Until recently, depictions of Turkey’s religiously conservative grassroots in either “secular” or “Islamist” films had become familiar. In “secular” films, religiously conservative Turks were portrayed as naïve and even sub-intelligent people who were either ridiculed or criticized. In “Islamist” films, by contrast, they were depicted as heroic and enlightened people who were on a mission to save the secularists from their wayward ways. Since the rise of the Justice and Development Party in 2002, these familiar – almost stereotypical – representations of religiously conservative Turks have started to change. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have been writing about how the political and social fabrics of Turkish society have changed under the Justice and Development Party governments. However, only a handful of these works have analyzed how genres of popular culture have echoed and responded to the changing political aspirations and social attitudes of Turkey’s Islamists. This paper focuses on two recent movies, The ?mam (?smail Güne?: 2005) and Bü?ra (Alper Ça?lar: 2010) to demonstrate how the changing outlooks and lifestyles of Turkey’s Islamists are being dealt with and reflected in Turkish cinema. In the last few years, Turkish cinema has witnessed a proliferation of protagonists who are religiously conservative. The hero of The ?mam and the heroine of Bü?ra provide two such examples. By analyzing the lead characters in the movies, the paper demonstrates that the all-too-common depictions of religiously conservative Muslims have given way to new Islamic identities and alliances. The lead characters do not fit squarely the traditional boxes that would have been assigned to them as “Islamists.” Both in terms of appearances and attitudes, they manifest multiple layers of identity, some of which are quite “secular.” Moreover, in terms of plot, the movies center on the internal journeys of their main characters. The hero and heroine in The ?mam and Bü?ra are not idealized Muslims. Rather, they were reflective individuals with reservations and trepidations about their faith. While the movies were meant to attract the religiously conservative segments of society, they fared poorly in the box offices. The paper will conclude with potential suggestions for this phenomenon.

"Gender and Memory in the Films By Tomris Giritlio?lu and Ye?im Ustao?lu" During the 1990s and early 2000s, politically active female film directors have acquired increased visibility in Turkey. This talk will discuss works by two of the most important, Ye?im Ustao?lu and Tomris Giritlio?lu, whose films deconstruct the narrative of “national history”. Through the depiction of national traumas, both Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu highlight the subordination of all those who occupy precarious positions within the nation-state: the non-Muslims, Kurds, and poor men and women. Both directors challenge assumptions about the homogenous “Turkish and Sunni-Muslim, yet secular, modern nation-state” through a gendered position. I argue that Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu impart a distinctively “feminine” (if not an exclusively female) gaze, which deconstructs the patriarchal arrangements in the mainstream society, and the vernacular of its national history. Their films make room for individual and group accounts which have been otherwise subordinated to the grand narrative of national history. Archiving messy human and group emotions, Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu complicate the neat picture of the modern nation-state through stories of individuals encountering trauma. References to strings of trauma (E.g. to tax of 1942, pogroms of 1955, Kurdish conflict of the 1990s) identify the nation as a construct of history in a state of continuous reproduction through moments of silence and subordination, rather than a product of one catastrophic moment of origination (e.g. a war of liberation). Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu represent a reversal of fortunes, a transition from the object to the authorial position for women in cinema. Women are no longer just ambivalent objects of desire in melodramas and “man’s films” of the 1960s and 70s; nor are they questions posed by “women’s films,” of urban male directors in the 1980s. At least some women no longer need a sympathetic male gaze on the facets of their victimization; instead, they explore how gender informs and is informed by the network of hegemonies (e.g. religion, ethnicity, class) in the mainstream of modern Turkish society.

