female character in both films, the visual treatment of the silent female character in relation to rape exhibits 9’s difference. In contrast to the rape scene in On Board that serves to destroy female subjectivity on the visual level by reducing her to an erotic and vulnerable look and, therefore, turning rape into a spectacle for the male gaze, rape is never shown in 9. By this omission, the film, on the visual level too, keeps distance from the silent female character who is constantly spoken of on the verbal level, and therefore does not withdraw the main emphasis from the discursive violence of the hegemonic identities of the district/nation over the Other. Moreover, although the climax of the narrative has its source in her silent presence and her inability to speak of her secret – the name of her killer – by leaving the answer to the question of “who killed her” unanswered at the end of the film, the narrative still does not fix her. That attributes a power position to the female Other as “the holder of the final word”, in Chion’s terms. Therefore, her silence does not turn into an erasure, as is the case in On Board, despite the fact that she is dead and depicted in utmost silence. Furthermore, her muted presence is broken by a song in Yiddish, sung by Spiky, which is heard occasionally throughout the narrative. Her singing voice – not the whole song, but a hum – is heard first as a voiceover. Her voice, which is heard over the images of other characters and over their controversial testimonials on her identity, registers her voice and her point of view on the aural level. In her article “The Machine and The Spiky” [Makine ve Kirpi], which is about 9, film scholar Özlem Köksal

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argues that the non-being of Spiky turns the story into a ghost narrative (Köksal 2012). It is possible to argue that Spiky’s singing voice haunts the narrative like the sound of a ghost. In the following scenes, her singing voice is occasionally heard over her image, and that registers her subjectivity in the filmic space. Since she does not sing in the hand-cam footage, which is the source of her seen image, her voice is not locked to its source but rather remains, to a certain extent, detached from its source, and so represents an aural authority. The alignment of voice and body creates the illusion of a unity and an authenticity that classical narrative cinema seeks to produce (Doane 1980). Since there is a close relation between voice and identity, the use of a misalignment of image and voice suggests an exteriority, and therefore a subversive strategy that serves to challenge notions of identity and belonging (Naficy 2001, 122). As Spiky’s song does not match the image, it serves to create a distancing effect between her image from the handy-cam footage, which represents how she is seen, and her song, which represents her as a speaking subject. Therefore, this misalignment, I argue, serves to open up a gap in the narrative that diminishes the authenticity of the other characters’ speeches about her. Moreover, as Spiky sings the song in Yiddish, this Other language gains articulation in the narrative as a marker of belonging and identity. In addition, the song in Yiddish, which is not subtitled, makes her inaccessible to our knowledge. Despite the attempts to restore the “wounded” unity of the nation, the developments at the end of the 1990s continued the crisis in the national order. The inadequate response to the 1999 earthquake pointed to the inefficiency of the state, while in 2001, the economic crisis caused soaring inflation and a rise in unemployment. The financial assistance that came afterwards from the IMF further revealed the Turkish nation-state’s impotency (Bulut 2006). Furthermore, the severe health problems of the Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, “who was physically declining, [was] a factor complementing and corroborating the image of weakness at a symbolic level” (Bulut 2006, 131). Yet the issue was not only the state’s inefficiency; “the nation itself was perceived as being weak” (Bulut 2006, 131). Moreover, the controversial voices of Kurds and political Islam continued to be heard at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. The leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured in November, 1999. Although this was often interpreted as a victory of the Turkish nation over the Kurdish resistance, it has “also revealed that, against all odds, the Kurds have been successful in laying bare the fundamental weakness of the official ideology of ethnic homogeneity” (Bozdo÷an and Kasaba 2000, 4). The official discourse on the controversial

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ethnic voices began to be challenged and criticised. In December, 1999, Foreign Minister øsmail Cem, stated that the Kurdish broadcasting ban should be lifted, and Mesut Ylmaz, leader of one of the three coalition parties in the government, argued that Turkey had to respect the basic human rights of the Kurdish population (Bozdo÷an and Kasaba 2000, 5). On the other hand, although the Welfare Party was closed down in the February 28 Incident, it did not manage to stop the acceleration of political Islam in the country. The political ban on one of the key figures of the Welfare Party, Recep Tayyip Erdo÷an, was lifted in 2001, and that paved the way for his new party, the Justice and Development Party, to come to power in 2002. In this context, the inscription of the silent female character’s voice into the filmic text can be considered as a representation of the controversial voices of Others that began to be heard in the public sphere. Furthermore, this represents a critique of the official discourse that had silenced the voices of the Other, by speaking on their behalf and casting them as threats without questioning its repressive and suppressive stance. Furthermore, Spiky’s silent presence serves to reveal not only the secrets of the neighbourhood, but also the crisis in the hegemonic discourses upon which the neighbourhood/nation is itself predicated. Saliha represents the mother of the neighbourhood, but her affair with Salim and the resultant illegitimate child disrupt the hegemonic discourse of nationalism that defines mothers and marriage as the norm. While she is accusing Spiky of being deviant, a threat to the order and honour of the neighbourhood by being available to the men of the neighbourhood, it is revealed that she herself has crossed the boundaries established for the women of the nation. The ruining of Firuz’s self-portrayal as the happy family man by the revelation of his love for Kaya also shakes the national discourse that inscribes the traditional family as the sacred cornerstone of the nation. Tunç’s homosexual relationship with Firuz tears down the heterosexual matrix of the hegemonic masculine discourse – “heterosexual, patriotic, decent”. The film as a whole questions the “silent” workings of the apparatus – that is, the nation – and reveals how it builds itself on secrets, corruption and lies, rather than on peace, unity and order: as Salim states, “Nothing’s like what it seems”. In their article on Turkish cinema culture, Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy suggest that one of the crucial mechanisms regarding the ties of national belonging is repression (Robins and Aksoy 2000, 205). Repression is related to the group’s “point of silence” (Sibony 1997, quoted in Robins and Aksoy 2000, 205), and serves to

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Robins and Aksoy’s suggestion is very much applicable to the narrative of 9, as Spiky’s silence functions as a means to evoke the neighbourhood’s point of silence, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood remain silent about the murderer and about the “violent and arbitrary” workings of the apparatus on Spiky to protect themselves and the apparatus itself. The distinguishable feature of the film is that it exposes the point of silence, namely the lies, crimes and secrets disguised in the neighbourhood/nation, and opens up a critical space for questioning the discourses of unity and peace on which the neighbourhood/nation itself is built. It does that, not by silencing the female Other, but rather by making the characters confess and confront themselves, one another and the silent order of the neighbourhood/nation. However, the silence and absence of the female character distance her presence from what is spoken of her and, therefore, do not fix her either on the verbal level or within the dominant imagination. The 1990s and early 2000s in Turkey witnessed revelations of the violent and arbitrary workings of the nation-state’s apparatus. In 1996, the Susurluk Incident was a scandal that exposed the cooperative ties linking the Turkish government, the armed forces and a criminal organisation. The victims in a car crash near a province called Susurluk included the chief of the Istanbul police, a member of Parliament and a leader of a radical rightist organisation, called the Grey Wolves, who had been a suspect in several murders. The incident brought to the surface “deep state” relations. It was revealed that a criminal organisation, set within the police and under the command of the general chief of police, committed serious crimes including homicides, drug smuggling and robbery (quoted in Bovenkerk and Yeúilgöz 2004). Though the prime minister of the period resigned, no one received a punitive sentence. Nevertheless, the nationstate and its apparatuses lost their reliability and sovereignty in the eyes of the public. Millions of people protested the corruption by putting their lights off for a minute every night at nine o’clock. The protests were also supported by some politicians, the media, artists and businessmen. After

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the Susurluk Incident, another “deep state” embodiment, Jandarma østihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele (JITEM) [Gendarmerie Intelligence and Fight Against Terrorism], began to surface through the publications of journalists (A÷aúe 1998; Yalçn 1994), although its existence had not been formally acknowledged. JITEM was founded to counter PKK guerrillas. It has been accused of kidnapping, torture, and extra-judicial killings of PKK members and supporters (ùk 2009). JITEM was involved in over 5,000 unsolved murders of journalists, intellectuals and political activists (Klç 2009). Both the Susurluk Incident and the disclosures about JITEM shook the national discourse. As Ismail Xavier argues, national cinemas bring out historical allegories in times of crisis when nation, national discourse and identity are at stake (Xavier 1999). Accordingly, the lies, crimes and familial secrets that surfaced in the narrative about a murder investigation of an unknown Other, and the dissected national discourses on the family and the unity and peace of the community against the non-being of that silent Other, present an allegorical manifestation of the socio-political climate of the period. The allegorical representations of the homeland as a ship in On Board and as a neighbourhood in 9 present their filmic spaces as scenes of violence, crime, death and destruction, and therefore they open a gap in the narrative that might lead to a confrontation with the nation’s participation in crime and destruction. On the other hand, while the responsibility for the crime scene of the ship/nation is put on the silent female character in On Board, in 9, crimes, lies and violence in the neighbourhood/nation are associated with the violent and arbitrary working order of the neighbourhood/nation itself. Furthermore, contrary to the re-established unity and order in On Board, the continuing corruption and crisis in the national order is underscored at the end of 9. After the scene in which Kaya is forced by the police to confess to the murder he did not commit, an intercut of Spiky’s image in the interrogation room appears for a second, and then Spiky’s necklace is found by Firuz in front of the interrogation room. The momentary use of Spiky’s image here opens up a gap in the narrative that implicates the police in their possible involvement in the incident, and by implication links them to the crimes and murders perpetrated by security forces in the country in that period (Köksal 2012). Though the silent female character is put in a position of “non-being” in that she is the one who is constantly spoken of but does not have a chance to talk, her silent presence takes part in the narrative to point out the silent workings of the apparatus. In The Shadowless [Gölgesizler], Ümit Ünal’s 2008 release, the silent

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female character, Güvercin (Bi÷kem Karavus), has a formation and function similar to Spiky’s, with one difference: Güvercin is not a foreigner, nor does she comes from a non-Turkish ethnicity; rather, she is a metaphor for the homeland itself. In The Shadowless, the narrative takes place in a timeless village that can be said to embody the nation. The film opens in a barber shop in Istanbul where a writer (Altan Erkekli) starts imagining his new story. The film’s fragmented atemporal narrative is the writer’s writing-in-process. Every object and character in the barber shop is being transferred to the timeless village imagined by the writer, which can be interpreted as an allegory of the homeland in a surrealist atmosphere (Çakrlar and Güçlü 2013). Each character personifies an element of the apparatus of the homeland. For instance, the character of the Mukhtar (Selçuk Yöntem), as the authority figure of the village, represents the state, like the Captain in On Board. The Guard (Hakan Karahan), the security figure of the village, represents the military. The Poet (Ertan Saban) represents the intellectuals. Güvercin, the beautiful, silent, innocent virgin, is the gender signifier of the homeland. Güvercin’s disappearance in the early scenes is the trigger point in the narrative. After her disappearance everything starts to be questioned rather than being revealed. As in 9, her absence and her silence become the means through which the narrative moves forward and a critical space for the corrupted order of the homeland, beyond the visible, is opened up. After her disappearance, “Who could kidnap Güvercin?” becomes the main question in the narrative – similar to the disappearance of Spiky in 9. At first, the Mukhtar raises the possibility of a bear making off with her: “Our forefathers used to talk about a bear making off with a bride. Could it be [that] a bear made off with Güvercin?” The Guard replies: “But there aren’t any bears in the hills around here”. Though the Mukhtar and the Guard blame the Poet, they do not have an accurate reason why; rather, as the Mukhtar says, “he’s all they’ve got left”. Like the narrative strategy in 9, here in this example, Güvercin is not fixed in the narrative. Though she is constantly spoken of – as the object of speech – the knowledge about her is not revealed: the answer to the crucial questions of “What happened to her?” and “Who could kidnap her?” is left open. While the director does not let other characters speak on behalf of the silent character, on the one hand, he turns the narrative itself into a question, on the other. As the characters, scenes, objects, stories and places constantly interchange and interpenetrate into each other throughout the narrative, this leads to an interdeterminancy, which affirms nothing, but evokes questions and creates a constant multilayering of meaning. This is also supported with the

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characters who constantly ask questions about everything that happened in their intertwined past and present, here and faraway, existence and nonexistence. The film, thus, connects the audience with the experience of loss, while questioning our assumptions about the truth and being. (Çakrlar and Güçlü 2013, 177)

When Güvercin is found, it is clear that she is pregnant. Despite all their efforts, she does not utter a word about who made her pregnant. As the paranoia about the “deviant” inside rises among the villagers, the Mukhtar goes to the town to report the incident to the authorities; however, he does not come back. After his departure, a bad smell, about which everyone complains, infests the village. Shortly after, the source of the smell is discovered as they find the Mukhtar’s dead body in his office. He has hanged himself. The bad smell suggests a metaphor for the corruption in the state order, and this is also underscored by the framing of his dead body hanging in between a Turkish flag and the portrait of Atatürk that hangs on the wall in the background. The representative of order and authority is not only dead but also corrupt. In the scene where Güvercin’s father (Ahmet Özaslan) forces her to say who is guilty, she screams in rage at her father, in a tight medium close-up, and thus finally registers her feelings and point of view in the narrative. Moreover, as Chion argues for the “screaming point”, as “a point of ... unrepresentability inside the representation” (Chion [1947] 1999, 77), her silence leading to a screaming point serves to communicate the unspoken/unspeakable truth about her experience. Toward the end of the film, Güvercin gives birth. In the scene where the villagers go to see her and her baby, the camera first shows the villagers from the front, opening the door of the barn where she is staying, and wincing at what they see. Then it cuts to a close-up of Güvercin looking at them silently, sweat all over her face and blood on her neck, and rests there for three to four seconds, which raises the tension and prepares us for the shocking things awaiting us. As the camera slightly and slowly tilts down, a tiny hand of a beast holding Güvercin’s hand appears in the frame. When the Mukhtar’s son’s hand, similar to Güvercin’s baby’s hand, is seen at the end of the film, it suggests the Mukhtar’s involvement in the incident (Figures 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10). In line with the historical context from which the film emerged, the silent female character, Güvercin, functions in the narrative as an instrument to reveal that the representative of the authority of the state (the father of the state) raped the virgin (the homeland) and their son (the future of the homeland) is finally shown as a beastly creature. The villagers, and therefore the audience, have to confront the deviant as the father of the state himself and the order that is already corrupt.

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3.8, 3.9 and 3.10: The Shadowless (Ünal 2008)

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The silent female character in The Messenger [Ulak] (Ça÷an Irmak 2007) is similar to Güvercin in that she serves to indicate the corrupt nature of the homeland. The film, which is set in a timeless village that is mired in sins and malignity, tells the story of a messenger, Ibrahim (Cemal Hünal), through the eyes and words of a storyteller, Zekeriya (Çetin Tekindor), who travels from village to village to tell this tale. With the arrival of Zekeriya, the silenced events begin to be illuminated and the villagers wait for the messenger to come and save them. The silent female character in the film, Havva (Feride Çetin), is a young woman of the village who is forced into prostitution by her mother, and although everyone in the village knows about this, they remain silent. Based on the Storyteller’s opening lines, the village in the film can be interpreted as a metaphor for the homeland. He reveals in a voice-over: “[It’s] a village, you can say it’s this village. ... A corner of this land, it was this land itself”. Her silent presence supports her vulnerable depiction and might be read as a metaphor for the silence of the villagers, the culture of silence in the face of her oppression, and therefore for all the oppression and sin prevalent in the village. The silent female character serves the narrative by underscoring the corrupt nature of the village, which is also implied by one of the repetitive lines in the film: “Those who knew and stayed silent are as guilty as the ones who sinned”. However, her story and presence remains secondary in the course of the narrative. Even if the narrative as a whole manages to reveal, on an allegorical level, the crimes, lies and murders of the rulers of the homeland, and opens up a critical gap regarding the prevalent culture of silence, the silent female character and her own experience do not have a role in it. The difference between the filmic treatments of Havva and Güvercin arises from the point that the function of instrumentality allows Güvercin to take part in the narrative and turns her non-being into an existence. Her experience and silence take the narrative forward and serve the narrative by opening up a critical gap by revealing an unspeakable secret of the town, the deviant as the father of the state himself. Even though Güvercin does not speak of her horrible and unbearable experience, the revelation against her silence opens up a space for questioning the unquestioned state authority and its unspeakable, corrupt nature. There are two more examples where the different forms of gendered/national fears and anxieties are registered in the embodiment of the silent female character. One is in The Bandit [Eúkya] (Yavuz Turgul 1996) and the other is in Istanbul Under My Wings [østanbul Kanatlarmn Altnda] (Mustafa Altoklar 1996). In The Bandit, in the scene where Baran (ùener ùen) and Keje (Sermin Hürmeriç) meet after thirty-five

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years, Keje breaks her silence and speaks to Baran in Turkish with a regional accent, rather than in her mother tongue. Though Keje and Baran are well known Kurdish names, the film, which does not directly articulate the characters’ Kurdish identity and/or language, establishes the superiority of Turkish identity and language in the filmic space. Keje regains her voice and subject position only through silencing her language. As Arslan suggests, Keje’s silencing, “reviv[ing] Yeúilçam’s cinematic narratives as well as its ideology and silences and its Turkifying aggression and violence”, echoes Gayatri C. Spivak’s arguments about the dual suppression of subaltern women and their resistance strategies through rejection (Arslan 2011, 255). However, the subjection of Keje, as the metaphor of the Other nation, to a Turkification on the verbal level, might also be considered as the personification of the symbolic violence that Kurdish people suffer in Turkey. In the scene where they meet, Keje notes: “My voice sounds strange to me now. As if someone else is speaking and I am listening”. The official discourse of the Turkish nationstate has chosen not to speak of Kurdish identity: even if it speaks, it speaks of a nonexistence (Çiftçi 2011; Ye÷en 1996; 1999; 2009). Zali Gurevitch argues that silence must be considered as part of a dialogue, that speech after silence exposes the silence itself (Gurevitch 2001; quoted in Çiftçi 2011). The lines of Keje emphasising her silence until that moment, and her facial expression which reveals her difficulty in speaking, register a defamiliarising gap in the narration and point to her (nation’s) symbolic silencing. Her silence restrains the Other in the dominant language that obliges a monolingualism, but simultaneously lays bare the national discourse that has been silencing the Other. (Figure 3.11) Another example of a silent/silenced female character as the repository of national fears and anxieties appears in Istanbul Under My Wings. The film tells the story of a seventeenth-century Ottoman scientist Hazerfan Ahmet Çelebi (Ege Aydan) who wants to fly by using Leonardo da Vinci’s blueprints. At the beginning of the film, Hazerfen rescues the wounded (mute) Italian Francesca (Beatriz Rico) from a ship that was brought to Istanbul after being seized in sea warfare, and heals her in order to make her decipher da Vinci’s ancient scripts. From the beginning of the film, she is presented as the key to the quest, as she is the only one who can decipher Leonardo da Vinci’s blueprints, and she therefore harbours the final word, in Chion’s term (Chion [1947] 1999). She can therefore be considered as holding a power position, since both the characters in the film and the audience do not know how much she knows and whether she can or will speak. However, even though she regains her voice at some point and manages to decipher the secret of the papers, her voice is not

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3.11: The Bandit (Turgul 1996)

allowed to have discursive authority. In the scene where she deciphers the papers and reads in Italian, her voice is lowered, made inaudible, and the male voice-over of the Translator (Giovanni Scognamillo) is heard over the images of Hezarfen working on the flying mechanism. Therefore, through the silencing of her language and use of the male voice-over in Turkish at the moment of the revelation of the secret, the final word, not only is she made accessible to our knowledge, but also the discursive authority and authoritative knowledge is transferred to the dominant language, Turkish. The hegemony of Turkish language, and the role division between the speaker and the silent are reassigned through the silence of the female Other. The silences of the female characters discussed in this chapter provide a narrative tool to project not only gender-based, but also national, fears and anxieties onto the Other. Furthermore, I have demonstrated how they reveal the crisis in the national order and in hegemonic national discourses. While the female Other’s silence serves to reassign the discursive authority and the order in favour of the hegemonic identities in some examples, it tends to open up a critical space that makes the audience confront the gaps and crises in the national discourse of unity, harmony and peace.

