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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
Abstract
In this essay, I explore the land-, sea-, and cityscapes in six films (five Turkish and one Turkish German)—Bliss, The Wound, Rıza, Broken Mussels, The Guest, and Seaburners—and their use of place and non-place. Hamid Naficy's concept of transitional space and Marc Augé's notion of non-place, based on Foucault's concept of heterotopia, will be the basis of the theoretical discussion. I focus on what I see as a major shift in the representation of the migrant experience in the Turkish cinema of the early and late 2000s, a shift from the land- and cityscapes to films whose setting is the seascape. This shift, I argue, corresponds to changes in the phases of migration that flow within and through Turkey, and both government policies and the public perception.
Keywords: Turkish cinema, migrant bodies, landscape, cityscape, seascape, transnational spaces, non-places, heterotopia
Introduction
The migrants’ stories in 2000s Turkish cinema are told in land-, city-, and seascapes as heterotopian, transitional spaces and non-places. In 2007, two striking films on migrants’ stories end with the protagonists gazing out on seascapes: Mutluluk (Bliss, Abdullah Oğuz, 2007) and the Turkish German film Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akın, 2007). The closing scenes of both films emphasize the seascape as heterotopian space, which mainly does not refer to a specific place with a geographical, social, and historical connotation, but to the inverse of real sites and utopias, a characteristic that is shared with the Turkish German film Yara (The Wound, Yılmaz Arslan, 1998). Bliss tells the story of a couple forcibly migrating from Eastern Anatolia to Istanbul due to an honour killing. A young man, who has come back from his military service, is tasked with killing a young girl, a relative who is a rape victim. He falls in love with her, and they find shelter in a professor's sailing boat on the Aegean. The boat gliding through the seascapes serves as an ultimate heterotopia, signifying both freedom and a passage to maturity for the migrant couple. The Wound tells the story of a Turkish guest worker's daughter, sent back from Germany to Turkey as a punishment. The film reverses migrants’ usual direction of mobility from East to West.
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