Prolegomena Linguistic precision is incumbent on achieving the truth of things.
he unpleasant olfactory associations of defecation produced by carnivores, by remembering that the elephants are vegetarian and their intestinal products are more or less odorless, like dried hay. Ofili is a winner of the prestigious Turner Prize commemorating Britain’s greatest Painter. The first room of a 7-room Retrospective in Britain’s Tate Modern this year – January-May 2010 – was “dominated”, according to a Reuters-release (25 January 2010) “by titles such as Shithead, Painting with Shit on It, and Spaceshit. …The Holy Virgin Mary executed in 1996, portrays a black Madonna figure with an exposed breast made of elephant dung and cutouts from pornographic magazines decorating the surrounding canvas.” 
It all started with Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal becoming eventually… Tracy Emin’s unmade My Bed (and bloody condom in the detritus of her handbag strewn next to the sex-bed). Post-modernism must be seen as an evolutionary sociological event developing from the French Dadaism followed by Surrealism becoming the process of post-World War Two democratization of art-work production, whereby nowadays, anything and everything goes … including another Turner Prize Winner whose w
ork was no more than switching the electrical lights on and off in a Gallery-space.Evaluation, discrimination, ‘giving prizes’ is however a fundamental aspect of human existence. In Art, not necessarily in life, ALL are not co-equal, of equal worth and value, as post-modernists fantasize. I wonder what the Medici patrons of Leonardo da Vinci would pay for Tracy Emin’s sex-bed or infantile scribbling?
Consumers of art-works vote by their purses … Were it not for the corruption of the anal (and urinary) art-markets, manipulated for maximum money-grabbing, post-modern art would be literally worthless. Classical Art strived for the representation of Beauty as a life-form. Modern Art incorporated the cult of the Ugly and the formless. Post-modern Art nowadays worships at the altar of the anal and Death – because dead things stink like dog-shit. You should need no money to buy post-modernist art-works, like Damien Hirst’s dead animals in formaldehyde, but you would have to pay the local Council several hundred pounds (with the present government cutting budgets) to take them and Emin’s filthy Bed away as garbage.
Although I would preserve in post-modernism (since anything goes -- hence, also classicism!) the classical hierarchies of value and worth in aesthetic expression in terms of Great and Bad art, I would however simultaneously endorse the overall process of typical post-modernist democratization in art-production.
What is of primary and primordial importance is the art-work, not who has done it – merely because all flesh is bound to turn to dust, but not one’s work, if it is good enough to be perpetuated by succeeding generations. Religious obsessions of re-incarnation and immortality are risible. Shakespeare shall never re-incarnate and ascend to heaven at the end of days, but his works shall never die for as long as a mortal exists that shall read them.
I have been watching Turkish films (in London) for half a dozen years now. What I must generalize from my very specific experiences of individual Turkish films, as the universal features of a category to be called Turkish Cinema, is of necessity and by definition dictated by the films available for viewing, but which are already selected as the best of the year’s crop by a remarkable lady of impeccable, highly evolved cultural tastes, Miss Vedide Kaymak, who has been running artistically single-handedly (with of course financial and technical help by Rio Cinema in Stoke Newington) an annual Turkish film-festival, which would be celebrating its 16th year in November (2010), evolving from its humble birth in the bosom of the Turkish community in Stoke Newington, into the posh circumstances of an international film festival Gala Night (4th November) at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (in Central London).
In a sense, my this website must be entirely dedicated and in great praise of and total gratitude to Vedide Kaymak, whose indefatigable personal efforts of magnificent choice over a decade and a half, has had, I am convinced, a beneficent influence over the fabric and quality of contemporary Turkish film-making itself. Miss Kaymak ensured that Turkish films wherever made and in whatever language are seen as multi-ethnic products created by multi-ethnic Turkish creative artists at home and in the diasporas of Germany, Italy, Iran … gently subverting all Turkish nationalist nonsense.
Patriotism is confused with Nationalism. The latter is an artificial construct, a specific product caused by 19th c. historical processes. The former, as Love of one’s own country and culture is natural and answers every human being's need to belong, to a group, a tribe, even an invented nation in modern times. It contributes to a human being's archetypal attempt at the acquisition of self-identity. Mental breakdown and schizophrenia can be caused by the loss of self-recognition and worth. It is the trick of the evil genociders – by cutting off the link of a social group from its historical territory and cultural identity, the genociding fascist State (of all hues) tries to achieve the murder of a people (= a nation, in the discourse of the 19th c.)
Nationalism on the other hand is the senseless and by definition racist cult of an invented nation with a fantasized culture – the ridiculous Nazi slogan of Deutchland über Alles (=Germany Above All!). It is arrogance carried to the extremes of sheer stupidity, and eventual genocide of people dehumanized by the nationalist in pathetic narcissistic masturbatory SS self-glorification.