CHAPTER FOUR SILENT RETURN OF THE PAST

You have not talked to me in such a long time. You know… What kills me most is your dead silence. You are wandering around me like a ghost, not uttering a sound… Even a shadow makes more noise than you. If you were able to talk you would claim that I was the source of all the negative things. At least this gaze of yours is telling that. —Mürúit, in 7 Courtyards There can be memory within silence and memory through silence. —Luisa Passerini, “Memories between Silence and Oblivion”

In the previous chapter, the silent female characters were discussed as the repositories of the clashing fears and anxieties present at the intersection of gender and national identities. As their feminine and also non-Turkish voices are silenced, I argued that the silence of the female characters in these examples serves to embody the fears and anxieties not only of wounded male egos, but also of a wounded national ego by calling into question the unity and coherence of masculine and national voices. The silent female representational form provides a tool by which the crisis is projected on to the Other, and therefore the discursive authority on the verbal, visual and narrative levels are restored in favour of the male Turkish characters. However, it also serves to evoke a critical underlying revelation about national fears and anxieties, which might make the other characters and, therefore, the audience confront the silenced Other. Furthermore, the silences of the female characters bear a close relation, in one form or another, to a traumatic past in most examples. These silences are presented either as a consequence of a traumatic event in the past, or as a key that gives a voice to a “silenced” event from the past. In addition, the silent characters in these films are usually depicted with filmic devices directly related to memory, such as camcorders, photographs, archival footage, or in flashbacks and dream sequences. Michel Chion’s suggested function of the mute character, instrumentality, is again very much applicable in these examples regarding the revelation of the past. In addition, as was discussed in the second chapter in relation to gender roles and attributes, he argues that the mute character always brings forth the

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question of knowledge, causing “any character [she] interacts with to question their own knowledge ... and the mute might well be the one who knows ‘the rest’”, for “the mute is considered as the guardian of the secret” and s/he “clues us [in] to the fact that there is a secret” (Chion [1947] 1999, 96). In the examples that will be analysed in this chapter, the silence of the female characters serves to reveal “the rest”, the knowledge of the unspoken past. Hence, I will argue in this chapter that a silenced or unspeakable event, wound or trauma in the individual’s past, and/or in the national history in some cases, is recollected, revealed and articulated through the silence of the female characters. Whereas the silent female representational form, for the most part, serves to give voice to “his-story” as it provides, in most of the examples, a medium through which the male characters articulate their own traumas and wounds from the past, only in one example is it used to reveal and register “her-story” from her point of view. Accordingly, Chion’s association of the mute with the moral conscience is very much applicable to this feature of female silences regarding the representation of the past: “the mute is often assigned the role of moral conscience, for next to [her] everyone is guilty” (Chion [1947] 1999, 96). Therefore, I shall suggest that although female silences, in their generic relation to the past, cannot escape functioning as an instrument to communicate the male characters’ pain, trauma and unspeakable past, they also serve to underscore the male characters’ shame and guilt and, therefore, carry the possibility of opening up a critical space that forces a confrontation with the traumatic past and with the self. Turkish society has founded itself on “layers of forgetting [nisyan katmanlar]” (Bora 2005; 2009) since the foundation of the Republic, which built itself on the erasure of the memory of its Ottoman past. The official ideology of the Republic developed a “militant forgetting” that was taught by national education, everyday nationalism and popular nationalism (Bora 2009). From the last years of the Ottoman Empire through the Republican period, the crimes committed by the nation state, such as the implementation of the Wealth Tax,1 the Events of September

1

Wealth Tax was a Turkish tax implemented on the wealthy citizens in Turkey in 1942 with a purpose of financing Turkey’s emergency military expenditures in World War II. It was imposed on the fixed assets of all citizens. However nonMuslims – Jews, Armenians and Greeks – were taxed far more heavily than Muslims for the reason of reducing the minority populations’ control over the economy.

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6-7, 2 or counter-guerrilla activities in the Kurdish region, were not confronted (Paker 2004). The official discourse of Turkish national history simply forgets the traumatic memories of the Other that it caused, and restrains the mourning of the Other for its loss (Bora 2003; 2009; Kaptano÷lu 2009). However, the memory discourse of the Turkish nationstate was challenged in the 1990s through the rise of counter-discourses in the public sphere. The rise of the Kurdish movement and the Islamist right (Özyürek 2006), the developments in the fields of oral history and memory studies (Neyzi 2009; Ergur 2006), and the new media that brought taboo subjects into the public sphere (Gürbilek 2011) opened a veritable Pandora’s box (Bozdo÷an and Kasaba 1997) of debates on what constitutes the national history (Neyzi 2010). Conflicts with the official discourse’s portrayal of the past have emerged out of this more open forum, forcing an obligatory confrontation with the past (Paker 2009). The crisis in the national memory was reflected in the cinematic context and the screen became a major forum for the revelation of the unspoken/unspeakable past of the country: The production of historical films, such as September 12 films and popular nostalgia films that portrayed these rarely discussed, traumatic moments in the history of Turkey increased, and documentaries about the silenced or unspeakable memories of marginalised groups that injected counter-discourse or counter-memory into the filmic space were made with increasing frequency. The silent female character, who signifies a gap or void in the narrative, or in the past of the other characters, is an effective vehicle to point out the unspoken or repressed traces of the past. I shall argue that the traumatic past of the country that cannot be represented directly leaks into the narrative through this new representational form, and opens up the possibility of revealing a crisis of national memory as well. In the context of Turkish society’s forced confrontation with its past – both in the socio-political and cinematic realms in the 1990s – and analysis of the thematic and stylistic features of female silence, this repository of gender and/or national wounds will reveal the functions of their generic relation to the past. 7 Courtyards [7 Avlu] (Semir Aslanyürek 2009) tells seven different stories taking place in seven different courtyards in the same street in Antakya, Turkey. In each courtyard, people speak different languages and 2 The Events of September 6-7, taking place in 1955, were a series of riots against the minorities of Istanbul, primarily aimed at the Greek population. The two-day riots, also known as the Istanbul Pogroms, were instigated by the Turkish government of the time. As a result of the attacks, massive numbers of minority properties and business were damaged, and people were killed.

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come from different ethnicities or religions that represent the multicultural reality of the city. The sequence of the seventh courtyard opens with a man, Mürúit (Varlam Nikolodze), who is shown from a side angle in a medium shot, down on his knees, praying. The camera cuts to Mürúit now finishing his prayer, facing the camera in a tight medium close-up; a woman’s hand appears in the frame and holds his shoulder. This shot, revealing the shock and fear on his face, raises the tension regarding the owner of the hand. The camera zooms-in on his face while he gulps and his eyes fill with tears, and then it cuts to a two-shot in which he bursts into tears, while the woman (Songül Sevdik) sits in silence on a chair behind him. While Mürúit is sobbing without turning to her, the woman (eventually it will be revealed that she is the ghost of his wife) looks at him from behind with a little smile on her face. Continuing to sob, with a deep sense of grief on his face, he says: Mürúit: Ayla... Is that you? Ayla...Whenever you wanted something from me, you would always place you hand on my shoulder with a cold and lifeless touch, just like you are doing now... And when I would turn around to look at you, I would be greeted with an innocent smile. Then... (he gets to his feet) Then... I would have to put a real effort to get a word out of you.

He turns around and looks at her. Then he approaches her and sits down at the table across from her. Though he talks directly at her, she is looking ahead in silence, as if he was not there: Mürúit: You had a way of expressing what you wished for... Most of the times in an indirect way that I mostly could not figure out what it was that you wanted...

Then the camera cuts to a medium close-up showing her looking at him, still with a smile on her face but a blank expression in her eyes, and then cuts back to Mürúit, with doubtful eyes, saying, “Well, now what do you want, Ayla?” Ayla’s silence in this scene functions as a generator of doubt, in Chion’s term (Chion [1947] 1999), regarding Mürúit’s and their joint past. The shot in which Ayla’s hand is seen on his shoulder registers as the return of the past: the phantom of the past on his shoulder. The ironic use of the hand of a ghost on a shoulder implies the inevitability of the past and creates a sense of suspense, as if the male character is trapped in the past and cannot move forward. The mise-en-scène in which Ayla is sitting in silence at his back and Mürúit is unable to turn around to look at her for a long time, and the contradiction between Ayla’s smile and silence and Mürúit’s grieving sobs also establish the doubt regarding their past.

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Moreover, Mürúit’s lines saying that Ayla comes back when she wants something from him and the silence of Ayla in response raise the tension and doubt. As the scene continues, Mürúit, is shown in a tight close-up, from the front, saying angrily: Mürúit: You have not talked to me in such a long time. You know... What kills me most is your dead silence. You are wandering around me like a ghost, not uttering a sound... Even a shadow makes more noise than you... If you were able to talk you would claim that I was the source of all the negative things.

The camera leaves Mürúit and pans left to frame Ayla looking ahead to establish her disappearing smile and emphasise the angst and grief on her face. As Ayla turns back to Mürúit, he says in voice-off, “At least this gaze of yours is telling that”. Mürúit’s lines delivered in response to Ayla’s ghostly presence assign her the role of moral conscience, in Chion’s terms (Chion [1947] 1999), with his guilty conscience coming to light before her “dead” silence. The silent female character signifies the doubt and the void regarding the past. The change in Ayla’s expression in response to Mürúit’s lines, together with the tight facial close-up underscoring his anger hint at the “secret”, the “silent wound or trauma” of his past. Trauma discourse and theory have been developed mainly by scholars from various disciplines of the humanities (Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1995; Radstone 2000; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003). In her influential work, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth explores the unconscious emotions that manifest in traumatic reactions (Caruth 1995). Caruth’s work, which associates the traumatic event with the repeated reactions in its aftermath, defines trauma as an event that cannot be left behind and it therefore haunts the present. Caruth notes that “to be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 1995, 5), as Mürúit is possessed by his wife’s ghostly appearance. Regarding the trauma discourse, Caruth’s work gives emphasis to the traumatic symptoms, namely the present, rather than to the original event itself, namely the past. To this end, what becomes important in relation to the silent female ghost in the narrative is not only the past that returns to the present, in the embodiment of a silent ghost, in order to be revealed, but also the present traumatic reactions that are triggered by the presence of the silent female character.

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Then the camera cuts back to the two-shot while Mürúit is getting up from the table. He turns away and approaches the camera. The camera’s focus shifts to him while Ayla is disappearing from the frame. In a tight facial shot, underscoring his regret, anger and grief, Mürúit reveals: Mürúit: Yes, I know that I am not God’s gift of a man. I can even admit that I am a bit of a loser. Yet, your unlimited selfishness has ruined everything, Ayla. You were not reconciled with yourself. Don’t think that I am blaming you though. You can’t blame someone because of his character.

In the second chapter, I suggested that although the silences of the female characters in most of the examples serve to make the male characters confront their anxieties, fears and guilt, they avoid the feeling of guilt by blaming or scapegoating silent female characters for their sufferings and wounds. However, in 7 Courtyards, the male character does the exact opposite; he emphasises that he does not blame her for anything she has done. The camera cuts to Ayla, who is shown from Mürúit’s point of view through the window, playing with a baby in the courtyard. While looking out of the window, he reveals the repressed secret, the wound, the trauma of his past: Mürúit: One day I was going through the closets, I found your diary. God knows I had no intention to read it. Yet, it fell down into my hands accidentally and a photograph slipped out of it. I bent down and picked it up. I took a glance at it. A photograph of a handsome guy... He had a suit and tie on. Obviously, a university student. I was handsome too at that age, but I was not going to the university. And it caught my attention that the boy in the photo looked a lot like our son whom we lost. I have to confess... it briefly crossed my mind that he was the father of our son. Then I put the photograph and the notebook back in their place and since that day I have been trying to push back the idea out of my head.

As was discussed in detail in the second chapter – although Chion argues that the power of the mute comes from the fact that the crucial knowledge of the story is mostly lodged in her/him (Chion [1947] 1999) and Silverman suggests that to permit the female character to be seen without being heard makes her inaccessible to male interpretation (Silverman 1989) – the use of the monologue serves to produce a truth effect, a knowledge about her and her story from a male point of view which withdraws the possibility of her having a power position and confines her to the male character’s point of view on the verbal level. The silent female

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character, in this case, too, plays a subservient role as an instrument to reveal the male character’s grief, wound and trauma in the narrative (Chion [1947] 1999). Although Ayla is presented as the one who keeps the secret of the past, it is the male character who reveals the repressed and unspoken past – the loss of a child and the grief of a betrayal. However, both the lines in which he mentions that he is a loser and not God’s gift, and the guilty and angst-ridden expression on his face each time he catches Ayla’s eye, indicate that Ayla’s silence is making Mürúit confront his silenced past. His feelings of guilt and shame are so intense that he tries to commit suicide towards the end of the sequence. Moreover, contrary to the examples in the earlier chapters, where the silent female characters are kept in off-screen space while the male characters are speaking about them, the intercuts to Ayla during Mürúit’s monologue register her presence in the filmic space and keep on generating doubt about what is spoken of her and of the past. The truth of Mürúit’s words about Ayla is shaken at the end of the sequence with the lines of the neighbour. In the following sequence, the neighbour knocks at his door to ask for a lemon just as Mürúit is ready to hang himself. The neighbour says that Mürúit has lost his mind since he lost his wife. Therefore, in the last instance, the real trauma of Mürúit, the loss of his wife, is also revealed. In “The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentary and The Psychology of Memory”, Janet Walker, drawing upon the readings of autobiographical documentaries, raises the issue of the truth of the representation of traumatic experience (Walker 2003). She argues that even though there is a tendency to make a distinction between the “real” event and the “false” memory, the distortions or amnesiac elements are actually the elements that lead to the truth of the memory, and that is for Walker “the traumatic paradox” (Walker 2003, 107). As Walker argues, as the traumatic event wounds the psyche, memory cannot represent the trauma and so constructs an alternative story which may at points coincide with the original, but at others will produce a different – sometimes falsified – narrative of what happened (Walker 2003, 106-7). However, it is because of the wound, she suggests, that memory misrepresents the event (Walker 2003, 106-7): “True events may produce veridical, abstract, or mistaken memories. Alternatively, the mind may produce an impression of memory, even an incredibly veridical one, where none is actually warranted” (Walker 2003, 108). The traumatic paradox, in Walker’s account, is relevant in order to associate Mürúit’s state of mind with the presence of the silent ghost that coincides in the diegesis. In accord with Walker’s account, the neighbour’s lines at the end of the episode suggest that the knowledge that is provided by Mürúit about his past and about Ayla might be read as a disruption of

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his memory, but also the very misrepresentation registers his trauma of losing his wife onto the filmic text. Yet, his revelation of a false memory underscores his wound and state of mind and, therefore, inscribes the knowledge or truth about him and his past, rather than about the silent female character’s. As Walker suggests, traumatic memories are highly fraught “imaginary scenes” that are constructed with regard to reality rather than reincarnating it; a traumatic memory both weaves itself around and substitutes for an event too terrible to acknowledge non-traumatically. (Walker 2003, 109)

The feeling of guilt evoked in Mürúit by the silence of the female character, the phantom of the past, forces him to confront his past. As the traumatic event – namely, the silence of his dead wife – is “too terrible to [be] acknowledged” and articulated, unrepresentable and unspeakable, he substitutes it with imaginary scenes. The narrative association with a traumatic past, as in 7 Courtyards, might be considered as an outcome or a symptom of the historical and cinematic contexts from which these films emerge. Susannah Radstone suggests that memory develops visibility at specific historical conjunctions, principally as a means of expressing and holding in balance particular ambivalences and equivocations about identity and cultural value (Radstone 2000, 7). Since the beginning of the 1980s, memory and/or the obsession with the past have become a major theme (Huyssen 2003; Sancar 2008). In line with this trend and also with the socio-political developments in the country, Turkey has been experiencing a return of the past (Gürbilek 2011), or a culture of memory (Suner 2010). As the Turkish nation-state was based on a culture of forgetting and suppression (Akçam 2005; Bora 2003; 2009; Kado÷lu 1998; Neyzi 2004; Özyürek 2006; Paker 2004; Sancar 2008), this return is striking. The September 12, 1980 military coup was a major crux in Turkish history. The army took over the government, abolished the Parliament, suspended the Constitution and banned all political parties in order to silence the voices of opposition and suppress in particular the oppositional left, which had in the 1970s achieved a mass status never seen before in Turkish history, thus establishing “economic stability” on the stage of a society cleansed of all tensions, all protest, and all opposition legal or illegal. (Gürbilek 2011, 4)

