Re-Imagining Queer Cinema Finding the Accent in Queer Filmmaking

Re-Imagining Queer Cinema Finding the Accent in Queer Filmmaking MA Programme in Film Studies Supervisor: Maryn C. Wilkinson Second reader: Marie-Aude Baronian MA thesis by: Yunus Emre Duyar Amsterdam, 26th June 2015 Word Count: 17,825 2 3 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... 7 1. Queer Films and Beyond............................................................................................................. 14 1.1 Queer Culture and Film ............................................................................................................ 15 1.2 Gender Performativity and Film ............................................................................................. 17 1.3 Queer and the Rural .................................................................................................................. 20 2. Queer Filmmaking as Accented Cinema ................................................................................... 24 2.1. Accented Style ........................................................................................................................... 25 2.2. Mode of Production .................................................................................................................. 31 2.3. Chronotopes of Homeland and Life in Exile .......................................................................... 35 2.4. Journeying, Border Crossing and Identity Crossing............................................................. 43 2.5. Epistolarity ................................................................................................................................ 48 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................ 54 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................................... 57 4 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the people who were there for me during this year of hard work. First of all, I would like to thank my advisor Maryn Wilkinson for providing me with meticulous feedback along the way, her unwavering support and just being there for me in every way. This paper would not have been possible without Marie-Aude Baronian encouraging my initial thesis idea during the course Film Theories & Practices. I would also like to thank other lecturers for nurturing my academic capabilities and my classmates who shared the several highs and lows of being a student in producing original thinking on films. I would like thank Reyhan Baykara, for her words of encouragement and all around psychological support during the whole year. I would like to thank dear friends Charlotte Marland and Elif Ozdemir for proofreading my work and giving me good feedback along the way. And lastly, I would like to thank the queer filmmakers who are invested in their films against all odds and produce such masterpieces that capture many sides of being queer and other scholars cited in this paper, who helped me understand the complexities of the queer experience. 6 7 INTRODUCTION I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. Audre Lorde (Lorde 113, emphasis in original) Experiences of being a queer individual traditionally involves an attempt to come out, or move to a different place, in an attempt to claim new space and gain social recognition; however, facing hostile treatment is often part of the equation. The notion of moving to urban places for the freedom of queer individual often results in failed attempts to integrate, which creates problems of belonging. George Chauncey, a scholar with a special interest in the history of the gay culture, states the following on the attempt of coming out in his article “Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public: Gay Uses of the Streets”: “There is no queer space; there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use. … Nothing illustrates this general principle more clearly than the tactics developed by gay men and lesbians to put the spaces of the dominant culture to queer uses” (224). Indeed, in the largely heteronormative space, queer individuals translate their personal spaces (which is mostly assumed to be that of heteronormativity) into a queer one by coming out. From this point of view, urban areas have been traditionally regarded, and put to use, as places of arrival for queer subjects, where the queer individual – estranged or not – goes through a transformation and displacement that shapes perception and identification mechanisms. As happens with every culture and sub-culture, art plays an important part in laying the foundations of a new culture. Film is one of these veins of art that the queer culture has heavily tapped into for constructing the queer culture and queer spaces. It is this formulation of places that this paper is focused on, and it is a meditation on what spatial formulations around gender and sexuality means for the queer and how these issues are reflected on in films. Although cinema has played an important part in the forming of a queer culture, the stories that have been told about queer subjects remain largely monolithic. While stories of coming out and having a family have constituted a large part of mainstream queer narratives, queer subject as part of different cultural contexts – where different mechanisms of being 8 queer is present – are largely ignored by the mainstream cinema. By erasing the differences in each and every queer experience, these narratives mostly involved reiterated stories from a mainstream point of view. As a result, stories of coming out, gay marriage and having a family set the cornerstones of the mainstream queer culture. Although there are films telling unique queer stories from different cultural perspectives, these films often go unmentioned and are often categorized under the umbrella genre of queer cinema. Another central aim of this paper is to bring these queer films to the foreground and revision how these queer films can be located in relation their engagement with identity politics in film. Queer films’ narratives are generally interested in traumatic experiences that are strongly tied to having a queer identity. Especially in alternative and independent works such as The Turkish Bath (1997), My Own Private Idaho (1991) and XXY (2007), these experiences are analysed under different interacting mechanisms of what makes an identity. In these films, queer characters’ experiences include feelings of loneliness and entrapment in heteronormative societies. From this perspective, being queer can resemble to being displaced and trying to fit in a new land which might not welcome the queer subject eventually. However, queer cinema is, of course, not the only filmmaking tradition that is fascinated with the politics of displacement and its representation in filmic form. One of the prominent scholars who are focused on the politics of displacement is Hamid Naficy, an Iranian-American film scholar with influential work published on exilic, diasporic and postcolonial filmmakers. His book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001) offers a comprehensive list of filmmakers who have exilic, diasporic and postcolonial identities (Naficy 10). Naficy’s framework analyses similar elements of filmmaking caused by displacement in these filmmakers’ works and groups these under the term ‘accented cinema’ (10). By bringing out the stylistic differences that these filmmakers have from the mainstream films, Naficy’s book creates a diverse platform, where the national context does not necessarily inform one’s filmmaking style (19). His book opens up the limitations that such categorizations bring about and centres film style around filmmaker’s personal and social experiences (19). Naficy’s conceptual framework defines several characteristics, including film style, production techniques, use of several literary devices such as chronotopes, epistolarity and border writing. One of the central premises that the accented cinema rests on is the displacement of the accented filmmaker from their original homelands to Western 9 metropolitan areas, which creates an “accent” in the films used by these directors (Naficy 4). However, this displacement does not only represent a physical move from one country to another. The reasons behind the displacement, the time of the displacement and the experiences related to the displacement, both on the individual and the collective level, are also important for the formation of an "accent" in the filmic language (Moodley 66-67). Similarly, as will be seen in this paper, some queer films that are not characterized as part of accented cinema (in terms of how they deal with displacement) can still be vested with similar characteristics that are caused by the experience of displacement. The reason why the filmmakers used in this paper would not be called as being ‘accented’ are all queer filmmakers still living in their home countries. However, their films are marked with the feeling of change brought about by displacement. I will use this initial observation and expand on it throughout my paper. The films analysed are: Zenne Dancer (2012) by Caner Alper

Load more