This manuscript—developed from a dissertation that won the London School of Economics Best Dissertation Award in Turkish Studies—is a thoroughly researched, well-written, and timely work. Köksal’s book is a study of cinematic representations of minorities in Turkey through the lens of the aesthetics of displacement. Her contribution to the literature on the cinema of Turkey, and more broadly to cinema studies and to Turkish studies, is (at least) fourfold. First, her book inquires into an immense number of films—such as Hejar (Handan İpekçi, 2001), 9 (Ümit Ünal, 2001), Waiting for the Clouds (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2003), My Marlon and Brando (Hüseyin Karabey, 2008), and My Father’s Voice (Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Doğan, 2012), among many others—that were produced in that period in the post-1990s when the “new Turkish cinema” began to flourish, films that have been underexplored before the publication of this book. Second, this study brings an insightful analysis of the political and social context of Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s together with cinema studies in its focus on the minority experience in Turkey, showing “how politics and art have shaped each other” (p. 131). Third, Köksal’s work breaks the bounds of the national cinema framework by exploring the representation of Turkey’s uneasy relationship with its minorities from a transnational perspective, by including inquiries into non-Turkish productions such as Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), Iraqi-Kurdish director Hiner Saleem’s The Valley of Tambourines (2007), Greek director Tassos Boulmetis’s A Touch of Spice (2003), and Fatih Akın’s recent The Cut (2014). Fourth and finally, Köksal situates her already interdisciplinary discussion on cinema side by side with representations of minorities in other media, ranging from postcards and videos (such as Osman Köker’s 2010 exhibition of Ottoman Armenian postcards and Kutluğ Ataman’s 2014 exhibition of videos from a Kurdish neighborhood in İstanbul) to literature (such as Fethiye Çetin’s 2004 Anneannem and Murat Uyurkulak’s 2006 Har). Overall, the book provides an essential introduction to ethnic and minority studies in Turkey through the lens of cinema.
The author describes her manuscript as a work that analyzes “the relationship between film and memory, taking memory as a concept and examining how cinema has responded aesthetically to the issues created by the unresolved past, particularly in relation to the concepts of unified citizenship and minorities in Turkey” (p. 180). The chapters move adeptly between discussions of the political and social context, theoretical debates, and film analysis as they explore how cinema has dealt and continues to deal with Turkey’s ongoing troubled relations with its Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish minorities, as well as with issues that still haunt present-day Turkey, such as the Armenian Genocide and the so-called “Kurdish issue.” Köksal argues that it is the social and the political that determine the aesthetics of filmmaking; that is, the experience and knowledge of the displacement of Turkey’s Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish minorities have an impact on the aesthetics of cinema. Hence, the book’s title, “aesthetics of displacement,” becomes a “structuring condition of the ‘now’ of these films [that] … bring the taboo issues of the repression of minorities into visibility” (p. xvi).
The book begins with a historical background outlining Turkey’s uneasy relations with its ethnic and religious minorities, thereby facilitating understanding of the more detailed contextual discussions in the chapters that follow. This first chapter succinctly summarizes the histories of the displacement of and the atrocities committed against Turkey’s minority populations—events such as the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, the Wealth Tax of 1942, the pogroms of September 6 and 7, 1955, and the settlement legislation law of 1934 that aimed to relocate Kurds, all of which have been “excluded from dominant memory … neither commemorated nor taught in the national curriculum” (p. 15). The chapter observes that, by the end of the 1990s, there had begun to appear in Turkey a large corpus of films with “post-national sensibilities” (p. 3) that openly discussed the unresolved issues of Turkey’s past and contested the nation’s monumental official histories. This chapter also provides an incisive overview of the history of cinema in Turkey through a focus on the underdiscussed role of its minority characters, directors, and actors/actresses, explaining how, for instance, most of the Yeşilçam actors of minority origin felt the need to change and Turkify their names, or how non-Muslim characters have typically been represented as ridiculed vessels of artificial Westernization (p. 19–24).