In 1915, the proto-Nazi-fascist Young Turk ultra-nationalists genocided the Anatolian and Cilician Armenians (almost 2 millions of them). They spawned like frogs their Armenian ultra-nationalist brethren, who today still wish ALL Turks dead. If they could, they would kill them, precisely as the racist nationalist Turks have been already attempting to genocide this time the ... Kurds in their boundaries, as an alternative to the Armenians their ancestors had drank the blood of …
My own parents as children had survived the 1915 soykirim (=genocide in Turkish) by the grace of God. My father, Israel, taught us, his children and whoever else would listen to him, that ordinary people are not the genociders, but their fascist racist criminal regimes are the ones. At the age of 95, tears would well up in my father’s eyes (and make all his hearers sob …) when he told the story of how in his village of Khasgal-Bardizag (near Adapazar), the local Mullah – an Ahlim = a Koranic scholar, and his whole family spoke ... Armenian – This holy Muslim sent his eldest son Mustafa, in their family cart, to my father’s family, to carry them to the train station … (and I am myself crying now as I write this and remember my father’s words and tears) Mustafa sobbing asks forgiveness in Armenian first, before waving them goodbye … until the train disappears out of sight into the horizon!
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the very first two people on this planet who grasped that the 19th century socio-historical development of Nationalism was racist by definition, and they tried to counter it, oppose and combat it vehemently by their own distinctive ideology of revolutionary Inter-nationalism. Their own brand of Communist sociology built up on the infrastructure of the economic forces at play, cleansed such matters entirely out of abhorrent racism – something alas, the ideologues of post-modern mafia-capitalism are still dabbling in by institutionalized racist perversions.
While for neo-Nazi ultra-nationalist Turks, all non-Turks are sub-human, while for fascist Armenians all Turks are worse than the Nazis … for humble me, my fellow poor Turk, uneducated and illiterate (whose life was sang by Orhan Veli, the Jacques Prévert of modern Turkish literature) is as much the victim of his fascist state as the Armenians were of the Young Turks …
I love my decent Turkish brothers and sisters – the trouble is that for the Armenian Nationalist none such exists.
And I am convinced, that one day it shall be a Turkish … film-director who will display the heroism of tackling the genocide of the Armenians attempted first by the anglophile Sultan Hamit (in 1890's) followed by the Young Turks.
It is already apparent in many Turkish films the creative tendency of wishing to treat their historical problems in the most sane, honest, and historically truthful manner. It is one reason I am as passionate about post-modern Turkish Cinema, films as selected for London audiences by the Gran’dame of Turkish films, the exceptional and inimitable Miss Vedide Kaymak (joined by Peter Howden for the 16th Festival this year).
(1) Overwhelming Humanitarianism
A great overall feature of post-modern Turkish cinema is its overwhelming human warmth, decency, and sheer humanity – it is an extraordinary feature, as if a conscious reaction, a deliberate attempt by the post-modern Turkish creative mind to denounce its successive governments’ historical fascism.
Many Turkish intellectuals are finally understanding today with deep regret and sadness that their modern State declared in 1923 was founded on the genocide of the multi-ethnic people of Anatolia – Armenians most of all, but also Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Alevis, the Laz, the Kurds today, to mention but a few, constituting the Ottoman Empire.
Unlike most Armenians who hate the Turks for not acknowledging formally the genocide of their own Armenian ancestors, I myself feel the grief and sadness of the cultured and creative Turks, the deep shame (not the filth of the Nationalists) they feel for having such an evil and barbaric historical ancestry. In other words, it seems to me that most reasonable, educated, intelligent and compassionate Turks today, including some of my good friends – and I feel sorry for them – deny the genocide of their fellow Armenians out of deep shame for it. They can’t bear to hear the word soykirim – the tone of this commendable sentiment was set by no less than Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself, the founder of Modern Turkey, labeling the genocide of the Armenians as a A Shameful Act, implying equally ambiguously as a rape-metaphor – the rape of a nation.
But History un-acknowledged is history repeated – the tragedy is that until Atatürk’s shameful act is atoned for, many other shameful acts perpetrated by successive fascist governments in Turkey, the thousands of disappearances that peaked in 1994, the murder of Hrant Dink, the on-going genocide of the Kurds etc. etc. shall not cease.
The problem is the same with the young generation of Germans now, who are deeply shamed by the thought grasped massively for the first time that their very own parents were Nazi murderers. But their mature acknowledgment and atonement, allows them to be today one of the lights of the European Community of democratic peaceful nations Turkey wishes to join but cannot, unless it performs a ritual cleansing and purgation similar to that of their German allies from the first world war.
