Fatih Akin & Post-nationalist Cinema

Fatih Akin and Post-nationalist Cinema

(One idea plumped up with three tangents)

(written 2008)

As he reflects his Turkish family background, the German-born director Fatih Akin may augur a shift in world cinema to a new internationalism. At 35 Akin typifies the generation for whom the operative community transcends national borders. His focus on German-Turkish relations is especially timely as Turkey pursues admission to the European Union. 

 In addition to issues around EU governance, the new internationalism in European film grows out of that mixed blessing of corporate globalization and the demographic shifts from immigration. The concept of A Cultural Nationalism Without Borders has both positive and negative implications. The clearly negative element is the challenge that anti-assimilationist Islam radicals pose to their host nations. This threat to national identities and values is exemplified by the firestorms suffered by Mark Steyn here, novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan in Britain, and the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Holland. This aspect is unlikely to be addressed by a cinema dedicated either to the mass box office or to the reflex judgments of the dangerously well-meaning Left. I will instead focus on the more positive, at least the less incendiary, effects of the new post-nationalism.

But first, Tangent #1:

This new internationalism rather jars us old pre-Boomer cinephiles. For film became our most serous art and pleasure by celebrating national cultures. True, to claim seriousness for the form we would usually focus on the coherence across the director’s canon: Hitchcock vs Lean, Ford vs. Hawks, Kurosawa vs Ozu, Godard vs Truffaut, Fellini vs. Antonioni, Bunuel vs. the world. Every nation bred its own auteurs. But we knew that for all their distinctive voices these artists advanced their respective national cultures. 

Indeed we embraced the medium’s new maturity because it made us feel we were citizens of the larger world. Even as it explored the most serious issues of life and poetry, ‘Cinemah’ opened us to divergent national cultures. If Calgary or Lethbridge did not have a Thalia (the arty rep house in the Greenwich pre-Global Village) they could still have a Film Society that imported 16 mm passports out of Here. All the more rewarding when they exercised the provincial provincial censors by flashing some breasts or letting an adulterer like Jeanne Moreau go unpunished. 

As Canadians we welcomed the advent of the two venerable Dons Owen and Shebib, Gilles Carle, Claude Jutra, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, because they proved -- to us as much as to the international community --that Canadian film need not be just the tatty hem on the American crinoline. Now we had our own national identity -- or two. Soon ‘from sea to shining sea’ meant from Jack Darcus in Victoria to William MacGillivray in Halifax with Mireille Dansereau and Micheline Lanctot en route. 

Now, at least since The Red Violin (Francois Girard, 1998) Canadian cinema has turned outward to international narratives. This is distinct from those eager denials of our nationality like Porky’s, Porky’s Revenge, Animal House, Animal House Revenge, and so on ad nauseum, where we’d fly an American flag within the first two minutes in order to hide in that American crinoline. But now our leading auteurs – after Norman McLaren -- Michael Snow, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan -- have transcended nationality in their subjects as in their reputation. The ubiquitous Don McKellar wrote the screenplay for the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (2008).

Even the ostensibly parochial My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2008) rather finds the director bellying up to the bar of an international poetic genre, the Symphony of a City as launched by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and most recently distinguished by Terrence Davies’ memoir of his Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008). If Maddin is contemplating his navel here, it’s a global navel engagement. His subject is not so much Winnipeg as urbane urban mythopoeia. Like Marcel Dzama, Maddin is a Winnipeg artist who has parlayed small works of huge quirkiness into international stature. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, if Maddin is ‘from Winnipeg,’ the scope of his ambition and his incorporation of the entire rhetoric of film history make him immediately ‘far from Winnipeg,’ however close he appears to operate. When Maddin opened this film in New York City last June he was deployed in several other functions unrelated to Canadian film. Clearly his local resonates the universal. In the January Sight and Sound Maddin made three of the critics’ Best Five Films of 2008 lists and was heralded by Michael Brooke as the “Canadian straitjacket case” (which in context is praise indeed). Even without a beckoning EU our cinema now waxes international. End of tangent.

***

In Fatih Akin’s films this change – this blurring of old borders -- proves the host culture’s richness. The theme of his 2007 film, The Edge of Heaven is the redemption, both personal and national, that derives from interweaving disparate cultures. The film presents three sets of alienated parent-child relationships which are resolved only after all six characters have moved to the other country and embraced that Other’s perspective. Though Turkey is characterized by civil unrest it is there that the characters find their peace and salvation. In a comic summary of this internationalist spirit, when the prostitute Yeter (Nursel Kose) is asked if she’ll “do French” she replies: “French, Italian, Greek, I’ll do it International for you.” I really should pay her for that line.

