According to Erdoğan and Göktürk, Yeşilçam comedies were primarily based on ‘gags and puns’ and many were produced with the same cast including famous comedy stars like Kemal Sunal, Şener Şen, Sadri Alışık, and the comedy duo Zeki Alasya and Metin Akpınar, each having their own stereotypical character on screen. These comedies, which most of the time had a melodramatic overtone, affirmed not just family values, but also ‘subtly produced points of resistance to power’ (Erdoğan and Göktürk 2001:
535). Moreover, comedy film series such as Cilalı İbo/İbo the Polished by Osman F.
Seden with Feridun Karakaya in the leading role, Turist Ömer/Ömer the Tourist by Hulki Şaner starring Sadri Alışık or Şaban/Şaban directed by Kartal Tibet starring Kemal Sunal as Şaban, were very popular comedies during Yeşilçam. Interestingly, the first both mentioned film series each have an episode dealing with Germany called Cilalı İbo Almanya’da/İbo the Polished in Germany (1970, Osman F. Seden) and Turist Ömer Almanya’da/Ömer the Tourist in Germany (1966, Hulki Saner). However, the Şaban series has two episodes, one where Şaban is an emigrant in Germany (Gurbetçi Şaban/Şaban the Gurbetçi (1985, Kartal Tibet) and the other a returnee from Germany (Katma Değer Şaban/Value Added Tax Şaban (1985, Kartal Tibet). The Şaban series, like most of the comedies starring Kemal Sunal, centre on a village idiot, often exposed to abuse by people in power around him, but manages to eliminate the evil. Şaban is ‘an ordinary man with good intentions, pure, clean, clumsy, and moral because he rebels against unjust situations’ (Arslan 2011: 216). Frequently the character Şaban, ‘a migrant from a rural area or a lower-class bum, copes with the challenges of adapting to urban environment’ (Arslan 2011: 217). With respect to the already mentioned melodramatic mode in comedies, Arslan points out that the melodramatic moments in Şaban’s movies
146 are based on conflicts between rich and poor, good and evil, rural and urban. These melodramatic conflict poles prove very fruitful in comedies dealing with migration to Germany, where the migrant frequently embodies the innocent, rural and poor and Germany and the Germans represent the urban and prosperity. This might explain why comedy was a popular genre to represent migration to Germany.
Turkish cinema started to depict the Turkish guest-worker through a humorous lens earlier than German and Turkish German cinema. Even if the first Turkish German culture-clash comedies Turist Ömer Almanya’da and Cilalı İbo Almanya’da were produced at the end the 1960s, they are not relevant for my analysis because both movies are a type of slapstick comedies focusing on funny situations emerging from tourist experiences in Germany rather than from migration.66
In the mid-1970s, the very first comedy that touches upon the topic of Turkish migration to Germany appeared in Turkish cinema and can be categorised in the first group of movies mentioned above. Baldız /Sister-In-Law (1975, Temel Gürsü) starts with the return of the guest-worker Hasan to his village, where his father expects him to marry a woman from the village. Since Hasan believes that he is going to marry Naciye, the beautiful sister of the actual woman he should marry, he agrees to the marriage.
After marrying the sister, Naciye, who now is Hasan’s sister-in-law, becomes pregnant from Hasan. It takes the whole film until Hasan finally convinces all relatives to get together with Naciye. However, as soon as they are allowed to get together, he starts flirting with another woman. Even if in the very beginning the audience sees Hasan returning to his village with a BMW car and the camera particularly gives close-ups of objects like Hasan’s hat and his large golden ring, which are typical symbols of wealth and the emigrant’s success in Germany, Hasan’s migrant identity and his experiences as a guest-worker are not main concerns of the narrative. In fact, the movie is not about Hasan’s definite return to Turkey, but a kind of romantic comedy about misunderstandings and a flirtatious man.
Fikrimin İnce Gülü – Sarı Mercedes/Mercedes mon amour (1987, Tunç Okan) can be regarded as the first comedy that concentrates on a Turkish guest-worker from Germany. The black comedy that incorporates Williams’s outlined features of the melodramatic mode, is about Bayram, a guest-worker in Germany, who is on his way back to his village in Turkey by car. He is in love with the yellow Mercedes he has worked so hard for in his three years in Germany. He is really excited to show off his
66 Another type of slapstick comedy film Deliler Almanya’da/The Crazy People are in Germany (1980, Yavuz Figenli) produced ten years later.
