Canan Gerede and the Experiences of a Female Director in 1990s Turkey

This article explores the cinematic journey of Turkish filmmaker Canan Gerede in order to try to understand the experience of being a female director within the cinema industry of 1990s Turkey. I examine the dynamics of production, distribution and screening, along with the diversification of cinematic forms and content that occurred over this period. During the 1990s, neoliberalism and globalisation found their way into local Turkish politics, and Turkish culture became affected by a rapid invasion of American culture products, including Hollywood cinema. This wave of neoliberalism had an Americanising effect upon Turkish society, and changed patterns of behaviour towards a more consumerist culture. Cinema became reduced to its market value, and films were experienced as commodified ‘goods’ by the local audience. This same period witnessed great changes to Turkish film-production processes along with the introduction of newly available funds from the Cultural Ministry, Turkish Radio & Television Corporation (TRT), Eurimages, various television channels and private sponsors. All of these changes that resulted from neoliberalism and globalisation were reflected in the production practices, form, and content of Turkish films.

Throughout the 1990s, there was also an unprecedented increase in female Turkish directors. Turkey witnessed fourteen debut female directors during this period, one of whom was Canan Gerede. After working with Yılmaz Güney for four years, Gerede began making her own short films and documentaries. Robert’ın Filmi (Robert’s Movie, 1991) was her first feature-length motion picture; she would go on to direct Aşk Ölümden Soğuktur (Love Is Colder Than Death, 1995) and Parçalanma (Split, 1999). For each of her films, Eurimages granted co-production funds along with providing the assistance of foreign cinematographers. The narratives of Gerede’s films centre on romantic ‘arabesque’-style relationships and feature a number of iconic motifs imminent to Turkish culture. However, in this article, I argue that Gerede’s position as an ‘outsider’ of Turkish culture results in her producing not only an orientalist narrative, but also a political discourse that lacks a feminist dimension.

Cultural dynamics shaping Turkey in the 1990s

Turkish politics have an interrupted history due to a series of military coups and interventions coming from dissident political figures. The 1980 military coup affected the flow of Turkey’s history (economic, cultural, educational, etc.) as a result of the imposed restrictions placed upon Turkish citizens. On 12 September 1980, Kenan Evren, the commander of the armed forces, seized control of the state.¹ Soon after, the constitution and the parliament were invalidated, the students and workers’ movements were banned² and the government body YÖK (Higher Education Institution) was introduced to control the universities.³ A referendum held on 24 October 1982 passed approval for a new constitution, which restricted the freedom of the press, union rights, individual rights and freedom.⁴ The restrictions placed upon citizens’ right to protest and express political freedom produced a new generation of Turkish citizens who were apolitical.

After the military coup, the army took full control of Turkish politics and retained only two of the original policies: the foreign politics and Decisions of 24 January, both of which aligned with neoliberal principles and opened the Turkish market up to foreign investors.⁵ Under the leadership of prime minister Turgut Özal,⁶ Turkey established itself as a ‘second-class imperialist country’ with support from the USA.⁷ Due to hyperinflation and budget deficit, state-controlled entities became privatised. By liberating foreign investment and importation restrictions on foreign goods and services, Turkey introduced and promoted competition within the domestic market. As a result, goods and services produced in the United States and throughout Europe came to occupy the Turkish market.⁸

Not only did American-made products come to dominate the shelves of Turkish retail outlets, but the attitude of Turkish citizens also shifted in a more competitive direction that reflected the values of a ‘market society’.⁹ The previously state-owned television channels were privatised and merged with American companies. Television and printed media promoted images of the ‘American Dream’, and sold the idea that the habits and tastes of American society were desirable, while degrading the habits and tastes traditionally viewed as Turkish.¹⁰ The entire physical landscape of Turkey was altered, as large-scale shopping malls and advertising billboards came to occupy the streets. While the public sphere became dominated with these billboards, the grasp of Western advertising extended into the private sphere through the television sets. Everything was reduced to its exchange value and became marketed as a commodified item.¹¹ As a result, not only was the relationship between the society and culture transfigured, but also the meaning of cultural products and the way they were produced.