The central figure, Nejat (Baki Davrak), is a Turkish professor of German literature at a German university. That is, he personifies internationalist culture. His Goethe lecture presumes an order beneath loss and chaos: “Who wants to see a rose bloom in the depths of winter?” That winter echoes in the casual mention of death in the opening scene and in the titles that predict the two women’s deaths, both in absurd accidents. 

 Nejat initially disapproves when his widower father Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) takes that prostitute as his live-in girlfriend. Nejat softens when he learns Yeter is funding her daughter Ayten’s (Nurgul Yesilcay) university education. When the drunken Ali kills his prostitute, Nejat rejects his father and goes to Istanbul in search of her daughter. While Nejat takes over a German bookstore there, Ayten, who is a political activist, flees the Turkish police to Germany. There she is taken in by a German student, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), with whom she has a lesbian affair. For that Ayten is resented by Lotte’s conservative mother Susanne, played by Hanna Schygulla. The rebel Ayten is arrested and sent back to a Turkish prison. Her lover Lotte campaigns to free her. After Lotte’s death her mother Susanne relents and takes on her daughter’s campaign to free Ayten. 

The two conflicted generations converge when Nejat, the unforgiving son in one family, meets Susanne, the newly forgiving mother in the other family, for dinner.  This leads him to forgive his father. In the last shot Nejat waits on the beach for his father’s unlikely return. Ali – who in despair has set fatal sail into the sunset -- will probably never know his son has forgiven him. Yet Nejat still redeems himself by this penitence. The instruction “repent” echoes through the film, from the Turks threatening the prostitute Yeter in Germany to the rebels’ internecine squabbles and at least the posture of penitence by which Ayten wins release from jail.

The tangle of impulse and coincidence points to the tragic effects of human division, whether personal or cultural. The need to understand and to embrace the Other is more clearly suggested in the film’s original German title, Auf der anderen Seite (On the other Side) than in the given translation, The Edge of Heaven.  

Amid these tragic divisions the rose that truly blooms in winter is Susanne – Lotte’s mother -- the character who most movingly transcends her prejudices.  In Hannah Schygulla Akin cast arguably the most compelling persona of post-war German film. Schygulla in her Fassbinder films, especially The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979-80), exemplified the responsible new Germany: brave, pragmatic, generous, loving, indomitable. Though we’re shocked to see this beauty as a bigoted frump, her character rises to recover those values. In this appearance the actress’s courage matches her character’s. Paradoxically, in the film’s most affirmative scene Susanne and Nejat, the conservative German mother and the liberal Turkish son, drink a toast to our most compelling unifier, Death.

Now, Tangent #2:

In a similar iconography Stephen Daldry in The Reader cast Bruno Ganz as the law professor who embodies Germany’s hard confrontation of the past. As Ganz is another icon of the new German film, his portrayal of Hitler in Downfall (2004) inflects his persona into the German who transcends the past by confronting history. Ganz’s law professor leads the new generation through the implications of the fact that “The law is narrow” – against the breadth that humanity and usually complex moral issues require. His candid humility contrasts to the shame that paralyzes the central couple. The Ralph Fiennes hero remains emotionally numbed by his sexual initiation by a beautiful older woman who he later learns had exploited young girls in the concentration camps to the same ends for which she exploited him. For her part the Kate Winslett heroine is a self-unaware cleanliness freak whose late literacy feeds only her taste for pulp romances and provides an elevation for her suicide. The boy’s – and our – discovery of her Nazi function rewrites everything we have thought about her, including her cleansing, her sexual generosity, her craving for narrative, and her self-destructive shame. The theme of literal literacy opens into moral illiteracy and reiterates the helplessness of high culture against savagery. 

End of Tangent 2. One left.

***

Akin introduced the internationalism of The Edge of Heaven more lightly in his first fiction feature, a heist film, Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos, 1998), where the gangster friends are a Turk, a Greek and a Serbian who tries to join an Albanian gang.  

Akin crossed other borders when he mixed genres in his more adventurous In July (2000), where a noir opening spins into a screwball romantic comedy that even includes whimsical animation. A young German physics teacher Daniel (Moritz Bleibtrau) hitches a ride with the violent Isa (Mahmet Kurtulus), a sinister Turk who has a corpse in the trunk of his car. As in The Edge of Heaven, the ensuing narrative explains how the hero got to the film’s ominous opening scene. By the end all our suspicions about that Turk are dispelled.