147 car and what he has achieved in Germany to friends and family back home. Bayram is characterised as selfish, cunning, and as attaching importance to material things and the need to impress people. Through flashbacks, the audience learns that Bayram had a difficult childhood with no parents and was often excluded and oppressed in his village.
This explains his dream of becoming a successful man to impress these people. En route, Bayram visualises how he will be welcomed with a celebration by a big crowd, who will admire Bayram for his success. Unfortunately for him, he experiences many misadventures in his Mercedes and so his symbol of success and prosperity gets literally scratched during his journey home. Moreover, when he finally arrives, he sees that everything has changed. His village is empty and his childhood love Kezban, whom he planned to propose to, is married and pregnant. The film ends with Bayram passing his village in his damaged Mercedes and stopping at a crossroads to wonder which direction to take. It is this sense of alienation that creates the deeply pessimistic perspective at the end of the film. Fikrimin İnce Gülü – Sarı Mercedes constructs opposing poles of urban, rich Germany and rural, poor Turkey. Bayram, with his shallow values and his greed for money, success, and approval, is punished by loneliness. Anık argues that this portrayal of Bayram as arrogant and selfish is a generalisation applying to the majority of guest-workers in Turkish cinema (Anık 2012:
40). It is true that Bayram is shown in a bad light but there is no hint of that this character is typical of Turkish emigrants in Germany. Moreover, Bayram is a rather tragic character, a role the prominent Turkish actor İlyas Salman was famous for.
Additionally, the famous comedy actor Kemal Sunal’s films shall be briefly mentioned. Sunal, who frequently plays a naive, clumsy, and innocent village idiot, who comes into contact with people with poor morals and has trouble adapting to an urban environment, stars even in five comedies about Turkish emigrants in Germany. In Davaro (1981, Kartal Tibet) and Katma Değer Şaban/Value Added Tax Şaban (1985, Kartal Tibet), Sunal portrays a returnee from Germany, whereas the comedies Gurbetçi Şaban/Şaban the Gurbetçi (1985, Kartal Tibet) and Polizei/Police (1988, Şerif Gören)
are shot in Germany and so show the guest-workers’ lives abroad.67 All the humorous moments in these films result from culture clashes in various dimensions such as the clash of values in the binary of rural versus urban, rich versus poor, and tradition versus modernity. These dichotomies of good and evil create the melodramatic tone in Sunal’s movies. Experiences of alienation as a guest-worker in Germany and a returnee in
67In the fifth film starring Kemal Sunal Postacı/The Postman (1984, Memduh Ün) he does not portray an emigrant, but experiences problems with his girlfriend’s brother Latif, a returnee from Germany.
148 Turkey, as well as being the other in both countries are intrinsic to the pessimistic perspective on migration.
An overview of the comedies reveals that Turkish migration cinema was able to take a self-reflective comedic approach as Alman Avrat 40 Bin Mark/German Woman 40 Thousand German Marks (1988, Ali Avaz) and its follow-up Alman Avradın Bacısı/The German Woman’s Sister (1990, Ali Avaz) show. Both parody scenes and characters of several emigration melodramas. Alman Avrat 40 Bin Mark, as for example, borrows from migration melodramas such as Bir Türk’e Gönül Verdim/I Lost My Heart to a Turk (1969, Halit Refiğ) and Almanya’da Bir Türk Kızı/A Turkish Girl in Germany (1974, Hulki Şaner). Alman Avrat 40 Bin Mark features the impact Ali’s emigration to Germany has on his family and village in Turkey. It starts with Ali’s fantasy of going to Germany and becoming a millionaire. After convincing his wife Ayşe, Ali emigrates to Germany to work. The film then cross-cuts between scenes of Ali’s hard working conditions in Germany and of Ayşe, who waits desperately for his letters and his return. When Ali finally returns to his village, he is accompanied by his attractive, blond, new German wife Helga. Scantily dressed and spoilt Helga upsets Ayşe, but arouses the interest of the men in the village, including Ali’s and Ayşe’s son.
Helga walks around the village skimpily dressed and sunbaths in inappropriate places.