(2) A Political Cinema
Turkish films are ahead of the Turkish State in this – they are uncompromisingly cleansing their fellow citizens’ souls and history. They show absolutely no compunction in calling a spade a spade, displaying and narrating and denouncing the fascist inhumanities committed by their military coups (the one in 1980 planned and subsidized by the American CIA), the un-reconstructed, uneducated, ignorant Istanbul citizenry barbarically slaughtering the Armenian and Greek ethnics, one day on September the 6th … in 1955 – Tomris Giritlioglu's stunning film Guz Sancisi. I myself remember the day as a teenager, when we woke up in Beirut, the Lebanon to the genocidal horror of the news on the international wire services.
Turkish cinema today is fulfilling its Aristotelian function of purging and therapeutizing the Turkish people, and leading them into a more wholesome democratic modern history.
I can never forget one of the most powerful films (perfectly scripted and acted) I had ever seen by Dervis Zaim, an oscar-worthy innovative film-director – Elefant ve Ciller, 2000, which had the extraordinary courage any European film-director could muster living only in a Democracy, denouncing the Turkish State as governed by the American CIA for the sole purpose of propounding global Cocaine consumption, something the free and democratic Hollywood directors (themselves cocaine consumers) would not dare articulate …
If one day Turkey shall become voluntarily a Federative Union of multi-ethnic communities perhaps called (my brother's idea) USA – the United States of Anatolia (better than the Mafia/CIA infested one we know), allowing refugees to return (The Law of Return acknowledged and demanded by the United Nations) of the descendents of all the genocided ethnics of the past – the homeless Assyrians and Armenians in particular, making a start in situ with the internal Kurdish refugees – it shall be because of the Turkish film-directors resolving these complex matters through the power of creative films that display their decent humanitarian concerns.
(3) The Breaking of Genre-moulds – the Greatest Historical innovation yet of Turkish Cinema
The creation of Genres by Hollywood was one of the daftest ideas in the history of Cinema to have come out yet of American unsophisticated provincialism. Genres are the modern equivalent of the Medieval European cardboard-charcters-typed theatre, by which I mean, where characters are simple-minded and one dimensional types, usually also single-costumed throughout the theatrical presentation – something which Europeans left behind for at least six hundred years … but which Hollywood still churns out for the American audiences, fearful that they lack intelligence to grasp European subtleties.
Genres in film-making are an embarrassment and must have been dumped long time ago, not encouraged to evolve into the totally inane Indian … Bollywood, which is a horrendous mockery and an unwitting caricature of Hollywood foolishness.
Films must be made according to where the needs of a script take them … not to conform to the recognizable types of an arbitrary genre.
Creatively speaking, Genres are limiting, strangulating the creative endeavor into replicating itself endlessly and frankly foolishly … the amounts of money wasted on producing the hundredth Schwarzenegger nonsense, the thousandth Lost and now The Event whoosh-whoosh, gay Ugly Betty’s and pathoogical Desperate Housewives is bluntly not fit for intelligent entertainment. I think most people watch them out of sheer boredom and not finding anything else better on the globalized junk-crammed Sky-TV schedules – what one man, the great Rupert Murdoch is capable of achieving in a life-time …
And in this, Turkish post-modern cinema (as identified by the perceptive and deeply insightful selection of Miss Vedide Kaymak) takes the lead in international cinema and film history as well; for the first time in the history of film-making, Turkish film-directors and casts are making mere films, not genres, and irrespective of American stupidities. They shall be the text-book examples of pure film-making, having broken all the Hollywood moulds of the silly Genres.
This was a prize won with hard slog – Turkish film-directors had no paradigms to imitate. Initially, until 2007 and 8 all life was there – films ended and started all over again ten times over (Vizion Telé, 2001, directed by Yilmaz Erdogan and Omar Faruk Sorak, Shellalé, to give two examples).
But last year (at the landmark 15th year of the Festival in London), Turkish cinema it seems had come of age – finally the Directors had learnt the difficult lessons of the cinematic experience, and the films were just right, with perfect lengths for their themes – no more the tendency of saying all in a single film.
(4) Essential Sound-Track
Much is written about the significance of an appropriate sound-track for a film. Mood-music used to be a much vaunted word in Hollywood. But ultimately, I think, American cinema lost its consciousness of a necessary sound-track, carried away by the superficialities of pop-music and its cinematic use, which can be said to have destroyed the American cinema’s potential for the appropriate sound-track to a film.
Turkish films are re-instating the essential need, with a profound awareness for good music that can only be classically inspired.
