Written by Sofia Bouguerra
Representation is an essential feature of identity building and cultural understanding. For those belonging to the culture, representation is a way to construct and accept one’s identity. Indeed, seeing someone that looks like you on popular medias gives you the impression that your culture is recognised and accepted. It is also empowering, as it allows you to have role models who look and act just as you do. But, representation is also a useful tool for those who do not belong to the specific social category that is represented. It is a way to learn and discover more about a specific culture, even if you were not personally exposed to it. If it is done accurately, representation can create more knowledge and acceptance within the population and facilitate integration. But, if the representation is partial or incorrect, it can also reinforce harmful clichés and stereotypes.
Nowadays, films are prominent elements in popular culture. Since the 20th century, they have had a growing impact on society and the way we as spectators perceive things. It is a rather uncontested view that films do have an influence on what we think and what we believe: as such, they have often been used as instrument of propaganda or political denunciation. Therefore, representation of certain culture and population in films can have a huge impact on how the society in general perceive and approach them.
Hence, if we want to learn how the Turkish community is seen in Europe, analysing its representation in films can give us a significant insight. Most films about the Turkish culture are produced in Germany, as it is the country with the biggest Turkish community. To understand how the Turkish culture is represented in popular German culture, we will focus on two films : “Almanya” by Yasemin Şamdereli, and “Head on” by Fatih Akin.
“Head On” tells the story of Sibel, a young Turkish woman whose parents emigrated in Germany. She found herself in a psychiatric hospital after having attempted suicide. There, she meets Cahit, another Turkish man who intentionally drove against a wall to take his own life. Rather surprisingly, Sibel asks Cahit to marry him right after she meets him : indeed, she explains that in order to gain freedom from her traditional Turkish family, she needs to marry a Turkish man. Even more surprisingly, Cahit accepts the proposition and the two of them move in together in his apartment. Sibel appears as totally going against the Turkish values of her parents: she drinks, she smokes, and she has sex with multiple partners. Cahit also seem to have rejected his culture : he doesn’t know how to speak Turkish and doesn’t want anything to do with his home country. But paradoxically, he does embody certain stereotypes about Turkish men : indeed, in an especially violent scene, he beats up a guy trying to seduce Sibel and end up in prison. Sibel then decides to go back to Turkey. Soon after, we learn she has married a man and is the mother of two children.
“Almanya” takes a totally different approach towards the Turkish culture. Indeed, the film tells us the story of a Turkish migrant family going back to Anatolia for a trip into memory lane. The film presents a multicultural family, in which Turks are happily married to Germans. In the film, the older generation is not oppressive: they are tolerant and accept the pregnancy of their granddaughter even though she is not married and is in relation with an English man.
So what is to be said about the representation of the Turkish culture in the two films? “Head On” depicts a rather dark vision, in which women are oppressed by their family and cannot enjoy sexual freedom. Turkish immigrants in the film seem to have hard times integrating in the Western European culture and fall into alcohol and drugs. The ending of the film suggest that is impossible to integrate and yet be happy : therefore, Sibel immigrates to Turkey where she lives the life her parents expected her to. In “Almanya”, there is no such problems of integration: the family has adapted to the German culture without compromising their roots, showing that the Turkish values and the western European values are in fact not contradictory. But, is “Almanya” actually a better representation of the Turkish culture than “Head On” is? The critic Oliver Kaever has argued that by avoiding to depict subjects such as women’s oppression and extremism, “Almanya” has failed to represent the Turkish community in its entirety. He argues that by failing to address such problems, “Almanya” is but an idealised version of the Turkish reality. Films such as “Head on”, even though they are darker, therefore could be seen as a more authentic depiction.
So, there are two opposites vision of the Turkish Community in popular western European cinema. The first depicts a society where oppressive and destructive traditional moral values are upheld, whereas the second presents an open-minded society which values actually does not differ from western ones. The truth is probably situated between the two images. However, the best way to understand who exactly are the Turks are is to move away from the western European gaze, and instead to focus on films produced in Turkey by the Turks: only that way will we be able to grasp fully the complexity of the Turkish identity.
European London 