Lusin Dink’s award-winning docudrama SaroyanLand (2013),Footnote 1 casts the famous Armenian-American playwright William Saroyan’s shadow on contemporary Turkey by tracking his 1964 journey to Bitlis, the land of his ancestors. In the cinematic journey referencing the actual one, Saroyan cruises in a 1960s Bel Air Chevrolet into the present day, cutting visually across space and time. The representation of memory—a record that inevitably begins with pain—comprises the central question of this lyric cinematic journey. The film dramatizes Saroyan primarily through a voiceover narration cast over shadows, and a series of images projected on mirrors, bodies of water, and glass surfaces, which reflect his presence through absence. Lusin DinkFootnote 2 is a new generation female director whose work resumes women filmmakers’ cinematic preoccupation with memory.
Female directors whose work heralds Dink’s have been addressing the discursive clash between the official narrative of history and personal and group memory since the 1990s. In fact, during the 1990s and early 2000s in Turkey, critically acclaimed female directors of political cinema acquired a growing visibility. The emergence of a new generation of female directorsFootnote 3 like Handan İpekçi, Pelin Esmer, Tomris Giritlioğlu, and Yeşim Ustaoğlu, as well as feminist platforms and festivals such as Uçan Süpürge (The Flying Broom), facilitated a new appreciation of films by and about women. Set against the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1980s,Footnote 4 women’s films promised to augment feminist filmmaking within a largely patriarchal industry.Footnote 5
Film scholar Gönül Dönmez-Colin summarizes the emergence of cinema in Turkey largely as “a form of entertainment for men, by men.”Footnote 6 Despite the presence of distinct personalities, such as Bilge Olgaç, who managed to leave their imprint on cinema’s depictions of gender, the number of women directors remained negligible until the 1990s.Footnote 7 Meanwhile, broadly speaking, male directors monopolizing the industry portrayed female characters as ambivalent objects of male desire in popular melodramas and in “men’s films” of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 8 During the 1980s, a celebrated cadre of urban male directors like Atıf Yılmaz produced films focusing on relatively complex female subjects, films which embodied issues of gender and sexuality in a changing society.Footnote 9 Subsequently, the 1990s marked the debut of an increasing number of female directors, concomitant with the revitalization of the feminist movement, which was characterized by its search for autonomy from the state.Footnote 10 The first sizeable generation of female directors emerged against this background and included women who held diverse positions concerning the role of their gender in filmmaking practices. These positions ranged from a public embrace to denunciation of feminism.
Two of these female directors, Tomris Giritlioğlu and Yeşim Ustaoğlu, have been candid about their ambivalence vis-à-vis feminism and the role of a director’s gender in filmmaking, describing themselves first and foremost as directors,Footnote 11 rather than as female or feminist film directors. Meanwhile, scholars like Asuman Suner have pointed out the absence of women as subjects, even though they do appear as characters, in the new cinema of Turkey,Footnote 12 which comprises films made largely by male directors.Footnote 13 Suner suggests that women in films made in the 1990s exist much like empty vessels, as instruments for discussing certain themes, while being absent themselves as active agents and subjects. Much of what was produced in the 1990s and 2000s may warrant this observation, but the question remains underexplored within the context of films by politically charged female directors, even those who have distanced themselves from feminism, like Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu.
At the same time, another avenue of exploration pertains to the relevance to issues of women and gender in Turkey, if any, of the themes dramatized by female characters. In fact, the relationship between female directors and their depiction of female characters in film begs several further questions: can political films made by women who refrain from describing themselves as feminists counter images of women produced by hegemonic discourses? Can these directors interrogate patriarchal depictions of women as typical objects and originsFootnote 14 of male desire? Can political films made by women speak to non-conventional constructions of subjectivity, whether that of men, women, or the nation? In answering these questions, one must turn to the broader cultural and political context, and specifically to the nation as the framework of feminist struggle in Turkey.
This article aims to explore the cultural significance of films made by two female directors of new wave Turkish cinema: Yeşim Ustaoğlu, acclaimed for her innovative film style, and Tomris Giritlioğlu, renowned for her contributions to mainstream television and popular cinema.Footnote 15 Both directors question the relationship between feminism and the nation in their work. Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu are especially interesting filmmakers due to their concern with national history and its taboos. Films like the Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, Autumn Pain, and Waiting for the Clouds—as well as some others, such as Journey to the Sun—arguably pioneered the direct questioning of established narratives in cinema during the 1990s and 2000s. In the article, I argue that female directors’ ambivalence about prescribed identities and labels underscores their desire to deconstruct hegemonic discourses in the formation of national history and identity. These female directors approach national history and the idea of origins critically by using female characters as symbols at once of the nation and of its ethnic and religious others. As a result, their work complicates the discursive relationship between women and the nation, pointing to a crisis in the construction of “Turkish womanhood.”
Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds (Salkım Hanım’ın Taneleri, film adaptation 1999) and Autumn Pain (Güz Sancısı, film adaptation 2008) and Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds (Bulutları Beklerken, 2004) all employ gender as a key to the articulation of identities and memories suppressed by national myths concerning ethnic and religious origins in Turkey. To borrow a Freudian term, in Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu’s films, women characters emerge as the “uncanny”Footnote 16 site, the store of the nation’s suppressed subjectivities. Through their depiction of women, Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu open up a feminineFootnote 17 narrative space in film for acknowledging silences, making allowances for alternate voices and visions of co-existence.
Through a close reading, primarily of film but also of literature, this paper raises questions about culture and gender, rather than offering a discussion of cinematic modes and styles of production. To this end, the article will point out two feminine narrative strategies employed in Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds and Autumn Pain and Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds:
(1) the recording of a fictionalized micronarrative about the feminized other, intended to undercut the macronarrative of official history;
(2) the gendering of trauma as inflicted by a patriarchal power on the feminized other.
