CINEMA AND IMMIGRATION
SOURCE PAGE
TOTALLY NORMAAAL: ACTORS OF FOREIGN ORIGIN IN CONTEMPORARY
CINEMA
Until the mid-1990s a commonplace amongst Turkish-German
actors in Germany was that "German film may have Turkish roles, but it
doesn't have roles for Turks." This situation has since changed. Beyond
being cast for comic effect as walking stereotypes in film comedies, as shady
figures in television mysteries or as the token foreigner on tv shows like
"Lindenstraße", a whole host of young, transnational actors have
established themselves as stars on the German film and television scene. Among
those who have found leading roles in some of the most popular German films of
the past few years are Hilmi Sözer ("Elefantenherz", "Voll
Normaaal"), Mehmet Kurtulus ("Nackt" [Naked]), Stipe Erceg
("Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei"), and Jasmin Tabatabai
("Mondscheintarif" [Moonlight Tariff]). These successful actors and
actresses comprise as heterogeneous a group as their director colleagues, from
the comedian Hilmi Sözer to the manly Mehmet Kurtulus, from young rebels like
Max Ophüls Award winner Stipe Erceg ("Yugotrip") to the wild and
melancholic Birol Ünel ("Gegen die Wand").
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Source: Senator, DIF
Moritz Bleibtreu and Idil Üner in "Im Juli" (In
July, 2000)
Does Background Even Matter?
Whether they appear in films by German or non-German
directors, the background of the characters performed by this new generation of
actors tends to play a secondary role in casting decisions. Even when Hilmi
Sözer, in "Auslandstournee" ("Tour Abroad", 2000), plays a
Turk who travels all the way across Europe to Istanbul, or when Serpil Turhan
plays a Turkish woman from Berlin in "Der schöne Tag" ("A Fine
Day", 2001) - the development of these characters and the conflicts they
experience are generated by issues that now have little to do with their own
ethnic background or that of their parents. And Idil Üner's performance of a
Turkish bombshell in Fatih Akin's spirited road movie "Im Juli"
("In July", 2000) consciously plays with the old cliché of the
"exotic and mysterious beauty," just as the entire film toys with all
manner of national stereotypes. On the other hand, transnational actors are
frequently cast without anyone noticing their background at all. Performers of
Eastern Europe origin often play German characters. Stipe Erceg comes across as
unquestionably German in "Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei" ("The
Edukators", 2004), just as Lenn Kudrajwizki does in "Kiki &
Tiger" (2003). One might well see this casting policy as providing a
method for breaking down boundaries.
"WHAT YOU LOOKING AT?" THE COMEDY OF IMMIGRATION:
THE FOREIGNER AS LAUGHING STOCK AND WALKING CLICHÉ
Parallel to the attempts made by ambitious film makers in
the 1970s and 1980s to draw attention, via social dramas and documentaries, to
the plight of foreign workers in Germany, a cliché of the foreigner as clown
was developing in other areas of the cinema. This began in the 1970s with films
like "Laß jucken, Kumpel" or "Geh zieh dein Dirndl aus,"
sex farces starring Italian actor Rinaldo Talamonti, who plays characters named
"Roberto Ravioli" or "Vittorio Parmesano" and repeatedly
gets into mischief with large, buxom blondes to the amusement of viewers. It
has continued in more recent films as well: "Das merkwürdige Verhalten
geschlechtsreifer Großstädter zur Paarungszeit" ("Love Scenes From
Planet Earth", 1998), for instance, which has the German actor Dieter
Landuris in the role of a puckish Italian who speaks a titillatingly broken
German and is so stereotypically Mediterranean in his hot-headedness that, out
of heartbreak, he decides to jump off the roof of a house. While the male lead
in Doris Dörrie's entirely well-meaning comedy "Keiner liebt mich"
("Nobody Loves Me", 1994) is African, the character he plays is
absurdly exaggerated, a mystic and "life artist" who paints his face
with apparently archaic symbols, plays African drums, and possesses clairvoyant
powers like a shaman. In her comedy-thriller "Happy Birthday, Türke"
("Happy Birthday!", 1992), on the other hand, Dörrie succeeds with a
number of gags in which clichés of and prejudices toward Turks and other
non-Germans are scoffingly played out ad absurdum.
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Source: Constantin, DIF
Tom Gerhardt and Hilmi Sözer in "Voll normaal"
(1994)
Humor and Immigration: Strange Bedfellows Even Now
All in all there are surprisingly few films that deal with
the issue of immigration through comedy. Rolf Lyssy's satire "Die
Schweizermacher" ("The Swissmakers", 1978), which takes potshots
at the Swiss naturalization process, was the first attempt at a comedic
approach to the grotesque circumstances under which foreigners are
"accepted" by an affluent Central European society. Another film from
Switzerland is Bernard Safarik's "Hunderennen" ("Dog-Race",
1983), which nonchalantly, albeit with tragicomic vitriol, depicts the fate of
East Europeans, former critics of the system, who end up selling out to
consumption-oriented Western Europe. In Germany, "Ich Chef, Du
Turnschuh" ("Me Boss, You Sneakers!", 1998) was one of the first
productions that dared take a satirical look at the problems of immigration and
asylum. The film tells the story of a newly arrived Armenian who leaves no
stone unturned in his quest to get a residency permit. "Ich Chef, Du
Turnschuh", however, was not as successful as the Swiss or Austrian
comedies on the same subject. Apparently the "immigrant problem" in
Germany is still considered too serious an issue to make jokes about.