The political economy of Turkish cinema in the 1990s

In line with the country’s neoliberal economic political shift, in 1989 the laws of foreign investment were altered, greatly affecting the dynamics of cinematic production within Turkey. Changes made to foreign-investment laws, which removed limitations upon American companies such as Warner Bros, Fox and UIP, allowed the unrestricted release of Hollywood films.¹² Together with big-budget promotional advertisements, the release of new Hollywood films flooded the cinematic market.¹³ As seen in Table 1,[14. Z.Ç. Erus, “Film Endüstrisi ve Dağıtım: 1990 Sonrası Türk Sinemasında Dağıtım Sektörü,” Selçuk Üniversitesi İletişim Fakültesi Akademik Dergisi 4 (2007): p. 10.] throughout the 1990s the Turkish film industry was dominated by three major distribution companies, and this stranglehold on the market prevented opportunities for Turkish films to be distributed and screened.

Table 1

Public-television network TRT had started broadcasting in the 1970s, and, in the following decade, VHS videos had first been introduced to Turkey. By the 1980s, colour television, home videos and private TV channels had gained popularity and come within reach of the average Turkish household. The Turkish cinema industry suffered from the widespread availability of television; however, with the monopolisation of film distribution, the industry came to the brink of collapse.¹⁴ As seen in Table 2,^{15 16} the relatively high number of films produced in 1990, 1993 and 1994 were unsustainable in subsequent years. The data also shows that, while the number of films being produced in Turkey was relatively low, an even smaller number had the chance to be screened in cinemas. Considering that, prior to the advent of American distribution, approximately 125 national films were being released annually in Turkey,¹⁷ the impact of major distributors upon Turkish cinema becomes clearer.

Table 2

However, in response to the near collapse of the national cinema industry, a number of production funds were founded. The Cultural Ministry, TRT, Eurimages, various television channels and private sponsors started providing production funds. The Turkish cinema industry also benefited from the technological advancements made possible by the advertising sector. The notion of working with a large budget in order to produce high-quality footage gained momentum within the advertising sector, and Turkish cinema made use of the renewed equipment and laboratories.¹⁸

In the 1990s, a new production style emerged in Turkey, in which the directors doubled as producers in order to finance their own films.¹⁹ Traditional Turkish cinema (Yeşilçam) had depended upon financing from local film importers and cinema houses in order to be able to produce films; however, the funding resulted in limitations upon directors’ artistic freedom.²⁰ With directors now financing their own films, there was an increase in the artistic freedom and expression of Turkish cinema and the emergence of a new cinematic genre of “independent/arthouse” films in Turkey.²¹ Independent Turkish directors worked on low-budget films that adopted a minimalist style.²² They critiqued society by adapting a singular narrative centring on the character. Common themes amongst the films of these new independent directors were the lives and conditions of working-class people, the effects of the 1980 military coup, criticism of hegemonic culture, gender roles and identity.²³ Kurdish, Alawite, Romani, Armenian and queer characters started to be represented in these films.²⁴

At the other end of the spectrum, popular Turkish films adopted many of the conventions of Hollywood cinema. Mainstream Turkish directors reached agreements with major American distribution companies in order to ensure their films were generating high domestic box-office returns. This resulted in the transformation of the style and content of popular Turkish films, promoting the use of mass technology and turning them into imitations of Hollywood films.²⁵ Unlike their independent counterparts, popular Turkish films stood at a distance from social realities, and avoided comentating on economic, political or cultural issues that were occuring nationally or globally. The new popular cinema also embraced fast-paced action and involved rapid cuts.²⁶ Other common features of popular Turkish films include the use of big-name actors, use of more advanced technology,²⁷ American-style marketing campaigns²⁸ and easy-to-watch storylines.²⁹ These radical changes coincided with the unprecedented emergence of female directors in Turkey in the 1990s.

Table 3

The data shown in Table 3³⁰ demonstrates that, although Turkish films were being produced from 1914, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the first female director made a film. In addition, the table shows that, between the 1950s and 1990s, the number of female directors was consistently low. However, in the 1990s, it is possible to describe the increase in the number of female directors as ‘radical’. These fourteen new female directors debuting their films in the 1990s, in chronological order, were: Füruzan and Gülsün Karamustafa, Gerede, Tomris Giritlioğlu, Işıl Özgentürk, Biket İlhan, Seçkin Yasar, Handan İpekçi, Canan Evcimen, Fide Motan, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Sunar Kural Aytuna, Necef Uğurlu and Jülide Övür. This article focuses on Gerede to explore the experience of being a female director within the social cinematic production dynamics discussed earlier.