The female subjects in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, Autumn Pain, and Waiting for the Clouds
Tomris Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds and Autumn Pain Footnote 18 are film adaptations of Yılmaz Karakoyunlu’s novels of the same titles, which came out in 1990 and 1992, respectively. Karakoyunlu’s novel, Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, is a social exposé of the Wealth (Capital) Tax of 1942,Footnote 19 while his other work of fiction, Autumn Pain, depicts the nationalist build-up that culminated in the anti-Greek pogroms of September 6–7, 1955.Footnote 20 Yılmaz Karakoyunlu’s novels revive the kinds of memories that “stable” narratives of nation-building and modernization have largely ignored. These stories contain autobiographical references from the authors’ life and times.Footnote 21
Similarly, Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds Footnote 22 was inspired by Yorgo Andreadis’ 1993 work Tamama: The Missing Girl of Pontos (Tamama: Pontus’un Yitik Kızı). Born in 1936 in the immigrant quarter of Thessalonica, Andreadis is a Greek novelist whose work addresses the culture and history of his ancestors, the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea.Footnote 23 The book was published in Turkish under the label of “novel,” even though the work is catalogued in world libraries as a “biography” based on a real-life story. Waiting for the Clouds depicts the story of a Pontic girl left behind in the Black Sea region of what is now modern Turkey during the Greek exodus from Asia Minor during the First World War.
The release of such material as the films and books mentioned above coincided with a public debate about modern Turkey’s foundational myths from the 1920s, within which women were ascribed a special place as mothers, teachers, and martyrs of the nation. This was a nation often viewed as uniformly belonging to the same ethnic (Turkish), religious (Sunni Muslim), linguistic (Turkic languages), and ancestral (Central Asian) origins.
Giritlioğlu’s first adaptation of a Karakoyunlu novel, Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, came out in 1999,Footnote 24 at a time when neither the Wealth Tax of 1942 nor the pogroms of 1955 were a matter of a public debate in Turkey, save in works by scholars like Ayhan Aktar.Footnote 25 The History Foundation (Tarih Vakfı) had not yet issued a book on the Fahri Çoker archive, which had compiled documentation on the pogroms, nor had it published Dilek Güven’s study of the events, in which stores were looted, property destroyed, and people openly attacked and even killed.Footnote 26 With the exception of novels by the Armenian-Turkish author Zaven Biberyan, such as Babam Aşkale’ye Gitmedi (Dad Didn’t Go to Aşkale; Armenian 1984, Turkish 1998),Footnote 27 public debate on the memory of traumas such as the discriminatory nature of the Wealth Tax encountered by Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities was just beginning to emerge. It is possible to view Giritlioğlu’s and Ustaoğlu’s films as pioneering works that provided public visibility for these issues in Turkey.
Nora in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds
Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds depicts how opportunism and a biased levy of the capital tax against non-Muslims causes the fall of a wealthy businessman, Halit Bey (played by Kamran Usluer), and his relations among the upper echelons of Turkish society. Halit comes from a family of high-ranking Ottoman officials who had dealings with the non-Muslim bourgeoisie around the time the republic was founded. Halit’s wife Nora (played by Hülya Avşar) is, in the film adaptation, an Armenian woman. Now an older woman suffering from a memory ailment, Nora lives in a time warp, mentally revisiting a sexual trauma. Having no sense of reality or chronology, Nora is eventually hospitalized in the nursing home of a non-Muslim charity.
Halit loves, maintains, and periodically visits Nora, even as he carries on with his conspicuous lifestyle—living in a mansion, attending gambling sessions at gentlemen’s clubs, and keeping a mistress—all against the backdrop of the extreme socioeconomic hardships experienced during World War II. Halit’s lifestyle represents what public opinion resented in Turkey during the 1940s, even though Halit himself has come from money and is not a war profiteer. While Turkey was not an active theater of the war, the war did bring serious strains to the majority of the population, with the possible exception of the war profiteers among the ranks of big farmers and importers and those who handled government contracts.Footnote 28
The film narrates the transfer of Halit’s capital and power to a rising underclass of robber barons, represented by the antagonist Durmuş (played by Zafer Algöz), from the provincial town of Niğde. Durmuş is a war profiteer who desires to grow rich at other people’s expense. Through deceit and murder, he acquires money, power, and even Halit’s mistress, herself a ruthless upstart. Durmuş is aided and abetted in his rise to power by the government’s new and unfair tax law, the Wealth Tax, which was passed in 1942.
In practice, the tax transferred the capital of Armenian, Greek, and Jewish—i.e., non-Muslim—minorities to the rising classes of Muslim entrepreneurs. Others like Halit, whose record lists the family as dönme (a Jewish convert), were also victimized by the tax. In order to come up with the money to pay the amount required by the government, many like Halit had to sell their property at significantly below market value. Upstarts like Durmuş exploited opportunities to acquire these assets. In the film, Halit, who cannot come up with cash to pay the tax, is sent to Aşkale labor camp, where he dies from an ambiguous mix of sheer exhaustion and a suicidal dash into the cold. In the meantime, Halit’s institutionalized wife Nora kills herself while suffering from mental delirium, and eventually all of Halit and Nora’s family and relations are destroyed.
The film exposes Durmuş’s sinister and illegitimate rise to power and wealth. In a striking final scene, the diamonds of a necklace left to Nora by Halit’s mother—a necklace that represents a once plentiful bounty of grapes (Halit’s mother’s name, Salkım, means “bunch of grapes”)—bounces off the stairwell. Nefise, Durmuş’s current mistress, collects the scattered stones with bloody hands, appropriating the family bequest as well as the dark secret behind Nora’s misfortune. The film ends with a freeze-frame shot depicting Durmuş: having just committed his second murder by killing an accomplice and long-time friend, he sits still with a gun in his hand on the same stairwell where the stones scattered. Unaccountable and defiant, his menacing gaze meets the camera behind the railing, as if to mark a new target. In both the novel and the film, while Halit’s fall is triggered by the Wealth Tax, it also stems from a deeper ordeal that has shaped his relationship with his wife Nora and disrupted the course of their lives. Suffering from a mysterious memory affliction, brought about by this earlier trauma, Nora only appears in a few compelling scenes. These scenes depict her as possessed by images of a psychosexual trauma.Footnote 29 Neither Nora nor Halit are able to articulate in words the nature of the trauma, which only emerges in violent flashbacks. These hallucinations intimate that Nora, the Armenian bride of young Halit, was violated by Halit’s own father, Sabit Pasha, who by raping Nora also symbolically emasculated his own son.
