In recent years, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been open to approaches and narratives once considered outside the norms of classic academic writing and research. We experiment with these narratives, at times personal ones, in order to engage readers and especially students to think critically, not only about the subject at hand, but also about themselves and their place within the larger context of the transcultural societies we live in today. In Six Turkish Filmmakers, Laurence Raw attempts to combine “the historical, personal, and political” in order to “rediscover the real purpose of cinema” in addition to encouraging an “ontological reflection both on oneself and on other people's relationship to the world” (p. 14). This can be, idealistically, a driving force for engaging in the field of education and research. Raw, a scholar of cross-cultural studies, makes an ambitious and original attempt to do this through his personal and academic encounter with Turkish culture, both its literature, and particularly in this book, its cinema. His perspective on this subject is also affected by his personal experience with a serious illness, which he candidly states throughout—all of which leads Raw to a certain disclaimer that “academic comprehensiveness” is not the aim of this book (p. 15), and it is not a classic “film studies” work either.

In this sense, perhaps a subtitle to “Six Turkish Filmmakers” would have better oriented the reader to one of the more principal themes of the book—a quest for identity and spirituality within a foreign culture—so that readers could have distanced themselves from the anticipation of a slightly more scholarly rigorous book. This is not to say that his sources and much of his analysis are not academic and erudite, they are. But in stating that the book is not necessarily academic, I had some difficulty in understanding exactly what the book is. Scholarly based perspectives and interpretations of his sources are at times mixed with somewhat spiritually minded analysis—one example being Raw's reference to “mindfulness,” situating himself in the present moment, not only when coming to terms with his illness, but also in the practice of interpretation. It is certainly original to apply a rather nonacademic state of being to his literary and filmic analysis. However, this method may be unclear to readers who are not fluent in this current wave of Buddhist-based but secular practice. It's fundamental relevance as an applicable theoretic orientation is questionable, despite it being philosophically or psychologically interesting.

On the other hand, the main topic of the book, the six filmmakers whom Raw studies—Zaim, Demirkubuz, Kaplanoğlu, Irmak, Örnek, and Ceylan—are certainly the iconic directors of the new Turkish cinema and are rightfully chosen. Raw's choice of an approach using the poet Rumi and his influence on Anatolian thought (as studied by the Turkish poet and scholar Talat Sait Halman, and referenced by Laurence Raw) as one of his interpretive foundations for the films is also unique and at times beautifully relevant. However, as with several of Raw's interpretations, he mostly avoids applying Rumi (and other Turkish poets, such as Nazim Hikmet) more directly to interpreting the new Turkish cinema's relationship to Turkish society's existential (and real) worries concerning their present social and political life. We might assume that Raw's interweaving of his personal existential and ontological reflections throughout the book can be read as a metaphor for the complexity inherent in a Turkish society's own search for “identity” and “belonging” (themes found rewardingly in the works of prominent Turkish film scholars, such as Asuman Suner and Gönül Dönmez-Colin). However, this is speculation on the reader's part, at best.

Herein, lies one of the most problematic elements for this reviewer. Through Raw's personal quests and reflections, we lose sight of the subject at hand, these six Turkish filmmakers, their films, and their possible role as filmmakers who are a part of an engaged civil society in Turkey. We lose sight not only because of Raw's reflections on his own personal quest, though at times relevant, but also because a more profound analysis of the individual films themselves is somewhat lacking, as well as the metaphoric language that runs through all six of the filmmakers’ work. For example, though Raw treats very astutely the theme of “mud” and “burying” in Dervis Zaim's film Çamur (Mud, 2003), as a metaphor of concealing guilt-ridden secrets, should he not also reflect upon the possibility of a similar interpretation in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, 2011) where the plot centers around asking a murderer to search for and dig up the “buried” body of his victim? In both films, could we not entertain the idea that “concealing,” “secrets,” and “guilt” could be metaphoric to the very relevant problems of the Turkish state (and at times, “deep state”) and the “concealment” or negation of state violence? In this instance, Raw refrains from making more comprehensive comparisons and analysis. For Ceylan's Uc Maymun (Three Monkeys, 2008), Raw subtitles this section “What about ‘Politics’?” Well, yes, what about politics and Turkish politics in particular? Though Raw rightly identifies that Ceylan depicts politics as it affects daily life, he hesitates again to go further with his analysis. Even in terms of the film's title (“Three Monkeys”), Raw describes its meaning as referring to the emptiness of the family's lives, that they “resemble performing animals carrying out their masters’ bidding.” Of course this is a possible interpretation, but if one looks at the visual theme of “opaqueness” and character point of views in the film, can one not surmise also the obvious political connotations of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?” For certain films, especially Turkish and Iranian films, politics as depicted on the microlevel, within the stories of individual family dramas and moral tales is quite often a metaphor for the larger sociopolitical struggles of the country, whose depiction on the screen helps a society articulate on a collective level their fears and anxieties. This is a part of the magic of storytelling. Here again, Raw hesitates to take his interpretations a step further and to dare apply them more to the present political situation at hand. In this section on Ceylan, he mentions the current Justice and Development Party (AKP, the political party of the current President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan), as well as the display of political corruption in the section on Dervis Zaim. However, “politics” and even a reflection of relevant “history” (two elements Raw promised the reader to combine with the “personal”) are mentioned less frequently.