Nonetheless, some comedies have managed, in passing as it were, to ironically
undermine clichés and stereotypes. The performances of non-German characters by
Moritz Bleibtreu in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (1997), Erkan Maria
Moosleitner in "Erkan & Stefan" (2000), and Hilmi Sözer in
"Voll Normaaal" (1994) do not so much revisit racist stereotypes as
reflect on obsolete clichés. Their figures are consciously deployed as
hopelessly exaggerated not only to produce the obvious comic effects, but as an
occasion for playing with wholly incidental prejudices and clichés ad absurdum.
As simple as these films and their humor may seem, they subtly but surely hit
their mark; for the only place where the image of the kooky foreigner with
frightful German, bumbling through the world like a simple Simon, still obtains
today, is in jokes.
ON THE BEAT, RECORDING LIFE: IMMIGRANT LIVES IN
DOCUMENTARIES
Parallel to the wave of feature films that in the 1970s and
1980s dramatized the lives of guest workers in Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland, documentarians also set about exposing immigrants' living
conditions and their social and cultural conflicts. Like the feature films,
these documentaries at first focused primarily on the difficult situation
facing foreign workers abroad. "Siamo italiani" (1964), one of the
first films of the "New Swiss Cinema," was also one of the first
German-language documentaries to deal with Italian immigrant workers in
Switzerland; initially invited as cheap labor, they were soon considered by
many Swiss citizens as "job stealers". The German documentary
"Die Kümmeltürkin geht" (1984/85) centers around a guest worker who
is both exploited for her labor and socially segregated until, after years of
humiliation and exhausted from the isolation and discrimination she has
experienced, she returns to her country. Jörg Gförer's "Ganz Unten"
(1986) represents a thematic high-point or end-point for documentaries dealing
with the problems of this first immigrant generation. Few films have been so
graphic in showing the discrimination against (primarily Turkish) workers.
Based on the book of the same name by undercover journalist Günther Wallraff,
the film combines surreptitiously filmed documentary material with
retroactively conducted interviews to show the shocking everyday working
conditions for Turkish day laborers at the Thyssen Steel Works.
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Source: DIF
"Günter Wallraff - Ganz unten" (1986)
The Second Generation Looks Back
While such films were concerned solely with the first
immigrant generation, Michael Lentz's "Verländert" (1983) was already
focusing on the next one - the non-Germans who were born in Germany and grew up
here. In "Verländert", Lentz portrays a girl in a Turkish family who
is forced to choose between the traditional way of life of her parents, who
want to send her back to Turkey, and a (relatively) self-determined life in
Germany, at the cost of severing relations with her parents. The 1990s saw the
production of more and more documentaries dealing primarily with the second
generation. Sometimes they focus on the family, as in Serap Berrakkarasus's
"Töchter zweier Welten" (1990/91) and Seyhan Derin's "Ich bin
die Tochter meiner Mutter" (1996), in which the directors describe their
own complicated lives "between two cultures." Sometimes they train
their sights on society, as in Aysun Bademsoy's "Deutsche Polizisten"
(1999), which accompanies young German police officers of non-German origin on
the job in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Bademsoy's
documentary "Mädchen am Ball" (1995), "Nach dem Spiel"
(1997), and "Ein Mädchen im Ring" (1996) all deal with young,
non-German women whose lifestyles not only are indistinguishable from that of
their German friends, but also launch them into traditionally male domains. As
football players and boxers, they dream of a future in professional sports. The
self-reflexive perspective of these films, all of which are made by women
directors who themselves are children of immigrant parents, occasionally
expands to take in a view of their parents. Kadir Sözen's "Mein Vater der
Gastarbeiter" (1994) and Fatih Akin's "Wir haben vergessen,
zurückzukehren" (2000) are attempts to understand the difficult situation
their parents faced when they left their own countries to start a new life in a
strange land.