Throughout the film, recurring visions progressively disclose the source of Nora’s unspeakable pain. Point-of-view shots alternate between her father-in-law and young Nora, who is running barefoot on stone pavement and down the narrow passages of an old mansion, located in remote history. Visually, her alarm is likened to the apprehension of an unsteady mareFootnote 30 who is similarly entrapped in the stony, contracted space of history. Nora’s rape is a deeply disturbing spectacle, projected through the mirror she faces. Sabit Pasha, whose features are never fully revealed, materializes through his subjugating gaze. The high-angle point-of-view shots and insignia—boots, horse whip, and uniform—implicate him as a powerful patriarch, a respectable general of the old Ottoman regime. Standing for dark hegemonic masculinity, Sabit’s perverse justification for his crime is that his son Halit could not inseminate Nora with progeny, the male lineage necessary to inherit the estate, thus leaving Sabit to undertake this task.
“To be traumatized,” says Cathy Caruth, “is to be possessed by an image or event.”Footnote 31 Nora’s flashbacks, triggered by the diamond necklace of her mother-in-law, violently disrupt the present-day narrative about the Wealth Tax. It is as if she is possessed by images of her trauma, lacks the language to articulate what has happened to her, and is therefore unable to heal. The director Giritlioğlu deploys fragmented editingFootnote 32 to take the audience back to Nora’s entrapment by visions of her trauma, highlighting the reality of her perceptions rather than seeking their authentication by the historical record.Footnote 33 Unable to break through the frame of her subjugation,Footnote 34 Nora is eventually released from the grip of this catastrophic memory by death, but her experience reverberates around the community. The original trauma of her rape precipitates the destructive process by which Halit’s life is peopled with parasitic figures like his mistress Nefise (played by Zuhal Olcay)—the reference through the name to nefs (the carnal soul or carnal desire) is no coincidence, as she is the urban female incarnation of the war profiteer Durmuş, and like him, she cares only about the material glory of the precious stones left by Halit’s mother to Nora.
The screenplays of both Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds and the second Karakoyunlu work, Autumn Pain,Footnote 35 were authored by the Armenian-Turkish writer Etyen Mahçupyan, who selectively departed from the literary texts. While a detailed comparison between the film and the novel is beyond the scope of this paper, two observations might be helpful: first, Karakoyunlu himself—a one-time socially conservative and economically liberal parliamentarian from Turgut Özal’s centre-right, nationalist Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi)Footnote 36—garnished the novels with references to religious mythology and appeals to the Ottoman historical legacy, particularly vis-à-vis the zimmi (non-Muslim Ottoman subjects). He underscored a relatively idyllic past in which the Ottoman state had extended certain protections to non-Muslim minorities in return for their loyalty and the payment of the special cizye tax. Director Tomris Giritlioğlu’s film adaptation, however, remains disengaged from such religio-political and patriarchal appeals.
Secondly, the main character in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, Nora, is no longer a Jewish character, as she was portrayed in the original novel. Burial practices depicted in the film, the use of the song “Sarı Gelin” with both Turkish and Armenian lyrics, as well as the rendering of Nora’s brother’s name Leon as Levon in the film, are all suggestive of Armenian origins. This brought a realignment in the plotline, shifting the emphasis from the suffering of non-Muslims (including the Jewish citizenry) in a majority Muslim culture, toward Armenian suffering at the hands of the Ottoman state at the end of the empire and even beyond—still a strong tabooFootnote 37 in 1999 when the film was released.Footnote 38 In the screen interpretation, the Wealth Tax emerges as yet another step in the continuum of unspoken loss and suffering inflicted on Armenians.
Elena in Autumn Pain
Giritlioğlu’s film adaptation of the Karakoyunlu novel Autumn Pain (Güz Sancısı) similarly substitutes the Greek Elena in place of the young Jewish woman Ester as the main female character, thereby underscoring the impact of the pogroms on Turkey’s Greek community as the primary, if not exclusive, target of violence in 1955.Footnote 39 The film depicts a love story between the conservative Muslim student Behçet (played by Murat Yıldırım), who enjoys paternal ties to the “deep state”Footnote 40 during the Cold War, and the Greek prostitute Elena (played by Beren Saat). Studying in cosmopolitan Istanbul with finances provided by his father—a provincial notable and a formidable figure of the patriarchal order—Behçet is engaged to marry Nemika (played by Belçim Bilgin) when he falls in love with Elena. Elena lives with her old and abusive grandmother, who prostitutes her to powerful old men.
Behçet’s infatuation with Elena grows against the background of social and political turmoil in Greek-Turkish relations, particularly the growing dispute over the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean. As Behçet continues to fall for Elena, the Turkish and Greek nations are pulled apart by powerful political interests. Meanwhile, Behçet’s fiancée Nemika cultivates political awareness about the predicament of the political opposition in the 1950s through her entanglement with a mutual friend of hers and Behçet’s, named Suat (played by Okan Yalabık). A bright medical student, Nemika questions the role of her own conservative father in the dark affairs of the state during the Cold War. Suat’s murder confirms her suspicions about shady networks within the state which implicate her own father, the patriarch of the household and a leader in the political scene. In fact, Nemika’s father’s nefarious dealings include silencing members of the political opposition—e.g., communist students like Suat—with the help of a corrupt police chief. Similarly, he mobilizes instruments of the state to incite demonstrations, which turn into ugly attacks against the person and property of minorities—specifically, the Greeks during the diplomatic negotiations over Cyprus.
The film opens as the camera quietly records the marking of the doors of non-Muslim businesses and homes on the eve of the 1955 pogroms.Footnote 41 It then seamlessly transitions to showing various looted and destroyed objects. The uninterrupted transition from the red crosses on the doors to the trashed property covering the streets foreshadows the historically foregone but cinematically yet to be enacted conclusion. Simultaneously, the continuous take puts forth the rhetorical argument that acts of marking ultimately lead to destruction. For a good part of the film, characters like Nemika and Suat serve to elucidate the relationship between instances of singling out and violent outcomes. Even when Suat is murdered, Nemika, the daughter of the powerful politician, remains the arbiter of the viewer’s conscience.
Nemika’s questioning extends to her own feelings about getting married to Behçet, who seems to be dragging his feet due to his infatuation with Elena. The pogroms of September 6–7, 1955, which constitute the traumatic climax, relay social suffering through the individual suffering of Elena. During the pogroms, unruly gangs attack and in some cases kill and rape people, ransacking minority homes, businesses, and houses of worship while chanting nationalistic slogans. Elena is raped by the corrupt police chief, an accomplice of Nemika’s father. Notwithstanding possible tensions in their relationship, Nemika comes to Elena’s aid. In fact, she and Behçet mobilize to put an end to the violence committed against Elena’s person and social community. Amid all this ordeal, Nemika dramatically confronts her own father, clearly one of the culprits of the violence, exclaiming, “I am ashamed of you!”