An artist’s personal journey

Canan Gerede was born in New York in 1948. She is the daughter of Reşiha Vafi, a translator of theatre plays, and Cemil Vafi, an ambassador.³¹ Due to her father’s job, Gerede lived in several countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Taiwan; therefore, she had the chance to experience different cultures. Furthermore, raised by parents with an intellectual circle of friends, Gerede met a number of prominent painters, journalists and authors of the time. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and, through Yaşar Kemal, was introduced to Elia Kazan, who would later help Gerede continue her education in Actors Studio. Whilst studying, she spent time travelling around Anatolia with Kazan for a shoot, during which she gained directorial experience. Later, she worked on the sets of a number of foreign productions as an assistant, wrote censorship scripts,³² and played the leading role in the TV series Seyahatname (Atıf Yılmaz, 1977).³³ During this time, she also started writing her own scripts.³⁴

Gerede visited Yılmaz Güney while he was in a military hospital in order to interview him for the French magazine Afrique Asie. On this occasion, he proposed that she work for Güney Film, beginning a collaboration that would continue on for four years. Gerede became responsible for all of the cinematic tasks of Güney’s films during his political imprisonment, and helped him with the production of the films Sürü (The Herd, Zeki Ökten, 1978), Düşman (The Enemy, Zeki Ökten, 1979) and Yol (The Road, Şerif Gören & Yılmaz Güney, 1981). When Yol won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, a German producer approached Gerede with the offer of making her own film. She started working on her own original script, which was later rejected on the grounds that it discredited Germany.³⁵ In 1983, she worked as the producer of the film Wundkanal (Thomas Harlan, 1984),³⁶ and, in 1987, she made the short documentary The Other Side.³⁷ The same year, she made the video film Pass the Bludwurst Please (1987), and, the following year, Abidin, Can You Paint Happiness? (1988). Returning to Turkey, she debuted her first feature-length fiction film, Robert’ın Filmi (Robert’s Movie), in 1991.³⁸

Robert’s Movie includes details of Gerede’s own identity and philosophy, but it is not a story that reflects her own life directly. After its release, Gerede wanted to make an entirely ‘Turkish’ film, a demand that was satisfied by the story of Bergen, an iconic Arabesque singer who was popular in the country during the 1980s.³⁹ The film that emerged was Aşk Ölümden Soğuktur (Love Is Colder than Death, 1995).

Gerede’s next and last film, Parçalanma (Split, 1999), was born from an offer from Icelandic producer Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, whom she met at a film festival in Hamburg. The film is based upon a true story – a custody battle between an Icelandic mother and Turkish father – and centred on the cultural differences between Iceland and Turkey, İmam Hatip high schools,⁴⁰ political Islam, and the tradition of marriage being solemnised by imams.⁴¹

Fighting for funding

Gerede received co-production funds from Eurimages, which constituted the main part of the budget for each of her three feature-length films. The budget for Robert’s Movie was US$1 million, including €228,674 from Eurimages. This funding was the first of its kind received by a Turkish production.⁴² The film was also supported financially by the French government and French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Gerede established a sponsorship agreement with a French laboratory for post-production. The lead actor of the film, Patrick Bauchau, also contributed personal funding to help meet production expenses in Turkey. While Valérie Seydoux was the producer from France, Michael White participated as the English producer.⁴³ The film also had producers from Germany and Turkey – respectively, Horst Knechtel and Onat Kutlar.

Budget for Robert’s Movie

The total budget for Love Is Colder Than Death was US$500,000, again supplemented by funding from Eurimages, this time covering €304,898 of the budget (co-producer Faruk Aksoy covered the remainder). In order to meet the budget, a number of the crew members also offered to work for a reduced salary.⁴⁴ Eliane Stutterheim was the French producer of the film, while Gerede worked alongside Aksoy as co-producer from Turkey.⁴⁵

Lastly, Split received €259,163 from Eurimages. This feature involved an international collaboration of French producers Stutterheim and Joel Farges, Icelandic producer Fridriksson and Dutch production company Scarabee Filmproducties. Gerede took the role of Turkish producer for this film. Gerede recalls that, as Split received the smallest funding among her three films, the financial difficulties were significant, with the shoot at one point having to be stopped for six months as a result.⁴⁶

Making the films

Gerede wrote the scripts of all three films herself⁴⁷, and chose to write in English, her mother tongue. This not only eased application processes to Eurimages and ability to build partnership with foreign producers, but also created multiple options for screenings outside of Turkey.