The next chapter provides a general overview of the themes and aesthetics of the films explored. Here, Köksal elaborates on the thematic and stylistic continuities running through films about minorities and displacement in Turkey. One of the continuities thus examined is the politics of language. The author traces how, since the beginning of the 2000s, multilingual filmmaking has become more dominant in Turkey, looking at how films such as Autumn (Özcan Alper, 2008) and On the Way to School (Orhan Eskiköy and Özgür Doğan, 2009), among many others, “question and challenge the idea (or the myth) of a unified language” (p. 29) imposed by the nation state. For instance, in an insightful analysis of My Father’s Voice—a film about the ban on the Kurdish “voice”—Köksal notes how the directors produce an ironic commentary by placing in the background, on a TV screen, a speech by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in which the then prime minister expounds upon the linguistic rights of Turkish-Germans. Other common elements of the “aesthetics of displacement” discussed in the book are the depiction of silent characters, especially women, as representatives of silenced pasts; the portrayal of displaced populations’ experience of space, home, and homelessness through the use of transitional spaces such as airports and borders; and depictions of the alienation of lives in the city of İstanbul. Köksal also finds that elements of hauntedness, ranging from representations of evacuated Kurdish villages as ghost towns to the murdered ghosts of minorities, appear to haunt narratives “as metaphors for unresolved past events and unjust treatments” (p. 50). Furthermore, these displaced narratives abundantly use epistolary forms—not only letters, but also photographs, video recordings, and television or archival footage—“as different ways of communicating with absent persons” (p. 55).
After these rich and insightful chapters introducing the larger social, political, and cinematic context as well as thematic and stylistic elements, the following three chapters delve into the book’s political and aesthetic concerns in a more detailed manner, more deeply interrogating the individual histories of minorities and engaging in closer film analyses. Chapter 3 examines the representation of Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities on the screen through a discussion of a wide range of works—among them Salkım Hanım’s Diamonds (Tomris Giritlioğlu, 1999), Pains of Autumn (Tomris Giritlioğlu, 2009), Toss-Up (Uğur Yücel, 2004), Offside (Serdar Akar, 2000), and Pandora’s Box (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2008)—followed by closes analysis of A Touch of Spice and Waiting for the Clouds. Continuing on the same larger topic, the next chapter focuses on the history and representations of the Armenian Genocide in its few cinematic renderings (The Lark Farm [Taviani Brothers, 2007] and The Cut), paying particular attention to Egoyan’s Ararat and the controversy it created in Turkey.
Chapter 5 examines films dealing with Kurdish identity, displacement, and its effects. The chapter begins with a background of the “Kurdish issue” through the 2000s and a debate concerning the representations of Kurds in the cinema of Turkey in films such as The Way (Yılmaz Güney, 1982), Storm (Kazım Öz, 1999), Innowhereland (Tayfun Pirselimoglu, 2002), and The Children of Diyarbakır (Miraz Bezar, 2010). This is followed by close analysis of Journey to the Sun (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2003), Hejar, My Marlon and My Brando, and The Valley of Tambourines, all films that place issues of language, journeying, and displacement at their center.
Finally, the book concludes with an insightful analysis of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), an upside-down murder mystery in which it is the corpse rather than the murderer that is sought. Although the film is not explicitly about Turkey’s historical wrongdoings, it “continuously implies what other films openly make their subjects: the past, even buried deep, will not remain in the past” (p. 173). Hence, while in this conclusion Köksal neatly ties up the multiple threads running through the book, her discussion of this particularly elusive narrative also opens the debate up to more questions that can be asked about history, memory, the present and the past, absent people, unmarked graves, and haunting memories.
As Köksal puts it, it is partly thanks to such films as those examined in her book that, “[a]lthough the official discourse … did not change much, public opinion began to change, including a willingness to open the issue to discussion” (p. 128). This essential and timely cinematic exploration of Turkey’s troubled relationship with its minorities as seen through the lens of films is now more relevant than ever given the resumption of armed conflict in the southeast of Turkey after several years of ceasefire and the fact that the Turkish state has continued to deny the Armenian Genocide even after its hundredth anniversary. This book will be an indispensable guide not only for those who conduct research in and teach courses on world, transnational, Middle Eastern, and Turkish cinema, but also for those scholars who appeal to the medium of film in their own research and in the teaching of Turkish and Middle Eastern history, society, and politics.