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In order to rescue Turkey from “deviant ideologies” and “destructive and separatist foci”, dossiers were created on nearly two million people; hundreds of thousands were arrested and hastily tried. Over five hundred people were sentenced to death, fifty of them executed; over a hundred died under torture; thousands lost their citizenship. Books, magazines and films were destroyed (Gürbilek 2011). Within three years, the generals of the junta institutionalised their control and ideology over political power and everyday life by passing eight hundred laws and a new constitution. In late 1982, Kenan Evren, the leader of the junta, was appointed as president of Turkey and served until 1989. As Gürbilek suggests, the climate of fear and of repression that had been established in the junta period endured afterwards and the post-junta period had a distinctive feature in comparison to the other repressive periods in Turkey’s recent past. “Repression came to the fore along with another strategy, apparently its precise opposite, one promising freedom in the cultural sphere” (Gürbilek 2011, 5). While the prohibitions continued and the right to speech was cut off, silenced groups – Kurds, Islamists, minorities – became more visible and began to speak their unspoken/unspeakable memories vis-à-vis Turkish national history. In the post-1980s, the rise of the Kurdish movement and of political Islam, on the one hand, and the increasing demands of the EU regarding democratization and the confrontation with the nation’s past, on the other, induced a challenge to “the memory of a strong, independent, self-sufficient state and its secularist modernization project that dominated the public sphere through the past century” (Özyürek 2006). As Leyla Neyzi suggests, Turkish society, which had turned its face away from the past for centuries, began to discover its past from different perspectives. Several factors led to this return of the past: Globalization, the integration of [the] Turkish economy [with] the global economy in particular, the growth of the diasporic communities from Turkey in Europe, the emergence of the global media and the visibility of Kurdish and Alevi identities in the public sphere had great parts in this process. The corruption, mafialization and violence of the state, caused a loss of credibility of the political system in the eye[s] of society. The Susurluk Incident and the Marmara Earthquake both unveiled these issues and triggered the demands of the society for democratization by strengthening the NGOs. (Neyzi 2004, 9- 10)

Along with these developments, Turkish society started “furiously debating national history” and “particular historical events have come under renewed scrutiny in the present” (Neyzi 2010, 446). These events include:

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the Armenian genocide of 1915, the War of Independence (1919-1923), the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the attacks against Jews in Thrace in 1934, the massacre of the Alevi/Kurds of Dersim in the 1930s (known as Dersim 1938), the conscription of non-Muslim soldiers into labour battalions during World War II, the pogroms against non-Muslims on 6-7 September 1955, the 1960, 1971, and 1980 military coups, the massacre of Alevis in Maraú in 1978, the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state from 1984, the Marmara earthquake of 1999, and the murder of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, among others. (Neyzi 2010, 446)

Growing interest in the past and rising identity movements also triggered memory studies in Turkey in the 1990s. Previously silenced identity groups, which became audible in the public sphere in the post-1980s, organised NGOs, networks and social groups that conducted oral history research to reveal their silenced testimonies (Neyzi 2010). In 1991, the History Foundation was founded for the purpose of oral history research, the creation of an oral history archive and the publication of books on oral history. The Foundation initiated several projects. Scholars in Turkish academia began to contribute to the development of memory studies (Ahska 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Neyzi 1999; 2004; 2008; 2010; Öztürkmen 2001; Özyürek 2001; 2006; 2007). These developments played a crucial role in the re-evaluation of the country’s recent past on the basis of personal memories (Neyzi 2010) and created multiple and critical perspectives on the existing constructions of the national history, thereby disrupting the authority of the official discourse (Ergur 2006). The relative loosening of censorship in Turkey also contributed to multiple representations of the past which began to appear in the public sphere, and “Turkish citizens began to develop a different relationship to the notion of memory” (Suner 2010, 39). The consensual narratives of Turkish identity and history had begun to be challenged. Moreover, due to the growing interest in the past, the production and consumption of literary genres such as memoirs, biographies, autobiographical novels, historical fiction, and of television series focusing on specific eras of Turkish history have increased. This has had an impact on representations of the past. As “cinema is part of history, namely a discourse on the past” (Mazierska 2011, 1), the cinematic context played its part in this shift in the culture of memory by addressing the issues of home, belonging and memory through individualistic narratives and by subverting traditional narratives of the nation in new political films. Most of the examples of the new cinema of Turkey present mnemonic features

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that carry the burden of the past through narration, representation or style. The shame, denial and trauma of the national memory leaks into the filmic space of the new cinema in the form of personal traumas, guilt and shame in individualist narratives that have no political content or direct reference to the national history (Akbal Süalp 2008). Though Akbal Süalp relates this persistent association with the past to the collective trauma that the September 12 military coup evoked (Akbal Süalp 2008), it can be attributed to all the traumatic events that were once silenced in the national memory but have since come to light in the public sphere since the early1990s. Hence, the silent female characters that persistently serve to reveal the unspoken or silenced past and the personal traumas of the male characters in these individual narratives might be considered as part of this cinematic symptom prevalent in the new cinema of Turkey. Suner argues that one of the important characteristics of the new cinema is “the figure of ‘spectral home’” and “the insistent return to ‘the idea of home/ homeland’” (Suner 2010, 1). Although the formations and operations are various, the new cinema insistently “tells us the stories of uncanny houses haunted by the ghosts of the past – houses associated with trauma, violence, and horror” (Suner 2010, 1). Suner associates this trope with a crisis of belonging that is prevalent in Turkish society because of the developments in the realms of identity and memory (Suner 2004; 2010). In this regard, while there is no direct reference to the recent history of Turkey, the literally haunted house in 7 Courtyards, and other houses in films with silent female characters associated with trauma, can be read as a trope for the homeland’s traumatic past, which “leaks”, in Akbal Süalp’s terms, into the narrative. This leaking occurs through displacement of the collective trauma onto the personal trauma, sense of loss, shame or guilt experienced by the male characters regarding their past. As the director of the film notes, each courtyard in the narrative represents a different language and identity in Turkey (Aslanyürek 2011). The episode discussed earlier in this chapter takes place in the house of a Turkish man, whose trauma, revealed through the silent phantom, is a possible projection of the crisis of national memory. His traumatic memory of his wife’s betrayal unveils a family secret and implies the dissolution of the family unit. The trope of betrayal and family secrets as a point of silence can be interpreted as leakage from the historical context in which the national memory suffers a crisis precipitated by the unlocked memories and family secrets regarding oppressed groups. The Ivy Mansion: Life [Asmal Konak: Hayat] (Abdullah O÷uz 2003) is another example of an individual’s narrative in which the return of the traumatic past is used as a trope. The film tells the story of the

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disappearance of a couple, Bahar (Nurgül Yeúilçay) and Seymen (Özcan Deniz), who have moved to New York from Kapadokya for the treatment of Bahar’s cancer. The main question of what happened to them motivates the narrative. At the beginning of the film, Bahar is found by a family friend, seriously wounded from a bullet in her head and comatose in a hospital. Seymen, on the other hand, is still missing, and police suspect him of having shot his wife. Family and friends come to New York and hire a private detective to find him as they wait for Bahar to come out of her coma. Since knowledge about the things that happened to her are inaccessible to the audience because of her coma, Bahar functions as both the generator of doubt and carrier of the final word. The doubt concerning the things that had happened to the couple is registered by Bahar’s compulsory silence, and rises from the scene in which Seymen is shown continuing his life among the homeless on the streets of New York. His portrayal in dirty ragged clothing with a full beard, his disturbed and unbalanced gestures, together with conversations that establish that he has been living with these homeless people for some time, escalate the doubt and suspicion and provide hints of his appalling past. In this scene, Seymen hugs a girl and calls her “my dear Dicle”, which is the name of the family maid with whom Seymen fathered a child (which we know about because the film is a continuation of the popular TV series of the same name). It is understood from their closeness that they are lovers. The scene creates a certain suspicion about Seymen’s sanity and gives us the first clue about his memory disruptions. Unlike the phantom in 7 Courtyards, Bahar’s silent presence is not kept on-screen throughout the narrative, which may partly soften the effect of her assigned role as the moral conscience. However, the intercuts of Bahar lying in her bed in the hospital continue to remind us of the doubt and the gap, the void in their past. The narrative moves forward in time, and one year later, while Bahar is still in a coma, Seymen is found. Pressured by family members, he starts seeing a therapist. His first session reveals that although he is talking about existing people and events, he misremembers the past. After Seymen says that Dicle (øpek Tuzcuo÷lu) is his first wife and Bahar is the second, the camera cuts to a flashback, or rather to the imaginary scene created by Seymen’s traumatised memory, in which Dicle and their son see Seymen, saying, “Goodbye Daddy!” Then it cuts to a tight facial close-up of Seymen telling the therapist that he has been suffering from insomnia for days, and that even when he sleeps he has nightmares. Like the narrative use of a ghost in 7 Courtyards, flashback is a formal strategy that “designates both a cinematic edit that links the present with the past and

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the involuntary and spontaneous recall of (usually traumatic) events” (Turim 1989; quoted in Radstone 2000, 81). The frequent use of flashback in this film depicts Seymen’s memory, which is fragmented between the past and the present. It becomes clear with this flashback that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and that because of the “wound” in the past, he creates alternative stories. The next therapy scene opens with a medium close-up shot of a voice recorder on the coffee table, and then the camera cuts to Seymen and the therapist sitting in the room in silence. When the therapist asks Seymen where Bahar is, Seymen replies with anger and hatred that he has not seen her for a long time, and that she might be with her boyfriend Yaman (Ege Aydan), who is in reality Bahar’s best friend. Then it cuts to an imaginary scene showing Bahar trying to seduce Seymen at the party where they met. In the intercuts to Seymen in the therapy room, he says that she tried to seduce him, but he was married and very much in love with his wife, Dicle. His verbal portrayal of Bahar as a femme fatale is underscored visually by her costume and make-up – a red, low-cut dress, red shoes, red lipstick and a blonde wig. The camera cuts back to the therapy session, and the doctor asks if they had sex. In a tight facial close-up Seymen is shown saying, “I don’t remember”. Traumatic memory suggests “the existence of a dissociated mental realm that contains and to an extent seals off recollections of things too painful to bear” (Kenny 1996; quoted in Radstone 2000, 87), this “walled-off area of memory giving rise to symptoms commonly referred to as post-traumatic shock [sic] disorder” (Radstone 2000, 88). Both the flashbacks and the imaginary scenes in which Seymen misremembers the past serve to underscore Seymen’s posttraumatic stress. Although the imaginary scenes also prioritise his point of view in the narrative, the therapy scenes and his memory disruptions convey not only the unsoundness of Seymen’s account, but also his denial of and refusal to confront his trauma. Therefore, the things that happened to Bahar remain unknowable. However, in the course of the narrative, the doubt raised by Bahar’s inaccessible knowledge is released when finally, Seymen is able to remember and eventually recount the things that happened “that night”. The therapist gives the sound recording of the session to Seymen to listen to when he goes back home. The scene in which Seymen is shown listening to the tape with fear in his eyes cuts to a flashback showing Seymen and Bahar’s first arrival to the house in New York. Then the camera cuts to Seymen shown talking to the therapist from a tight facial close-up, looking directly at the camera, underscoring his angst and guilt, saying, “Shall I tell you the hardest night of my life?” It cuts back to a

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long flashback in which Seymen tells Bahar that she has a cancer. They go to see the doctor, she gets chemo treatment in the hospital, and she is having a very hard time at nights because of the pain. Bahar and her past are confined to Seymen’s memory both on the verbal and visual levels. The flashback sequences are intercut by the image of Seymen talking to the therapist. The position of the camera and the framing of these cuts also prioritise Seymen’s point of view, and the tears in his eyes and the sweat on his face are the visual signifiers of the return of the repressed past. As Bahar is kept in off-screen space, which doubles the effect of her literal silence, the things that happened to Bahar are established only from Seymen’s point of view. Then the camera cuts to the flashback of “that night”, then back to Seymen shown lying on his bed listening to recordings of sessions in which he cannot remember the events of that night. What actually happened is at last revealed in Seymen’s flashback: They came upon armed robbers in a street, and while Seymen was struggling with one of them he accidentally fired a shot that hit Bahar. The fragmented and fast editing of this flashback sequence, with the intercuts of Seymen having a memory crisis, sobbing and shaking in the therapy room, establishes his entrapment between the past and present, and his confrontation with his trauma, guilt and shame. Bahar’s crying “Seymen” as a voice-over during the fragmented images of the event manifests a contradiction with her present silence and highlights the gap in the narrative, the thing that Seymen cannot remember: his part in and the guilt and shame regarding his wife’s injury. Yet in the end, the tension and doubt raised by her inaccessible knowledge is released by her husband’s revelation about what happened to her. In this way, she is demystified, and the knowledge about her is produced from a male character’s point of view, both on the visual and verbal levels. Therefore, her power position is transferred to the male character, and the transfer indicates a role division between the speaking subject (Seymen) and the spoken-of object (Bahar). Bahar’s comatose silence is not only used as a generator of doubt but also as a means to set forth and to open Seymen’s trauma and sufferings to empathy and to prioritise his point of view. Even though she is spoken of and she is the subject matter of his monologue, Bahar serves as a vehicle for Seymen to confront himself and reveal his experience. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011) is another example of the use of the silent female representational form in relation to the characters’ pasts. The film tells the story of a murder investigation in an Anatolian steppe. At the beginning of the film, Kenan (Frat Tanú) confesses to the murder. However, the place of the dead body and why he killed the victim remain unknown. Since

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Kenan was drunk when the murder took place, he cannot remember exactly where he buried the body. A group of men, Dr. Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), the local commissar Naci (Ylmaz Erdo÷an), the prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), police officers, soldiers, diggers, and Kenan, traverse roads in search of the dead body buried somewhere in the Anatolian steppes. It takes them all night to arrive at the crime scene. As the team tires of going from one place to another, not finding “the round tree” under which the body is said to be buried, they decide to have a break in a nearby village and to carry on after that. While they are eating in the house of the Mukhtar of the village, the electricity is cut off. The Mukhtar (Ercan Kesal) calls on his daughter, Cemile (Cansu Demirci), to bring a lamp. While they are sitting in the dark, one of the search party is shown looking out through a window. Then the camera, from the place of the window, cuts to an extreme long shot of a young woman coming towards the house, carrying a lamp. Then another cut shows the Doctor turning his head towards the door while the creaking of the opening door is heard. As the camera cuts to the door, the light from the lamp behind the door slowly illuminates the darkness, and a young woman appears, holding a tray bearing the lamp and glasses of tea (Figure 4.1). She stands still for a moment at the door. This first appearance of the silent woman in the narrative, holding a light that illuminates the darkness, establishes her role as moral conscience, in Chion’s terms, her function as an instrument of revelation, and hints of the future revelations that will be evoked as the male characters encounter her. As the young woman enters the frame from behind and offers tea from the tray to the Doctor, the camera cuts to him, then to the Prosecutor, the brother of the murderer, and the murderer. In each cut, the character taking a glass of tea from the tray is shown looking at her in a facial close-up as the light from the lamp illuminates his face. The use of light, while showing us their changes of expression, suggests that each character’s world is full of mystery, secrecy and possibly lies and crime. In the silent “light” of the female character, the Doctor and the Prosecutor look at her with doubt and dazed discomfort, and the scars on the Prosecutor’s face, which might be read as wounds from the past, become visible. Kenan, the murderer, is shown looking at the silent woman with tears in his eyes as if he would like to say something (Figure 4.2). While Kenan starts sobbing, the young woman turns her back on him, leaving him in the dark, and the camera cuts to her offering tea to the ghost of the victim, seen from Kenan’s point of view. Then the camera cuts back to Kenan, in a tight facial close-up, looking as if he cannot believe his eyes, and his exclamation “Yaúar! Aren’t you dead?” registers his feelings of guilt and attributes the role of moral conscience to the silent female

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4.1: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan 2011)

4.2: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan 2011)

character. In this sequence, the silent girl, the carrier of the light, serves not only to reveal Kenan’s guilty conscience, but also to generate doubt about the other characters’ mysteries. After their encounters with the silent female character in this sequence, the characters’ traumatic pasts connected with the women in their lives begin to unfold. In the garden of the house, the Prosecutor tells the Doctor the story of his friend’s wife who had foretold that she would die after giving birth to their child and who “died the very minute she said she would”. The intercut to the silent young woman standing behind the window of the house while the Prosecutor tells his story recalls the role of moral conscience and creates a gap in the story, and thus registers a doubt about its veracity. The use of low-key lighting from the side, which partially illuminates one side of the Prosecutor’s face and creates a deep shadow on the other, sustains the doubt by pointing out the dark side of his story. The police commissar calls to the Prosecutor and

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tells him that Kenan has confessed the reason for the murder: Kenan is the father of the victim’s son, and the victim had not known that. On the night of the incident, when they were drunk, the truth slipped out, and they had a fight, at the end of which Kenan killed him. As both the Prosecutor’s and Kenan’s pasts are revealed, as they confront their pasts and their guilty consciences just after their encounter with the silent female character, her function as an instrument of revelation is once more established. While the Commissar and the Prosecutor proceed to talk to Kenan, the camera cuts to the Doctor sitting in the garden and zooms in, underscoring the anxiety on his face as he turns his head toward the house, toward the sound of the creaking door. Then it cuts to the young woman coming out of the house, collecting the clothes from a clothesline, and going back into the house. The intercut to the silent female character serves to suggest doubt regarding the Doctor’s own story. Her function both as an instrument of revelation and as a generator of doubt is sustained with a cut away to a lamp on the wall at the end of this sequence, suggesting illumination and revelation. After this sequence, the team takes to the road to carry on their search for the body. Finally, Kenan spots the place. They dig and find the body. While they are on their way back, the police commissar says, “Wherever you find a can of worms, look for a woman. Be sure to look for an issue with a woman”. This sentence might be considered as the affirmation of the doubts that are raised by their encounter with the silent female character in the previous sequence, and as the forerunner of the future doubts and revelations from this point onward in the narrative. In the scene in which the Doctor is shown going into to his flat and sitting at his work table, the camera cuts to photographs from his past: including one perhaps with his wife, happily smiling. These cuts to visual references to his past imply the reactivation of the Doctor’s memory. Then he is shown from behind, looking at a mirror with an anxious expression on his face. Though the story of the Doctor’s past is not revealed, the mirror scene, which comes after the images of his past, suggests a moment of confrontation with his past. Later, the Doctor sees the wife of the victim, Gülnaz (Nihan Okutucu), in the corridor of the hospital before the autopsy. The wife is shown, from the Doctor’s point of view, sitting on a bench in the corridor, looking at him. Then the camera cuts back to the Doctor, in apparent discomfort, turning his head. In this scene, the momentary silent look of the woman also raises doubt about the mystery of the Doctor. Moreover, after his encounter with the victim’s wife, the Doctor discovers in the autopsy that the victim had been buried alive, but he does not include that in the autopsy report. The Doctor’s anxious and disturbed attitude and his

