From Margins to the Center Through the Film Lens: Gender and Turkish-German Cinema (2024)

Engendering Orientalism Fatih Akin's Head On and The Edge of Heaven

Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond (2 Volumes), 2021

This study explores the elements of Orientalism in German-Turkish director Fatih Akin's films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007). Utilizing Homi Bhabha's theory of "third spaces," which immigrants often inhabit, and Edward Said's lens of the postcolonial gaze, I analyze the degree to which the bodies of immigrants willingly embody the mysterious "oriental," and how and when it is projected upon male and female characters in these two films. Akin's characters dwell between a perceived and imaginary Occident and Orient, while living and traveling in the soil of both Germany and Turkey.

Negotiating gender, sexuality and ethnicity in Fatih Akin’s and Thomas Arslan’s urban spaces

2008

This essay explores the relationship between the representation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity and the negotiation of urban space in the post-migrant ‘city films’ of two of the most prominent Turkish-German filmmakers working today, Thomas Arslan and Fatih Akin. It aims to identify whether stereotypical representations of ethnicallyspecific gender relations of the sort to be found in the so-called ‘cinema of duty’ of the 1970s and 1980s have been abandoned in contemporary filmmaking in favour of more complex and diverse versions of the interaction between male/female identities and ethnicity, or whether, in fact, more recent films produce a new set of stereotypes in this regard. It investigates representations of Turkish-German masculinities and examines the ways in which female identities have been imagined on screen, before turning briefly to representations of gender/sexual dynamics which fall outside the binary logic underpinning all of the films discussed here, exploring th...

A Country of Immigration? Situating German Multiculturalism in the New Europe

2011

This dissertation addresses a complex cultural and social phenomenon: German multiculturalism in the framework of the European Union in the century of globalization and global migration. I use selected cinematographic works by Fatih Akin, currently the most celebrated German and European filmmaker, as cultural texts. This project illuminates cultural controversies, political complexities, and the discriminatory nature of German multiculturalism. Specifically, I show how and why the German society eagerly accepts and successfully integrates Italian immigrants, yet, culturally marginalizes and socially excludes the Turks. My work illuminates how complex historical and political processes of the past, guided by the principle of Euro-centricity, affect the multicultural dynamics in the German society. I also analyze Akin’s positionality as filmmaker, political figure, and a poster-child of contemporary German and European cinema. This project invites critical re-consideration of the que...

Akin’s "Auf der anderen Seite" ("The Edge of Heaven") and the widening periphery [co-authored with Roger Hillman]

In this paper we explore how Fatih Akin's film "Auf der anderen Seite" ("The Edge of Heaven") situates Turkish-German transnationalism within historical and contemporary frameworks. The film reconfigures paradigms of Eastern and Western relationships, positioning Germany and Turkey (and beyond) within each other‟s sights/sites, rather than following the traditions which cast Turks as Germany's cultural others. Throughout the film references to the Koran and the Bible, the Gastarbeiter programme, Turkish and German literature and music, and Turkish history triangulate the Jewish, Christian and Islamic roots of German and Turkish culture. Also rooted in cinematic intertextuality, Akin's film comments on and inverts traditions of the representation of Turkish-German relationships, repositioning Turks and Turkish Germans as constitutive of German culture and vice versa. Beyond blurring these borders, it places transnational cinema in a global context. Auf der anderen Seite belongs to a recently emerged class of films whose structures emphasise pluralistic perspectives and whose themes revolve around globalisation's effects upon national borders. As such it remaps relationships between the European Union and the rest of the world, putting Turkey under the spotlight politically and geographically, which widens the periphery of European and global mediascapes.

The Subjects of Fati̇h Akin's Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through the Films of R.W. Fassbinder, Yilmaz Güney and Atif Yilmaz

2016

7. Precarious Masculinities in the New Turkish Cinema

Queer studies, 2022

Representing reality: literature, film, and the construction of Turkish-German identity

The Gastarbeiter and the subsequent Turkish-German community in Germany have prompted scholarly debate over the challenges such a settlement has posed to larger German society. Yet few among those involved in such discussions approach these issues from the perspective of the Turkish-German community and thus lack a critical viewpoint. This study seeks to address this limitation; yet, to do so, one must turn to less conventional sources. In the first chapter, I compare the historiography of Germany's Turkish minority to the literature of Turkish-German writers to determine how the addition of Turkish-German perspective complicates and fills out the findings of historians and social scientists. In the Chapter 2, I analyze films by Turkish-German directors and discuss what these works suggest about that community's development. Ultimately, I find that the Turkish-German artists and their creative works advocate and represent a blended identity that incorporates ethnic backgroun...

Memory and Migration: An Analysis of Identity and Nostalgia in Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven and Head-on

In this essay I examine the effects that the experience of migration has on memory and how this matter is portrayed in two movies directed by the Turkish German film director, screenwriter and producer Fatih Akin. His parents, originally from the Trabzon Region in Turkey, moved to Germany in the late 60s and settled in Altona, known as one of the most multicultural districts in the borough of Hamburg. Akin’s filmography interestingly brings to light his Turkish origins and focuses on the traditional features of his parents’ country, analysing the complicated but at the same time intriguing situation of being a migrant. In fact, it comes as no surprise that the Turkish German film director feels affinity to Martin Scorsese who, when titling Italianamerican , removed the hyphen to strongly remark the fusion of his parent’s and his own cultural identities. It becomes apparent that Akin’s production fits perfectly in a transnational context as his films also depict the relation between migration and memory, emphasizing the blur of Turkish and German identities.

Moving Images Against The Current: The Aesthetics and Geopolitics of (Im)mobility in Contemporary Europe

2011

The Use of Music in the Films of Fatih Akın

This study investigates the use of music in the films of Fatih Akın and the music’s contribution to the director’s narrative, specifically in relation to the issue of migration. Migration here refers to the large-scale immigration of Turks to Germany, which occurred between the 1960s and 1980s. In Akın’s films, music is used to represent the uncompromising and unique relationship between these two societies, Turkish and German, living together in the same country. Through an in-depth textual analysis of three of his films: Head-On (Akın, 2004), Crossing the Bridge (Akın, 2005) and The Edge of Heaven (Akın, 2007), this examination focuses on how music constructs a framework/background concerning immigrant culture in these films, as a contributing layer which parallels the main narrative and as a medium to explore the director’s position as a member of an immigrant family himself.