The interesting fact is that while American cinema goes for percussion and computer-generated sound-effects, the dominant sound of the Turkish films nowadays is produced by the melodic Strings – basically violin or cello. This choice of instruments is telling about the true Turkish Soul as different from the Hollywood manufactured ones …
(5) Exploration of Non-Homosexual Male Friendship
One of the great lacks in post-modern Western culture is the total absence of a notion of true non-sexual male friendship, perhaps because gay Liberation was one of the contributing factors to the rise of post-modernism itself.
The universalization of the notion of Cultural Relativity – one of the important achievements of post-modernism – was sustained by the gender ambiguity of the Anglo-American male homosexual, who appeared a man but behaved as a woman, unlike Turkish men, who even in a homo-erotic context (like olive-oil drenched nude-wrestling when the participants plunge their hands into enemy leather loin-cloths) would be mortally outraged at the suggestion of any homosexual behavior.
It does not mean that there are no Turkish gay men. People are the same everywhere. What it means is that homosexuality unpredictably is more liberated than in the West, in spite of the West’s endless razzmatazz about it. It also means that the lines are clearly demarcated – Turkish gay men need not pretend to heterosexuality like their Anglo-American counterparts, which also liberates the latter from any concern that they may be knocking at the wrong Turkish … closet.
The Turkish male is thus un-inhibited about his male heterosexual friendships, totally misunderstood by the Western men who think they may have dropped themselves into a gay heaven.
Turkish cinema can open the doors of exploration onto this phenomenon which gets unfortunately instantly inverted in the films produced in the Western world.
(6) Wholesome Adult-Child Relationship as a form of surrogate Parenthood
A still from the film Héjar
Similarly to the above, the Western poison of pedophilia is entirely absent from Turkish films. Yet again, Turkish films pioneer a natural wholesome attitude towards children (Héjar, 2001, written and directed by Hamdan Ipekci). The Adults involved with children not-their-own are free from all pedophile perversions, and can teach a heartwarming lesson to the Lolita-perverts of Hollywood cinema and their despicable audiences.
The cinematic adults in Turkish films are entirely non-sexual and parental towards their wards, helped by the fact that there simply are no Turkish Lolitas, promoted by the lunacies of Sigmund Freud, hypothesizing, not to say fantasizing, three year olds seeking some kind of sexual gratification …
This grotesque stupidity, because ‘discovered’ by a world-famous figure (Freud), then made even more famous by a Russo-American anti-Soviet novelist Vladimir Nabokov, was and still is ruthlessly exploited globally by pedophiles everywhere as an argument to ‘naturalize’ themselves in society, in replication of the social success of the Gay and Lesbian struggle.
Pathetic old Muslim and Hindu men may be practicing the obnoxious and obscene child-bride marriages for historical cultural reasons, but modern sensible Turks have no commerce with such perverted rites, considering them laughable, and preserving intact the purity and health of Adult-child relationship as a form of parental surrogacy.
Future features
The above is what I myself have discovered and diagnosed as the prominent features of the post-modern Turkish cinema; and I must never tire of stating, as selected over half a decade by Miss Vedide Kaymak.
I am certain others will enrich the above list with many more discoveries. The future of Turkish cinema is not only brilliant, but innovative and a new word, a new beginning in the history of world cinema.
Presently, Turkish features seem to be the only ones worth watching.
Hollywood is gone to the dogs of Tarantino’s senseless and vicious violence.
The glory days of Italian and French Cinema have gone to seeds and shall never return.
Russian cinema –like all good things Russian – seems to have self-destructed with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Chinese cinema with its flying human-saucers endlessly boringly cloning itself … seems to be desperate to capture the mindless Hollywood audiences.
Indian Cinema needs to start all over again where Satyajit Ray (one of the great Directors of all time) left it.
Turkish cinema thus, frankly and bluntly, seems to be the only hope left (perhaps with the up-and-coming Venzuelan cinema at its tails) in this … hamburgarized world (my word for American globalization), preserving human warmth, decency and dignity.
Nota Bene
Many films I have been unable to Review yet in great detail is due to the chaos of Turkish film market. Films are not available in English subtitles. The Festival Management has been unable to provide DVD copies, not at all, let alone several weeks in advance.
What I have struggled to write is from sheer memory, and occasional notes taken in the darkness of the auditorium. I am sad and sorry that I cannot Review yet masterpieces like Elefant ve Ciller, and Héjar, as I need DVD's to refresh my memory.
The medium being visual, demands extensive stills-prints to enhance the information provided for the reader, which I have been unable to acquire from the Festival Management.
I hope others in time succeed to do better, as the chaotic clouds of market-management dissipate and evolve into a better organized world of a well-healed venture. Meanwhile, I shall continue to review what I can from sheer memory.
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