POR UN JUÁREZ PROSPERO

As already briefly mentioned in the section about the history of Yeşilçam and its characteristic features, Yeşilçam has always been a hybrid cinema. Arslan stresses how films during that period ‘Turkified’ European cinema and Hollywood by copying whole

72 Other arabesk films on Turkish migration in Germany are: Ayrılamam/I Cannot Leave (1986, Temel Gürsü), Batan Güneş/The Setting Sun (1978, Temel Gürsü), Son Sabah/The Last Morning (1978, Natuk Baytan), Almanya Acı Gurbet/Germany Bitter Gurbet (1988, Yavuz Figenli).

158 narratives and distinctive visual practices (Arslan 2009: 85). He further states that Turkish cinema during the Yeşilçam era adapted, dubbed, and ‘Turkified’ not only Western films, but also Egyptian and Indian films from the 1940s and 1950s. Arslan notes that this process ‘involved (mis)translations, Turkification of characters, and muting ideological aspects of films by giving them a “Turkish” voice’ (Arslan 2011:

116). The author also mentions the domestication of social realist Soviet films and describes the methods Turkish cinema used to adapt them for the Turkish market. The films were dubbed and new scenes were added that altered the narrative in order to reflect life in Turkey. Usually the new scenes involved performances by famous Turkish singers.

Erdoğan argues that the practice of dubbing, which does not conform to Western aesthetics, represents a typical Turkish tradition that has its roots in shadow-plays with the two-dimensional cut-out characters Karagöz and Hacivat (Erdoğan 2002: 236). This demonstrates how Turkish cinema sometimes resists Western aesthetics and unwittingly creates something new. In ‘Narratives of Resistance: National Identity and Ambivalence in the Turkish Melodrama Between 1965 and 1975’, Nezih Erdoğan refers to the issues of adaptations and plagiarism during Yeşilçam, arguing that it is possible to recognise an identity crisis in Turkish cinema, so focused on mimicking the other cinema, it is unable to establish its own national identity (Erdoğan 2006: 230).

In ‘Translating Modernity: Remakes in Turkish Cinema’, Gürata draws attention to the difficulties of remakes, arguing that the process of remaking a movie for a different cultural context involves an alternative perspective which has to take into account different cultural modes, values, and morals (Gürata 2006: 244). He further suggests that this process of the negotiation of original and remake could be seen as highly creative and that these remakes might have a ‘hybrid nature’. Similarly to Gürata, Erdoğan explains how plagiarism, as he prefers to call the adaptation of foreign movies into Turkish cinema, combined different narrative and stylistic forms and therefore created something new:

The technical and stylistic devices of Yeşilçam differ radically from those of Hollywood and European cinema. Lighting, colour, dubbing, dialogue, shooting practices, point of view shots and editing create a very specific cinematic discourse in even the most faithful adaptations (Erdoğan 2006: 235).

159 In summary, scholars who have approached the Yeşilçam period agree - to cite Erdoğan – that ‘Yeşilçam was a hybrid cinema’ (Erdoğan 2006: 235). I shall examine this statement more closely by drawing on Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia, dialogue, and hybridity, as well as on Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, the third space, and hybridity.⁷³

Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (different languages) describes the intermingling of different languages in novels, such as those of the author, the narrator and the characters. With respect to film, this would incorporate the producer’s, the director’s, and the screenwriter’s language. Heteroglossia refers to the variety already present in any single (national) language with ‘social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions’ (Bakhtin 1981: 262-263). In relation to the novel, the author claims that every novel is hybrid, since it involves all these different voices. Bakhtin’s remarks on hybridity can apply to film as another form of art. The author calls this type of hybridity ‘intentional’ and ‘artistically’ hybridity and defines hybridity as a fusion after an encounter of two social languages and consciousness in a single utterance (Bakhtin 1981: 258-366). Besides intentional hybridity, Bakhtin affirms the existence of a second form of hybridity, namely the unintentional, historical, or organic hybridity, which is a mix of different ‘languages’ ‘co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages’ (Bakhtin 1981: 358f.).