Given this corpus of filmmakers, the author could have worked more on a link between politics and aesthetics. Raw's interpretations tend to strip the possibility of a political aesthetic language in the filmmakers’ works, particularly in Ceylan's. To mostly deny (though he doesn't always) political metaphors in their films is to separate a filmmaker from his or her society and from the possibility of allowing that society to openly dialogue with a film. Raw's personal search for identity and his use of spiritual metaphors and guidance can indeed be comforting and enlightening to some readers. But in the present politically threatening climate in Turkey, it's hard not to emphasize the importance of a more candid expression of the general malaise of the Turkish people under such an oppressive regime—a disquiet that is projected onto the screen by the current group of filmmakers.

It is possible that Raw, himself, is expressing this metaphorically through his own interpretations of the metaphors of the Turkish poets whose poems he uses as catalysts for his film interpretations throughout the book. However, if one of his intentions is to offer a clearer path for a transcultural spectatorship of new Turkish cinema through uniting metaphors of “elemental forces” (p. 174), the emphasis on his personal journey through literary references is at times an opaque extra layer added onto an already complex art form. Non-Turkish and Turkish spectators might recognize their political and non-political selves more directly through a more straightforward encounter with the personal dramas and landscapes painted by the films themselves. Raw points the reader in this direction; however, in his frequent use of references such as “the goddess Mother Anatolia,” in his interpretations, he may be alienating those who do not follow his spiritual journey. Merging past, present, and future (often stated by Raw), within the idea of a spiritual Anatolia is a concept that in today's Turkey runs the risk of an idealism that is problematic in the wrong hands. The mysticism and spirituality of “Mother Anatolia” is perhaps more pertinently treated in the literature of the prominent Turkish writer Yaser Kemal. Raw cites Kemal's short novel The Drumming Out (Istanbul: Varlik Yayinlari, 1955), and not his most famous work Memed, My Hawk (Istanbul: YKY Yayinlari, 1955). However, despite the citation of Kemal, Raw's filmic interpretations head more in the direction of an imagined ancient “Anatolia,” steeped in an idealized mysticism and spirituality as opposed to Kemal's more political treatment of Anatolia in his novels—an “Anatolia” that is much less romanticized than Raw's “goddess Mother Anatolia” (p. 170). Kemal's literary use of Anatolia provides us with a prime example of how one can link the political with the aesthetical and vice versa, which can be further suggested in interpreting the contemporary cinema of today's Turkey.

Raw states quite clearly that his intention is not necessarily a scientifically political approach and, in this, the book is not misleading. However, his lack of keen attention to the present political situation in Turkey raises some important practical problems in terms of suggested sources. For example, Raw's suggestion of the website for the “Ministry of Higher Education” (YÖK) as an additional Turkish bibliographic source is problematic. Not only is there no bibliography for cinema on their website, but YOK is not a scientific research institution, and is even recently responsible for impeding academic freedom and freedom of research. This is a pragmatic criticism and one that is evident for those more sensitive to the political reality today.

Although Raw did not set out to do a political analysis of the current Turkish cinema, he, nevertheless, did not develop all that he could have developed. It is possible that he has, in fact, considered the present Turkish political context in which he works and made a conscious decision not to, and who can criticize him for that?

I do not doubt the sincerity and personal integrity of Raw's very ambitious intentions. However, the methodology and support of his arguments remain challenging. It is difficult for a study of six filmmakers to be “the” definitive work in terms of defining one relationship with a non-native culture through an exchange with cinema, and even more difficult to try to prove how one's relationship with a cultural object can define one's “ontological existence.” Perhaps concentrating more on the films themselves and their own language, without burdening them with ancient Anatolian mythology, one might arrive at a less ambitious but more deferential exchange.