"ME BOSS, YOU SNEAKERS": ON THE CULTURE CLASH AND
THE REPRESENTATION OF GERMANS
If one looks at the immigrant films of the 1970s and 1980s
that dealt with guest workers and their desperate attempts to orient themselves
in an alien and mostly alienating culture, the question automatically arises as
to how Germany and the Germans were being represented, especially as most of
the films on this issue were made by German directors, including Jan Schütte
("Drachenfutter" ["Dragon Chow"]) and Helma Sanders-Brahms
("Shirins Hochzeit"). From today's perspective, the characterization
of the German figures unavoidably comes across as rather clichéed. The German
(or Swiss or Austrian) characters are typically represented as intransigent
authoritarians ("Jannan - Die Abschiebung,""Das kalte
Paradies"), exploitative schemers ("In der Fremde,""Drachenfutter,""Reise der Hoffnung") or as
uncomprehending or indifferent passers-by, co-workers, or neighbors
("Palermo oder Wolfsburg"). The essence of these films often consists
in the (thoroughly suspect) recognition that the cultures coming into contact with
each other are irreconcilable, and that this fact has less to do with any
intention on the part of the immigrants than with the disinterest of the
locals. In this way, the German film makers, all of whom were on the left of
the political spectrum, frequently used their films about immigrant lives; to
launch a harsh critique of existing social-political conditions. Other
directors, on the other hand, ironically portrayed the ignorance of affluent
Central Europeans in comedies like "Die Schweizermacher" ("The
Swissmakers", Switzerland, 1978), "Ilona und Kurti"
("German Guy Sexy!", Austria, 1991), or "Ich Chef, Du
Turnschuh" ("Me Boss, You Sneakers!", Germany, 1998) - this last
showing a shrewd asylum seeker who takes advantage of the Germans' typical
reverence for authority in order to fake his residency status.
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Source: DIF
Marius Müller-Westernhagen and Guido Gagliardi (from left)
in "Theo gegen den Rest der Welt" (Theo Against the Rest of the
World, 1980)
Insurmountable Differences?
The films in which Germans and non-Germans achieve anything
like mutual understanding, however, can be counted on one hand. Hark Bohm's
intercultural love story "Yasemin" (1988) abounds with German
do-gooders who are at pains to demonstrate their respect and tolerance for
traditional Turkish values. In "Anam" ("My Mother", 2001),
a German cleaning lady helps her Turkish co-worker find her son. It is
characteristic of these films that understanding and friendship between Germans
and Turks are only possible when the individual parties are members of lower
social classes. In Fassbinder's "Angst essen Seele auf" ("Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul", 1974), an older cleaning lady falls in love with a
young Moroccan. "Wenn der Richtige kommt" ("When the Right One
Comes Along", 2003) also has a cleaning lady, an unquestionable outsider,
falling in love with a Turkish man. In Tevfik Baser's "Abschied vom
falschen Paradies" ("Farewell to False Paradies", 1989), a Turkish
woman, in prison following the killing of her tyrannical husband, befriends the
German inmates. In films like "Theo gegen den Rest der Welt"
("Theo Against the Rest of the World", 1980) or "Voll
Normaaal," the close friendship between a "white trash" German
protagonist and a foreigner throws the outsider status of the German into sharp
relief. Similarly, in a genre film like Lars Becker's "Schattenboxer"
(1992), the crew of socially marginal tough guys only becomes truly whole when
the non-German joins them. What is likeable about all of these films is that
the origin of the foreign friend is not at all a problem: "The cultural
and racial differences [have been] subordinated to a masculine [...] canon of
behavior. [...] What is important is that the men can rely on each other and
that they have mastered a common symbolic language."
![]()
Source: timebandits, DIF"Gegen die Wand" (Head On, 2004)
With his melodrama "Gegen die Wand" ("Head
On"), Fatih Akin gave German cinema its first Berlinale triumph since
1986. Winning the Golden Bear and five German Film Awards, Akin's story about a
Turkish-German woman put a whole generation of young, non-German film makers
and actors into the limelight - despite the fact that they had already been
making significant creative contributions to German film for years.
IMAGES OF IMMIGRANTS
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Source: Concorde, DIF
"Kanak Attack" (2000)
For most moviegoers, contemporary "immigrant
cinema" consists in fast, hip films by and with young foreigners, in which
the "scene" is depicted more or less successfully as an easy
counterpart to models from American genre films: "Kanak Attack",
"Kurz und schmerzlos", "Freunde", "Lost Killers",
or the Kreuzberg hip-hop film "Status Yo!" all convey the image of a
cool neighborhood or ghetto milieu. Contemporary cinema by and about immigrants,
however, is quite a bit more diverse than one might think based on these
examples. But it has taken years, decades even, for films by first- and
second-generation immigrants to achieve such diversity and self-sufficiency. A
few individual films dealing with the fate of foreigners in Germany were made
as early as the early 1960s. This was at the very beginning of the wave of
immigration of migrant workers from countries like Turkey, Greece, and Italy.
The romantic drama "Bis zum Ende aller Tage" ("Girl From Hong
Kong", 1961) was likely the first feature film to deal with the
antagonisms, prejudices, and exclusionary processes that immigrants and
foreign-born citizens then faced. In
1965 Franz Antel addressed the problems of so-called "guest workers"
in his heimat-film "Ruf der Wälder".