Script of Love is Colder Than Death

Gerede shot all three films on 35mm and, with the exception of the lighting, sourced all of her equipment from outside of Turkey. Therefore, she was able to use high-tech equipment on each production. Although she released her films in the 1990s, she was able to shoot them without dubbing, which necessitated a technology that was not available in the Turkish cinema industry at that time. She also worked with a non-Turkish cinematographer, Jürgen Jürges, on Robert’s Movie and Love Is Colder Than Death, while the cinematographer for Split was Jürges’ assistant Peter Steuger.⁴⁸

Gerede cast actors in her films without any intervention from the producers, and says that she never experienced trouble on the set during shooting; according to her, if the crew acknowledged the presence of the director, they would respect and work in a disciplined way, and this presence was not related to gender. She also comments that neither within Turkey nor abroad did she encounter any difficulties with directing cast or crew as a female director.⁴⁹

Critical analysis of Gerede’s films

Robert’s Movie is a road film that follows the intersected lives of war photographer Robert (Bauchau) and Gogo (Aslı Altan); throughout the film, Gogo falls in love with Robert and experiences a transformation as a result. Love Is Colder than Death narrates the passionate and violent love story between Belgin (Bennu Gerede), who works as a belly dancer and singer at a club, and Ali (Kadir İnanır). Split’s narrative focuses on the custody dispute of Sol (Bennu Gerede), an Icelandic mother, and Halil (Mahir Günşiray), a Turkish father.

In all three films, Gerede uses the traditional motifs immanent to the cultures of the lead characters. The traditional motifs not only help to construct the narrative and the characters, but also to create a political discourse and a critical perspective. In Robert’s Movie, the criticism is directed towards an American lifestyle, consumerist culture and war; in Love Is Colder than Death, the criticism is aimed at the corrupt values of society and hegemony; and in Split, the criticism is directed towards puritanical Islam, and the corrupted triangular relationship between money, government and power. However, the cultural motifs that are not immanent to the narration but merely ‘decorate’ the images result in an orientalist landscape and confine viewers to a Western perspective. This gaze places the audience at a heightened perspective as a way of degrading Eastern culture. The East is shown as being corrupt, conservative and unrefined.

An Image from Robert’s Movie

Due to her upbringing outside of Turkey, Gerede builds the discourse of her films as an ‘outsider’ in the context of Turkish culture, which allows her to both remain distant and develop a critical perspective, but also results in a biased point of view. Due to distant relationship to Turkish culture, Gerede stands amongst the female directors of the 1990s who, for the first time in history, politicised discourse within their films; however, she also exploits her unique position to construct a fictional, orientalised East through her depictions of Arabesque lives, macho men, dervishes, women wearing hijabs, the Islamic call to prayer (Azaan), sheikhs and dhikr rituals.

An Image from Split

The main character of Robert’s Movie is Robert (a filmmaker); however, this does not make the gaze of the film ‘male’, because, as Gerede states, Robert is a reflection of herself.⁵⁰ Based on dialogue in the film between Robert and Gogo, the sentiment of the film can be defined as partly feminine and partly masculine; or, as the central characters say “part-boy, part-girl.” In contrast, the protagonists in Love Is Colder than Death and Split are female, but their lives are directed by the male characters in the films, which positions the females as passive subjects. Likewise, while Robert’s Movie plays around with expressions of gender, it is still Robert who dictates the life and liberation of Gogo. Although, in Gerede’s debut feature, the male character’s decisions eventuate in freedom for the female character, in Love Is Colder than Death and Split, the male characters control the females’ lives in a destructive manner that limits their freedom – in the case of Love Is Colder than Death, to such an extent that it brings about her demise. In Split, Sol is presented as an upper-middle-class, European woman who is strong and empowered; however, her life also becomes controlled and shaped by the male character. After being forced into moving to Istanbul, she is later exiled from Turkey as a result of Halil’s religious/political power, and is therefore unable to see her children.

An image from Love Is Colder than Death

In all three of the films, women face violence from men and the patriarchal structures within society. In the first film, it is Robert who uses direct violence against Gogo. In Love Is Colder than Death, besides the male characters Ali and Osman, the State, the police and members of the male-dominant society also perpetrate violence against Belgin (the violence in this film includes a rape scene that was censored). In Split, it is Halil, the police and other members of society who exhibit violence towards the female characters.

The preference of Gerede to film within urban settings – all three films are set within urban landscapes – matches the location preference of other female directors during the 1990s. In each of her films, scenes centred on the activities of the female characters are shot in public places. In Robert’s Movie and Split, exterior scenes dominate the storyline, while, in Love Is Colder than Death, the majority of scenes are interior in order to enable ongoing scenes depicting violence and sex. While Gerede comments upon violence towards women and the subordination of females within a patriarchal society, her films cannot be described as feminist because she denies female characters the agency of narrating their own experiences, depicts them solely as ‘victims’ and retains patriarchal narrative conventions.