These scenes are obviously copied from other films’ depiction of German lovers or wives. When Ali wants to divorce from Helga, she claims 40,000 DM from Ali to get divorced. Helga is pressured by Ali to adapt to the local culture and wear traditional clothes including a scarf, work in the fields, and help out at the farm. A satirical moment of subtle social criticism of the tough conditions for Turkish women in villages occurs when Helga on top of all the hard work, has to please Ali sexually, who also continues to have sex with Ayşe. Since Helga can bear these living conditions no longer, she agrees to a divorce and returns to Germany. Ali, Ayşe, and Helga represent exaggerated versions of the characters Murat, Zeynep, and Gertha in Almanya’da Bir Türk Kızı, a singer melodrama that I will analyse later in the chapter.
The follow-up comedy Alman Avradın Bacısı is more a satire than a parody, since it involves a stronger social-critical overtone. After Ali’s wife Ayşe dies, he moves to Istanbul where he lives an ordinary life with his son, until one day, they receive a visitor from Germany. Helga’s sister Anna, who like Helga in the first movie attracts notoriety through her promiscuity, has decided to live in Istanbul. The multilingual film is, on the one hand, a culture clash comedy deriving humour from German Turkish cultural encounters and language misunderstandings, and, on the other hand, a satire on the
149 whole emigration process to Germany, as it showcases the male neighbours’ ceaseless efforts to marry Anna in order to get the opportunity to move to Germany. At the end of the film, Anna marries one of these men and after becoming a Turkish citizen, neither Anna nor her husband can get a visa for Germany. Alman Avradın Bacısı ends with a message recited by Ali, that questions the existence of borders and nations and criticises the privileged status of the West. The binarism of the privileged West/Germany versus the unprivileged East/Turkey creates the typical melodramatic tone at the end of the film.
Neden? Neden? Why? Why?
Hudutları kimler çizdi? Ayrılık neden? Who draw the borders? Why separation?
Pasaportlar, kontrollar, vizeler neden? Why passports, controls, visas?
Vizeler neden? Why visas?
Sen bana benziyorsun, ben sana benziyorum. You look like me, I look like you.
Ben sana bakayım, sen de bana bak. I look at you, so look at me.
Hayvana benziyor muyum Babo? Do I look like an animal babo (mate)?
İkimiz de insanız. Adımız insan. We are both human. We are called human.
Sen istedigin zaman bana geliyorsun. You can come to me whenever you want.
Ben istesem gelemiyorum. I cannot come to you when I want.
Bencillik neden? Why this egoism?
Senin ayrıcalıgın neden? Why are you privileged?
Yasaklar neden? Why these prohibitions?
Vizeler neden? Why visas?
Neden, neden Babo neden? Why? Why babo (mate) why?
Neden? Neden vizeler? Neden? Why? Why visas? Why?
After a long break of over two decades, the genre resurfaced with the comedy Berlin Kaplanı/The Tiger of Berlin in 2012. It is interesting that even after twenty years the first humorous take on migration still includes a melodramatic mode, with Ayhan, as a naive man with good intentions, having to confront his calculating relatives.68
In summary, most of the comedies on emigration were made between the mid-1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. This reveals that Turkish cinema showed emigration and Turkish German cultural contact from the humorous angle around a
68 Berlin Kaplanı will be analysed in depth later in this chapter.
150 decade earlier than Turkish German cinema did. An examination of these comedies demonstrates that whether slapstick comedy, black comedy, or a comedy entailing satire or parody, the humour usually stems from cultural clashes resulting from encounters of the liberalised, modern, Western culture in industrialised Germany versus the rural traditional culture of guest-workers and their friends and families in Turkey. All the comedies employ the melodramatic mode that often accompanies typically fixed binary oppositions. Germany, Germans, and assimilated Turkish emigrants often represent the
‘bad value’ associated with urbanisation and prosperity, such as individualism and degeneration, whereas Turkey and villagers frequently represent innocence, honesty, fidelity and high moral values. Other prevailing themes are the emigrants’ and returnees’ experiences of loneliness, unemployment, alienation or difficulties adapting, which similar to German films representing a rather pessimistic view of migration as victimised. The construction of different ‘black and white’ binaries is a typical convention of Yeşilçam comedies and migration comedies made during Yeşilçam are highly influenced by this convention. As a result, nearly all the comedies that tackle migration are crossed by a melodramatic mode. Thus: even in a comedy, migration is always shown as something sad or melancholic and is never depicted as pleasure or a valuable and enriching experience.