Elif Akçalı

Özlem Güçlü

Cüneyt Çakırlar

This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born France-based director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang (2015), which tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. The film’s familiar art-house style, and its universalising focus on female coming-of-age and feminist dissent, resulted in celebratory reviews from journalists and scholars of world cinema. Meanwhile, Mustang’s framing of youth in the Turkish national context, and its representation of gender, divided Turkish film critics and cultural theorists. These divisions led to a debate that questions the politics of transnational feminism by criticising the film’s failure to capture the local intricacies of the politics of gender and youth. While this book aims to locate Mustang within the intersection of emerging female and youth narratives in the cinema of Turkey, it also provides a critical understanding of the differences in Mustang’s local and global reception. This focus on the geopolitics of representation informs the diverse criteria this study uses to evaluate Ergüven’s stylistic choices. Engaging with both Anglophone and Turkish literature in youth cinema and gender studies, the book makes an original contribution to current debates on national/transnational cinemas and gender/youth studies and is an accessible reference for graduate and undergraduate study of contemporary film. Elif Akçalı is Associate Professor in Film and TV Studies at Kadir Has University, Turkey. Her research focuses on film aesthetics, videographic criticism, non-fiction film, and gender/sexuality studies.

Translating Willful Youth

Mustang

In the mid-1990s Turkish cinema experienced a remarkable revival. However, what is particularly unusual about this revival is the emergence of a new representational form: silent, inaudible characters. Equally unusual is the fact that this new on-screen silence had a gender(ed/ing) aspect, since, for the most part, the mute(d) characters were female. This book focuses on these newly emergent silent female characters in the new cinema of Turkey, and explores the relationship between the ‘new’ female representational form, the ‘new’ cinema of Turkey, and the ‘new’ socio-political climate in Turkey after the September 12, 1980 military coup. It investigates two central questions: what are the functions, formations and operations of these silent female characters, and why did this female representational form emerge specifically in this timeframe? Bearing a cinematic function of instrumentality and exposing, one way or another, a close association between point of view and discursive authority in the films studied, the silent female representational form in the new cinema of Turkey is a cinematic symptom of the on-going struggle over the disrupted orders of gender, nation and national memory due to an increase in thus-far silenced or marginalized voices in Turkey. The silent form not only functions as a cinematic instrument to reveal crises in hegemonic power positions, but also becomes a battleground within a struggle for (re)obtaining a position of discursive authority in the realms of gender, nation and past. The silent form in itself becomes an instrument on the discursive level, which enables a response to Turkey’s crises in these three interconnected realms in the post-1980s.

Özlem Güçlü

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