Nemika’s awakening against the patriarchal order represented by her own father can be contrasted with the Greek prostitute Elena’s inability to verbalize her own victimization. Elena speaks Turkish with an accent, her utterances garnished with Greek words. She is beautiful and sensual, but also childlike, whereas her clientele consists of much older, wealthier, and politically powerful men, like Nemika’s father. This further infantilizes her. In fact, the film builds on the contrast between childlike Elena and her powerful clientele, depicting as perverts the older men who solicit the childlike Elena’s services.
But Elena does maintain some agency. Her relationship with Behçet belies this type of power differential, even when Behçet seeks to turn his infatuation into a real liaison. Not being defined by money, power, or age, but rather characterized by mutual attraction, Behçet’s rapport with Elena is comprehensible, and is controlled largely by Elena. Giritlioğlu articulates Elena’s decidedly limited yet still discernible agency through the positioning of the camera. In the course of the movie, the camera views various contentious scenes through windows and screens, which mark the social filters employed by witnesses. But windows and screens are also rendered as instruments of control—like the film itself—which can be used to subvert authority. This is clearly the case for Elena, who remains aware of Behcet’s gaze from the start: not only does she watch Behçet just as much as Behçet watches her (hence her awareness of him), but she also manipulates and controls his view by intentionally opening and closing the drapes of her windows.
At the end of the film, Elena, having experienced the trauma of the pogroms, looks physically and emotionally drained. This is an obvious departure from the novel, in which all the loose ends are neatly tied up as the Jewish Ester leaves for Israel, only to visit Turkey again much later; similarly, in the novel, Behçet marries his fiancée, Nemika, and order is restored. The film, in contrast, concludes as Behçet slowly walks away through scenes of immense destruction with the lifeless Elena in his arms. Thus, the film stresses the dissolution of social arrangements, rather than any cathartic restoration of order. By using the outbreak of violence—a crisis—as her conclusion, Giritlioğlu undermines the classical structure of narrative cinema. She opts for the implosion of action in her finale—a closing without any closure. Moreover, the film’s credits proceed to visually implicate the actors by showing rampaging personalities in archival photographs of the pogroms. Finally, an expository text reveals not what happens to Elena, Behçet, or Nemika, our fictional characters, but the actual toll of the mass violence that occurred on September 6–7, 1955.
Both the novel and the screen adaptation of Autumn Pain maintain the patriarchal and nationalist framework, in which a Muslim Turkish man seeks to rescue a needy and childlike non-Muslim woman,Footnote 42 a prostitute,Footnote 43 abandoned by her family, abused by her grandmother, and objectified by her upper-class clientele.Footnote 44 Despite such drawbacks and the stern criticism the film received from some feminist reviewers,Footnote 45 its cultivation of the ties between hegemonic masculinity and the nation was significant: the film connects evildoers, like Behçet’s father-in-law, to organized crime and to extra-legal political networks, while sparing Behçet’s fiancée Nemika, who tries to disrupt their evil plots. It constructs Behçet’s inability to comprehend the scope of political malevolence as naïveté, while depicting the dark authoritarianism of the father-in-law and of Behçet’s own father as patriarchy run amok.
In fact, dialogues between Nemika and her father clearly reveal patriarchy as the source of the challenge. When confronted by her about Suat’s murder, Nemika’s father demeans her, suggesting that she ought not to get involved in matters she does not comprehend. Nemika pushes back, asking whether he will also get her killed. In several significant scenes, point-of-view shots set up Nemika as the emphatic subject. During these scenes, shadowy networks and rioting crowds appear to be pursuing her just before they commence attacking and ransacking stores and homes. Finally, in a climactic mise-en-scène, a terrified Elena takes shelter behind Nemika from Nemika’s father, while the father and daughter stand holding on to one another in the middle of the carnage, simultaneously struggling with and supporting each other. Social disintegration may not be enough to unravel their biological kinship, but it radically alters the father-daughter relationship.
In film and television, Giritlioğlu’s work on the military coup of 1980Footnote 46 has been emblematic of her interest in historical trauma during the republican period.Footnote 47 In particular, her work on the two Karakoyunlu novels seeks to account for the ways in which the historical record has been altered or hidden from public view. The film adaptations of Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds and Autumn Pain stand for memory interventions, reminding generations who have forgotten, or who never knew, about the dramatic events of the Wealth Tax of 1942 and the pogroms of 1955. Spectacles of extra-legal political networks nurtured by patriarchal relationships resonated with audiences in the aftermath of the Susurluk scandal of 1997.Footnote 48 Overall, both films speak to a turbulent history with traumas that continue to resonate in the present.
Ayşe/Eleni in Waiting for the Clouds
In Waiting for the Clouds, Yeşim Ustaoğlu depicts the story of Ayşe reclaiming her original identity as Eleni (played by Rüçhan Çalışkur) after the death of her loving adopted sister Selma. As the film opens in 1975, Ayşe is an old woman, living with her sister in the secluded village of Tirebolu, tucked away on Turkey’s Black Sea shores. The two share one family history, as well as the secrets of another, which are slowly revealed. Before Selma’s death, the old sisters are visited by census-takers—men who record detailed accounts of the members of each household for the state. According to the director Ustaoğlu’s own notes, this was the first census to include Turkey’s ethnic minorities.Footnote 49 Even so, in a scene telling of how the individual story remains disconnected from the official, the sisters carefully hide from the census-takers Ayşe’s past as a Pontic Greek.
When Selma dies, Ayşe/Eleni takes care of the rites necessary for her burial as a good Muslim. Meanwhile, she herself becomes increasingly introspective and isolated from the village community, who embrace her as Ayşe. In an unavoidable struggle to reconnect with her buried past and to come to terms with the guilt she feels for having left her young brother to his fate during the deportations, Ayşe/Eleni stops communicating with her neighbors and begins speaking in Greek. It is as if her suppressed identity returns and completely possesses her. She does this particularly in the company of her neighbor’s son Mehmet (played by Rıdvan Yağcı), who reminds her of her lost brother Niko (the older Niko is played by Jannis Georgiadis). From this point on, the film follows two threads: on the one hand, it covers the history of how Ayşe/Eleni was separated from her brother and how she now tries to reconnect with Niko and, on the other hand, it tells the story of the community in which young Mehmet lives.
