ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Kedi’s complex sonic address of existing and new music. For most of the film, popular songs are linked to specific cats (almost in the manner of a theme song or leitmotif), while Kira Fontana’s score accompanies unnamed cats and images of the city. The music stages a series of productive collisions between the foreign and the familiar, between musics, between sound and image, and between music and film. Kedi presents Istanbul as a place where East and West meet, where the past, present, and future of the city intermingle, and where the choice of music, and the treatment of that music, demonstrate that differences are not erased in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan space. Kedi's compilation score represents a specific period of Turkish history (roughly the late 60s to the early 80s), and the film creatively uses music to address diverse audiences at different registers. On the one hand, it declines to translate the lyrics of Turkish popular music, thus overtly dividing audiences between two groups: those who can understand the lyrics and those who cannot. However, these songs are also noticeably altered from their preexisting form by the film’s narration in their arrangement, mixing, and even content. The songs are therefore defamiliarized for potentially all audiences: lyrics are rendered as sound rather than language for some audiences, and famous (if older) songs are clearly changed by their encounter with Kedi. The chapter offers case studies of two songs as emblematic of the film’s goals, each of which bridges the East and West from different directions. Barış Manço’s “Arkadşim Eşek” (1981) is a Turkish song by one of the artists most responsible for the growth of rock music culture in the nation and the successful effort to make indigenous Turkish rock music. The second song is Eartha Kitt’s “Uska Dara” (1953), an American version of an ancient (perhaps Turkish) song. Each famous song is also significantly rearranged by the film’s narration to provide audiences with a unique (and incomplete) version. The chapter next briefly explores Kira Fontana’s original score. Fontana’s minimalist score typically plays as the camera floats and surveys Istanbul from above. Fontana’s score dominates the soundtrack in these passages, and it does not interact significantly with sound effects or speech, or the individualized cats. Yet in the film’s concluding montage, the score overtly resists the mechanical connotations of minimalist music. Here the music joins the named felines and summarizes the film’s spaces. The chapter finally concludes with a call for more study of soundtrack albums.
