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Review: New Turkish Cinema: belonging, identity and memory, Asuman Suner

Article  in  Historical Journal Of Film Radio and Television · June 2010

DOI: 10.1080/01439681003779291

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Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and

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New Turkish Cinema: belonging,

identity and memory
a
Kevin Smets
a
University of Antwerp
Published online: 19 May 2010.

To cite this article: Kevin Smets (2010) New Turkish Cinema: belonging, identity and memory,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 30:2, 246-248, DOI: 10.1080/01439681003779291

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 246 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

Leggott’s project of proving his subjects uniformly attention-worthy: after all, what is
culture without participation? A significant number of the films cited—Evil Aliens
(Jake West, 2005) (p. 58), Dead Man’s Cards (James Marquand, 2006) (p. 62), and
9 Dead Gay Guys (Lab Ky Mo, 2002) (p. 65) amongst them—took less than £15,000 at
the UK box office, which suggests that none were likely to have attracted more than
3000 viewers. When one thinks of this in the context of a film such as The Full Monty,
which took over £52 million in the UK and thereby achieved a far more extensive
cultural outreach, one must question their level of significance within a survey that
leans toward the quantitative rather than the qualitative.
‘A wholly academic approach,’ Leggott observes, ‘leaves unaddressed the kind
of questions that a lay viewer might pose about British film culture. Just how good is
recent British cinema? How creative and resourceful are its practitioners? And how
is it impacting upon hearts and minds domestically and worldwide?’ (p. 112). I would
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suggest that it is not only the layperson who might derive benefit from the rigorous
interrogation of such questions as these. Whilst the last is occasionally addressed—for
instance in the author’s observation that the critically reviled Outlaw has ‘proven more
capable of speaking to parts of the British public about the contemporary pressures
upon working-class men’ than have the works of more ‘socially committed directors
such as Ken Loach and Shane Meadows’ (p. 98)—for the most part the book
perpetuates his own tacit disappointment in the continued critical tendency ‘to
contextualise and explain rather than to evaluate cinematic worth’ (p. 13).
If Contemporary British Cinema at times raises more questions that it answers, it
undeniably functions admirably as an entry level text, which offers a good grounding
in both the range of recent productions and the critical questions that surround them.
Easy to navigate and featuring clear and logical chapters and subdivisions, it contains
brief but cogent accounts of significant genre traits as well as popular (and sometimes
unpopular) representations of prevalent cultural discourses. Writing in a style that
is at once scholarly and accessible, Leggott has produced an engaging work, which
promises to take its place alongside the best of the other entries in Wallflower’s ‘Short
Cuts’ series as the standard undergraduate text that it so clearly sets out to be.

DEBORAH ALLISON
Independent scholar, London
ß 2010, Deborah Allison

New Turkish Cinema: belonging, identity and memory

ASUMAN SUNER
London/New York, I.B. Tauris, 2010
209 pp., illus., bibliography, index, £16.99 (paper), £49.50 (cloth)

The revival of Turkish cinema, which commenced in the mid-1990s, has stimulated
Turkish independent scholars and academics to address issues of cinema within the
contemporary society for over a decade. Being exemplary of this wave of scholarship,
Asuman Suner now assembles a number of the recent insights in the field of
Turkish film studies in New Turkish cinema: belonging, identity and memory, although
 BOOK REVIEWS 247

up-to-dateness might not be the strongest feature here, since the majority of the book
draws from its 2006 version. That previous version has now been revised and updated
for readers who are not necessarily familiar with Turkey’s recent political history.
As some of the latest scholarly works suggest (e.g. Gönül Dönmez-Colin, 2008,
Turkish cinema: identity, distance and belonging, London, Reaktion), ‘belonging’ and
‘home’ are chief themes and metaphors in writings on (new) Turkish cinema.
Suner now continues on that course, by putting the figure of the ‘spectral home’
central in this contribution. The home that many Turkish films refer to, Suner argues,
is an image of both nostalgic fantasy and haunted trauma. The current volume analyses
Turkish cinema within the frames of this dichotomy. Continually examining questions
of identity and memory, this book addresses the links between cinema and the
transformations in modern Turkish society. Drawing from film analyses, cultural
theory and interviews with film directors, Suner includes both popular and art
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house productions. The combination of these distinctive film categories—elsewhere