THE 1970S AND 1980S
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Source: DIF
"In der Fremde" 1975
By the mid-1970s, there was a real surge of films that
depicted straightforwardly and with considerable complexity the problems and
crises confronting immigrants. With the exception of "In der Fremde"
by Iranian exile Sohrab Shahid Saless, these films were almost all made by
German directors, such as Christian Ziewer ("Aus der Ferne sehe ich dieses
Land"), Helma Sanders ("Shirins Hochzeit"), Rainer Werner
Fassbinder ("Angst essen Seele auf") and Werner Schroeter ("Palermo
oder Wolfsburg"), to name just a few of the more prominent. These film
makers consistently demonstrated a fine feeling for social problems in their
work. They established in the domain of art a mouthpiece for a marginalized
social group that had no lobby - not in the society itself and certainly not in
the world of culture.
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Source: DIF
"Palermo oder Wolfsburg" (1980)
Even when non-German film makers like Tevfik Baser ("40
qm Deutschland" ["Forty Square Meters of Germany"]) or Bernard
Safarik ("Das kalte Paradies") began addressing the conditions of
their compatriots' lives 'on foreign soil', the (cinematic) image of immigrants
remained much the same; the foreigner was depicted as little more than a
tolerated and exploited, oppressed and humiliated guest worker in an arrogant,
ignorant, and prejudiced society. A few rare attempts to consider the
relationship between natives and newcomers with satirical humor were produced
in Austria and Switzerland ("Die Schweizermacher" [The Swissmakers,
1978], "Hunderennen" [Dog-Race, 1983]). The German cinema, on the
other hand, as Katja Nicodemus succinctly put it in Die Zeit, "with its
impulse toward social enlightenment, presented so-called guest workers as
victims of a policy toward foreigners that was economically oriented and
unconcerned with integration."
THE CLASH OF CULTURES
When positive German figures appeared in these films at all,
they came across as didactic do-gooders like the idealistic lawyer in
"Jannan – die Abschiebung" (1985). But such figures remained the
exception. At the same time, feature films like "Palermo oder
Wolfsburg" and documentaries like "Die Kümmeltürkin geht" (1985)
were conveying the message, at least implicitly, that the encounter between
Mediterranean or Near Eastern mentalities and the Central European way of life could
never generate anything but conflict, so insurmountable were their differences.
Only in a few films, like Tefvik Baser's "Abschied vom falschen
Paradies" ("Farewell to False Paradise", 1989), do the cultures
ever reach a mutual understanding based on respect. Sometimes, as in Baser's
"40 qm Deutschland" (40 Square Meters of Germany, 1986), the usual
narrative is reversed, and it is the prejudices of a Turk toward his host
country that are at the heart of the conflict. But regardless of the
configuration, the attempt at coexistence is almost always doomed to failure in
these "immigrant films" of the seventies and eighties.
THE 1990S: FIRST (AND SECOND) GENERATION IMMIGRANTS BEHIND
THE CAMERA
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Source: DIF
"40 qm Deutschland" (40 Square Meters of Germany,
1986)
In the 1990s the second generation of immigrants—those born
in Germany—began to direct films about their generation's dreams, troubles, and
hopes. These contrasted with the feature films of the 1970s and 1980s, in which
primarily German directors portrayed their parents' lives. This
second-generation cinema started out with documentaries like Serap
Berrakkarasu's "Töchter zweier Welten" (1990), which portrays a
confident young Turkish-German woman and her more traditionally oriented
mother. And it has continued since, with numerous films made by directors like
the Turkish-Germans Fatih Akin ("Kurz und schmerzlos" ["Short
Sharp Shock"]), Thomas Arslan ("Geschwister – Kardesler"), and
Züli Aladag ("Elefantenherz"), the Greek-Germans Filippos Tsitos
("My Sweet Home") and Daphne Charizani ("Madrid"), the
Croat-German Damir Lukacevic ("Heimkehr"), and the Berlin-based
Georgian Dito Tsintsadze ("Schussangst" ["Gun-shy"]). They
are joined by female directors like Nadya Derado ("Yugotrip"), Ayşe
Polat ("En Garde") and Buket Alakus ("Anam" [My Mother]).
With all of their stylistic differences, these films testify to the new
self-confidence of the second generation. Their protagonists provide audiences
with identification figures who, while not without conflict, are thoroughly
positive, and whose actions are characterized by energy and vitality rather
than resignation and homesickness. While the issue of immigration continues to
play a relatively large role in their lives, life 'between the cultures' is no longer
the problem that it was for their parents. Their films show no sign of the
sentimentality or depression so typical of the immigrant dramas made by German
directors in the 1970s and 1980s. On the contrary, "Here was a cinema that
had little to do with juvenile delinquency, social issues, cultural isolation
or ghettoization," as Katja Nicodemus writes in Die Zeit. Instead, she
continues, these films convey a perspective "that in a globalized world of ubiquitous
migration has multiplied to such astronomical numbers that it hardly bears
mentioning."