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mysterious omission, following his encounters with the silent female characters, suggests that the silent female character once more evokes the feeling of guilt, and that the guilt or burden of his past, uncovered in this silent confrontation, drives him to cover up the actual cause of the victim’s death. Discussing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, film scholar Umut Tümay Arslan suggests that the film pushes us to reflect on the profound difference between our gaze at a crime that stands outside us and that does not have the potential to stain us, and our gaze at our own crimes (Arslan 2015). This reflection, I argue, starts with Cemile’s silent illumination. Until Cemile’s entrance, the division between the guilty and the innocent is very clear-cut. After the characters’ encounter with Cemile, along with the revelations, the difference between the innocent/not guilty and the villain/guilty starts to get blurry, like the blurry window that does not allow us to see the crime scene at the beginning of the film. Cemile’s silent encounter with the characters illuminates not only the scars on the Prosecutor’s face, but also the stains on other characters’ lives and suggests that the stain is not fixed on a murdered image, but it is all around. That suggestion is strengthened with the autopsy scene towards the end of the film, when a drop of blood accidentally splashes from the corpse onto the Doctor’s face. As Arslan notes, what is searched for in the narrative is the stain itself, not the perpetrator or the reason for the crime (Arslan 2012). The stain is all around; that is, all around us. In the end, the silent images of the female character embody the revelation of what cannot be represented. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a film haunted by “ghosts of the past” (Köksal 2011), might be considered as a confrontation with the unrepresentable, namely corpses buried under these lands and unsolved murders in the recent history of Turkey, which are stains that are all around our faces and all around Anatolia. As Arslan argues, the film prefers to leave the unrepresentable out of its frame and by so doing, it turns into a ghost-like-excess: that thing that drives someone to kill his neighbour is segregated only as a stain, due to our continuing role in a past that produces the truth about all the violence in this land (Arslan 2012, 215). In the end, the two silent female characters are instrumental to the male characters’ confrontations with their own feelings of guilt, shame and doubt; however, they also serve to open up a critical gap regarding the divisions between the guilty and the innocent, the truth/event and the representation of it, and the stains on our own faces. (Figure 4.3) Despite the differences, in all the above examples, silent female characters remain merely instrumental though they serve to reveal male characters’ traumatic experiences, therefore making them and the audience confront their guilty consciences. Furthermore, they serve to maintain the

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4.3: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan 2011)

role division of speaker male and spoken-of female, and therefore to attribute discursive authority to the male characters. Hence, even though the revealed shame and guilty conscience of the male characters point to a male lack and/or loss, the various uses of silent female characters all serve to turn the male loss into a gain by prioritising male points of view. Akbal Süalp suggests that arabesque male melodramas of the new cinema present apolitical, lumpen and neurotic narratives that avoid critical interrogation of the political context (Akbal Süalp 2008). Both 7 Courtyards and The Ivy Mansion: Life can be cited, to a certain extent, as examples of these male weepies or melodramas. Although it is hard to consider Once Upon a Time in Anatolia as an example of male melodrama, it does not overtly associate the traumatic past that it represents with the social and political context. These films, notably free of overt political content, can be considered as cinematic projections of the social and political memory of the 1980s, when two simultaneous cultural strategies took effect: political repression leaving its stamp on society on the one hand, and “A Speaking Turkey” offering new frameworks for speech on the other (Gürbilek 2011). However, that provoked speech was for the most part free of politics: “People were relieved of their political responsibilities and began for the first time to speak ... for their own selves, rather than in the name of some political mission” (Gürbilek 2011, 6). People in Turkey began to speak in the 1980s, maybe more than ever before; in fact, the order of discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, of who has the authority to speak and what can and cannot be spoken of, was in flux. Yet, as mentioned above, marginalised and/or silenced identity groups, such as Kurds, Islamists, gays and lesbians, and women, began to speak in the public sphere as a consequence of this dual cultural strategy. However, as Gürbilek argues, “each of these different sectors began to speak, doubtless in different

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forms ... but suddenly without the framework of a grand political narrative” (Gürbilek 2011, 9). The visibility of heretofore silenced groups in the public sphere increased, but “that visibility coincided with the effort of the masses to put forth cultural identities unmediated by a grand political narrative, to search for cultural identity not shaped by a shared political language” (Gürbilek 2011, 81). Accordingly, it is possible to consider male representations – which repeatedly turn to and suffer from the past and recollect their personal traumas in guilt, angst and shame – as leakage into the filmic text of silenced and traumatic memories of the Other that began to be revealed in the post-1980s. In her analysis of the film Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis 1994), and in relation to issues of trauma and memory, Radstone, following Burgoyne’s analysis of the film that stresses the separation between memory and fantasy, argues that what gets forgotten in the filmic text is itself “symptomatic of contemporary culture’s imbrications with traumatic memory” (Radstone 2000, 96). The insistent speech about traumas, guilt and shame, repeated tropes of memory and past in the face of (female) silence might be considered as the cinematic return of the repressed in national memory. As “the repressed never returns as the repressed thing it was ... [and] it returns as something shaped by the needs of the site to which it returns” (Gürbilek 2011, 86), silenced traumas of the recent history of Turkey return as cinematic projections in the form of personal (male) traumas. Personal traumas that are repetitively used as a main trope in these films remember and represent the past as problematic, and in doing so, point at the historical context when the national memory was suffering a crisis. On the other hand, as they do not explicitly attribute these traumas to the revealed collective traumas of the country, they provide an “adequate” way of projecting the crisis onto another field. Yet, revelation of the past occurring in front of, or rather at the cost of, silence is suggestive, because the silences of female characters point out or embody a gap, a void in the male characters’ pasts, and so recall and represent the historical and political context that these films avoid. Contrary to most of the examples, Pandora’s Box [Pandora’nn Kutusu] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2008) involves a scene where the silence of the female character, Nusret (Tsilla Chelton), makes another female character confront herself and her past. The film tells the story of three siblings who have to bring their mother, Nusret, who is suffering from an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease, from her village to Istanbul and look after her there. Except for a few things from the past, Nusret does not remember anyone or anything, and she rarely speaks. Their mother’s disease and the issue of taking care of her makes the tensions between them rise.

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Pandora’s Box is opened, and all the unresolved disputes, wounds and conflicts of the past come to light. In one scene of the film especially, the wound, the unresolved dispute of the past, rises to the surface before the silence of Nusret. In the scene where Nusret and her daughter, Güzin (Övül Avkran), are shown sitting and laughing in Güzin’s house, the camera cuts to Güzin who is shown sobbing in a medium shot. Then it cuts to Nusret silently looking at her, while Güzin, in voice-off, says that Nusret has never loved her. As the camera cuts back to Güzin in a facial medium close-up, she continues, “I always wondered if you ever really loved me. Look at you, you are empty, as empty as the glass behind you. The funny thing is I am just like you.” Then the camera cuts to a two-shot of them, and Güzin says that now they are both the same. While Güzin is shown restlessly sighing, Nusret, as if she were “empty”, is staring blankly at Güzin. The silent, empty image of the mother in the face of the revelation of the past, registers her as the literal image of forgetting. And only in front of this silent empty image, is she able to articulate the burden of the past. As the recollection is about the confrontation with absence and forgetting (Roth 1995, 93), Nusret’s silent presence, as an embodiment of forgetting, allows Güzin to confront her wound regarding her mother. Discussing the relation between recollection, trauma and representation in film, Michael S. Roth suggests, “the very quality that makes an experience traumatic (that we cannot take it in through the mental schemes available to us) is lost in the telling. This ‘loss’ can be felt as a cure” (Roth 1995, 99). The past’s wound, the thing that she cannot forget, becomes tellable, therefore forgettable and curable, through the confrontation with the mother’s silent presence. In the next sequence, Güzin notices that her mother has left the house while she, Güzin, was asleep on the sofa. She goes out, in a panic, to look for her mother and finds her nearby, sitting on a bench and staring at the sea. The embrace between the mother and the daughter in this scene also provides a hint to the spectator about the curability of this silent confrontation with the past. Hence, it is possible to suggest that the female characters’ encounter with the silent female character ends up not only with a confrontation, but also with the possibility of a cure. (Figures 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6) As was previously mentioned, the change in Turkish society’s relationship with the past and memory not only projected itself onto these narratives, but also found direct representations in the examples of the new cinema:

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Chapter Four As a result of the process of democratization over the last decade, Turkish cinema has begun to address politically charged issues more easily than before. To a certain extent, this new liberal atmosphere is an outcome of the improving relations between Turkey and the European Union from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. The relative softening of political censorship has had a positive impact on Turkish cinema ... potentially inflammatory subjects such as the periods of martial law, discriminatory policies against religious minorities, or the conflict with Kurdish separatist guerrillas in the southeast have been critically interrogated in the films of the last decade. (Suner 2010, 51- 52)

Until the mid-1990s, due to censorship, except in rare examples, Turkish cinema did not produce films that subverted traditional narratives of the nation regarding its past (Arslan 2011), “favour[ing instead] the official state policy of national identity based on homogeneity” (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 15). While the dominant melodramatic mode of Turkish cinema represented the past mostly in a nostalgic mode, the historical films reasserted the official discourse of national history. As Dönmez-Colin notes, the classical Turkish cinema presented “the world through rosetinted glasses” and prohibited the distribution of the films that “would be harmful to the undividable wholeness of the state – that would affect national independence, general morality, health and politics in a negative manner and insult national feelings” (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 49). Even though the September 12 films of the 1980s, as previously discussed, emerged as a consequence of a traumatic event in the history of Turkey, by not tackling the politics, they did not go beyond portraying the emotional effects of the coup on individuals. Law scholar Mithat Sancar, working on the issues of the culture of memory and confronting the past in a Turkish context, argues that the September 12 films of the 1980s might be called “depression films”, or “maudlin cinema” (Sancar 2011, 115), because these films are limited to self-pitying prison memoirs without confronting the effects of the military coup (Sancar 2011, 115). Though the selfpitying tone decreased relatively and the narratives diversified, most of the September 12 films of the late-1990s and 2000s avoid confronting the trauma of the coup (Gürata 2011, 111). They introduce a form of recollection in which the aim is forgetting rather than remembering (Gürata 2011, 111). Drawing upon two box-office hits of this genre, Vizontele Tuuba (Ylmaz Erdo÷an 2004) and My Father and My Son [Babam ve O÷lum] (Ça÷an Irmak 2005), Gürata argues that these films produce a new view, a sheltered remembering that does not confront or come to terms with, but avoids the traumatic past (Gürata 2011, 111). Nonetheless, as Akbal Süalp notes, these films aroused interest in the recent history of Turkey that has been either silenced or erased from the

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collective memory (Akbal Süalp 2008, 48). On the other hand, the sheltered remembering, suggested by Gürata, goes hand in hand with a nostalgic yearning, which constitutes a sub-genre in the new cinema, called “popular nostalgia films” (Suner 2004; 2010). Propaganda (Sinan Çetin 1999), Offside [Dar Alanda Ksa Paslaúmalar] (Serdar Akar 2000), The Waterfall [ùellale] (Semir Aslanyürek 2001), Vizontele (Ylmaz Erdo÷an and Ömer Faruk Sorak 2001), and most of the September 12 films of the era, such as The International [Beynelmilel] (Srr Süreyya Önder and Muharrem Gülmez 2006), Vizontele Tuuba and My Father and My Son, can be cited as examples. According to Suner, the sort of past remembered in these films is akin to childhood memories, imagined as innocent and articulated with a sense of “once upon a time” (Suner 2010). Hence, the examples of the sub-genre represent the lost past as a period of collective childhood (Suner 2010). Though these films foreground a yearning for a lost past and idealise the image of that past, they take a political stance with their potential to critique the state authority in Turkey (Suner 2010, 29). They attempt to critique contemporary Turkish society through an idealized representation of the past. They seem to suggest that Turkey’s current problems arise from the unnecessary and often violent intrusion of central government upon communal life. These intrusions have ultimately destroyed internal harmony and peace in Turkish society. (Suner 2010, 40)

However, the potential of these films to criticise is both limited and problematic, as Suner notes, since they do not contextualise the anxieties and tensions raised by complex social and political problems. Rather, they try to resolve them within, in a before/after and inside/outside dichotomy, and therefore smoothly avoid the burden of responsibility: “Rather than engaging in a critical interrogation of the past, Turkish nostalgia films attempt to arrest the past in an image of frozen childhood” (Suner 2010, 40-41). There was also an increase in the number of historical dramas produced in this time period. As film scholar Serhan Mersin suggests, these films, retriggering collective memory, initiate a perception of history, via individual memories, as a tool of rediscovery (Mersin 2010, 28). In their relation to the past, as in September 12 films and popular nostalgia films, these films do not go beyond a sheltered remembering. Most of the examples of the genre, such as Mrs. Salkm’s Diamonds [Salkm Hanm’n Taneleri] (Tomris Giritlio÷lu 1999), which is about the Wealth Tax; Pains of Autumn [Güz Sancs] (Tomris Giritlio÷lu 2008),

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which treats the Events of September 6-7; and 120 (Murat Saraço÷lu 2008), a film about the Battle of Sarkamú during World War I, all justify the motives of social conflicts in the country’s past in terms of, or rather in favour of, the official discourse through the distortion of collective memory (Mersin 2010). In this regard, it is possible to argue that most of the examples of the new cinema explore a retelling of the past that allows previously silenced or erased events in collective memory to be remembered, and/or open to public appeal. However, that remembrance does not necessarily bring a confrontation. On the other hand, the new cinema of Turkey has managed to produce multiple and critical perspectives in the representation and interpretation of the past with the emergence of new political films. As Suner argues, these films address political issues in the recent history of Turkey not in a nostalgic mode, but with a focus on the trauma of the past (Suner 2010). In these new political films, not only have the traumatic memory and the subject of silence in Turkish society and in the history of the Turkish Republic found a voice on screen, but also the representation of the multiplicity of accounts and experiences regarding these issues has produced counter-discourses about knowing and interpreting the past. As Suner argues, “without endorsing a single position or offering clear-cut solutions, new political films are preoccupied with the question of how to come to terms with a traumatic past” (Suner 2010, 53). Özcan Alper’s feature Autumn [Sonbahar] (2008), which was discussed in the first chapter, brings to the screen the heretofore untold memories of the hunger strikes and Operation Return to Life, while Toss-Up [Yaz-Tura] (U÷ur Yücel 2004), told from veteran soldiers’ points of view, makes visible for the first time the traumatic memories of the people who did their military service in south-eastern Turkey during the 1990s when the armed conflict between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerrillas was at its zenith. Kurdish director Kazim Öz depicts the events of the pro-Kurdish student movement in Istanbul during the 1990s in The Storm [Bahoz] (2008) and describes the thus-far unrepresented memories of the Kurdish movement. In his feature debut Before Your Eyes [Min Dit] (2009), Miraz Bezar tells a story of an unsolved murder in Diyarbakr through the eyes of two children who witness the murder of their parents by a member of JITEM (Turkey’s deep state security apparatus which is thought to be responsible for covert and illegal murders and activities especially in the 1990s) and makes the audience confront the silenced “deep” past of the country. An example of these new political films, Waiting for the Clouds [Bulutlar Beklerken] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2003), is most relevant regarding

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the use of the silent female representational form in relation to the traumatic and silenced past of the nation. While the male characters’ confrontations with their personal traumas and past are revealed through the instrumentality of the silent female character in the abovementioned examples, Waiting for the Clouds provides a confrontation with the points of silence in the national history, as its narrative focuses on a silenced woman’s journey after regaining the voice of her identity and past. Ayúe (Rüçhan Çalúkur) feels lost and alone and becomes distanced from everyone in the village after the death of her elder sister, Selma (Suna Selen). She does not speak to anyone, but continues to speak only with Mehmet (Rdvan Ya÷c), the eight-year-old son of her neighbour. After days of silence and isolation, Ayúe unlocks her memories and starts speaking Greek, telling the story that she has not spoken for fifty years: Her real name is Eleni, and she was adopted and protected by a Turkish family during World War I, when her family and other Pontic Greeks were deported by force. She had been forced to forget her real name, language, identity and past for fifty years because of the assimilation policies of the Turkish nation. Many converted to Islam for survival and kept their identity secret all their lives. In 1924 the rulers of Greece and Turkey agreed to repatriate the ethnic Greeks and Turks and another massive deportation took place... In 1994 the Greek parliament adopted 19 May as the day to commemorate the Turkish genocide against the Pontus Greeks, claiming that between 1916 and 1924 the Greek Orthodox population of Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region became victim of a systematic policy of extermination by the Turkish authorities. The Turkish government has been very sensitive about the unofficial part of the Turkish history that is not included in schoolbooks. As shown in the film, Turkey’s first census to include all minorities was not until 1975. (Dönmez- Colin 2008, 111)

The government’s approach to the unofficial part of Turkish history silenced many incidents in the history of Turkey and therefore excluded the traumatic experiences of minority and/or marginalised groups, such as the forced deportation that becomes the main trope of the narrative in Waiting for the Clouds. The film opens with archival footage, possibly from the Population Exchange after World War I, showing, in sepia tones, crowds of people with their suitcases, gunny sacks, and chests travelling by boats and trains, children and adults walking in lines, and women crying. These images of deportation and displacement, accompanied by sorrowful music, come one after another and dissolve into an extreme long shot of a village in the mountains under a thick haze. An intertitle, “Tirebolu, 1975”, appears. The use of this archival footage of the

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displacement establishes an association between the “not included” past and the film’s present, and between the narrative and history, inscribing the gap – the silenced and traumatic memories of the Other in Turkish history – on the filmic space. The image of the village, which comes just after the archival footage, and the extreme long shot underscoring the vastness of the land, might refer to the homeland under the thick haze of the repressed past. In the following scene, Ayúe is telling Mehmet, the son of a neighbour, a fairy tale about a girl whose family is kidnapped on a snowy winter night by Karakoncolos, a dark creature from an ancient regional myth, who kidnaps people from their houses while they sleep. Ayúe’s story is cut off by the arrival of the census officers. The folkloric myth, which is cut by the official discourse, points out the gap, the missing, the cut part of her story, and/or history. In the article “(Cannot) Remember: Landscapes of Loss in Contemporary Turkish Cinema”, through a discussion of two films, Waiting for the Clouds and Autumn, Övgü Gökçe investigates the new paths that these films open to interpret and read loss, remains and trauma (Gökçe 2009). Regarding the juxtaposition of the folkloric myth and the official discourse, Gökçe argues: The sequence not only creates a dual vision between the mythical story and official history, between the census and the Karakoncolos tale, but also … the supposedly fearful tale of Karakoncolos creates an ambiguous and uneasy feeling, possibly referring to something unknown in the story. (Gökçe 2009, 271)