It is in this second context that the story of Mehmet’s friend Cengiz (played by İsmail Baysan) is also uncovered. Cengiz is an orphan trying to reconnect with his lost father, who, the child believes, will one day return from communist Russia. Bringing these two threads about Ayşe/Eleni and Mehmet together is Tanasis (played by Dimitris Kaberidis), a communist and a partisan during the Greek Civil War of 1946–49, who is also originally from Asia Minor. Reminiscent of the trope of the traveling leftist—which, according to Dina Iordanova, is typical of the intercultural cinema of the BalkansFootnote 50—Tanasis connects people: he helps Ayşe/Eleni undertake the unlikely journey from her sleepy town to Greece in an effort to locate her brother, just as he also helps Mehmet’s friend Cengiz keep up the hope of reuniting with his lost father.
Chronological time—a sense of normalization and subjectivity—is possible for Ayşe when she recovers her suppressed self as Eleni and then encounters her deserted brother. However, Ayşe/Eleni’s story does not end in a happy reunion with Niko: when she finally locates and visits her brother, Niko denies ever having had any connection with Ayşe/Eleni, forcing the old woman to counter his established account with an obscure old photograph of hers. In many ways, Ayşe/Eleni is back where she started: the experience of cultivating multiple identities, rather than one essential or original one, and she remains equally estranged from and nativized in both of her identities.Footnote 51
Asuman Suner suggests that the tension in the film between speech and silence calls attention to issues of identity and belonging.Footnote 52 Employing open chronotopes of natural landscapes and journeyingFootnote 53 that combine the past and the present, the film affirms a desire to both cultivate connections and to “dismantle” political “assemblages”Footnote 54 standing in the way. In fact, Ayşe/Eleni’s story refers the audience back to a traumatic past during the first quarter of the twentieth century when modern borders were drawn, commemorating that historical moment as the source of painful estrangement for Ayşe/Eleni. Ustaoğlu’s statement on the press kit for the film adds to this thematic and stylistic concern by pointing out the mass killings of Pontic Greeks during the forced deportations of 1916.Footnote 55
Ustaoğlu’s film, which is loosely inspired by Yorgo Andreadis’ book Tamama: The Missing Girl of Pontos (Tamama: Pontus’un Yitik Kızı), was based on a script co-authored with the famous Greek author Petros Markaris, who was born in İstanbul.Footnote 56 The film opens where the book draws to a close; i.e., long after the seemingly stable narratives of the Greek and Turkish national identities have been articulated. War, intercommunal violence, and deportations are openly depicted in Andreadis’s portrayal of Tamama’s story, whereas they loom as marked silences in Ayşe/Eleni’s. Cutting through the storyline of an idyllic past disrupted by intercommunal violence, the film complicates identity and survival. Rather than abbreviating, it amplifies the sisterhood between two senior women. Andreadis’ narrative closes with Tamama’s grandchildren locating and summoning her (and their) Greek relatives to urban Turkey, whereas Ustaoğlu’s film underscores Ayşe/Eleni’s journey to Greece in search of her lost brother. Whereas Tamama achieves a state of redemption when she reconnects with members of her lost family, Ayşe/Eleni’s journey articulates memory as a deeply personal, contested and elusive terrain.
One could argue that Ustaoğlu’s cinematographic landscape registers trauma as loss and absence, while Giritlioğlu’s registers it as presence. The details of the desexualized, senior peasant woman Ayşe/Eleni’s original loss are missing from the screen. Furthermore, her refusal to speak with the neighbors and her gazing at the boundless skies and moving clouds signal her search for a part of her voice, memory, and identity. Conversely, in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds and Autumn Pain, profoundly disturbing violations against the younger and sexualized Nora and Eleni are constructed in settings replete with markers of material wealth: suffocating monumental structures, dazzling diamonds and coins, expensive fabrics and furs. It is possible to list other noticeable differences as well. Still, these disparities in the cinematic lexicon of the directors do not alter the fact that all three films remain preoccupied with specific sociopolitical traumas as personified by female subjects who come from minority backgrounds.
The strategy of highlighting personal narratives
As “literature” or “art,” personal stories are capable of digging a burrow of the kind Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify in Franz Kafka’s work as “minor literature.”Footnote 57 The use of personal stories to enunciate collective experiences that are political in nature runs like a thread through these narratives as a common characteristic. But even more strikingly, these micronarratives claim a creative license that has ordinarily been denied to history and the social sciences. Such a license would confer to literature or cinema limited but consequential freedoms, which come at the expense of scholarly authority. In cinema, the historical authority undermined by artistic license is bolstered by the blending of documentary footage with the storyline, or by using such footage either as the introduction or postscript of the fictionalized memory.
The films under discussion here share certain hybrid characteristics reminiscent of docudramas.Footnote 58 For example, Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds incorporates an almost photographic mise-en-scène of goods being auctioned off on the street, while Autumn Pain utilizes photography for the historical reconstruction of the 1955 pogroms, as well as including a postscript of photos and a balance sheet listing businesses destroyed, synagogues and churches damaged, women harmed, etc., thus using fiction to invoke historical reality. Similarly, Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds conjures up memories of expulsion and loss through documentary footageFootnote 59 of people departing en masse in boats, on foot, and by train. It also uses a close-up from such footage of two siblings—what appears to be an eleven year-old girl in charge of her four year-old brother—as a point of departure and return for the narrative.
Hence, overall, these films inscribe the personal on the macronarrative of official history and politics, destabilizing accounts of “us versus them” or one nationalism versus the other by focusing on individual stories of friends, neighbors, loved ones, shared songs, and common journeys, all of which impact human emotions.Footnote 60 Yet they also refer the audience back to the macronarrative through documentation, thereby opening up a space for the individual story within the larger narrative. As such, this type of film and literature embody what Elif Shafak characterizes as “microlevel studies” (in this context, “stories” would be more precise) that can potentially balance the “macrolevel analysis of political history,”Footnote 61 which dominates discourse on the nation. On the screen, imagining—i.e., remembering and forgetting—is not a ritual function of the collective, but a deeply personal and intimate act that allows for political agency.Footnote 62
One way of producing microlevel interventions into the macrolevel analysis and highlighting individual agency is to foreground the role of gender in the discourse on the nation. In the narratives of Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu, the nation is held together by patriarchy, which issues appeals to an all-consuming collective and its flag. Women’s stories provide a reminder about the gendered—i.e., patriarchal—nature of the national collective, interrupting what would otherwise be neutralized, rendered legitimate and invisible.Footnote 63 But how exactly do the female subjects of these films interact with the macronarrative of the nation?