THE ISSUE OF IMMIGRATION IS NO LONGER OBLIGATORY
While Fatih Akin's Berlinale success "Gegen die
Wand" (2004) specifically deals with the problems of a young
Turkish-German woman attempting to free herself from the confining moral
universe of her conservative family, the film effaces distinctions between
German and immigrant cinema. The issues Akin is dealing with are so universal
that it is difficult to describe the film in terms of an immigrant cinema or
particularly Turkish problems. Other transnational directors have already left
the foreigner or immigrant theme far behind them. With "Lautlos"
(2004) Mennan Yapo made a dyed-in-the-wool thriller about a (German) hit man.
And the films of prizewinning documentary and feature film director Romuald
Karmakar ("Warheads,""Manila"), who resists being labeled
a foreign director, have long focused almost exclusively on German characters
and on conflicts that arise in decidedly German middle-class milieus. This
thematic approach is one Karmakar shares with a member of the older generation
of transnational directors, namely Sohrab Shahid Saless, the Iranian exile who
took a rancorous view of the realities of German life in films like
"Ordnung" ("Order", 1980), "Empfänger Unbekannt"
(1983), and "Utopia" (1983). Sales is also known for his documentary
"Die langen Ferien der Lotte Eisner" ("The Long Vacation of
Lotte Eisner", 1979), which is about one of the best-known film critics of
German silent film.
NOT ONLY, BUT ALSO: "TURKISH-GERMAN" CINEMA TODAY | WITHOUT BORDERS: TRANSNATIONAL
© Wüste Filmproduktion, photo: Romano Ruhnau
"Anam" (2001)
The development of a Turkish-German cinema is not only part
of the international phenomenon of "Cinema du métissage" but also a
sign of the new, self-confident "intrusion" of Turks onto the German
cultural scene. At the same time, any discussion of Turkish-German cinema
automatically begs the question: Where does "Turkish-German" cinema
end and "German" cinema begin? Turkish-German cinema has demonstrated
considerable diversity with its distinctive orientations, styles, genres and
subjects. One of its most important tendencies is the gradual emancipation of
the film maker from surreptitious expectations and deep-seated stereotypes.
"We're a lot more German than a lot of Germans," said Buket Alakus in
2002. "Our apartments, our goals: there aren't as many differences as many
people used to think."
With their range of subject matter, the fact that these
directors have Turkish-German biographies is often obvious only in the fact
that their films regularly take up quarters in a multicultural milieu.
Significantly, there is a growing awareness that while these films could easily
narrate the experiences of immigrants and their children, they are by no means
bound to do so. In his first film, "Mach die Musik leiser" (1994),
Thomas Arslan portrays German youths from the Ruhr region on the threshold of
adulthood. Similarly, Mennan Yapo's thriller "Lautlos" (2004) has no
visible link to an immigrant history. In films like Züli Aladag's
"Elefantenherz" (2002) and Ayse Polat's "En Garde" (2004),
immigration only comes up in the subplot.
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Source: Peripher, DIF
"Der schöne Tag" (2001)
Unlike the immigration films of the 1970s and 1980s, which
generally showed clearly delineated cultures in conflict with each other, most
of these new films center around open forms of coexistence in a hybrid, urban
society. In "Gegen die Wand," for instance, the Turkish-German
characters, their lives fraught with problems and contradictions, are rooted in
different ways not only in Germany but also in Turkey. Even so, since the end
of the 1990s, this double background is generally depicted as something secondary,
commonplace, auxiliary to the film. Thomas Arslan put it this way when
discussing his film "Der schöne Tag": "Deniz's character no
doubt stands for experiences that many people her age have. [...] The
frequently invoked clash between cultures is something she has never
experienced herself. [...] She feels absolutely at home and at ease in the
environment she lives in."
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Source: Delphi, DIF
"Lola und Bilidikid" (1998)
One consequence of this orientation is that ethnic identity
in these films is presented simply as one element amongst many others.
"Lola und Bilidikid" (1999) portrays the sense of dislocation a
transvestite feels in a Turkish-German no-man's-land of sexual roles and
assumptions. "Yara" (1999) depicts mental instability and the
hopelessness of the psychiatric establishment. "Dealer" (1999), as
Horst Peter Koll writes in the magazine film-dienst, is "an existential
story that only indirectly deals with social conflicts and controversies."
Another consequence is that the politically confrontational gravity of many
films about immigrants is no longer inevitable. Films like Hussi Kutlucan's
"Ich Chef, Du Turnschuh" ("Me Boss, You Sneakers," 1998)
show that today even the subject of asylum can be dealt with in the form of
comedy. This rise in humorous treatments of multiculturalism corresponds on the
one hand with the filmmakers' new self-understanding, and on the other with the
increasing importance of comedy in German television, where not only Erkan
& Stefan, but Kaya Yanar ("Was guckst Du?") and Django Asül
("Quatsch Comedy Club") as well, have firmly established themselves
in recent years.