Distribution

Robert’s Movie was screened both in and out of Turkey. The film had only one copy, but screened in two different cinemas in Turkey, so the only bobbin was carried from one cinema to the other. During its premier in Ankara, a bomb was placed inside the cinema. According to Gerede, the reason that the person placed a bomb was because she accompanied a sex scene with the sound of the call to prayer. As a result of this, producer Kutlar deleted the sound from that scene.⁵¹ Love Is Colder than Death also had only one copy for its İstanbul screening.⁵² Film critic and scriptwriter Tamer Baran, who watched the film in 1996 at Fitaş Cinema, İstanbul, comments that the premiere of the film took place in the medium-sized auditorium, but that, on the second day, the film began screening in the smallest one. On two occasions, Baran attended the cinema to watch the film, but the cinema refused to screen it because he was the only attendee.⁵³ Gerede puts the lack of audience down to the fact that she did not have a budget for distribution or to promote the film through advertising.⁵⁴ Split did not have a Turkish screening at all; according to Gerede, the owners of the cinema houses refused to screen the film, saying, “Even if you made a Kurdish film we would find a way to screen it, but we cannot screen something that discredits Islam.”⁵⁵ Therefore, the film was screened only in Iceland. For television releases, the sex scenes in Robert’s Movie were censored,⁵⁶ and a number of screens that involved political dialogue were censored from Split.⁵⁷ Nonetheless, all three of Gerede’s films were also screened in national and international film festivals and won a number of awards.

Final thoughts

Gerede had an affluent upbringing that was conducive to her profession. Growing up outside of Turkey and being surrounded by intellectual and artistic family friends, she was able to utilise her personal connections, and thus experienced a relatively easy path to establishing herself as a director and acquiring the funds to produce her films. From this perspective, Gerede’s pathway and experience is far removed from that of other Turkish female directors in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the emergence of new grants brought about a new mode of film production, whereby directors doubled as producers for their films, acquiring their own funding. For each of Gerede’s three films, she obtained co-production funding from Eurimages, and was able to put her own personal funding into the projects. In this sense, Gerede is a key example of the new wave of independent film production in the 1990s.

One of the requirements in order to receive funding through Eurimages was that the project needed to have two foreign co-producers. While the majority of Turkish directors in the 1990s had to sign co-production agreements with countries who had poorly developed cinema industries (including Greece and Bulgaria), Gerede was able to secure co-producers from countries with developed cinema industries. As a result of her connection with co-producers from western European countries, Gerede received wider support from Eurimages and higher budgets to produce her films.

The role of director-producer, which was a new concept for the Turkish cinema industry in the 1990s, enabled greater freedom for directors to construct their own discourse in their films. For the first time, Turkish directors were able to explore their own cinematic style and pursue their own topics, having gained independence from the demands and limitations of traditional producers. While Gerede embraced this new production mode, it could be argued that she restricted her own cinematic freedom by pandering to the interests of a Western audience. Having grown up outside of Turkey and therefore being an outsider to the culture, Gerede had an understanding of how to make Turkey marketable; she also received funding from Western sources, which undeniably had an impact on the discourse of her three films. While she explored political themes throughout her films, these themes were always addressed from a Western perspective.

Gerede’s three films are focused on female protagonists, which suggests that she attempted to construct a feminine language; however, in each film, the females are victimised and rendered passive by the interventions of male characters. They are denied the authorship of their own stories, which results in their passive subjectivity and turns the narratives into conventional depictions. Therefore, while there was potential for a feminist discourse in Gerede’s films, this did not eventuate, as was the case with the majority of films by Turkish female directors in the 1990s.

Gerede faced fewer hardships throughout the production stages of her films than many of her counterparts did; however, her experiences with distribution and screening of her work closely reflect the dynamics of the Turkish cinema industry in the 1990s. Her films were unable to be advertised due to a lack of budget, could not be screened due to the monopolisation of distribution and, when screened, were shown only for a short period of time. Since the taste of Turkish viewers had become Americanised during the 1990s, the public were not in favour of national arthouse films; therefore, any films that did not fit the criteria of mainstream cinema had few opportunities to be screened. Due to this, Gerede, in accordance with other independent filmmakers in Turkey in the 1990s, made use of film festivals as an alternative platform.

Gerede’s artistic persona, along with the perspective reflected within her films, ensured that she would always maintain an outsider in Turkish cinema. Nonetheless, her journey as a filmmaker was, in so many ways, deeply representative of the country’s film-production process in the 1990s.

Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Jess Connoley for her contributions.

Endnotes: