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A the Subjects of Fat H Akin's Melodramas University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2016 THE SUBJECTS OF FATİH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL READING THROUGH THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY AND ATIF YILMAZ Emir O. Benli University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, German Literature Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Benli, Emir O., "THE SUBJECTS OF FATİH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL READING THROUGH THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY AND ATIF YILMAZ" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 550. https://doi.org/10.7275/7944321.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/550 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Subjects of Fatih Akın‘s Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through the Films of R.W. Fassbinder, Yılmaz Güney and Atıf Yılmaz A Dissertation Presented by EMĠR BENLĠ Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2016 Comparative Literature © Copyright by Emir Benli 2016 All Rights Reserved The Subjects of Fatih Akın‘s Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through the Films of R.W. Fassbinder, Yılmaz Güney and Atıf Yılmaz A Dissertation Presented by EMĠR BENLĠ Approved as to style and content by: Catherine Portuges, Chair Don Eric Levine, Member Ela Gezen, Member Asuman Suner Zontul, Member Edwin Gentzler, Program Director Comparative Literature Program Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures William Moebius, Chair Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout the process of writing this dissertation and during my time at UMASS Amherst, I have been very fortunate to be guided and helped by many wonderful scholars and friends. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Catherine Portuges, for her patience and guidance, from the very inception of my ideas for the dissertation to the final line edits of the text that has evolved. The times I have worked on this dissertation have been immensely formative, thanks to her example at every step of the way. Without her support I am not sure this dissertation would have come to its conclusion. Don Eric Levine has been a mentor, dare I say a friend, whose ideas shaped this dissertation throughout my graduate life. I feel very lucky to have been his student and his assistant over the past 10 years. My work with Asuman Suner has also been key in shaping this dissertation, as well as in my decision to return to academia in Turkey. Though having met towards the end of my graduate studies, I am grateful to Ela Gezen for her thorough comments and helpful feedback on all stages of this dissertation. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the many academic mentors I had at UMASS Amherst who have inspired me in different ways and encouraged me to follow through with my scholarly work. From my program, Comparative Literature, I especially would like to thank David Lenson who has been and continues to be a source of inspiration as to how I should live my life as an academic. James Hicks and María Soledad Barbón's help and patience in the past years have also been crucial in helping me along in my studies. I would be remiss not to mention Jean Fleming and Linda Papirio at whose door I always found a helping hand. I also would like to thank Barton Byg and iv Sarah Lennox, from the German and Scandinavian Studies Program, for their support and intellectual guidance both in and outside of the classroom. I have also been very fortunate in being surrounded by a close-knit body of friends from all corners of the globe and the campus. My time at UMASS and in the US has been profoundly unforgettable thanks to the memories these friends impart. Most deeply and most directly, I feel I have been very lucky to have been a student and close friend of Mithat Alam whose guidance, in subtle ways, has always helped me overcome all obstacles I have faced in life, in and outside of academia. I am indebted to my brother, Ali Emre Benli for keeping me in line since the moment we realized we are so much alike, my mother Zeynep Erengül, without whose presence and love everything in my life would come tumbling down, her husband Ali Erengül, and to my late father, Cem Benli whose intellectual influence, for better and worse, still continues to shape me. I thank both my mother and father for supporting me in treading the paths that I have chosen for my life. Finally, I thank Bade Uysaler for her patience and support at every step in all the different spaces we have occupied together, for the hours of conversations we had that rendered everything around us more lucid and more ambiguous at the same time, and for the dreams we shared and realized together. v ABSTRACT THE SUBJECTS OF FATĠH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL READING THROUGH THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY AND ATIF YILMAZ FEBRUARY 2016 EMĠR BENLĠ B.A., BOĞAZĠÇĠ UNĠVERSĠTY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Catherine Portuges Fatih Akın's feature films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) resonated strongly with Turkish, German and Turkish German communities, albeit for diverse reasons, opening spaces for debate with regard to subjectivites that foreground their alterity and redefine readings of national identity. This dissertation addresses ways in which the melodramatic modality of Akın's films partake in such debates by presenting a dialogic genealogy of melodramas from Turkish, German and Turkish German contexts. An analysis of Fontane's novel "Effi Briest" and of R.W Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Atıf Yılmaz's O Beautiful Istanbul; and Yılmaz Güney's The Herd suggests ways in which these texts and films inscribe different aspects of alterity, situating the subjects of these narratives in disruptive relationships with national and transnational identitarian discourses. vi I examine these melodramatic narratives and the impasses they constructfor their subjects together with the relationship of the films' uses of mise-en-scène to further complicate notions of ethnic and other modes of belonging. Divergent modes of distanciation and identification from different filmic traditions in Turkey and in Germany constitute a multivalent nexus through which I approach Akın's films. The ambivalence of the protagonists' affective states sets up another point of critical inquiry from which I utilize notions of performativity to critique interiorized and exteriorized readings of affect. I trace articulations of the realistic registers in these works, seeking the fissures where the melodramatic modality reveals itself to allow the directors to leave open the subjects' alterity. Finally, I link certain plot-lines to the "stranded objects" of Turkish and German national histories, including histories pertaining to the Nazi past in Germany, the erasure of the Ottoman cosmopolitan cultural nexus and the nomadic modes of existence of the Kurdish population in Turkey. I then posit ways in which these objects come to interact with transnationally determined subjectivities in the films of Akın. The dialogic genealogy I propose intervenes in current critical debates on melodrama as a trans- generic mode and on transnationality in cinema that look beyond paradigms of nationalism(s) towards a diverse articulation of subjectivities that resist reification by dominant identitarian discourses. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………iv ABSTRACT ........………………………………………………………………………...vi CHAPTER INTRODUCTION ………………...………………………………………………………1 I. DISRUPTING THE GERMAN NATIONAL NARRATIVE: FASSBINDER's MELODRAMATIC OTHERS…………………………………………………………...24 A. Depictions of Alterity from Realism to Modernism: A Reading of Theodore Fontane's "Effi Briest"………………………………………….24 B. Adaptation as Critique: Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul ...……………………………………………..44 1. Responding to German History (of Cinema) ………………...….....44 2. Adapting A Novel, An Author's Point of View and A Society's Weltanschauung: Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest …...49 a. Cinematic Realism and National Cinemas …………………..49 b. 19th Century Realist Novel and Fassbinder's Response …..…50 c. Fassbinder's Style: Departures from the Realist Register ……52 d. Locating the Melodramatic in a Realist Costume Drama ……61 3. The Conundrum of the First Generation Gastarbeiter: The Case of Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Sou l…………...……..66 a. The Double Register of Identification/Distantiation…………68 b. Kif-Kif: The Dialectics of Alterity and Victimhood in the Characters of Ali and Emmi ……………………………...80 II. ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME PATHOS: MELODRAMA AND DISPLACEMENT IN ATIF YILMAZ's AND YILMAZ GÜNEY's FILMS …………...88 A. Breaks and Continuities in Yeşilçam's Melodramas: An Overview of Context, Content, and Form ……………………...…………………….88 B. Melodramatic Istanbul and Its Displaced Subjects: A Reading of Atıf Yılmaz‘s O Beautiful Istanbul ...…………….……………………….91 C. Nomadic
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