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© Wüste Filmproduktion, photo: Kerstin Stelter
"Gegen die Wand" (Head On, 2004)
While films by immigrants or second generation immigrants
were the exception in German cinema well into the 1990s, a greater normality
and continuity can be seen today in the work of both transnational male and
female Turkish-German directors. The same holds true for those who work in
front of the camera: actors like Birol Ünel (winner of the 2004 German Film
Award) and actresses like Idil Üner are now familiar faces in German cinema.
They are visible not only on screen, but on television, where for some years
now the ranks of non-German performers have been increasing. Heterogeneity and
a complex and elusive connection between biography and fiction all characterize
the new Turkish-German cinema. At the same time, broad swathes of the public
still associate these films with "authentic" perspectives on the
social problems of immigrants. The elements of fantasy, fictionalization, and
aesthetic processes that characterize any film rarely remain for long in the
public eye. People expect "authentic stories" about a homogeneous
society of Turks in Germany - i.e. something that the films with all their
diversity emphatically contradict. Even when some films continue to proliferate
stereotypes and social-critical clichés, these films testify not only to the
experience of immigrants, but to a hybrid German reality beyond the confines of
Leitkulturen or "majority cultures".
THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT TURKISH-GERMAN CINEMA
Question 1: Who are
we talking about here?
Who are these so-called "Turkish-German"
filmmakers? They are women and men who came with their parents to Germany when
they were children or teenagers, or who were born in Germany. Some of them have
German citizenship, others do not. The majority of them grew up bilingually,
but it would be hard to say who considers which language to be his or her
native tongue. And how they define themselves is up to them. Their films are as
diverse as their biographies.
© Trans-Film
"Geschwister – Kardeşler" (1997)
Question 2: What is a German film?
Where does the boundary lie between German and
Turkish-German cinema? Does one even exist? How do we categorize a film like
"Gegen die Wand" ("Head On"), which was produced by a
German company and made under the direction of a Hamburg-born, ethnically
Turkish director, and whose forerunners can be found in American genre film?
Compounding matters further is the fact that the film was set partly in
Hamburg, partly in Istanbul, with a German, Turkish, and
"Turkish-German" crew, and was shot in both Turkish and German. Is it
a German, a Turkish, or a Turkish-German film? Is Thomas Arslan's
"Geschwister - Kardeşler," which is about three very different Berlin
teenagers (played by Serpil Turhan, Tamer Yigit, and Savas Yurderi), "more
Turkish" than, say, Mennan Yapo's thriller "Lautlos", which has
Joachim Król playing the lead? Is "Lautlos" more "Turkish"
than Wolfgang Becker's "Good Bye, Lenin!", which deals with East and
West Germans? Both films were produced by the Berlin-based X Filme Creative
Pool; which raises the question: to what extent do the production conditions of
a film by a Turkish director living in Germany, or by a German one of Turkish
origin, differ from those of a ("merely") German film maker? How
German or how Turkish is "Yara"? The film is a German-Turkish-Swiss
co-production directed by Yilmaz Arslan, who was born in Turkey and has lived
in Germany since 1978. "Yara" has played in German and in Turkey. The
female lead, Yelda Rynaud, is a French citizen who was born in Austria. The
cameraman, Jürgen Jürges, is from Hannover. Editing and sound were covered by
two Brazilians, André Bendocchi Alves and João da Costa Pinto. And the music
was composed by the Lebanese-born sound artist Rabih Abou-Khalil. Does this say
anything about immigrants? About Turks? About Germans? About European film
production in the twenty-first century?
Source: Pegasos, DIF
"Yara" (1998)
Question 3: The meaning of "Turkish-German"
How ought we to talk about these films? To what extent does
the phrase "Turkish-German" actually solidify an opposition and
further affirm assumptions and stereotypes? We have a dilemma here: Nowadays,
when globalization and border crossers of all kinds have become the norm, these
films present us with the challenge of describing cultural phenomena without
recourse to established, albeit questionable, categories such as nationality
and ethnicity. Simply to ignore differences that are perceived (in whatever form)
by the public, however, would mean turning a blind eye to an important aspect
of the reception of these films. During the 2004 Berlinale, for example, Fatih
Akin still had to repudiate people labeling "Gegen die Wand" as a
"guest-worker film". For lack of a more precise term for this net of
markedly different films, we will call it here, in quotes, "Turkish-German
cinema".
DAUGHTERS OF TWO WORLDS? WOMEN CHARACTERS, FILMS BY WOMEN
A favorite subject of German immigrant film in the 1970s and
1980s was the fate of the Turkish woman; twice alienated, once as a woman and
again as a foreigner, she had no language, no rights, and no way out. Enormous
changes have taken place since then in the lives of second- and
third-generation Turkish-German women. A generation of self-confident women
directors now stands behind the camera. "German viewers still expect
socially critical films, but I'm interested in making stories for the heart and
soul," states Buket Alakus, whose film "Anam" ("My
Mother") came out in 2001. She intended the film "to entertain but
sometimes, too, to go against convention. [...] Anam ultimately isn't a Turkish
woman, at least not in the way Turkish women are portrayed in the movies she's
seen."