treated separately—is the book’s most original pursuit. Throughout this book,
the author demonstrates that commercial as well as art house films share an
ambiguous relation with the political, social and cultural alterations that characterize
present-day Turkey and that this relation can best be understood in terms of (not)
belonging.
After a concise historical overview of Turkish cinema, which especially highlights
the emergence of the new cinema scene in the 1990s and 2000s, Suner discusses
the category of so-called ‘popular nostalgia films’ in the first chapter. These films,
typically focusing on the provincial small-town life of the past, are reflective accounts
of a lost yet romanticized past. Suner claims that by depicting how the protective
shells of home or childhood are destroyed by outside forces, popular nostalgia films
criticize the contemporary Turkish society. Often politically charged stories that deal
with the impact of the centralized state on traditional community life, these films
are either illustrations of or critiques on the rising nationalist discourse in Turkey.
The parallels that Suner draws between the political stances expressed in these films
and the contemporary cultural memory politics in Turkey make this chapter
undoubtedly the most original and insightful one.
The following chapter concentrates on new wave films that take the political
critique even further, as they address the traumatic past and refer to armed conflicts
and minority suppression. Drawing on Naficy’s conceptualization of transnational
cinema, Suner describes the new political films of Turkey as being close to the genre
of independent transnational cinema. Even though this argument is only cursorily
explicated, it spurs the author to recognize appropriately that the category of ‘Turkish
cinema’ is problematic. The country’s cultural, ethnic and religious diversity
challenges the ‘Turkishness’ embedded in this category. Instead, Suner suggests that
‘cinema of Turkey’ is a much more fitting term.
In chapters 3 and 4, the focus is on the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki
Demirkubuz respectively. With their international acclaim, both directors have
become synonyms for the new independent cinema in Turkey. Starting again from the
point of view of the home, Suner describes the work of Ceylan mainly in terms
of ‘the paradoxes of belonging’ (p. 98). By means of a detailed discussion of Ceylan’s
films, it is demonstrated that the idea of home is continuously evoked, either as a trap
or as a zone of comfort. Equally detailed, a similar analysis is made of Demirkubuz’s
 248 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

films, which unambiguously represent the home as a claustrophobic place symbolizing

the social entrapment of many of the characters in it.
Chapters 5 and 6 then discuss two favourite topics of last decade’s cinema
studies in Turkey, i.e. the place of Istanbul in cinema and the gender politics of new
Turkish cinema. Concerning the first subject, Suner makes mention of a genre of ‘new
Istanbul films.’ Unlike the romanticizing tendencies towards the city in classical
cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, recent Turkish films—if set in Istanbul at all—put
forward alternative ways of seeing the city. Works by Derviş Zaim and Fatih Akın,
among others, illustrate a new attitude vis-à-vis Turkey’s metropolis, characterized
by the critical recycling of old clichés and images of the city into a new visual urban
space. The author makes an analogous argument about gender politics in new Turkish
cinema, stating that even though women’s stories have quasi-disappeared from the
scenes, a new awareness of the male complicity with the patriarchal culture is evident.
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This is but one of the slightly uncomfortable paradoxes that Suner discerns in new
Turkish cinema.
The current social and political transformations in Turkish society are a necessary,
yet painful process, Suner concludes in her contribution to Turkish film studies. The
creative practices that deal with these changes have, however, produced fascinating
cinematic accounts. By focusing on these films and their context, this book illustrates
how social and political changes become intelligible and tangible in the creative
industry. Though occasionally imprecise in reasoning, the essential socio-political
background provided by Suner throughout this volume makes clear that new wave
cinema and the ongoing social transformations in Turkey are to be examined as two
halves of a whole.

KEVIN SMETS
University of Antwerp
ß 2010, Kevin Smets

Outsider Films on India 1950–1990

SHANAY JHAVERI (Ed.)
India, The Shoestring Publisher, 2009
264 pp., illus., index, appendix, £14.99 (paper)

More than 50 years after independence, the issue of a problematic Western outlook
on India in film is still extremely relevant, as the heated discussions provoked
by Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) recently have shown. Especially following
Edward Said’s work Orientalism (1978), the last few decades have witnessed an
increasing interest in the Western perception of the East. Most books and articles
dealing with this topic in the context of film, such as Ananda Mitra’s India through
the Western Lens: creating national images in film (1999) or the content analyses done
by Srividya Ramasubramanian, focus on the reverberations of cinematic portrayals
of India in this (stereotypical) perception by the West.
As acknowledged in the introduction by the editor Shanay Jhaveri, the essays
in Outsider films on India 1950–1990 are less occupied by the effects of orientalist

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