Gender and Turkish-German Cinema

From Margins to the Center Through the Film Lens: Gender and Turkish-German Cinema Filiz Cicek Submitted to the Faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department The Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University December, 2012 Accepted by the Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee: Chair: Professor Cigdem Balim Harding, Ph.D Emeritus Professor Gustave Bayerle, Ph.D Professor Paul Edward Losensky, Ph.D Professor Jennifer Elizabeth Maher, Ph.D Professor Colin J. Williams, Ph.D Date of Dissertation Defense: November 2, 2012 ii Copyright © 2012 Filiz Cicek iii To My Little Sparrow who left this earth all too untimely. To My family and Friends. To My Committee Members. To all the Others. iv Preface The knowledge that isn’t transformed into compassionate wisdom is useless thinking. Hindu proverb. I come from the East, the Middle East, from the oral tradition of story telling and record keeping in memory. And I have been living in the West, where most everything is written down, intended for posterity. East might have been East and West West for Kipling, but they have been meeting in continued fluidity in my life and in my work for the past twenty years by necessity of a life as an immigrant. It was in the silent hiking with my grandmother, up and down the Caucasus Mountains. It was in the voice of my 110-year old great-grandmother, chiming her stories from the potato ditch where she was hiding from the Russians. It was in my mother’s poetry. The flowers, the bees, and the honey she made. Home. When I think of home, I feel and smell her honeycomb. It takes me to the mountains of my foremothers; the shimmering voice of my great-grandmother in particular, whose name was Bedir. “Like the Moon above, I was so beautiful,” she would say. The moon was home to many pagan women before Judeo-Christianity and Islam. Cornfields replaced the pine trees of my mountains. I would go to see Nutcracker at the IU Auditorium just to see fake snow flaked pine trees and to pretend, to feel closer to home, through the sensibilities of the Russian music aesthetic. I was here to study art, and soon art would become my home. The immigrant’s incipient v rootlessness accentuates his/her need to communicate; art becomes a vital outlet for the ineffable loneliness, the longing for the familiar, the sorrows and the joys of the host space in which one’s now forever-mobile body becomes a home-on-foot. Here in the cornfields, it was nature, the hills of Brown County and the Buddhist temples resting in the woods that were home to me. Parks and temples became my dwelling places, to travel back to the other side, into childhood memories. Memories for the immigrant are keys to the door to a motherland left behind. Memories embody facts and figures, the people we knew and events that occurred; they are about the experiences. Memories are mostly about how we felt then. They are potent with emotions. Emotions are deemed or supposed to be secondary to the rational human. Most often, the law of the rational-Western man collides that of nature, for nature has a law of its own, one that is not concerned with manmade, rationalintellect; nature might be altered by humans, but ultimately it will always be humans who yield to nature, or else participate in their own destruction. Art utilizes the human experience as a whole: the mind, the body, the spirit, the mysterious and the emotions. Emotional intelligence, has been lagging behind the intellect for many centuries, resulting in aggression, violence, war, and death. Art gives us an outlet to try out our emotions in a safe space. Alongside literature and music, it has been the cinematic form that Turkish migrants have most utilized, to render visible and audible their daily existence in Germany, a land and culture very different from the Middle East Mediterranean. And here lies a surprising irony: what vi twist of fate that Turks, who had given Jews sanctuary after their expulsion by Christians from Spanish lands, Al-Andaluse, regained from Muslims half a millennium ago, would now be the Muslims filling the space left by the Jews after the Holocaust and thus become the new others in this German land. Mystery, like emotion, is considered feminine, and is not always meant to be known intellectually. For men culturally structured as rational it is thus especially unknowable, its ineffability particularly potent, and those who meet its obscure essence with reason and science may be caused to wonder. Indeed, Albert Einstein expressed this most eloquently: "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”1 And emotions are at the heart of the matter. Without a healthy development and processing of our feeling, of our sense of life, of our desires and denials, we are forever at odds, in imbalance within ourselves, and thus with each other and in turn with our wider environment, which takes us to the point, even, of its destruction. And yet from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, the emotions were attributed to women as a pejorative, the less than rational, pertaining to the second sex. This has taken a firm hold in the West after the defeat of the Anatolian Black Sea Amazons; this heralding the lead of the Greeks, and on to Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, 1 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, edited by Carl Seelig (New York: Bonzana Books,1954), 8-11. vii who further established the rules of masculinity and femininity in Medieval Europe before Protestantism ejected women from its Church altogether. Love of woman of the mysterious women turned her both into a Mary the Holy Mother and Magdalene the Dammed Whore, one stripped naked of her dignity and the other fully clothed with divine grace. While one is celebrated as a mother, the other is burned at the stake as a witch. Not that men or their culture were really the victors. The 1939 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame constitutes a prime cinematic example of what emerged as a masculinity in crisis, when a priest in love with a gypsy woman sees her burning at the stake as his only salvation from the stirrings of lustful passion. Significantly, it takes a “lesser” man in love, the Hunchback other, to save her from death. The three films I focus on here occupy the dichotomous feminine space of prostitutes and mothers, as defined especially through the feminine genre of melodrama. But by putting the drama and emotion at the center, my goal is not to help perpetuate the victim stereotype of women, who is only granted temporary agency and expected to conform to the patriarchal norms at the end of the film. Melodramas, after all, are one of the few genres, next to action heroine and horror films, that give agency to women, however temporarily. Rather, I aim to highlight gender in melodrama as a cinematic framing of the immigrant’s incipient rootlessness, the melodramatic art as a vital expression of and outlet for this viii particular form of unbearable loneliness, desperate hope, and longing for the familiar. From the sorrows and the joys of the host space in which the now forever-mobile body becomes a home-on-foot, to the tales of sex and love on this journey-place in the quest for self and identity, it is the power of the immigrant’s existential emotions and the drama that this makes for which informs the cinematic works examined here. The dynamics of angst and loss and movement that accentuate the immigrant’s need to communicate through art combined in the three films to produce a melodrama that challenges once again its negative stereotyping. The structure of this document is that of a story-telling, modeled after a classical cinematic narrative. It is told in three sections via the three films studied as a beginning, middle, and end. The concepts and theories utilized reveal this story as it proceeds, sometimes subtly and sometimes in detail. Conceptually, this work is informed by the poetry, literature, art, philosophy, and scholorship. Generally, I aim my words and my work to function as those of an activist, artist, scholar, feminist, and journalist. I do come, after all, from the land of the Amazons, the Eastern Black Sea of the Western Caucasus Mountains. I aim to take on the Aeschylus’ Oresteria no less, which unjustly blamed Trojan war on women! Not just this work in particular, but in my life in general. Because ix Aeschylus’ blatant opposition to women of power has now become the norm for the practiced misogyny. Such norms are hard to subvert and difficult to change, sometimes requiring revolutions. And as Goethe once pronounced to Eckermen,2 he hated revolutions, for they destroy good as well as bad in order to create anew. From that point of view, the immigrant life itself is a revolution, indiscriminately ending all for a fresh start, and as such, a daily revolution of the emotions. Old is no more, home is left behind, and the Turk must make a new one in Goethe’s Germany. The language of this thesis is developed organically from the totality of my experiences rooted in the land and its medicine, art and its action, in higher education and its feminism.

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