After the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The new republic embarked on a radical reform agenda that renounced the Ottoman legacy as the ancien régime. Secularism emerged as the defining element of the modern national identity, which also promoted women in various social arrangements. The reforms enacted by the republic improved the status of women significantly. The Kemalist transformation included changes in women’s attire; the introduction of co-education; the abolition of Islamic courts and their replacement with modern courts that applied the new civil code of 1926; the attainment of women’s suffrage in local (1934) and national (1936) elections; and significant gains in access to education and employment—a modern legacy that constituted the substance of what Şirin Tekeli has described as “state feminism.”Footnote 64 In the new republic, women as a group represented the face of the grand project of modern Turkey.Footnote 65 In addition to being mothers and wives, they were now redefined as patriotic citizens.Footnote 66 Until the 1980s, this narrative represented the most widely recognized account of women’s history in the country.
However, an undercurrent of criticism became increasingly discernible in the 1990s. Women from those segments of society that had benefited from the reforms the most had laid to rest their ethnic and religious differences and buried the past—a past shaped profoundly by massacres, deportations, and fierce ethnic and religious strife lasting from the first Balkan War in 1912 right through the founding of the republic in 1923. Far from completely eliminating gender inequalities across the board, the sweeping reforms still remained a platform from which to solicit women’s loyalties to the founding principles and founding father(s) of the new republic. Furthermore, the growing scholarship on women’s history has revealed that the record of an independent women’s movement predating the republic was made inconspicuous;Footnote 67 its subsequent growth after the founding of the republic was curtailed;Footnote 68 and women from minority backgrounds were effaced from the nation’s feminist history.Footnote 69
In fact, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality—themes depicted in the films under discussion—were often subsumed as inferior in the narrative hierarchies of the nation-state. In what Esra Özyürek describes as “administered forgetting,”Footnote 70 the nation and its women suppressed ethnic and religious narratives that differed from the Kemalist story of national genesis. Meanwhile, paradigms of defining women’s gender through domesticity and asserting corporate control over women’s sexuality endured with minor alterations, leading Deniz Kandiyoti to suggest that, while women may indeed have been emancipated by the modern state, the question remained as to whether they had really been liberated.Footnote 71
The 1980s comprised a watershed in the emergence of critical voices calling for a reexamination of women’s position and history within the nation-state. During the second half of the twentieth century, the culmination of the Cold War-period internal conflict, economic insolvency, and political crises brought about a series of military coups, the most violent of which occurred in 1980.Footnote 72 During the 1980s, in an environment that stifled all other political discourse,Footnote 73 women began audibly criticizing patriarchal aspects of their own common experience,Footnote 74 while also rediscovering the multiplicity of their individual origins. Throughout the next couple of decades, when Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu made their films, critical voices—both male and female—turned to individual stories or “micronarratives” about identity that interrogated official history.Footnote 75
Recording the history of atrocities, national traumas, military interventions, social movements, and ethno-religious conflicts in Turkey’s modern history is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the female protagonists in Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu’s films acquire special significance against the backdrop of this national questioning and feminist resurgence. They unravel, rather than uphold, the tacit agreement women had entered with the nation-state. The female characters in these films question the sustainability of suppression—specifically, the suppression of memory and identity—as a way of securing individual fulfillment and social cohesiveness. Not unlike other geographies where suppression of identity has proven a powerful tool for the construction of the nation, these female characters function as destabilizing allegories for the nation.Footnote 76 Micronarratives focus on unearthing different or even multiple ethnic, religious, linguistic, and ancestral roots, as a result creating complications for the modern nation-state’s pedagogically acceptable line of history, which in the post-1980 period combined a Turkic essence with an Islamic spirituality.Footnote 77 Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of semi-autobiographical and biographical narratives—oral history accounts of formerly taboo subjects.Footnote 78 These accounts have underscored the transgressions and traumas inflicted on those who inhabited precarious positions in the founding of the modern nation-state, because by their very nature they belied the acceptable—the Turkish, the Islamic, or both—roots of the nation. The directors Tomris Giritlioğlu and Yeşim Ustaoğlu partake in this rising tide of remembering and reinventing the diverse subjectivities of the nation.
Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu’s narratives produce interventions in the patriarchal discourse of the nation in which women are emancipated, but not liberated, by the “father” of Turkey. At one level, women’s films depict women’s recovery of their own story—a constitutive trauma—and of agency. In return, these films underscore other forms of attachment and bonding that women experience—that of the friend, the lover, the neighbor, the fellow traveler, and the fellow sufferer.
Gendering trauma: the patriarchal nation and its feminine other
Depiction of “the non-Muslim minority woman” as a human being with the agency to acknowledge and confront her suppression—while a limited agency, considering Nora’s death and Elena’s decent into the unconscious in Giritlioğlu’s work—denotes a change in sensibilities. Greek, Armenian, and Jewish characters have not occupied primary roles in Turkish fiction or cinema.Footnote 79 During the early decades of the Republic of Turkey, nationalist fiction—even by female authors such as Halide Edip—typically depicted Greek women as negative characters. According to Hercules Millas, sexual interactions between Turkish men and Greek women communicated power differentials between ethno-religious communities, transforming Greek women into femme fatales unless they converted to Islam, or else into sexual playthings without any spiritual agency:
[S]exual relationships (without love) are more striking and varied. Turkish men frequently sleep with Greek women. Greek women are already generally fond of Turkish men. The Turkish male heroes (or writers) of these novels seem to imply that one side is on “top” and “the other” side on the “bottom” in this sexual encounter, and [they also imply] that this has a national significance.Footnote 80
Conversely, the historically resonant representative of the homeland remained a Muslim Turkish woman,Footnote 81 typically contrasted with her traitorously ultra-Europeanized and frequently non-Muslim sister.Footnote 82 Only a century ago, when the nation was being forged in a struggle against colonialism, she was often imagined by the late Ottoman press as a Muslim woman in jeopardy of being victimized by European colonialism. During the republican period, in cinema, the ultra-Westernized blonde woman—whether a non-Muslim or otherwise—was often portrayed as the evil twin of the oppressed feminine nation. She was a femme fatale complicit with dark powers, a cold-blooded predator, and the victimizer of the nation’s male youthFootnote 83 rather than their victim.