Throughout the narrative, this ambiguous and uneasy feeling, this gap in her story, and in the history, is used in relation to the female character’s silence, her silenced identity and past. After her sister’s death, Ayúe goes up to the attic one day with Mehmet. They find old photographs in a box. In this scene, they are shown looking at the photographs in a medium twoshot as Mehmet asks, “Who are they?” Then the camera cuts to the photographs, and then cuts back to a medium two-shot. When Mehmet asks, “Who are those strange looking people?” and turns to Ayúe’s face looking for an answer, the camera slowly pans left and focuses on Ayúe in silence, in a medium close-up, while Mehmet goes out of the frame. The reframing of the camera underscores the momentary silence and the doubtful look on her face, and then it dissolves to black, thus pointing out the gap, “the point of silence” on the visual level. In this respect, Gökçe reads these points of silences drawing upon Laura Marks’ theory on intercultural cinema (Gökçe 2009). As Marks explores the ways that intercultural films inscribe “the disjunction between orders of knowledge,

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such as official history and private memory, by juxtaposing different orders of image, or image and sound tracks that do not correspond to each other” (Marks 2000, 31), her argument is applicable to the relation between the points of silence and memory in this film, though this film, Gökçe argues, cannot be placed in the intercultural film category (Gökçe 2009). There is a moment of suspicion that occurs in these works after the official discourse has been (if only momentarily) dismantled and before the emerging discourse finds its voice. This is a moment of silence, an act of mourning for the terrible fact that the histories that are lost are lost for good. Yet this moment is also enormously suggestive and productive. It is where these works begin to call upon other forms of cultural knowledge: it is where the knowledges embedded in fetish-like objects, bodily memory, and the memory of these senses ... are found. (Marks 2000, 25- 26; quoted in Gökçe 2009, 273)

Ayúe’s momentary silence while looking at the photograph is suggestive. It is in this silent moment that the silence in the official discourse and the possibility of alternative narratives are pointed out. In the scene where the villagers make their annual summer move from the village to the plateau, a similar kind of momentary silence occurs. A long shot shows the villagers walking in lines with their animals and belongings, recollecting the images in the archival footage that we were shown at the beginning of the film. Then the camera cuts to Ayúe staring around in silence, with puzzled eyes, from a tight medium shot, and cuts back to the foggy and vast land (Figure 4.7). Marks argues that “to read/hear the image, then, is to look/listen not for what’s there but for the gaps … to look what might be in the face of what is not” (Marks 2000, 31). In this respect, her moment of silence in this instance, too, is suggestive, in Marks’ terms. The image of the village people walking in lines in contrast with the vast land shown from a long shot recalls the deportation and evokes a sense of displacement. The recollection of the past that is lost for good is indicated in her puzzled look in this silent moment. Indeed, after this scene, Ayúe isolates herself from the villagers and stops talking to people. Her voluntary mutism keeps generating doubt and points to the gap in the narrative, as neither the villagers nor the audience are provided with the actual reason for her silence. The villagers think that it is motivated by the loss of her sister. However, due to the earlier moments of silence, through which the audience is made to confront the possibility of unspeakable memories (Akbal Süalp 2004, 30), we infer that there is something beyond her sister’s loss: there is “the rest” that is fully known only to Ayúe. Though her silence partly breaks, the suspicion regarding “the rest” is reaffirmed in

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4.7: Waiting for the Clouds (Ustao÷lu 2003)

the scene when, in response to Mehmet asking whether or not she is going to speak again, she starts, all of a sudden, to speak in Greek and she asks for forgiveness. And the rest starts to be revealed in the scene where Mehmet brings a Greek stranger to Ayúe’s house in the highlands. Sitting in front of her house, Ayúe breaks her silence and starts telling her family’s deportation story in Greek while looking at the vast view of the highlands: Ayúe: Niko…you came back…See Mother in the clouds? She’s carrying Sofia on her back. But I can’t see Sofia clearly…Her head bounces lifelessly. I can’t tell if she’s alive. Father isn’t there to protect them anymore. He was shot by other rebels, remember? Look…Mother put baby Sofia in the snow. She’s leaving her there. Oh little Niko…Remember how we feared for our souls every night? We used all our strength to walk each day, only to watch each other die at night. Why did they do this to us, Niko? They told us “only 2 days”. You’ll have to walk “only 2 days”. But what happened? We walked weeks and weeks to get to Mersin. They watched us burry our dead along the way. Should we tell him who you are? Niko is my brother. I’m Eleni Terzidis, the daughter of Prodromos and Marika Terzidis. Before my father died he made me promise to protect Niko. He trusted me.

In this long monologue scene, from a close medium shot, which prioritises the silent female character’s point of view, contrary to the other examples, Eleni reveals her identity, her language, her story and her memory that were previously silenced and supressed. Rather than speaking on behalf of

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the silent character, the film lets the silenced character tell her story. Along with the articulation of her story in Greek in this monologue scene, it is understood that the girl of the fairy tale, which is told at the beginning of the film, is Eleni’s herself. Moreover, the film reverses the division between the silenced language of the female and the speaking –Turkish – language of the male as the revelation comes in Greek, in her mother tongue. That inscribes a so-far silenced memory in so-far silenced language on the cinema screen of Turkey. In the following scene, they enter the house and after a short while Mehmet’s parents come and take him to the village. After Mehmet leaves, Ayúe reveals the rest of the story in Turkish. (Figure 4.8)

4.8: Waiting for the Clouds (Ustao÷lu 2003) Ayúe: Süleyman...father...He found Niko and I in the snow. I was like a wild animal full of fear. Süleyman became my new father, his daughter, Selma, became my sister. They helped me to feel human again. My Niko wanted to stay in the barracks with the other orphans. Then came the order to collect all the orphans. They wanted to load us onto the boats and send us away...Süleyman gave me his name. For fifty years, no one suspected who I really was. For fifty years, I never spoke in my own language. Our father made us swear never to reveal our secret. We never told a soul. Even Selma’s husband never knew who I was. Then Selma brought me back here. We bought the house where I was born. She said this would clear my conscience. But the guilt was always there.

When the rest of her story unfolds in a long monologue, from a static medium shot from the front, the silenced and unspoken past in the national

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history is revealed. The use of monologue and the position of the camera that prioritises her point of view inscribe the memory and the counternarrative of the Other in the filmic space. In the previous scene, she speaks in Greek when she, for the first time, speaks of her real name and identity. Here, in this scene, she shifts to Turkish, as she speaks of how her identity is suppressed. The shift serves to point out how the official history silenced counter-narratives. Apart from that, along with the monologue, her silence is established not only as a metaphor for the silencing of her ethnicity and language; it also establishes the return of the repressed feeling of guilt. The moment she regains her voice, both literally and symbolically, her silence becomes an instrument to reveal her story and underscore her confrontation with the traumatic past and her feeling of guilt. As Suner suggests, “where everyone sees the mundane realities of the present, she sees the ghosts of the past” (Suner 2010, 61) that has haunted her. However, the function of Ayúe’s silence is not completed here. In the last section of the film, she embarks on a journey to Greece to find her long-lost brother, Niko, to get rid of the ghosts of the past. In the last scene, Ayúe goes to Niko’s home and finds him looking at family photographs. Niko says that if she were his sister, she should have been in one of those pictures. In response, Ayúe, in silence, puts the only family picture that she has on the table, and as the camera slowly pans into the family portrait, the picture is seen in extreme close-up until it dissolves into archival footage of the forced deportation. Her silent response in this scene, again, is suggestive. It not only calls the concept of belonging into question, but also leaves the audience with the burden of the past that is lost for good. As S. Ruken Öztürk indicates with regard to this scene, in “Hard to Bear: Women’s Burdens in the Cinema of Yeúim Ustao÷lu”, while relieving the main character from the burden of the traumatic past, the director “shifts that burden to the shoulders of her viewers” (Öztürk 2010, 161). The moment of silence at the end of the film both puts an emphasis on “her” story and “her” loss, and serves to reveal the gap, the void in the national memory. As her momentary silence dissolves into the archival footage of the deportation, the film manages to connect with the audience, but does not make them come to terms with it, since it does not offer a resolution to or a recovery from the pain and burden of loss that Ayúe has suffered from, like many others, in the past of the country (Güçlü 2013, 123). In the same vein, Gökçe argues: In the end, the film closes the bracket it opened at the beginning with the images of immigration, and Ayúe/Eleni’s story becomes something

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bracketed, related to the stories of other anonymous people; she becomes one of the many whose stories are lost. (Gökçe 2009, 274- 275) (Figures 4.9 and 4.10)

4.9 and 4.10: Waiting for the Clouds (Ustao÷lu 2003)

As such, the film does not fill the gap that it opened in the history and leaves the audience with the so-far suppressed and silenced traumas of the Other (Güçlü 2013, 123). In contrast to the films discussed thus far, in Derviú Zaim’s feature film The Mud [Çamur] (2004), which is also an example of the new

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political films, the silent character is male. As in Waiting for the Clouds, this character’s silence signifies his own trauma rather than being an instrument to reveal other characters’ relations to their traumatic pasts, and the silence of the character is associated with the recent history of Turkey. Both these films display a tendency shared by all the other films discussed so far: avoidance of direct reference to the collective trauma while dealing with the personal trauma. The Mud tackles the trauma of the violent partition of Cyprus in 1974 through a portrayal of a group of middle-aged friends. The conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots arose in 1963 and led to a period of inter-communal violence in the early-1970s. In 1974, Greek Cypriot nationalists attempted a coup d’état in order to realign the union of the island with Greece. Following this incident, Turkey invaded the northern part of the island. That led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, from the north to the south and vice versa. The main character, Ali (Mustafa U÷urlu), collapses and loses his voice during an address by the commander while Ali is in the last three weeks of his compulsory military service. Due to this undiagnosed illness, he is sent to rear duty, to stand guard at a checkpoint around a dried salt lake. The mud around the lake is believed to cure many illnesses, and Ali begins to apply mud to his throat to cure his loss of voice. Gradually he becomes obsessed with it. One day, while he is searching for mud inside a well next to the checkpoint, he finds a precious Cybele sculpture, an ancient object that will figure in the conflict at the end of the film. The dried salt lake where Ali looks for a remedy is actually the place where Ali’s friends Temel (Taner Birsel), Halil (Bülent Emin Yarar) and Ahmet (Ali Düúenkalkar) killed and buried Greek people in 1974 in revenge for the killing of their relatives by Greeks. Suner argues, “the film portrays the different attitudes to [coping] with the past” (Suner 2010, 57). While Ali’s trauma surfaces psychosomatically as the loss of his voice, Temel, as a peace activist, is now running memory projects supported by the United Nations to help Greek and Turkish Cypriots to confront the past and communicate with each other. On the other hand, Halil, who does not believe that peace is possible between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, is obsessed with getting rich and starting a new life: so “the memory of this unspeakable crime haunts them today in different ways” (Suner 2010, 57). The film begins with a male voice-over speaking over a black screen: “Soldiers! Remember what Cyprus was like thirty years ago. On this island, on Cyprus, there was no security of life or property”. Then as the

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camera pans to the left, dim sunlight enters the frame while the voice-over continues: You Turks lived under Greek threat. There were massacres, uprooting, raping and loss. They said that when the Turkish army got here they wouldn’t find any Turks alive to save. The Turkish army came to the island. And they made you a region where it is safe to live.

As the camera dissolves from the light of the sun to the image of the soldiers listening to their commander, in an extreme long shot taken from above, the voice-over joins its speaker, the commander, who says: Now the Greeks live in the South, in their own region; and now the Turks live in peace in their own region in the North. And it has been like this for thirty years. With nobody getting hurt. But according to some news we got lately, the Greeks are again building up their weapons.

Then the camera cuts to a middle shot of Ali standing in a row of soldiers while the commander, in a voice-off, is saying, “This is why we must be ready. Repeat now!” Ali is shown repeating, “We must be ready!” After the third repetition of “We must be ready!” Ali collapses. In the following sequence he is taken to a clinic, and subsequently it is revealed that he has lost his voice. Ali is a survivor of the massacre that occurred earlier in history. The loss of his voice, which occurs just after a speech recalling the traumatic past, is “a psychosomatic reaction to the resurfacing of the past” (Suner 2010, 57). Since the main trauma is not confronted, it surfaces as a neurotic projection (Akbal Süalp 2010a, 13). Ali’s silence is suggestive not only because it emerges as a symptom of a collective trauma. He loses his voice as a response to the voice-over/voice-off articulating the official discourse about the incidents in 1974. The invisible source of the voice establishes the discursive authority of the commander – a figure of authority. Through the reciprocal use of voice-over and the thematic trope of voice loss in the opening sequence of the film, the traumatic memories of Ali and many others are inscribed as a response or perhaps an opposition to the official discourse of history. Moreover, Ali’s friend Temel, who confesses that he killed many Greeks in 1974, conducts a memory project in which the sculptures of former inhabitants of the deported houses are given to the present inhabitants to be set in their living rooms. These sculptures are accompanied with video images in which the former inhabitants speak about their memories which are associated with these houses. Ali’s sculpture is a part of Temel’s project; however, his memories cannot be recorded due to his loss of voice. This loss points to an absence in the collective memory, implying unrecorded, unspeakable

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traumatic narratives. Ali partly regains his voice during a memory project, which involves role-play in which he speaks of what happened on the day of the massacre from the point of view of the Others. This suggests that he could find his voice and he could be healed, only if he speaks out and confronts the traumatic memories of the Other. Hodgkin and Radstone argue that “the film ... allows us to rethink the question of historical truth, by way of an awareness of uncertainty, partiality and constant reinvention” (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, 173). As in Waiting for the Clouds, rather than being instrumental for another character’s individual trauma to be revealed, the main character’s silence in The Mud registers in the filmic text the silenced experiences of the Other in the national history and provides a means for questioning the historical truth and a confrontation with the traumatic past. In the films discussed in this chapter, the silent female representational form functions as an instrument through which the unspoken or unspeakable pasts of the characters, and/or of the nation, come out from obscurity. While the silent female characters, as the personification of moral conscience, raise doubt about the other characters’ pasts in some examples, they engender a revelation of the past in others. Although the silent female characters’ instrumentality slightly differs from one example to another, it eventually serves the narrative in each example as a pointer to the return of the traumatic past and evokes a confrontation of some sort. Yet the contrasts posed by Waiting for the Clouds and The Mud imply that the silent female representational form most often does not signify itself: In other words, it does not, or is not used to tell of or connote its own silent/silenced experience; rather, it is a vehicle or a signifier for the other characters’ silenced pasts to be revealed. It is used primarily in narratives that do not have a direct reference to collective traumas, and it serves to reveal male trauma, loss, lack, shame and pain. In doing so, although the past is rendered problematic, the crisis is rendered as a crisis of masculinity, not of national memory, because the silent character, most often, is used to prioritise male experiences and points of view. When the silent character’s role is not subservient to other characters, as in Waiting for the Clouds and The Mud, when silence is used to signify the silent character’s experience from his/her own point of view, the gender aspect relatively disappears, and the silent character is able to reveal a silenced narrative in the national memory. Thus, silent female characters in these films serve to both reveal the trauma, shame and guilt of the male characters, and therefore point to the traumatic memories of individuals; and also serve to represent the gap or absence in the narrative through which the unspeakable returns, whether from a personal or from the

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national historical context. As they function to restrain the traumas on the personal level, in the end, to a certain extent, they find an “adequate” way of coping with the crisis in the national memory.

CONCLUSIONS FEMALE CINEMATIC SILENCES, RESONANCES OF TURKEY’S CRISES

Don’t be sad. Even if tongues stay silent, hearts still have a hundred ways of speaking. —Zekeriya, in The Messenger [W]e must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underline and permeate discourses. —Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality: 1

The primary focus of this book was on the silent female characters in the new cinema of Turkey. More specifically, this book has aimed to investigate these characters in order to reveal and understand the functions and formations of this newly emergent and frequently used female representational form after the mid-1990s. After viewing the films involving a silent female character, it became evident that the uses of the silent female representational form pointed to a specific historical time frame, in a specific country, and was not specific to an auteur, genre or to the art house/commercial cinema divide and its conventions, and therefore promised fruitful and unique material for research. This book grew from the initial premise that there was a close association between this newly emergent representational form and the historical and cinematic contexts from which it appeared. Chapter 1 discussed the innovations that the new cinema of Turkey introduced, not only in terms of content, style and filmmaking modes, but also in relation to the changing perceptions, uses and operations of sound, voice and silence. The chapter demonstrated that the frequent use of silent female characters cannot be explained merely by an aesthetic style or a filmmaking mode, and this realisation prefaced my exploration of the functions and operations of silent female characters in relation to thematic tendencies and the historical context. Accordingly, this book sought to investigate two central questions raised in the Introduction:

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What are the functions and operations of these silent characters, and why did this silent representational form emerge specifically in this time frame? In order to explore the relationship between this new form in the new cinema and the changing socio-political climate in Turkey, I undertook to analyse the uses of female silence in new cinema’s film space, on verbal, visual and narrative levels. In “Aesthetics of Silence”, Susan Sontag argues that because a silent person becomes opaque to another person, silence “opens up an array of possibilities for interpreting that silence, for imputing speech to it” (Sontag [1966] 2009, 16). But instead of interpreting that silence and attributing a positive or negative value to it, I attempted to demonstrate “how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (Sontag 1983, 104). After viewing the films of the new cinema, I resolved to avoid interpretation. Although the functions of silent female characters are not uniform and differ significantly from one film to another, their silences most often point to the other characters’ speeches, feelings and experiences. In addition, as the other characters speak of the silent female characters in most of the films studied, it became important for this book not to duplicate the filmic treatment by “imputing speech” to them, or speaking on behalf of them, but rather to analyse and discuss how they operate in the film space and resonate with the historical context in which they appeared. Drawing on the theories of Michel Chion ([1947] 1999) and Kaja Silverman (1988; 1990), Chapters 2, 3 and 4 demonstrated that instrumentality is the main function of silent characters in representative examples of the new cinema. They point to the speeches, acts, experiences and feelings of others, usually male characters, rather than their own. Their instrumentality gives precedence to the male characters’ points of view and often attributes discursive authority to them. On the other hand, the feelings and experiences of male characters that emerge through female silences are mainly expressions of suffering, anxiety, fear, guilt and shame, pointing to a lack or a loss. Thus female silence becomes a vehicle for revealing a wounded power position, a crisis in the gender order, in the national order and in the past. However, that loss is converted to a gain by registering male points of view and reassigning the role division between the speaker (male) and the spoken-of (female) on the verbal, visual and narrative levels. Chapter 2 analysed the silent female representational form through a focus on gender. The chapter demonstrated that instrumentality of the silent female representational form allows the male characters not only to speak of their own experiences, feelings and sufferings, and therefore to

