Women and New Turkish Cinema

Current writings on the representation of women in new Turkish cinema focus on the concepts of silence and absent women. According to Suner, for instance, one of the tendencies that can be observed in films since the early 1990s is that ‘the figure of woman … often comes into view as a constitutive absence. She is the driving force behind the narrative, yet absent as a subject’. ¹ This assertion suggests that the image of woman in Turkish cinema is a silent one, that she is spoken for and her voice cannot be heard. Suner goes on to argue that women are represented as they are seen by men, and that even where the stories revolve around female characters ‘filmmakers seem to shy away from foregrounding’ these gender-related issues. ² In a similar line of argument, Özlem Güçlü argues that silent female characters are ‘either used as a vehicle for the male characters’ speech and stories, or rendered an erotic or a suffering body in order to enjoy male gaze or affirm male mastery’. ³ These arguments are accurate in their judgements of the representation of women in new Turkish cinema. Indeed, there have been a number of silent women narratives since the 1990s. Serdar Akar’s Gemide (On Board, 1998) presents ‘silenced’ characters who do not even show reaction when raped. In Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (Distant, 2002), Bahar expresses her emotions through remaining silent. In Mutluluk (Bliss) (Abdullah Oğuz, 2007), Meryem cannot speak out the truth about being raped. The Keje character in Yavuz Turgul’s 1996 film Eşkiya (The Bandit) is mute, just like one of the female characters in Zeki Demirkubuz’s 1997 film Masumiyet (Innocence). What underlies the silence of all these characters are different levels and types of violence – verbal, physical, emotional. Yet silence may have different connotations, for example, one needs to consider the difference between ‘choosing’ to be silent and being ‘silenced’ in order to make sense of these different meanings. Silence may signify a choice, a resistance, even a type of rejection of speaking the language of the male. As Suner provocatively writes, when women speak ‘the untranslatable to the male dominated language’ by remaining silent, silence turns into a form of expression. ⁴ Masumiyet and Eşkiya’s mute characters are cases in point. Their silence is the cause of their husbands’ despair. However, when women use silence strategically as a form of resistance, they seem to suffer from physical violence. The woman in Masumiyet is mute because she was accidentally shot by her own brother as he was trying to kill the man she was having an affair with, in the name of protecting the family ‘honour’.