Nora and Elena represent a transformation of this trope. The patrie as homeland may well have been defined as Muslim from its initial modern conception in the nineteenth century,Footnote 84 and the suffering of the homeland has typically been represented by the suffering of its women.Footnote 85 However, the films explored here suggest that the suffering of the motherland (anavatan in Turkish), the search for its roots and dignity, is no longer the symbolic domain of Muslim women alone. This transformation signals the end of the discursive privilege assigned to Muslim women the motherland incarnate, and this constitutes a call for the forging of a new imagination of the nation, one which can account for cross-fertilized roots.
As suggested by Suner, unlike more popular films—which make merely nostalgic references to a multi-ethnic and multi-religious past—the “dialectic of remembering and forgetting is central” to new political films like Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds.Footnote 86 These films publicly invite the hegemonic patriarchy marked by Sabit Pasha, Nemika’s father, the police chief, or the census-takers to take account of women as humans with diverse experiences and informed by different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Meanwhile, remembering and forgetting attain significance as gendered acts. Not only do these films represent exclusivist visions of the nation as patriarchal, they also depict such visions as the perpetrators of national traumas, inscribed on women’s bodies.
On the one hand, allusions to violation of the homeland and national trauma are represented through the violation of the female body.Footnote 87 Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu reverse the trope that depicts violation of the homeland through the violation of the Muslim woman. Now, violation of the homeland—a trauma from which the entire nation suffers (often as an unspeakable devastation)—is depicted through transgressions against the non-Muslim female body: Sabit Pasha’s rape of Nora in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, the police chief’s implied rape of Elena in Autumn Pain, Eleni’s being deprived of her own family and history, and even the near attack the orphan Cengiz suffers at the hands of the town’s drunk men in Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds—all these refer to an emergent trope of physical violation that stands for broken social arrangements. In speech and in deed, the turbulent history of the nation becomes inscribed on the female body through a physical breach, which can range from repression of identity all the way to rape and incest. Infringement on the agency and will of the female subject serves as a powerful symbol of historical catastrophe and social paralysis.
On the other hand, these films also mark patriarchy through the display of flags that denounce difference and dissent, and through ties and stuffed shirts that entrap and eliminate discord. In Autumn Pain, patriarchy is what effectively runs the labor camps, and in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, it is hegemonic masculinity roaring on the streets, “To end this show, the Greeks must go! (“Rumlar gidecek, bu iş bitecek!”). Patriarchy is also reflected in Behçet’s father’s (played by Tuncay Kurtiz) powerful conviction that there are no other storylines, no alternatives to submission. The authoritarian father thunders, “There is no other world!” In Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds, patriarchy reaches mythic dimensions in the karakoncolos, the bugaboo that lurks under children’s beds, separates and deports families, and harms little people like Niko and Mehmet. It forces children to wave flags and cheer parades they have no way of appreciating.Footnote 88 Overall, in these films, patriarchy emerges as the state’s grim face that brands difference and subdues alternate visions of a collective future.
Through their concern with individual psychosis and paralysis, these films also feature an inability to acknowledge trauma and accept the traumatized body as part of the national whole. Ustaoğlu’s Eleni is paralyzed by the childhood memory of being torn away from her family, and Giritlioğlu’s Nora by the memory of her rape as a young bride. In Autumn Pain, Elena’s infantilization, her regression into early childhood as expressed through an obsession with dolls and toy stores, communicates both the earlier trauma of losing her parents and her present means of coping with her subjugation. In love with Behçet, she recovers her own sexuality, and what breaks the time warp and brings relative normalcy is articulation and acknowledgement of the pain—a process that the films map out.
In Waiting for the Clouds, memory and its suppressionFootnote 89 are historical acts with larger societal consequences. Ayşe/Eleni is captured by her past. She experiences an awakening from the present through the specter she sees in the clouds: the past, which awaits recovery. She eventually announces her identity—not the formal lie recorded on the census registry, but the intimate reality preserved for many years as a family secret. In her native Greek, she declares: “I am Eleni Terzidis […] the daughter of the Terzidis. Niko is my brother.” Similarly, Nora in Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds frees herself from the burden of painful memories. In a tragic moment of awakening, she escapes the shame of rape and the taboo of incest by killing herself. As she stabs herself, Nora, the person, seems alienated from her own body. Memory emerges not just as a function of the mind: the female body, with its history of trauma, appears as the very site of social suffering, and mutilation of the womb emerges as the termination of unspoken pain and neurosis.
Even as these films depict women as the storehouse of ghostly memories, they also remind the audience that subordination is an experience, an effect of power, and not an aspect of identity. Neither Tamama/Raife in the original book by Andreadis nor Ayşe/Eleni in the screen adaptation of Waiting for the Clouds ends up happy ever after, in an unambiguous union with their historical roots simply because they have recovered a lost essence. In Autumn Pain, Behçet’s authoritarian father opposes his love affair with Elena because he believes that one has to choose between two worlds: that of a prostitute or that of a good girl; that of a Greek or that of a Turk; that of the Cold War nationalists or that of the communists. In Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, Nora’s Muslim husband Halit suffers the same fate as Nora’s family, because the registries that have branded Nora and her natal family as outcasts have also classified Halit and his family as dönme (Jewish converts), thereby legitimizing his financial demise. Modern authoritarianism seeks precision and certainties,Footnote 90 exacting a price from those who stand in-between.
The directors Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu refrain from essentializing positions or identities. In Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, Hikmet crosses over into Nora’s world, and Nimet into Levon’s. (The latter couple is even more significant than Nora and Halit, for, in a twist of the subplot, Nimet—a woman from a notable provincial family—falls for Nora’s brother Levon and chooses him over her diabolical husband.) In Autumn Pain, Eleni and Behçet fall in love with each other. In certain poignant frames of the film, Behçet literally views the street through Eleni’s window, just as Nemika, the privileged daughter of the government representative, does through the communist student Suat’s. In Waiting for the Clouds, Mehmet, the young friend of Ayşe/Eleni’s, is the first to recognize her transformation, precisely because he is able to slip into and out of different worlds on the social periphery—he keeps company with both a homeless orphan friend (Cengiz) and a stateless communist (Tanasis). Similarly, Eleni befriends Mehmet and identifies him with her lost brother.