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register and prioritise their male points of view in the film space; but also, and most often, to speak of the silent female characters, to impute speech to female silence, interpreting the silence, often in denunciatory or accusatory tones. Female silences provide male characters with a space in which to identify female characters as the scapegoats responsible for their destroyed lives. In this way, the silent female characters become fixed and registered from male points of view, denying the possibility that female silence could occupy a power position. On the other hand, silent female characters also serve as vehicles to make male fears, anxieties and guilty consciences visible on screen, and point to lost male authority and masculinities in crisis in the narrative. Yet, in most of the examples, wounded male egos are repaired on the verbal and visual levels by the reattribution of discursive authority to the male characters. Chapter 2 has a pivotal role in the whole study. The following chapters showed that gender has always had its place in the intersection of the nation and the past. Chapter 3 primarily focused on the relationship between the silent female representational form and national identity. My analysis in this chapter showed that the silences of non-Turkish female characters serve to reveal and register gendered and national fears and anxieties in the face of threats to national unity on an allegorical level. However, their silences are used as tools for defining the Other as a threatening outsider by attributing discursive authority to the Turkish male characters on the verbal and visual levels. Moreover, silencing their languages in the film space inscribes a role division between the speaker (Turkish male) and the spoken-of (non-Turkish female) as an issue of national identity and thus registers a nationalist division line between “us” and “them”. Chapter 4 demonstrated that the silences of the female characters have an instrumentality for making visible and audible the male characters’ traumatic pasts. The insistent use of female silence for revealing unspeakable traumas and feelings of angst, shame and guilt registers crises in male characters’ pasts. However, female silence becomes a means to prioritise the male points of view and to open a role division between the speaker male and the spoken-of female. My analyses in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 demonstrated that the silent female characters always bear a function of instrumentality and exposed, in one way or another, a close association between point of view and discursive authority in the films studied. On the other hand, Chapter 1 revealed that the new cinema, in contrast to the era of Turkish classical and national cinema, has a heterogenic structure, and despite some shared tendencies, is

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multifaceted. Likewise, the uses of silent female characters fit the new cinema’s heterogenic character. The silent female form’s instrumentality, in some cases, such as Shadow Play [Gölge Oyunu] (Yavuz Turgul 1993) and 9 (Ümit Ünal 2002), does not necessarily serve to restrain the female characters in male points of view, and even serves to open up a critical gap in the narratives about the points of view that attempt to impute speech into the silences. Yet, it is important to note that these characters’ silences still do not signify themselves in these narratives, but remain as narrative vehicles for other characters’ experiences and feelings to be expressed. In this respect, the film Waiting for the Clouds [Bulutlar Beklerken] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2003) is an exception, since its narrative does attribute discursive authority to the female character. The silence of the female character does not point to the other characters’ experiences and feelings, but rather serves to reveal her story from her point of view. As mentioned earlier, this book grew from an initial premise that there is a close relationship between the silent female representational form and the historical and political contexts from which they emerged. My analyses in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of repeated uses of the form in insistent association with the thematic tropes of gender, nation and the past supported this connection. I argued that the silent form also functions as an instrument to reveal crises in hegemonic power positions, and it becomes in itself a battleground in a struggle to (re)obtain a position of discursive authority in these realms. Following Nurdan Gürbilek’s argument concerning the shifting division of silence and speech in Turkey in the post-1980s, I suggested that the silence of female characters is a cinematic symptom or projection of this on-going struggle over the disrupted orders of gender, nation and national memory due to an increase in thus-far silenced or marginalised voices in Turkey. In addition to the thematic tropes, the silent form in itself becomes an instrument on the discursive level that enables a response to these crises in these three interconnected realms. However, the main theories on silence that this study drew on do not suggest an association between the filmic functions of the form and the historical contexts from which it emerged. This study could thus be regarded as a critical investigation of the silent form, connecting the theories of Chion and Silverman with the historical context, and therefore transcoding narrative functions on to the contextual level. In Chapter 2, I argued that the silent female representational form emerges as a projection of and a response to a crisis of masculinity due to the rising voices of women through the representational and political practices of feminism. In almost all the films studied, the silent form

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enables male characters to express and confront their masculinities in crisis. However, even though silent female characters serve to reveal the masculinities in crises and lead the male characters to confront their problems, the male subjectivity – whose mastery has been undermined in the social and political realm – ultimately finds a cinematic way, through this form, to project the loss of mastery on to the other, and to re-establish the disrupted role division of speaker male and spoken-of female. Moreover, in the majority of examples, male voices, which cast the blame for male suffering and anxiety onto the silent female characters, speak on behalf of the silent female characters and fix their “meaning” as vicious, threatening and deviant. In this way, they reassert the traditional definition of femininity, gender roles and perceptions of female sexuality that have been disrupted by feminist discourses and practices. In this respect, I argued that the silent female representational form offered, in one way or another, a filmic means to restore the gender order that was disrupted by the discourses of feminism and women’s films in Turkey in the 1980s. Through the use of this form, the increased voice of women – women speaking for themselves – in the public realm, which resulted from the rise of the women’s movement, is confronted in the cinematic realm after the mid-1990s by (re)attributing the discursive authority to the male characters who constantly and repeatedly speak of their own wounds, traumas and sufferings and leave no place for the female word and/or experience. Therefore, this male discursive authority not only prioritises his own experience and point of view, but also resets the traditional cinematic codes, themes and conventions regarding female characters. In doing so, it restores what women’s films in the 1980s broke by their narrative structures that prioritised female experiences and points of view, which had a self-reflexive stance or a critical perspective. On the other hand, the uses of the silent female form also resonate with the fears and anxieties arising from Turkey’s transition process in the post1980s, in response to the impaired order of discourse with regard to Turkish national identity and the past. My analyses in Chapter 3 demonstrated that the silent female characters in the selected films, whose non-Turkish languages are muted, are depicted in relation to the trope of national unity and language on an allegorical level. In the social and political climate wherein the single nation, single language and single land ideal of the Turkish nation has been disrupted by the rising Kurdish movement, the Islamist movement, and the EU’s conditions for full membership, the silent female characters are cast either as threats or outsiders, and their muted languages function as instruments both to reveal a crisis in the national order and to restore it by projecting the voice loss of

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Turkish national identity on to the Other’s silence, thus resetting the role division – the speaker Turkish male and the spoken-of non-Turkish female – on the discursive level. Moreover, the non-Turkish voices, which are cast as threats to national unity on an allegorical level, and then are subjected to visual and verbal control, serve to re-establish the dominant nationalist discourses on the division between “us” and “the other”, and therefore to find a way to allay national anxieties and fears regarding the disrupted order of unity in the given historical context. On the other hand, the film 9 provided an exception to the pattern of restoring the authority of the hegemonic discourses which are crucial to the Turkish nation-state and national identity formations. Although this film, like its counterparts, sets a role division between the speaker Turkish male and the spoken-of female Other, the role division itself becomes the tool that challenges the truth value of the hegemonic national discourses. In the end, in all examples, the silent female form becomes an instrument allowing the national self to have a speaking position when its position has been endangered in social and political contexts. Chapter 4 demonstrated that the instrumentality of the silent female form also serves to set a role division between the speaker male and the spoken-of female by prioritising male points of view and experiences through the revelation of the past. However, as the revealed past refers to a trauma, a feeling of guilt and shame, the silent form also becomes a vehicle that enables the male characters to confront their silenced pasts. I argued that the repeated uses of silent characters in association with past traumas have a relation to social and political contexts in which voices from the previously silenced past of the country began to be heard. Apart from that, the analysis of the exceptional case of female silence in Waiting for the Clouds demonstrated a crucial feature regarding the relationship between the uses of this form and the historical context from which it emerged. After the analysis of this film, it became evident that all the other films involving silent female characters and following the functional tendencies described above are narratives that do not have a direct reference to the historical and political contexts in which they were set or produced. Waiting for the Clouds is the only film in which the silence of the female character signifies her experience from her point of view. In this respect, the exceptional use of the form in this film leads to another answer to the meaningful question of why the silent form has an indirect, or at most allegorical, representational relation to the political context, and why the historical context only leaks, in Akbal Süalp’s terms, into these narratives. In his article on silence, Paul Connerton identifies different types of silences, and suggests that narrative silences “signify the refusal

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or inability to tell certain narratives” (Connerton 2011, 73). In his view, these silences generate from shocking or painful experiences. He points to Albert Camus’ novels, The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956), written after World War II, and argues that Camus uses the theme of silence to allegorise “the vast conspiracy of silence [that] has spread all about us, a conspiracy accepted by those who are frightened and who rationalise their fears in order to hide them from themselves” (Camus, cited by Felman and Laub 1992, quoted in Connerton 2011, 73). As a matter of course, the transition period that Turkey has undergone in the post-1980s cannot be compared with the effects of World War II. Nevertheless, as was mentioned in detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, Turkish society was exposed in various ways to violations of fundamental rights and freedoms, including murders and torture, along with the political silencing imposed by the junta after the September 12 military coup. Moreover, the armed struggle between the Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish military since the 1980s, which spread fear and terror, has deeply and irreversibly affected individuals’ lives. The unsolved murders and corruption that were revealed in the 1990s stunned Turkish society and caused the nation-state and its apparatuses to lose their reliability in the eyes of the citizens. The culture of silence in Turkish society was broken down not only by shockingly explosive political scandals but also by controversial narratives about previously silenced traumatic experiences that entered the public sphere. In addition, the rising women’s movement impacted the political and social spheres. All of these developments spread feelings of shock, fear and anxiety in the society and led to crises in the hegemonic discourses. Nevertheless, as Gürbilek suggests, political silencing, its attendant climate of fear, and the crises in the hegemonic discourses were confronted with an explosion of speech about private life (Gürbilek 2011). Therefore, silence, I argue, becomes an adequate, acceptable and “tolerable” form for revealing gaps, ambivalences, secrets, fears and anxieties regarding the pasts of the characters in these narratives, a form that provides a way to speak about and confront the unspeakable crises, by projecting it onto another field. The instrumentality of the repetitive use of the silent form in association with the tropes of the past still serves to attribute a speaking position to the male characters, because female silence does not signify female experience, and represents personal traumas rather than newly revealed collective traumas. However, it also hints at crises in the home and homeland by revelation of guilt and angst in relation to familial traumas. Shown not only in Chapter 4, but also in Chapters 2 and 3, the silent female form, usually accompanied by a tone of accusation, is always associated with a crisis in the familial structure. In the majority of

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the films, the silent form functions as an instrument to project the crises that the family or the country have been through onto the filmic space in the form of personal male traumas, revealing the inability in the new cinema of Turkey to tell certain narratives openly and directly. In this respect, the frequent and repetitive use of the silent female representational form in the given time period denotes mostly a battle for discursive power positions on the screens of the new cinema of Turkey and pushes us to reflect on how these power positions are set and change at certain historical junctures. In this book, I argued that the “silenced tongues” of the female characters have usually had a subservient role, which reveal and respond to the changing demarcations of silence and speech in Turkish society. Throughout this book, I have tried to maintain my resolve to refrain from interpreting these silences, but instead to prioritise listening to their “hundred ways of speaking” about the cinematic language and historical context of their time. In the new cinema of Turkey, some examples have come up in recent years that might be considered exceptions for their focus on female experiences through female protagonists who are associated with the tropes of voice, rather than silence. These films include Ümit Ünal’s The Voice [Ses] (2010) and Özcan Alper’s Future Lasts Forever [Gelecek Uzun Sürer] (2011). The protagonist, Derya (Selma Ergeç), in The Voice, starts hearing a strange voice, which drives her to do inexplicable tasks, but then turns out to be, in the course of the narrative, her inner voice trying to surface from her repressed childhood memories. It would be interesting, as a future research project, to investigate the new cinema’s affection towards familial traumas through the use of female voice and female experience. In Future Lasts Forever, Sumru (Gaye Gürsel), an ethnomusicologist, sets off on a journey to south eastern Turkey to research and record elegies. In the course of her research, she starts recording the testimonies of Kurdish people (mostly women) who have survived but who have had relatives who became victims of unsolved murders. It would be important to explore the filmic treatment of the silenced past of Turkey through female voices, female agency and the female point of view. Furthermore, Orhan Eskiköy’s and Zeynel Do÷an’s film Voice of My Father [Babamn Sesi] (2012) requires special attention among all the recent films which deal with the tropes of voice and silence in their association with collective memory and the culture of silence in Turkey. It would be meaningful to explore a different mode of silence and the contradictory use of female silence (not mute, but one that avoids speaking of the trauma) and a different mode of male voice (disembodied,

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coming from tape recordings) in this example: a silence that does not bear the function of instrumentality to reveal, tell and name the trauma; a disembodied male voice that does not hold the discursive authority; but does register a gap, a crack in the narrative that exposes and reflects on the unrepresentability of the trauma. After listening to the hundreds of ways of speaking through cinematic silence, it would be meaningful to pursue these examples and their resonances.

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FILMOGRAPHY

7 Courtyards [7 Avlu]. (2009). Directed by Semir Aslanyürek. Turkey: Aslanyürek Film Production. 9. (2002). Directed by Ümit Ünal. Turkey: Haluk Bener, Aydn Saro÷lu, Ümit Ünal, PTT Film. 120. (2008). Directed by Murat Saraço÷lu. Turkey: Posta Film. A Madonna in Laleli [Laleli'de Bir Azize]. (1999). Directed by Kudret Sabanc. Turkey: Yeni Sinemaclar. A Question of Silence [De Stilte Rond Christine M.]. (1982). Directed by Marlene Gorris. Netherlands: Sigma Film Productions. The Abortion [Araf]. (2006). Directed by Biray Dalkran. Turkey: DFGS Yapm. Aliúan. (1982). Directed by ùerif Gören. Turkey: Uzman Film. Autumn [Sonbahar]. (2008). Directed by Özcan Alper. Turkey, Germany: Kuzey Film, Filmfabrik. Away From Home [Herkes Kendi Evinde]. (2001). Directed by Semih Kaplano÷lu. Turkey: Haylazz Prodüksiyon. The Bandit [Eúkya]. (1996). Directed by Yavuz Turgul. Turkey: FilmaCass. Before Your Eyes [Min Dit]. (2009). Directed by Miraz Bezar. Turkey, Germany: Bezar Film, Corazon International. Beyond The Hill [Tepenin Ard]. (2012). Directed by Emin Alper. Turkey, Greece: Bulut Film, 2/35. Big Man Little Love [Hejar]. (2001). Directed by Handan øpekçi. Turkey, Greece, Hungary: Yeni Yapm. Billionaire [Milyarder]. (1986). Directed by Kartal Tibet. Turkey: Arzu Film. Birds of Exile [Gurbet Kuúlar]. (1964). Directed by Halit Refi÷. Turkey: Artist Film. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant [Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant]. (1972). Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. West Germany: Filmverlag der Autoren, Tango Film. Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds [Karpuz Kabu÷undan Gemiler Yapmak]. (2004). Directed by Ahmet Uluçay. Turkey: øFR. Bornova Bornova. (2009). Directed by ønan Temelkuran. Turkey: Temelkuran Film.

202

Filmography

The Broken Landlord [Zü÷ürt A÷a]. (1985). Directed by Nesli Çölgeçen. Turkey: Mine Film. The Bus Passengers [Otobüs Yolcular]. (1961). Directed by Ertem Göreç. Turkey: Be-Ya Film. Children of a Lesser God. (1986). Directed by Randa Haines. U.S.A.: Paramount Pictures. Climates [øklimler]. (2006). Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, France: NBC Films, Pyramide Films, ømaj. Clouds of May [Mays Sknts]. (2000). Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey: NBC Films. Confession [øtiraf]. (2001). Directed by Zeki Demirkubuz. Turkey: Mavi Film. Dabbe. (2006). Directed by Hasan Karacada÷. Turkey: J-Plan. Dad is in the Army [Babam Askerde]. (1994). Directed by Handan øpekçi. Turkey: Yeni Yapm. Dark Spells [Büyü]. (2004). Directed by Orhan O÷uz. Turkey: UFP. Destere. (2008). Directed by Gürcan Yurt & Ahmet Uygun. Turkey: Zero Film. Destiny [Kader]. (2006). Directed by Zeki Demirkubuz. Turkey, Greece: Mavi Film, Inkas Film. Distant [Uzak]. (2002). Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey: NBC Films. Dry Summer [Susuz Yaz]. (1963). Directed by Metin Erksan. Turkey: Hitit Film. Egg [Yumurta]. (2007). Directed by Semih Kaplano÷lu. Turkey, Greece: Kaplan Film, Inkas Film, PPV Athens. Elephants and Grass [Filler ve Çimen]. (2000). Directed by Derviú Zaim. Turkey: Maraton Film, Pan Film, Tem Studios. The Escape [Firar]. (1984). Directed by ùerif Gören. Turkey: Gülúah Film. European [Avrupal]. (2007). Directed by Ulaú Ak. Turkey: Muhteúem Film. Everything About Mustafa [Mustafa Hakknda Herúey]. (2004). Directed by Ça÷an Irmak. Turkey: ANS. The Exorcist. (1973). Directed by William Friedkin. U.S.A.: Warner Bros. Pictures. The Extremely Tragic Story of Celal Tan and His Family [Celal Tan ve Ailesinin Aúr Ackl Hikayesi]. (2011). Directed by Onur Ünlü. Turkey: Eflatun Film. Fate [Yazg]. (2001). Directed by Zeki Demirkubuz. Turkey: Mavi Film.

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises

203

Five Cities [Beú ùehir]. (2009). Directed by Onur Ünlü. Turkey: Eflatun Film. The Fog [Sis]. (1993). Directed by Zülfü Livaneli. Turkey, Sweden, West Germany: Interfilm Media and Entertainment. Forrest Gump. (1994). Directed by Robert Zemeckis. U.S.A.: Paramount Pictures. Frenzy [Abluka]. (2015). Directed by Emin Alper. Turkey, France, Qatar: Liman Film, Paprika Films, Insignia. Future Lasts Forever [Gelecek Uzun Sürer]. (2011). Directed by Özcan Alper. Turkey, Germany, France: Nar Films, unafilm, Arizona Films. Gene [Gen]. (2006). Directed by Togan Gökbakar. Turkey: Tilgon Yapm. Gomeda. (2007). Directed by Tan Tolga Demirci. Turkey: Energy Yapm ve Prodüksiyon. G.O.R.A. (2004). Directed by Ömer Faruk Sorak. Turkey: BKM, Böcek Yapm. Hair [Saç]. (2010). Directed by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu. Turkey: Zuzi Film. Haunted [Musallat]. (2007). Directed by Alper Mesçi. Turkey: Dada Film, Mia Yapm. Haze [Pus]. (2009). Directed by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu. Turkey: Zuzi Film. The Herd [Sürü]. (1978). Directed by Zeki Ökten. Turkey: Güney Film. Hidden Faces [Sakl Yüzler]. (2007). Directed by Handan øpekçi. Turkey, Germany: Yeni Yapm, Bir Film, Tradewind Pictures. The Holly Carboy [Kutsal Damacana]. (2007). Directed by Kamil Aydn. Turkey: Zero Film. The Holy Carboy 2: It Men [Kutsal Damacana 2: It Men]. (2010). Directed by Korhan Bozkurt. Turkey: øyi Seyirler Film, Zero Film. Honest [Namuslu]. (1984). Directed by Ertem E÷ilmez. Turkey: Uzman Film. Honey [Bal]. (2010). Directed by Semih Kaplano÷lu. Turkey, Germany: Kaplan Film Production, Heimatfilm. How Can Asiye be Saved? [Asiye Nasl Kurtulur?]. (1986). Directed by Atf Ylmaz. Turkey: Odak Film. Hunting Time [Av Zaman]. (1988). Directed by Erden Kral. [Motion Picture]. Turkey: Mine Film. Hürmüz with 7 Husbands [7 Kocal Hürmüz]. (2009). Directed by Ezel Akay. Turkey: Boyut Stüdyolar, Muhteúem Film. I Saw the Sun [Güneúi Gördüm]. (2009). Directed by Mahsun Krmzgül. Turkey: Boyut Film. In Bar [Barda]. (2007). Directed by Serdar Akar. Turkey: Filmakar, Marka Sokak, Öger Prodüksiyon.