In a flea market Daniel attracts a girl, July (Christiane Paul). She persuades him to buy a Mayan sun-ring that will ensure he will meet the one girl destined to bring him eternal happiness. She hopes that will be her so she invites him to a rock concert, where – to my present purpose -- the band sings about “a love that crossed over every border.” But these sun-crossed lovers are thwarted when Daniel is instead attracted to a Turkish girl, Melek (Idil Uher), who also wears a sun image. After a chaste night together she leaves to meet her friend in Istanbul. When Daniel drives off after her, he picks up the hitchhiking July, who -- frustrated at losing him -- decided to go whichever direction her first ride would take her. As destiny would have it, he is that first ride.

In the subsequent series of accidents, disasters and random crimes, Daniel and July are repeatedly separated and reunited. As she introduces him to fighting, marijuana, the exhilarating joys of misadventure, she proves her initial sense that “He has something deep inside waiting to get out.” Like a politicized – and leopard-free -- Bringing Up Baby, the ultimate romantic union fulfills the screwball heroine’s intuition and ends the hero’s dullness. Prefiguring the end, Daniel pretends to marry July so the border guard (played by director Akin himself) will admit them into Romania. The fake union overcomes the barrier of the border. In his cameo the director personifies border crossing.

Tangent #3:

The film’s genre switch from its thriller start to the comedy conclusion anticipates the frame on the Irish Danny Boyle’s current exercise in internationalism, Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle opens with a chase through the meanest streets of Mumbai and a torturous interrogation, but works around to close with a garish Bollywood song and dance spectacular. In that framework collide not just two genres but two worlds and two visions of life. It establishes perhaps the film’s radical point, the reciprocal relationship between the harshness of social reality and escapist entertainment, especially film and TV. Here as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), the arts provide a refuge from life’s terrible miseries but that anodyne keeps us from addressing them. The illusional refuge perpetuates the misery. Boyle’s hero succeeds in part by his own integrity but more largely because the questions he’s asked happen to coincide with what he has suffered. He wins with the scars of his experience, as his beloved is purified by her scar. But his freakish success, which feeds the fantasy of the suffering nation, hardly justifies the system from which he has implausibly emerged. The film embodies that saw-off. End of tangents.

Though Akin’s In July is a much lighter film it anticipates the concerns of The Edge of Heaven. In both, the German heroes find their salvation in Turkey. The Turkish border officials are more generous and considerate than the Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian -- as the girl Ayten’s experience in a Turkish prison is a far cry from Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978). In the final resolution the dreaded Turk Isa was only trying to smuggle back into Turkey his dead Uncle Ahmed, who died while visiting his family in Hamburg but could not be buried there without his birth certificate. That is delivered by Isa’s girl friend, who turns out to be Daniel’s first dream-girl, Melek. The Turks not only prove amenable but they enable the German lovers, Daniel and July, to fulfill their destiny. 

In addition to refuting their suspicious stereotype, both films touch on the alienation Turkish immigrants experience in Germany. In Akin’s German films the deepest human relationships require we transcend national borders. The host German culture is liberated by its minority Turkish. So, too, in Solino (2002) an Italian family’s pizza business in Germany thrives until the brothers split in romantic rivalry. But they ultimately reunite over memories that outweigh their differences. As it happens, this morning’s Globe and Mail reports a poll that reveals the Turkish people think Germany is the only country that has a largely positive effect on the world. 

  As Akin rejects borders he has also switched between fiction and documentary. Head-On (Geigen die Wand, 2004) details the pragmatic union between two self-destructive German Turks, the rocker Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), who slashes her wrists to escape her traditional Muslim family. The 1980s rock score led to Akin’s feature documentary, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) where Akin collaborated with the German avant-rock musician Alexander Hacke to survey Turkish popular music. 

To a Turk born in Germany his nation and his culture are neither Turkish or German but both. A minority in one culture finds freedom and fulfillment beyond its borders. Any hard and fast border between them would be a destructive artifice. Given this commitment to super-national community it is not surprising that Akin has contributed to two international anthology films, Visions of Europe (2004) and the imminent New York I Love You (2009). Akin may augur a new generation of auteurs who choose to bestride the wider world -- and the narrowing law -- not like a colossus but as a bridge.