Issue 3/2010  -  ISSN 1470-9570

ARTICLES

Einleitung zum Themenschwerpunkt in GFL 03/10:
Cultural Encounters in Contemporary German Cinema: An introduction.

Christopher Hall & Guido Rings (pages 1-4)

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Wandel deutsch-türkischer Konstellationen im filmischen Migrationsdiskurs.

Stefan Halft, Passau (pages 5-39)

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Das deutsch-türkische Kino setzt sich seit der Einreise der ersten türkischen ‚Gastarbeiter„ intensiv mit der türkisch-deutschen Selbstdefinition auseinander. Frühe Filme präsentieren Fremd(heits)bilder eines kulturellen alter, dem ein deutsches Selbstbild sowie ein normatives Integrationskonzept gegenübergestellt werden. Seit den 1990er Jahren werden diese Fremd(heits)bilder zunehmend mit Selbst(werdungs)bildern der ‚Deutschtürken„ konfrontiert, die Stereotype untergraben und eine veränderte Selbstrepräsentation und Selbstdefinition anstreben. Ziel des Beitrages ist es, die skizzierten Tendenzen im deutsch-türkischen Film als "interkulturelle" Konstellationen strukturell zu erfassen. Über einen engen Interkulturalitätsbegriff hinausgehend werden intrakulturelle Konstellationen (Generationen, Milieus und Lebensstile) ebenso ins Visier genommen, wie transdifferente Phänomene im Hinblick auf Figuren und (abstrakt-) räumliche Kontaktzonen und die in ihnen ablaufenden Aushandlungs-, Übersetzungs- und Aktualisierungsprozesse. Ob aus diesen Prozessen genuin transkulturelle Identitäten hervorgehen wird ebenso zu diskutieren sein wie die Frage, welche Machtstrukturen den interkulturellen Interaktionsprozess negativ beeinflussen. Dabei fällt auf, dass von einem multikulturellen cinema of métissage nur bedingt gesprochen werden kann: Dem stehen bisweilen noch Kommunikations- und Interaktionsbarrieren entgegen.

The Politics of Space in the Cinema of Migration.

Barbara Mennel, Gainesville, Florida (pages 40-55)

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This article offers a reading of three films associated with migration and mobility between Turkey and Germany organized around the cinematic representation of space. Focusing on the politics of space, instead of national and/or ethnic identity, I propose, allows us to account for larger cultural shifts from a national to a transnational framework for cultural production, but also to be mindful of representational continuities from filmmaking in Turkey to Germany. My reading of Tevfik Başer's 40m² Germanyem> (1986) in the context of Yilmaz Güney's The Father (1973) and Fatih Akın's Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) proposes that the film was significantly misread by the West German public at the time. The comparison of the three films reads their spatial aesthetics as responding to the shift from national to transnational contexts and left-wing ideological to multicultural politics.

Calling All Migrants: Recasting Film Noir with Turkish-German Cinema in Christian Petzold’s Jerichow (2009).

Jaimey Fisher, Davis, California (pages 56-74)

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Christian Petzold is among the most critically acclaimed film directors of post-1989 Germany, and his Jerichow is particularly intriguing because, on the one hand, it addresses an issue of contemporary controversy, namely, ethnic diversity in Germany, while also, at the same time, emphatically positioning itself within world cinema by taking as its inspiration a US-novel and film cycle, the Postman Always Rings Twice. The film engages specific national discourses while emphatically underscoring German cinema's place within the larger system of world cinema (and especially global genres). In order to analyze Petzold's Jerichow and comprehend its politics, the essay takes up its multiple contexts, including: that of the so-called Berlin School, of the many German films about Germany's growing ethnic diversity, and of US film noir, which Petzold cited as the inspiration and basis for his film. In particular, Petzold's deployment of spaces, both domestic space and what Edward Soja has called a “third space”, reflect his engagement with the genre of film noir, the tradition of Turkish-German films, and what theorists have called uneven geographical development, that is, globalization. Ultimately, the film deliberately moves beyond the conventional, German-host versus Turkish-guest relation and into one of reciprocal interaction and influence.

‘Sameness’ in Disguise of ‘Difference’? Gender and National Identity in Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite.

Gözde Naiboğlu, Manchester (pages 75-98)

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Leslie Adelson argues that the rhetoric of „in-betweenness‟ is the most common argument in migrant literatures and in that, it is not yielding. In this essay, I will explore how Akin challenges the long held rhetoric of cultural discrepancy in bringing the two poles together in his Gegen die Wand (2004) and Auf der anderen Seite (2007). I will search how he both subverts and resettles the sexual and cultural difference by revealing how gender, like nationality, is performed. I argue that in Gegen die Wand the characters have flexible identities that dissolve the clear-cut stereotypical representations, however this well-meaning, universalist discourse he follows in Auf der anderen Seite rasps the „difference‟ in order to highlight the sameness and thus Akin follows the reductivist discourse of nationalism.

Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) and the widening periphery.

Vivien Silvey & Roger Hillman, Canberra, Australia (pages 99-116)

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In this paper we explore how Fatih Akin's film Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) situates Turkish-German transnationalism within historical and contemporary frameworks. The film reconfigures paradigms of Eastern and Western relationships, positioning Germany and Turkey (and beyond) within each other‟s sights/sites, rather than following the traditions which cast Turks as Germany's cultural others. Throughout the film references to the Koran and the Bible, the Gastarbeiter programme, Turkish and German literature and music, and Turkish history triangulate the Jewish, Christian and Islamic roots of German and Turkish culture. Also rooted in cinematic intertextuality, Akin's film comments on and inverts traditions of the representation of Turkish-German relationships, repositioning Turks and Turkish Germans as constitutive of German culture and vice versa. Beyond blurring these borders, it places transnational cinema in a global context. Auf der anderen Seite belongs to a recently emerged class of films whose structures emphasise pluralistic perspectives and whose themes revolve around globalisation's effects upon national borders. As such it remaps relationships between the European Union and the rest of the world, putting Turkey under the spotlight politically and geographically, which widens the periphery of European and global mediascapes.

Rock statt Marx: Rock and Roll Narratives in Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee.

Elizabeth Nijdam, Ann Arbor, Michigan (pages 117-136)

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East and West German youth have always shared an infatuation with rock and roll regardless of their political and ideological differences. Penetrating the borders of the German Democratic Republic, British and American Rock music represented freedom, nonconformity and liberal political values on both sides of the Wall. Correspondingly, homegrown Ostrock offered an immediately accessible avenue for resistance to East German youth. With the release of Sonnenallee in 1999, a new era for German cinema began and East German directors started to examine their East German experience in a new way: with a sense of humor. In Sonnenallee, director Leander Haußmann and screenplay writer Thomas Brussig explore the demise of the GDR using comedy, East German kitsch and rock music. Examining the Wendezeit from the eastern side of the Wall, Haußmann and Brussig illustrate the position of rock and roll in the collapse of East Germany.

REVIEW

Sammelbesprechung: Neue Veröffentlichungen zur Interkulturellen Kompetenz.

Christopher Hall, Joensuu (pages 137 – 150)

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