204

Filmography

Innocence [Masumiyet]. (1997). Directed by Zeki Demirkubuz. Turkey: Mavi Film. The International [Beynelmilel]. (2006). Directed by Srr Süreyya Önder & Muharrem Gülmez. Turkey: BKM. Istanbul Under My Wings [østanbul Kanatlarmn Altnda]. (1996). Directed by Mustafa Altoklar. Turkey: Umut Sanat. The Ivy Mansion: Life [Asmal Konak: Hayat]. (2003). Directed by Abdullah O÷uz. Turkey: ANS. Jîn. (2013). Directed by Reha Erdem. Turkey, Germany: Atlantik Film, Mars Entertainment Group, ømaj, Bredok Film Production. Johnny Belinda. (1948). Directed by Jean Negulesco. U.S.A.: Warner Bros. Pictures. Journey to the Sun [Güneúe Yolculuk]. (1999). Directed by Yeúim Ustao÷lu. Turkey, Netherlands, Germany: øFR, Medias Res Filmproduktion, The Film Company. Killing the Shadows [Hacivat Karagöz Neden Öldürüldü?]. (2005). Directed by Ezel Akay. Turkey: IFR. Kosmos. (2009). Directed by Reha Erdem. Turkey, Bulgaria: Atlantik Film. The Last Ottoman: Yandm Ali [Son Osmanl Yandm Ali]. (2007). Directed by Mustafa ùevki Do÷an. Turkey: Özen Film. The Law of Borders [Hudutlarn Kanunu]. (1966). Directed by Lütfi Akad. Turkey: Dadaú Film. Love Lorn [Gönül Yaras]. (2005). Directed by Yavuz Turgul. Turkey: Filma-Cass Love Convict [Aúk Mahkumu]. (1973). Directed by Nuri Ergün. Turkey: Acar Film. Love in Another Language [Baúka Dilde Aúk]. (2009). Directed by ølksen Baúarr. Turkey: PPR østanbul, Kutu Film. Masked Quintet: Iraq [Maskeli Beúler: Irak]. (2007). Directed by Murat Aslan. Turkey: Arzu Film, Fida Film. Merry Go Round [Atlkarnca]. (2010). Directed by ølksen Baúarr. Turkey: Kutu Film, Most Production, Global Agency. The Messenger [Ulak]. (2007). Directed by Ça÷an Irmak. Turkey: Avúar Film. Milk [Süt]. (2008). Directed by Semih Kaplano÷lu. Turkey, France, Germany: Kaplan Film Production, Heimatfilm, Arizona Films. Mrs. Salkm’s Diamonds [Salkm Hanmn Taneleri]. (1999). Directed by Tomris Giritlio÷lu. Turkey: Avúar Film. Mud [Çamur]. (2004). Directed by Derviú Zaim. Turkey, Cyprus, Italy: Downtown Pictures, Marathon Film.

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises

205

My Father and My Son [Babam ve O÷lum]. (2005). Directed by Ça÷an Irmak. Turkey: Avúar Film. My Marlon and Brando [Gitmek]. (2008). Directed by Hüseyin Karabey. Turkey, U.K., France: A-SI Films, Ajans 21, Motel Films, Mechant Loup Productions. My Only Sunshine [Hayat Var]. (2008). Directed by Reha Erdem. Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria: Atlantik Film. The Naked Citizen [Çplak Vatandaú]. (1985). Directed by Baúar Sabuncu. Turkey: Uzman Filmcilik. Offside [Dar Alanda Ksa Paslaúmalar]. (2000). Directed by Serdar Akar. Turkey: Umut Sanat, Yeni Sinemaclar. Turkey: Umut Sanat. Oh! Belinda [Aahh! Belinda]. (1986). Directed by Atf Ylmaz. Turkey: Odak Film. On Board [Gemide]. (1998). Directed by Serdar Akar. Turkey: Yeni Sinemaclar. On The Way to School [2 Dil 1 Bavul]. (2009). Directed by Özgür Do÷an & Orhan Eskiköy. Turkey: Periúan Film, Bulut Film. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da]. (2011). Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, Bosnia Herzogovina: Zeynofilm, Production 2006, 1000Volt, NBC Films, Fida Film. Ottoman Cowboys [Yahúi Bat]. (2010). Directed by Ömer Faruk Sorak. Turkey: Böcek Yapm, Fida Film. Pains of Autumn [Güz Sancs]. (2008). Directed by Tomris Giritlio÷lu. Turkey: C Film, Asis. Pandora’s Box [Pandora’nn Kutusu]. (2008). Directed by Yeúim Ustao÷lu. Turkey, France, Germany, Belgium: Ustao÷lu Film, Silkroad Production, Les Petites Lumieres, Stromboli Pictures, Match Factory, Visions Sud Est. Perfidious Byzantium [Kahpe Bizans]. (1999). Directed by Gani Müjde. Turkey: Özen Film. Persona. (1966). Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden: Svensk Filmindustri. Photograph [Foto÷raf]. (2001). Directed by Kazm Öz. Turkey: Yapm 13. The Piano. (1993). Directed by Jane Campion. Australia, New Zealand, France: Australian Film Commission, CiBy 2000, Jan Chapman Productions. Police [Polis]. (2006). Directed by Onur Ünlü. Turkey: Eflatun Film. Press. (2010). Directed by Sedat Ylmaz. Turkey: Karncalar. Propaganda [Propaganda]. (1999). Directed by Sinan Çetin. Turkey: Plato Film.

206

Filmography

Rza. (2007). Directed by Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu. Turkey: Zuzi Film. Reddish Coloured Grape [Knal Yapncak]. (1968). Directed by Orhan Aksoy. Turkey: Akün Film. Romantic [Romantik]. (2007). Directed by Sinan Çetin. Turkey: Plato Film. Sacred [Kadosh]. (1999). Directed by Amos Gitai. Israel, France: Agav Hafakot, MP Productions. Saw. (2004). Directed by James Wan. U.S.A., Australia: Evolution Entertainment, Saw Productions Inc., Twisted Pictures. School [Okul]. (2003). Directed by Ya÷mur and Durul Taylan. Turkey: Plato Film. Secret Intentions [Gizli Duygular]. (1984). Directed by ùerif Gören. Turkey: Uzman Film. Semum. (2008). Directed by Hasan Karacada÷. Turkey: J-Plan. Shadow Play [Gölge Oyunu]. (1993). Directed by Yavuz Turgul. Turkey: Erler Film. The Shadowless [Gölgesizler]. (2008). Directed by Ümit Ünal. Turkey: Narsist Film. Sing Your Songs [Sen Türkülerini Söyle]. (1986). Directed by ùerif Gören. Turkey: Uzman Film. Small Town [Kasaba]. (1997). Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey: NBC Films. Somersault in a Coffin [Tabutta Rövaúata]. (1996). Directed by Derviú Zaim. Turkey: øFR. Song of My Mother [Annemin ùarks]. (2014). Directed by Erol Mintaú. Turkey, France, Germany: Mintaú Film, Arizona Productions, Mitos Film. Sons of a B…[O... Çocuklar]. (2008). Directed by Murat Saraço÷lu. Turkey: Dinamik Prodüksiyon. Speak Little Mute Girl [Habla, Mudita]. (1973). Directed by Manuel Gutierrez Aragon. Spain, West Germany: Elias Querejeta Producciones Cinematograficas S.L., Filmverlag der Autoren. The Storm [Bahoz]. (2008). Directed by Kazm Öz. Turkey: Mezapotamya Sinema, Yapm 13 Film. The Son of the Sun [Güneúin O÷lu]. (2008). Directed by Onur Ünlü. Turkey: Eflatun Film. Sweet and Lowdown. (1999). Directed by Woody Allen. U.S.A.: Sweetland Films, Magnolia Productions. Talk to Her [Hable Con Ella]. (2002). Directed by Pedro Almadovar. Spain: El Deseo S.A., Antena 3 Television, Good Machine.

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises

207

Those Awakening in the Dark [Karanlkta Uyananlar]. (1964). Directed by Ertem Göreç. Turkey: Filmo Ltd. Thou Gild’st The Even [Sen Aydnlatrsn Geceyi]. (2013). Directed by Onur Ünlü. Turkey: Eflatun Film. Three Monkeys [Üç Maymun]. (2008). Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, France, Italy: Zeynofilm, NBC Films, Pyramide Productions, BIM Distribuzione. Toss-Up [Yaz-Tura]. (2004). Directed by U÷ur Yücel. Turkey, Greece: Cinegram, Mahayana Film. Traces [øz]. (1994). Directed by Yeúim Ustao÷lu. Turkey: Mine Film. Valley of the Wolves Iraq [Kurtlar Vadisi Irak]. (2005). Directed by Serdar Akar. Turkey: Pana Film. Vasfiye is Her Name [Ad Vasfiye]. (1985). Directed by Atf Ylmaz. Turkey: Odak Film. Vizontele. (2001). Directed by Ylmaz Erdo÷an & Ömer Faruk Sorak. Turkey: BKM, Böcek Yapm. Vizontele Tuuba. (2004). Directed by Ylmaz Erdo÷an. Turkey: BKM. The Voice [Ses]. (2010). Directed by Ümit Ünal. Turkey: Bir Film, Mars Prodüksiyon. The Voice [Ses]. (1986). Directed by Zeki Ökten. Turkey:Gala Film. Waiting for the Clouds [Bulutlar Beklerken]. (2003). Directed by Yeúim Ustao÷lu. Turkey, France, Germany, Greece: Silkroad Production, Flying Moon Filmproduktion, Ideefixe Productions, Ustao÷lu Film, Yalandünya, ZDF/Arte . Waiting for Heaven [Cenneti Beklerken]. (2006). Directed by Derviú Zaim. Turkey, Hungary: Hermes Film, Marathon Filmcilik, Sarmaúk Sanatlar, Tivoli Film. Waiting Room [Bekleme Odas]. (2003). Directed by Zeki Demirkubuz. Turkey: Mavi Film. The Waterfall [ùellale]. (2001). Directed by Semir Aslanyürek. Turkey: Ecco Partners, øFR, ùelale Film Yapm. The Way [Yol]. (1982). Directed by Ylmaz Güney & ùerif Gören. Turkey, Switzerland, France: Güney Film, Cactus Film, Antenne 2, SRG. Voice of My Father [Babamn Sesi]. (2012). Directed by Orhan Eskiköy & Zeynel Do÷an. Turkey: Periúan Film. Wildheart: Hell of Boomerang [Deli Yürek: Bumerang Cehennemi]. (2001). Directed by Osman Snav. Turkey: Özen Film, Sinegraf. Wrong Rosary [Uzak øhtimal]. (2008). Directed by Mahmut Fazl Coúkun. Turkey: Hokus Fokus Film. Yes Sir! [Emret Komutanm: ùah Mat]. (2007). Directed by Taner Akvardar & Mustafa Altoklar. Turkey: Altoklar Film Prodüksiyon.

INDEX 1 120 (Murat Saraço÷lu 2008), 166

7 7 Courtyards [7 Avlu] (Semir Aslanyürek 2009), 27, 144, 147, 149, 152, 153, 160

9 9 (Ümit Ünal 2002), 3, 26, 28, 51, 127, 131, 134, 135, 136, 181, 183

A A Madonna in Laleli [Laleli’de Bir Azize] (Kudret Sabanc 1999), 50 A Question of Silence [De Stilte Rond Christine M.] (Marleen Gorris 1982), 4 Abisel, Nilgün, 1, 54, 75, 76 Abortion, The [Araf] (Biray Dalkran 2006), 47 accented cinema, 52 Adanr, O÷uz, 54 A÷aúe, Çetin, 135 Ahska, Meltem, 151 Ahmed, Sara, 126 Akay, Ezel, 51 Akbal Süalp, Z. T and ùenova, B, 2, 6, 112, 116, 120

Akbal Süalp, Z. Tül, 1, 2, 6, 33, 48, 49, 50, 51, 65, 68, 79, 82, 83, 86, 119, 120, 152, 160, 164, 169, 175, 183 Akçam, Taner, 114, 149 Akser, M and Bayrakdar, D, 36 Algan, Necla, 119 Aliúan (ùerif Gören 1982), 4 alluvionic (filmmakers), 33 Alper, Emin, 52 Alper, Özcan, 51, 62, 166, 185 Altnay, Ayúe Gül, 9 Altoklar, Mustafa, 46 Andrew, Geoff, 57, 58 arabesque films, 84, 85 arabesque-noir films, 6, 50, 82, 120 Arslan, Savaú, 12, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 54, 82, 83, 122, 140, 164 Arslan, Umut Tümay, 159 Aúar, Ceyda, 59 Aslanyürek, Semir, 152 Atakav, Eylem, 76, 77, 78, 79 Autumn [Sonbahar] (Özcan Alper 2008), 51, 62, 166, 168 Away From Home [Herkes Kendi Evinde] (Semih Kaplano÷lu 2001), 50 Ayça, Engin, 5, 43, 49

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises

B Bandit, The [Eúkya] (Yavuz Turgul 1996), 2, 3, 6, 13, 28, 46, 49, 57, 92, 139 Barkey, Henri J, 10, 114 Barney, Stephen, 113 Barthes, Roland, 97 Baúarr, ølksen, 101 Before Your Eyes [Min Dit] (Miraz Bezar 2009), 166 Beyond The Hill [Tepenin Ard] (Emin Alper 2012), 52 Bezar, Miraz, 52, 166 Big Man Little Love [Hejar] (Handan øpekçi 2001), 51 Billionaire [Milyarder] (Kartal Tibet 1986), 41 Birds of Exile [Gurbet Kuúlar] (Halit Refi÷ 1964), 52 Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The [Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1972), 4 Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds [Karpuz Kabu÷undan Gemiler Yapmak] (Ahmet Uluçay 2004), 51 Bonitzer, Pascal, 18, 74 Bora, Tanl, 143, 144, 149 Bornova Bornova (ønan Temelkuran 2008), 52 Bozdo÷an, S and Kasaba, R, 10, 114, 132, 133, 144 Broken Landlord, The [Zü÷ürt A÷a] (Nesli Çölgeçen 1985), 41 Brooks, Peter, 75 Brown, Wendy, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 95, 97, 100 Brownmiller, Susan, 118, 119

209

Bulut, Ebru, 10, 11, 114, 115, 132 Bus Passengers, The [Otobüs Yolcular] (Ertem Göreç 1961), 52 Butler, Judith, 109

C-Ç Çakrlar, C and Güçlü, Ö, 56, 100, 136, 137 Campbell, Russell, 123 Caruth, Cathy, 146 Çetin Özkan, Zuhal, 81, 82 Çetin, Sinan, 46, 47, 48 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, 48, 50, 57, 58, 60 Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines 1986), 4 Children of Diyarbakir [Min Dît] (Miraz Bezar 2009), 52 children’s silences, 63 Chion, Michel, 19, 20, 68, 71, 73, 80, 88, 89, 99, 102, 107, 110, 111, 127, 131, 137, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 156, 179, 181 Çiftçi, Ayça, 120, 121, 140 cinema of quietude, 58 Climates [øklimler] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2006), 3, 50, 59 Clouds of May [Mays Sknts] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2000), 50 comedy genre, 46 commercial/art cinema division, 37 Confession [øtiraf] (Zeki Demirkubuz 2001), 50, 60 Connerton, Paul, 30, 183 Coúkun, Mahmut Fazl, 60 Creed, Barbara, 74

Index

210 culture of silence, 62, 104, 139, 184, 185

D Dabbe (Hasan Karacada÷ 2006), 47 Dad is in the Army [Babam Askerde] (Handan øpekçi 1994), 51 Dark Spells [Büyü](Orhan O÷uz 2004), 47 de Lauretis, Teresa, 28, 97, 125 Demirkubuz, Zeki, 48, 50, 55, 58, 60 Destere (Gürcan Yurt and Ahmet Uygun 2008), 46 Destiny [Kader] (Zeki Demirkubuz 2006), 50 discursive authority, 12, 15, 23, 26, 63, 68, 70, 75, 81, 88, 93, 97, 107, 110, 111, 113, 120, 121, 141, 142, 160, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186 disembodied voice, 21 Distant [Uzak] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2002), 3, 33, 50, 58, 100, 101 Dittmar, Linda, 8, 18, 20, 111 Doane, Mary Ann, 18, 20, 21, 77, 124, 132 Do÷an, Özgür and Eskiköy, Orhan, 52 dominant fiction, 81, 82, 83 Dönmez-Colin, Gönül, 1, 5, 28, 38, 75, 78, 79, 164 Dorsay, Atilla, 1, 5, 28, 41, 42, 43, 45 Dot [Nokta] (Derviú Zaim 2008), 51 Dry Summer [Susuz Yaz] (Metin Erksan 1963), 52 dubbing, 12, 53, 54, 55

E Egg [Yumurta] (Semih Kaplano÷lu 2007), 50, 59 Elephants and Grass [Filler ve Çimen] (Derviú Zaim 2000), 51 Erdem, Reha, 48, 51, 56 Erdo÷an, N and Göktürk, D, 28, 44, 78 Erdo÷an, Nezih, 55 Erdo÷an, Ylmaz, 46, 48 Ergur, Ali, 144, 151 Escape, The [Firar] (ùerif Gören 1984), 81 Esen, ùükran, 41, 75 Eskiköy, Orhan and Do÷an, Zeynel, 52, 185 European [Avrupal] (Ulaú Ak 2007), 47 Everything About Mustafa [Mustafa Hakknda Herúey] (Ça÷an Irmak, 2004), 64 Evirgen, Dilek, 5 Evren, Burçak, 5, 37, 39, 41, 42 excess, 97 explosion of speech, 24, 65, 184 Extremely Tragic Story of Celal Tan and His Family, The [Celal Tan ve Ailesinin Aúr Ackl Hikayesi] (Onur Ünlü 2011), 51 Eyübo÷lu, Selim, 5