This paper delves into two fiction films, I Saw the Sun (Güne?i Gördüm) (2009) and The Storm (F?rt?na/Bahoz) (2008), as vantage points for a discussion about the contemporary representations of Kurds and the Kurdish issue in cinema. Both films narrate stories of displacement, war, and the Kurdish experience yet with drastically divergent undercurrents about Kurds, the Kurdish issue, and the Turkish state at large. While I Saw the Sun revolves around a rural family and the humanitarian tragedies they face before and after migrating to Istanbul, The Storm is about the political socialization of a Kurdish teenager in Istanbul. In I Saw the Sun, Kurdish individuals are long-suffering yet obedient subjects, who submit to a Turkish state that guarantees their security. In The Storm, on the other hand, the protagonist runs into trouble with the same state; he becomes a self-declared revolutionary and joins the Kurdish guerilla forces. Second, appearing in movie theatres within only a few months of each other, the two films received markedly different responses. Within a few weeks of its release, I Saw the Sun was seen by two and a half million moviegoers. Many critics celebrated both the film and its director for his courage to narrate such a story. The Storm, on the other hand, was seen by fewer than one hundred thousand moviegoers in part due to a lack of exposure and critical praise. Except for a few, critics largely ignored it, while the selection committees of the prominent national film festivals excluded the film from their programs. In this paper, I explain why and how certain representations of the Kurdish issue and Kurdishness gain currency while others are ignored. In other words, I hope to explore “the rules of discursive formation” that circumscribe the articulations of Kurdishness and lead to the recurrence of certain representations rather than others (Foucault 1972). An analysis of the previously mentioned films reveals these pathways of circulation, situates the category of Kurdishness within the metadiscursive conditions of Turkish nationalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, and evinces the rules of the discursive formation about Kurds, which seem lately to be modified but are in fact continuous with existing state ideologies. The dismissal of the ethno-political character of the Kurdish issue is a stark continuity between earlier and current discursive formations about Kurds, a continuity, which facilitates I Saw the Sun’s availability, while it decreases The Storm’s circulation in film circles.

In this paper, I explore the politics and aesthetics of a recent orientation in contemporary Turkish cinema that engages with different aspects of the provincial/peripheral (‘ta?ra’). This new orientation finds expression in the works of renowned filmmakers such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplano?lu but also in the internationally lesser-known yet equally significant works of Ümit Ünal, Belma Ba?, Ya?mur and Durul Taylan, Reha Erdem and the late Ahmet Uluçay. My entry point into the analysis of this new trend is the concept of ‘ta?ra,’ which has been produced as a deeply marked and slippery concept in the culturo-political topography of Turkey. Although commonly used to refer to a geographical location, to those parts of the country that are outside of big cities, ‘ta?ra’ also connotes a rather hierarchical and awkward relationship between the center(s) and the peripheries. Particularly with the onset of the Turkish modernization project, ‘ta?ra’ has come to signify a rather ambivalent and ambiguous space. On the one hand, defined largely in terms of deprivation, insularity, and traditionalism as opposed to the social and economic plenitude, modern and enlightened politico-intellectual-scape of the center, ta?ra was abjected as some spatially and temporally, and indeed ontologically, yonder domain. As such, it had to be developed, regulated and brought into maturity/modernity. On the other hand, the same hegemonic narratives of modernization simultaneously produced ‘ta?ra’ as an element to establish the authenticity of the emerging ‘nation’ and its difference from the West. Here, ta?ra signified the unadulterated native self. Infused with nostalgia and mystification, ta?ra was codified as the “repository of folk wisdom;” benevolent, forbearing and dignified, ‘ta?ra folks’ were often pitted against the menacing figures of the ‘over-westernized,’ self-centered, inauthentic urbanites. Although the social(ist)-realist films of the 1960s and 70s, to a limited extent, questioned these dominant narratives of modernization around ‘ta?ra’, it is in the recent trend in Turkish cinema that I locate not only more complex and nuanced articulations of the concept of ‘ta?ra’ but also a real encounter with it. Through the analysis of particular scenes, I try to argue that these films contain moments where the boundaries between center/periphery, authenticity/ inauthenticity, inside/outside are blurred and/or dislocated in such a way so as to reveal that ‘ta?ra’ is not simply the sign of an ‘other’ space, but is the constitutive outside of the modern subject who is marked by some fundamental loss and its bereavement.