The postcolonial theorist Bhabha was influenced by Bakhtin’s thoughts when theorising the notion of hybridity. In his crucial work, Bhabha (1994) focuses on the construction of culture and identity within a colonial context and the relationship between the coloniser and colonised. He argues that the dialogue between both parties, which can also be regarded as the dialogue between the self and the other, leads to an interweaving and an intermixture of cultures. This process results in the formation of new hybrid cultures and thus in hybrid cultural identities. Another concept Bhabha uses to explain the cultural dynamics between the self and the other is the idea of mimicry.

He claims the colonised attempt to mimic and copy the coloniser’s language, behaviour,

73 See Chapter 2 for a detailed exploration of all theoretical concepts including the work of Bhabha and Bakhtin.

160 and manners, but inevitably deviate from the ‘original’.⁷⁴ The process of mimicry and negotiation of different fluid cultures takes place in what Bhabha names the third space, a symbolic space of enunciation where hybridisation occurs.

To sum up, both theorists assume that neither a social language (Bakhtin), nor a culture or identity (Bhabha) is ever stable or pure, but fluid and always in motion.

Bakhtin argues that unintentional or organic hybridity emerges in the utterance when different languages create something new. Similarly Bhabha uses his concept of the third space as a metaphorical place where different cultural identities negotiate and likewise produce an original hybrid culture.

This brief repetition of the crucial theorists’ conceptualisation of hybridity serves on the one hand to support the scholars’ arguments that Yeşilçam cinema is a hybrid cinema and on the other hand to provide an entry point for the following analysis of (cultural) hybridity in films on Turkish migration to Germany and the Turkish diaspora in Germany in Turkish cinema in the last section of this chapter.

With respect to Yeşilçam’s hybridity, I agree with Göktürk, Erdoğan, Arslan, and Gürata, who argue that Yeşilçam’s practice of pirating and adapting narratives from Western, Egyptian, and Indian cinema as well as remaking such films for the Turkish sociocultural context, creates something new and hybrid. Erdoğan believes this creates an identity crisis of Turkish cinema (Erdoğan 2006: 230). Without going into too much detail about what constitutes national identity, I want to draw on Bhabha’s ideas about culturally hybrid identities and stress that it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak about a (stable or fixed) national identity that could be represented. This is especially true of Turkey where the population includes diverse large ethnic groups like the Kurds or the Armenians. However, I agree that mimicking other cinemas (the other) leads to a process of negotiation and mixing of the in itself also fluid other and self whether this occurs in Bakhtin’s utterance or in Bhabha’s third space. The outcome of this intermingling then is new and hybrid. Hence, it can be stated that Yeşilçam was a hybrid cinema.

As a significant number of films about Turkish migrants in Germany and their descendants were produced during Yeşilçam, it is a given that these movies are already artistically, organically, and culturally hybrid. Given the fact that film is artistically

74 This imperfect duplicate provides the chance for colonial resistance, since the coloniser loses his position of power when undermined by the colonised, who tries to copy, but inevitably creates something new.

161 hybrid and cultural identity is hybrid too, the critical question is to what extent an analysis of hybridity in migration films is relevant. Nevertheless, the key purpose of the following analysis is to examine how cultural hybridity resulting from migration and different cultural encounters is represented in Turkish cinema. The main question is whether culturally hybrid identities with a migrant or diasporic background are considered, and hence depicted, as something positive and constructive or are there insted ‘monologic tendencies’ in the representation that ignore ‘the diverse and complex qualities’ of people with a migration experience (Mercer 1994: 62).⁷⁵

Before the in-depth analysis of cultural identity and hybridity in the three chosen films from Turkish external migration cinema, I will explore the cinematic representation of Turkish migration to Germany after the Yeşilçam era. As mentioned, fewer films about migration were produced in Turkey after Yeşilçam. However, it is important to investigate the reasons for this decline and the eventual change in the representation of migration in the post-Yeşilçam era, which is also called the new cinema of Turkey.

4.4 The Turkish Diaspora in Germany and Its Relationship to the New Cinema of