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© Wüste Filmproduktion, photo: Romano Ruhnau
Saskia Vester, Nursel Köse, Audrey Motaung in
"Anam" (My Mother, 2001)
In the documentary "Töchter zweier Welten" (1990),
Serap Berrakkarasu depicts the problems of arranged marriages and marital
violence, but without glorifying victimhood. The film centers around a dialogue
between two generations of women who must find their own way between two
cultures. In "Mädchen am Ball" (1995) and "Nach dem Spiel"
(1997), Aysun Bademsoy portrays five Turkish-German football players. The focus
of her thirty-minute documentary "Ein Mädchen im Ring" (1996) is the
boxer Fikriye Selen, who trains along with forty men at the
"Faustkampf" Boxing Club in Köln. In "Wie Zucker im Tee"
("Like Sugar for Tea", 2001), Hatice Ayten shows people who
"with their winning, open smiles put paid to the old story about fractured
identities." With "Auslandstournee" ("Tour Abroad",
2000) Ayse Polat has succeeded in treating radical cultural changes and sexual
boundaries with a sense of humor. In this road movie, a gay torch singer
travels with an eleven-year-old girl from Turkey to Germany on the trail of her
vanished mother. Polat's second feature, "En Garde" (2004), tells of
the friendship of two unusual girls: the Kurdish asylum-seeker Berivan, and the
lower class German Alice. "En Garde" was distinguished with a Silver
Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival.
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© X Verleih
Pinar Erincin, Maria Kwiatkowsky in "En Garde"
(2004)
The actress Idil Üner is likewise no stranger to the
director's chair. Her directorial debut, the comedy "Die Liebenden vom
Hotel Osman", won the 2001 German Short Film Award (Gold Medal). The young
director Canan Yilmaz provides a refreshing cinematic treatment of
transnationality with her questioning film: "Ben Kimim?/Wer bin ich?"
(2003). The four-minute short shows a young woman in a black sweater and
dreadlocks, turning around inside a room. When she's facing the viewer, she ask
herself (and her public) in German and Turkish, "Ben kimim? Wer bin ich? -
Who am I?" And answers at once: "I'm a German! A Turk! A
Turkish-German citizen. A Turkish German, a Turkish woman born in Germany, a
German woman of Turkish origin, a half-German woman. German. Turkish.
Turkish-German?" At the end of the film she recites, with ironic pathos, a
poem in Turkish: "The day will come when you'll know what you are. My
heart is bleeding, my heart is on fire. What am I? Where am I from, and where
am I going? Who am I?" The young woman, now wearing a head scarf and clad
in blue silk from head to toe, turns around inside the room. The
director/actress's body is both an authentification of her identity, which
resists stereotyping, and a playing field. "Ben Kimim" is both a game
with the camera and a game with self-image and the image of the other: the
director's self-image and images of other, as well as those had by her viewers,
who in viewing have become part of the game.
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Source: Ottfilm, Dif
Manfred Zapatka, Daniel Brühl in "Elefantenherz"
(Elephant Heart, 2002)
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Source: zero film, DIF
Poster from "Der schöne Tag" (A Fine Day, 2001)
The new
"Turkish-German" films are regularly praised for providing, from an
insider perspective as it were, a complex picture of the everyday reality of
young Turks in Germany. This may be the case for some films, but it ignores the
considerable differences between these productions. While a film like
"Winterblume" (1997) tells of an immigrant in a politically
confrontational manner, "Kurz und schmerzlos" ("Short Sharp
Shock", 1998) celebrates multicultural solidarity; and in "Der schöne
Tag" ("A Fine Day", 2001) the main character's ethnic background
plays no role whatsoever - significantly, this film is the third in a trilogy
about Turkish-German youth in Berlin.
Some of these films are only marginally concerned with
immigration ("Elefantenherz" [2002], "En Garde" [2004]),
while others pay it no heed at all ("Mach die Musik leiser" [1994],
"Gott ist tot" [2003], or "Lautlos" [2004]). Some of them
have nothing to do with Turkish immigrants ("Schwarze Polizisten"
[1991] or "Solino" [2002]), or only partly ("Wie Zucker im
Tee" ["Like Sugar for Tea", 2001]). Decidedly different
documentary productions like "Deutsche Polizisten" (1999) "Mein
Vater, der Gastarbeiter" (1994), or "Wir haben vergessen
zurückzukehren" (2001) stand back to back with light, poetic feature films
like "Sommer in Mezra" (1991) or social-critical dramas dealing with
psychic pressures and social violence ("Aprilkinder" ["April
Children", 1998], "Kleine Freiheit" ["A Little Bit of
Freedom", 2003]). In some films ("Töchter zweier Welten" [1990],
"Geschwister - Kardeşler" [1997], "Gegen die Wand" [2004]),
images of self and other are treated with considerable complexity, and
protagonists are much more than just members of an ethnic group. Still other
films remain fraught with stereotypes even today, with ethnic clichés, e.g. in
"Anam" (2001) or "Solino," and with questionable attempts
to stage a kind of "ghetto pride" as in "Kanak Attack"
(2000) or "Alltag" (2002). The comedic deconstruction of stereotypes
has functioned so far only rarely, examples being "Ich Chef, Du
Turnschuh" ("Me Boss, You Sneakers", 1998) and "Getürkt"
(1996).