F Fate [Yazg] (Zeki Demirkubuz 2001), 50 Felman, S and Laub, D, 146 female point of view, 1, 77, 94, 96, 185

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises female silence, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 29, 34, 68, 89, 91, 97, 100, 101, 108, 143, 179, 180 female voice, 8, 14, 20, 68, 69, 80, 124, 185 fetishism, 68, 83, 111, 116, 117 final word, 68, 131, 140, 141, 153 Five Cities [Beú ùehir] (Onur Ünlü 2009), 51 flashback, 24, 92, 153, 154, 155 Fog, The [Sis] (Zülfü Livaneli 1993), 41 Foucault, Michel, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 24, 67, 108, 178 Frenzy [Abluka] (Emin Alper 2015), 52 Fuery, Peter, 32 Future Lasts Forever [Gelecek Uzun Sürer] (Özcan Alper 2011), 51, 185

G G.O.R.A. (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2004), 46, 56, 121 Gene [Gen] (Togan Gökbakar 2006), 47 generator of doubt, 19, 71, 73, 90, 96, 98, 145, 153, 155, 158 ghosts of the past, 159 Giritlio÷lu, Tomris, 48 Gledhill, Christine, 75 Gökçe, Övgü, 62, 79, 83, 84, 168, 169, 172 Göl, Berke, 47, 48 Göle, Nilüfer, 10 Gomeda (Tan Tolga Demirci 2007), 47 Greenblatt, Stephen J, 119

211

Güçlü, Özlem, 89, 172, 173 Güney, Ylmaz, 52 Gürata, Ahmet, 81, 164, 165 Gürbey, Gülistan, 11, 115 Gürbilek, Nurdan, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16, 24, 65, 144, 149, 150, 160, 161, 181, 184 Gurevitch, Zali, 140 Güven, Ali Murat, 58 Güven, Yavuz, 5, 28, 37

H Hair [Saç] (Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu 2010), 59 Haunted [Musallat] (Alper Mesçi 2007), 47 Hayward, Susan, 38 Haze [Pus] (Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu 2009), 50, 59 Herd, The [Sürü] (Zeki Ökten 1979), 3 Hidden Faces [Sakl Yüzler] (Handan øpekçi 2007), 51 Higson, Andrew, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 45, 49, 51 Hodgkin, K and Radstone, S, 146, 176 Holy Carboy 2 It Men, The [Kutsal Damacana 2 It Men] (Korhan Bozkurt 2010), 46 Holy Carboy, The [Kutsal Damacana] (Kamil Aydn 2007), 46 homeland allegory, 113 Honest [Namuslu] (Ertem E÷ilmez 1984), 41, 84 Honey [Bal] (Semih Kaplano÷lu 2010), 50, 59, 65

Index

212 Horney, Karen, 87 Horrocks, Roger, 81 horror genre, 47, 122 How Can Asiye be Saved? [Asiye Nasl Kurtulur?](Atf Ylmaz 1986), 41 Hunting Time [Av Zaman] (Erden Kral 1988), 41 Hürmüz with 7 Husbands [7 Kocal Hürmüz] (Ezel Akay 2009), 51 Huyssen, Andreas, 149

I I Saw the Sun [Güneúi Gördüm] (Mahsun Krmzgül 2009), 63, 64 image and sound duality, 20 image and sound unity, 21 In Bar [Barda] (Serdar Akar 2006), 50 Innocence [Masumiyet] (Zeki Demirkubuz 1997), 2, 13, 25, 28, 37, 63, 70, 75, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93 instrumentality, 19, 24, 25, 102, 104, 111, 127, 131, 139, 142, 167, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186 International, The [Beynelmilel] (Srr Süreyya Önder and Muharrem Gülmez 2006), 165 øpekçi, Handan, 51 Irmak, Ça÷an, 46, 48 Istanbul Under My Wings [østanbul Kanatlarmn Altnda] (Mustafa Altoklar 1996), 3, 46, 89, 139, 140 Ivy Mansion Life, The [Asmal Konak

Hayat] (Abdullah O÷uz 2003), 14, 27, 28, 89, 92, 152, 160

J Jîn (Reha Erdem 2013), 51, 56 Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco 1948), 4 Johnston, C and Cook, P, 74 Journey to the Sun [Güneúe Yolculuk] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 1999), 51, 61

K Kabaday, Lale, 82 Kado÷lu, Ayúe, 149 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 124 Kaplan, Ann, 1, 18, 111 Kaplan, Neúe, 75, 76, 85 Kaplano÷lu, Semih, 48, 50, 56, 58, 59, 60, 65 Kaptano÷lu, Cem, 144 Kara, Mesut, 12, 40 Karabey, Hüseyin, 52 Karahan, Jülide, 59 Keyder, Ça÷lar, 10, 11, 112, 114, 115 Killing the Shadow [Hacivat Karagöz Neden Öldürüldü?] (Ezel Akay 2005), 51 Klç, Ecevit, 135 Kraç, Rza, 5, 34, 37 Krel, Serpil, 41, 54, 76, 84 Koç, Ayúegül, 5 Köksal, Özlem, 131, 135, 159 Kosmos (Reha Erdem 2009), 51 Köstepen, Enis, 47 Kozloff, Sarah, 18

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises Kristeva, Julia, 32 Kuhn, Annette, 28

L Laplace, Maria, 76, 77 Larrabee, F. S and Lesser, I. O, 114, 115 Last Ottoman Yandm Ali, The [Son Osmanl Yandm Ali] (Mustafa ùevki Do÷an 2007), 47 Law of Borders, The [Hudutlarn Kanunu] (Lütfi Akad 1966), 52 Lawrence, Amy, 8, 18, 21 Love Convict [Aúk Mahkumu] (Nuri Ergün 1973), 4 Love in Another Language [Baúka Dilde Aúk] (ølksen Baúarr 2009), 26, 28, 105 Love Lorn [Gönül Yaras] (Yavuz Turgul 2005), 63

M macho cinema, 1 Made in Europe (ønan Temelkuran 2007), 52 Madsen, Deborah L, 114 Maktav, Hilmi, 5, 28, 41, 42, 46 male films, 1, 2, 81 male gaze, 69, 111, 116, 131 male masochism, 82 male point of view, 2, 25, 69, 73, 79, 88, 97, 110, 147, 160, 179, 180, 181, 183 male voice, 20, 182, 185 male weepy films, 1, 6, 82, 160 Marks, Laura, 168, 169

213

masculinity crisis, 5, 6, 25, 68, 69, 81, 83, 91, 120, 180, 182 Masked Quintet Iraq [Maskeli Beúler Irak] (Murat Aslan 2007), 47 masochistic subtexts, 82, 83 Mazierska, Ewa, 151 melancholic rural escape films, 50 melodrama, 54, 75 Merry Go Round [Atlkarnca] (2010), 101 Mersin, Serhan, 165, 166 Messenger, The [Ulak] (Ça÷an Irmak 2007), 89, 139 Metz, Christian, 19, 20 Milk [Süt] (Semih Kaplano÷lu 2008), 50, 59 Minh-ha, Trinh T, 17, 18, 90 Mintaú, Erol, 52 Modleski, Tania, 119 monologue, 24, 58, 71, 73, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 99, 100, 102, 104, 148, 155, 170, 171, 172 Mrs. Salkm’s Diamonds [Salkm Hanm’n Taneleri] (Tomris Giritlio÷lu 1999), 48, 165 Mud, The [Çamur] (Derviú Zaim 2004), 27, 28, 173, 174, 176 Mulvey, Laura, 18, 68, 69, 110, 111, 116, 119 music score, 57 mute character, 19, 71, 89, 91, 105, 111, 127, 142 Mutman, Mahmut, 58 My Father and My Son [Babam ve O÷lum] (Ça÷an Irmak 2005), 48, 164, 165 My Marlon and Brando [Gitmek] (Hüseyin Karabey 2008), 52

Index

214 My Only Sunshine [Hayat Var] (Reha Erdem 2008), 51, 56, 63, 64

N Naficy, Hamid, 52, 53, 132 Nagel, Joane, 124 Naked Citizen, The [Çplak Vatandaú] (Baúar Sabuncu 1985), 41 national cinema, 24, 30, 31, 34, 35, 180 national history, 143, 144, 150, 151, 152, 164, 167, 172 national identity, 26, 31, 35, 51, 52, 54, 114, 115, 118, 120, 180 national memory, 144, 152, 161, 172, 176, 177 national order, 26, 111, 113, 115, 121, 122, 123, 127, 132, 135, 141, 179, 182 nationalist adventures, 47, 122 nationalist comedies, 47 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 151 new cinema of Turkey, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 16, 18, 24, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 53, 74, 110, 151, 152, 166, 178, 185 new political films, 52, 120, 151, 166, 174 new Turkish cinema, 3, 31, 32, 34, 36 Neyzi, Leyla, 144, 149, 150, 151 non-being of woman, 97, 125 non-subject, 88

O-Ö O’Regan, Tom, 35, 36

Offside [Dar Alanda Ksa Paslaúmalar] (Serdar Akar 2000), 165 Oh! Belinda [Aah! Belinda] (Atf Ylmaz 1986), 41, 80 Oktan, Ahmet, 5, 69, 81, 82, 86 On Board [Gemide] (Serdar Akar 1998), 3, 13, 26, 28, 50, 89, 112, 116, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 135 On the Way to School [2 Dil 1 Bavul] (Özgür Do÷an and Orhan Eskiköy 2009), 52 Onaran, A and Vardar, B, 34, 41, 42, 43, 55 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011), 27, 28, 155, 159, 160 Oran, Bülent, 54 Ottoman Cowboys [Yahúi Bat] (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2010), 121 Ottoman Cowboys, The [Yahúi Bat] (Ömer Faruk Sorak 2010), 46 Öz, Kazm, 51, 166 Özbek, Meral, 85 Özbudak, Elif Nesibe, 59 Özgüç, Agah, 5 Öztürk, S. R and Tutal, N, 5, 6 Öztürk, S. Ruken, 172 Öztürkmen, Arzu, 151 Özyürek, Esra, 144, 149, 150, 151

P Pains of Autumn [Güz Sancs] (Tomris Giritlio÷lu 2008), 48, 165 Paker, Murat, 144, 149

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises Pandora’s Box [Pandora’nn Kutusu] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2008), 161 Passerini, Luisa, 142 Pateman, Carole, 123 Perfidious Byzantium [Kahpe Bizans] (Gani Müjde 1999), 37 Persona (Ingmar Bergman 1966), 4 Photograph [Foto÷raf] (Kazm Öz 2001), 51 Piano, The (Jane Campion 1993), 4 Pickering, Michael, 123, 126 Pirselimo÷lu, Tayfun, 50, 55, 59, 60 point of silence, 11, 12, 133, 134, 152, 167, 168, 169 Police [Polis] (Onur Ünlü 2006), 51 popular nostalgia films, 48, 144, 165 Pösteki, Nigar, 34, 37, 41, 43 Press (Sedat Ylmaz 2010), 52 Propaganda (Sinan Çetin 1999), 3, 48, 165

R Radstone, Susannah, 146, 149, 154, 161 Reddish Coloured Grape [Knal Yapncak] (Orhan Aksoy 1968), 4 regime of brothers, 81 repression of speech, 24, 65 return of the past, 11, 27, 149, 155 Rhodes, L and Sparrow, F, 8 Rza (Tayfun Pirselimo÷lu 2007), 50, 55, 59 Robins, K and Aksoy, A, 62, 114, 115, 133, 134 role of moral conscience, 19, 89, 143, 146, 153, 156

215

Romantic [Romantik] (Sinan Çetin 2007), 13, 95 Roth, Michael S, 162 Ryan, M and Kellner, D, 8, 81, 83, 86, 122

S-ù Sacred [Kadosh] (Amos Gitai 1999), 5 sadism, 86 Sancar, Mithat, 149, 164 Santaololia, Isabel, 8 School [Okul] (Ya÷mur and Durul Taylan 2003), 47 Scognamillo, Giovanni, 41, 43 screaming point, 80, 137 Secret Intentions [Gizli Duygular] (ùerif Gören 1984), 80 Semum (Hasan Karacada÷ 2008), 47 September 12 Films, 41, 84, 144, 164, 165 Shadow Play [Gölge Oyunu] (Yavuz Turgul 1993), 26, 96, 97, 98, 99, 181 Shadowless, The [Gölgesizler] (Ümit Ünal 2008), 51, 135, 136 silent female character(s), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 27, 63, 69, 73, 74, 88, 89, 96, 99, 110, 111, 131, 136, 137, 139, 142, 146, 148, 149, 152, 157, 158, 159, 167, 178, 179, 180, 182 silent female representational form, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 67, 110, 167, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185 silent male character, 28 silent representational form, 13, 179

216 Silverman, Kaja, 8, 18, 20, 21, 69, 73, 80, 82, 83, 99, 110, 111, 112, 113, 147, 179, 181 Sing Your Songs [Sen Türkülerini Söyle] (ùerif Gören 1986), 41 ùirin, Uygar, 37, 43 ùk, Ahmet, 135 Sjogren, Britta, 124 Small Town [Kasaba] (1997), 50 Smelik, Anneke, 73, 88, 94, 97 social comedies, 41, 83, 84 social realist films, 52 Somersault in a Coffin [Tabutta Rövaúata] (Derviú Zaim 1996), 2, 49 Son of the Sun, The [Güneúin O÷lu] (Onur Ünlü 2008), 51 Song of My Mother [Annemin ùarks] (Erol Mintaú 2014), 52 Sons of a B… [O…Çocuklar] (Murat Saraço÷lu 2008), 48 Sontag, Susan, 24, 110, 179 Sorak, Ömer Faruk, 46, 56 sound design, 12, 53, 55, 56 sound technology, 12, 53 Soyarslan, Mehmet, 42 Speak Little Mute Girl [Habla, Mudita] (Manuel Gutierrez Aragon 1973), 4 speaker, 1, 16, 23, 25, 26, 67, 70, 74, 75, 95, 107, 110, 113, 118, 141, 160, 179, 180, 182, 183 spiritual realism, 59, 65 Spivak, Gayatri C, 140 spoken-of, 16, 23, 25, 26, 67, 70, 75, 95, 97, 107, 110, 160, 179, 180, 182, 183 Storm, The [Bahoz] (Kazm Öz 2008), 52, 166 style of confession, 74

Index Suner, Asuman, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 28, 31, 35, 37, 39, 44, 45, 48, 50, 52, 53, 58, 75, 78, 79, 84, 91, 93, 100, 120, 149, 151, 152, 164, 165, 166, 172, 174, 175 Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen, 1999), 4

T Talk to Her [Hable Con Ella] (Pedro Almadovar 2002), 5 Taúçyan, Alin, 60 technology of gender, 28 Tekeli, ùirin, 78 Teksoy, Rekin, 41 Temelkuran, ønan, 52 third meaning, 97 Those Awakening in the Dark [Karanlkta Uyananlar] (Ertem Göreç 1964), 52 Thou Gild’st The Even [Sen Aydnlatrsn Geceyi] (Onur Ünlü 2013), 51 Three Monkeys [Üç Maymun] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2008), 37, 50, 57, 64 to-be-looked-at-ness, 18, 116 Toss-Up [Yaz-Tura] (U÷ur Yücel 2004), 166 Traces [øz] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 1994), 51 transpositions, 32 traumatic paradox, 148 Turgul, Yavuz, 46, 49 Turkish melodrama, 7 Turkish national identity, 11, 26, 34, 114, 120, 182, 183

Female Cinematic Silences, Resonances of Turkey’s Crises

U-Ü Uluçay, Ahmet, 51 Ulusay, Nejat, 1, 2, 5, 6, 41, 43, 45, 46, 69, 81, 82 Ünal, Ümit, 48, 51, 127, 135, 185 Ünlü, Onur, 51 Ustao÷lu, Yeúim, 48, 51, 61

V Valley of the Wolves [Kurtlar Vadisi Irak] (Serdar Akar 2005), 47 Vardar, Bülent, 41 Vasfiye is Her Name [Ad Vasfiye] (Atf Ylmaz 1985), 41, 79 Vitali, V and Willemen, P, 32, 33 Vizontele (Ylmaz Erdo÷an and Ömer Faruk Sorak 2001), 58, 165 Vizontele Tuuba (Ylmaz Erdo÷an 2004), 48, 58, 164, 165 Voice of My Father [Babamn Sesi] (Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Do÷an 2012), 52, 185 Voice, The [Ses] (Ümit Ünal 2010), 47, 185 Voice, The [Ses] (Zeki Ökten 1986), 41 voice-off, 124, 125, 162, 175 voice-over, 24, 96, 97, 111, 113, 114, 116, 131, 141, 155, 174, 175 voyeurism, 68, 87, 89, 111

W Waiting for Heaven [Cenneti Beklerken] (Derviú Zaim 2006), 51

217

Waiting for the Clouds [Bulutlar Beklerken] (Yeúim Ustao÷lu 2003), 13, 14, 27, 28, 51, 62, 166, 167, 168, 174, 176, 181, 183 Waiting Room [Bekleme Odas] (Zeki Demirkubuz 2003), 50, 60 Walker, Janet, 148, 149 Walters, Susan D, 117 Waterfall, The [ùellale] (Semir Aslanyürek 2001), 88, 89, 165 Whitehead, Stephen, 15 Wildheart Hell of Boomerang [Deli Yürek Bumerang Cehennemi] (Osman Snav 2001), 47 women’s films, 8, 25, 40, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 182 Wrong Rosary [Uzak øhtimal] (Mahmut Fazl Coúkun 2008), 60

X Xavier, Ismail, 135

Y Yalçn, Soner, 135 Yavuz, M. Hakan, 11 Ye÷en, Mesut, 114, 140 Yes Sir! [Emret Komutanm ùah Mat] (Taner Akvardar and Mustafa Altoklar 2007), 47 Yeúilçam, 12, 13, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 43, 44, 46, 49, 52, 55, 75, 79 Ylmaz, Atf, 41 Ylmaz, Cem, 46 Ylmaz, Sedat, 52

218 Yol [The Way] (Ylmaz Güney and ùerif Gören 1981), 84 Yücel, Frat, 74 Yurdatap, K and Yavuz, D, 45

Index

Z Zaim, Derviú, 33, 44, 48, 49, 51, 173