Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens

SABINE HAKE and BARBARA MENNEL, eds. Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012). Pp. 251. $ 90.00 cloth.The making of a distinct Turkish German cinema over the last three decades is an instance of what has variously been termed minority cinema, exilic cinema, transnational cinema, accented cinema (Hamid Naficy), hyphenated cinema, le cinema de metissage (Georg Seeslen), a cinema of double occupancy (Thomas Elsaesser) or diasporic cinema As Sabine Hake wrote in 2008, it is a cinema that, in its dominant trajectory, thematizes "the consequences of migration, displacement, diaspora and exile from the perspective of private lives and personal relationships and through the key categories of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and race." Although many of the filmmakers associated with the term prefer to distance themselves from what one contributor to this volume calls a "value-added marketing label" (199), the development of Turkish German cinema, particularly since the late 1990s, has been accompanied by international critical acclaim and a substantial body of validating scholarly work. Although the latter has included several works in German, this is the first volume to appear in English, and, while making no claims to comprehensiveness, it is by some distance the most systematic, original and thought-provoking discussion of the subject to date. Subsequently it has been complemented by another volume of essays evincing a slightly different emphasis on "Turkey-related cinema," Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey, edited by Gokcen Karanfil and Serkan §avk (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).Although the impetus for Hake and Mennel's anthology was provided by a workshop at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, it displays a greater level of coherence than is often the case with publications based on the proceedings of symposia. In marked contrast to volumes in which the introduction amounts to little more than a table of contents formulated in continuous prose, here the editors have furnished a contextualising introductory essay that is both thematically and methodologically wide ranging. Their approach is informed by the desire to move beyond the traditional focus on representation and signification and, in particular, a preoccupation with discourses of identity:Instead of abandoning identity as a critical category altogether, we suggest expanding our definition of Turkish German cinema to include the perspective of filmmaking as a profession and of ethnicity as a function of self-branding. This enables us to theorize transnational cinema as part of Europe's new creative economies and its long history of film migration and cultural exchange. Turkish German cinema makes a rightful claim to occupying both sides of the divide marked by the absent hyphen: of being self and Other, at home and abroad, foreign and native-a unique position that explains the frequent enlistment of these films in larger theoretical debates about national cinema (10).Accordingly, the individual essays engage with a number of disciplinary approaches, including, film aesthetics, television studies, auteur theory, star studies, reception studies, feminist theory, and minority studies. The volume gains further coherence from the resonance across the fifteen contributions of "keywords such as identity, stereotype, hybridity, migration, globalization, cosmopolitanism, social realism, spectatorship, nostalgia, and performativity," that bind the essays together "like an invisible thread" (13).The book has been plausibly structured into four sections. The title of the first, "Configurations of Stereotypes and Identities: New and Old," is suitably reflected in the opening essay by Daniela Berghahn on the feature film Evet, I Do (2009). Sehing the analysis in the context of a broad range of social realist texts and romcoms, Berghahn traces the paradigm shiftfrom culture clash to cultural convergence and links it to a concomitant change in the representational strategies of Turkish German cinema. …