These differences are by no means limited to subject matter
and themes, but can be found in directing styles as well. In Fatih Akin's
films, Hamburg-Altona is shown with a lot of local pride as a sort of
"cool hood", while Berlin's streets have never looked so cosmopolitan
as in Thomas Arslan's work. The two directors (to stay with these particular
examples) also differ considerably in their distinctive positionings. In the
one corner, there's Fatih Akin, who stated in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in
February 2004: "I want to be a commercial film maker," and who makes
movies that are modelled on American genre films and are capable of moving
viewers with considerable emotional force. In the opposite corner, there's
Thomas Arslan, a member of the so-called "Berlin school" who produces
complex and formally rigorous films whose forerunners can be found in European
auteur cinema; he is clearly in opposition to the mainstream. These
"Turkish-German" film makers have abundant opportunities before them:
Akin and Arslan are (cinematic) worlds apart, and those worlds have nothing to
do with the adjectives "Turkish" or "German."
FROM "FORTY SQUARE METERS OF GERMANY" TO
"FORTY SQUARE METERS OF ISTANBUL"
The film "40 qm Deutschland" ("Forty Square
Meters of Germany", 1986) by Tevik Baser, who was born in Turkey in 1951,
is a condemnation of existing conditions. The film foregrounds the story of an
immigrant, Turna, who is brought by her husband Dursun to Hamburg and locked
inside their apartment. She is shown as being powerless in a macho society and
isolated in a foreign land that she knows only from looking out the window. The
film ends when her husband dies and she stands before the front door, a door to
the world that according to Dursun was full of dangers and infectious
immorality.
Source: DIF
"40 qm Deutschland" (Forty Square Meters of
Germany, 1986)
Twenty-four years later, Fatih Akin's film "Gegen die
Wand" focuses on the life of Sibel, a young woman of Turkish descent who
lives in Hamburg. Akin, who was born in Hamburg in 1973, does not condemn
anyone in the film, even though he does show constricting relations and
considerable existential uncertainty. Sibel is banging her head against a wall
just like her husband, Cahit, is.
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In the foreground are ambivalent characters
who resist ethnic categorization, who are as anchored in the Hamburger
"scene" as they are in the world of Turkish immigrants, and whose
lives are as typical as they are unique, wherever they are. This evolution from
Turna to Sibel is characteristic of a development in films by immigrants. One
might put it this way: in 2004, the filmmakers (like their protagonists) have
far more than "forty square meters of Germany" at their disposal;
rather, their opportunities extend so far that they might take in even
"forty square meters of Istanbul" (Sibel chooses, after all, to start
a family in the Turkish metropolis).
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© WÜSTE Film, photographer: Kerstin Stelter
Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul 2005
THE HISTORY OF
IMMIGRATION IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
1st Phase (1955 – 1973): Recruitment Phase
Negotiations for temporary work migration to be initiated by
the recruitment countries. Regulations differ from agreement to agreement,
those with Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia being more restrictive.
1955 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Italy.
1960 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Greece and Spain.
1961 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Turkey.
1963 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Morocco.
1964 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Portugal. Two-year residency restriction for Turkish
immigrants struck from recruitment agreement.
1965 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Tunisia.
1965–1971 Number of immigrant schoolchildren in West Germany
rises from 35,000 to 159,000.
1966/67 Recession: Foreign workforce reduced to 400,000.
1968 The West German government concludes recruitment
negotiations with Yugoslavia.
1968–1973 Economic boom: Foreign workforce increases from
991,300 to 2,595,000.
1969 Italians make up largest contingent of immigrants at
23%. Intensified recruitment in Yugoslavia and Turkey.
1971 Change in work-permit regulation: Foreign employees who
have worked longer than five years in West Germany may be granted a special
work visa.
1972 Turks comprise largest contingent of immigrants.
1973 Highpoint of immigration. "Action Program on
Foreign Employment" for reducing the number of immigrants. Turkish workers
go on strike in West German factories.
November 23, 1973 Ban on recruitment.
Sources: The webpage of the Bundesbeauftragte für Migration,
Flüchtlinge und Integration: http://www.integrationsbeauftragte.de/. Hisashi
Yano, "Migrationsgeschichte," in Carmine Chielino, ed.,
Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: ein Handbuch (Weimar: Metzler 2000).
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