Art enables symbolic border crossings. In the first half of Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds, when Halit is still holding social gatherings at home, Nora steps temporarily out of her neurosis and walks into a room full of people, drawn by the tune of the clarinet. In an empathic scene, the camera circles Nora, who gradually whirls around the clarinet player, who in turn slowly rotates in a dizzying motion —movements testifying to the magnetic lure of music. Later in the same movie, the melody of the shared folk song “Sarı Gelin” is played by Artin, a captive in the labor camp. Artin’s performance is accompanied by his captor, a young conscript who sings the song in Turkish. The community upholds their “geographical kinship”Footnote 91 as a value that transgresses the borders of modern national identities. Similarly, in Autumn Pain, Elena and Behçet unite in a peaceful, immaculate embrace when Elena croons a Greek lullaby. In Waiting for the Clouds, Ayşe/Eleni converses in Turkish with Damoklia, a peer from the Turkish town of Havza, during her visit to Greece. Two women—“Turkish-Greek” and “Greek-Turkish”—go back and forth chatting about mundane things with ease, now speaking Greek and now Turkish. These films breed empathy for the feminine other, inscribe doubt in the audience about the inhumane acts of the collective—pogroms, marches, labor camps, national victories.Footnote 92 Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu’s films use female characters to open up the intimate space of fictionalized history, the flea market of memory, with its “stories suppressed from official history and national collective memory.”Footnote 93
Concluding remarks: locating and dislocating identities
Scholars have long pointed out the significance of linguistic breakdown and silence in representations of historical trauma.Footnote 94 But the role of women as signposts of this breakdown and conduits of suppressed memory has not been fully addressed, particularly within the context of cinema in Turkey. This paper has underscored how Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu’s work deploys female subjects as signposts of a crisis in women’s relationship with national identity. In these films, the predicament of marginalized women exposes a number of mainstream impediments to subjectivity and self-realization in Turkish society at the dawn of the new century: the inability to claim one’s memories, to speak one’s language, to be whomever one chooses to be and realize one’s full potential. Arrested by traumatic memories, female characters survive as silenced outcasts—a parable assembled so as to trigger “a desire to re-imagine”Footnote 95 not just the individual’s experience, but also that of the social and national collective more comprehensively.
Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu’s films introduce interventions into patriarchal discourses that uphold one particular lineage above all others and chastise any identities that are seen as indeterminate and cross-bred. In these works, suppression of the identity and history of Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities is personified by women, because the feminine is imagined as hybrid, ambiguous, and indeterminate. The female subjects of these films complicate the narrative of homogeneous Turkish nationhood by drawing attention to social and individual marginalization and trauma, even as the memory of that trauma is denied due to social taboos. Women’s silence denotes a collective psychosis, the closing-off of the national space to ambivalent and layered subjectivities. In return, recovery or acknowledgement of memory, however traumatic, brings release from oppression.
Complicating identity, particularly that of gender, is a political act for both directors owing to the national and transnational paradigms in which they operate. Turkish modernity during the first half of the twentieth century essentialized womenFootnote 96 as the index of national transformation, whereas colonialist discourses, then and now, uphold a set of reductionist assumptions associated with the work of feminist women from “the Muslim Middle East”: the latter is not just a reductionist misnomer, but often a racially biased identification as well. Consequently, Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu avoid labels such as “women’s films” and “feminist filmmaker” from “the Muslim Middle East.” Footnote 97 Another reason for their reluctance to embrace such banners stems from a political position about identity itself. Undermining intransigent identities that claim to be embedded in the national mythology remains a significant goal in their respective cinemas. Their work historicizes the nation while also unraveling categorical portrayals of its women.
This is by no means an uncontested or innocuous task. Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s earlier work drew accusations of “orientalism” aimed at curtailing cultural self-reflection and criticism.Footnote 98 The limited current studies of audience reception of Waiting for the Clouds reveal confusion, unease, and a marked resistance to address the content of political art films.Footnote 99 This response may be amplified in more mainstream projects. In Autumn Pain’s DVD extras, both Giritlioğlu and her scriptwriter Etyen Mahçupyan explain the difficult process that resulted in several rewrites of the award-winning screenplay. The crew had to bring in yet another pioneering woman, the writer Nilgün Öneş,Footnote 100 precisely because producers kept abandoning the project owing to its controversial content regarding minority experiences in modern Turkey.
Despite these financial and political challenges, both Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu’s work has opened up a cinematic space for a new generation of filmmakers, like Lusin Dink, who appropriate silences only to subvert them. The work of these women filmmakers represents a reversal of fortunes at multiple levels: it signifies a transition from an object to an authorial position for women in cinema—women who explore how gender informs and is informed by the network of hegemonies (e.g., religion, ethnicity, class) in modern Turkish society.
In her analysis of the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-Semitism, Julia Kristeva identifies a paternal mastery that attacks the weak, the sensual, the cross-bred. Céline’s racist treatises condemn the other—Jews in inter-war France—as being abject because they are hybrid and feminized.Footnote 101 If “the feminine” is what is hybrid, cross-fertilized, impure, and therefore the focus of patriarchal abjection, then patriarchy as such defines itself in its pure, unadulterated, seemingly rational, uncompromising masculinity. Kristeva explains that, in a world like Céline’s, all things in-between, situated indecisively between the object and the subject, the I and the other, fall into this feminine space. It is precisely this space that Giritlioğlu and Ustaoğlu help to open up through fluid transitions.
Citing Ayşe Gül Altınay’s 2005 work, Asuman Suner suggests that political films like those discussed here “destabilize essentialist nationalist discourses that fix identities” and “emphasize interactions, transformations, and hybridity in history.”Footnote 102 I have argued that such hybridity is represented in film as gendered and feminine. Through the depiction of women who experience national traumas, Ustaoğlu and Giritlioğlu highlight the subordination of all those who occupy precarious positions on the margins of the nation-state. Whether they claim it publicly or not, their contributions impart a distinctively feminist gaze, in which female subjects disclose hegemonic arrangements in the mainstream of society and in the vernacular of its national history.
