ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Abdul the Damned (Karl Grune 1935), which in its day was acclaimed and heavily promoted. The film evidences a female Orientalist harem fantasy, rarely treated in an Orientalist scholarship that largely focuses on male Orientalists. This fantasy involves a complex exploration of psychoanalytic concepts of female masquerade, narcissism, voyeurism, and the mirror stage and reverses Orientalism’s revulsion of the Other to embrace the Other. The fantasy is explored through the devices of the mise-en-scène, articulated at the textural level of costumes, lighting, props, sets, and innovative technology, an approach associated with German film. The film’s fantasy in its appeal to women spectators raises complexities, too, around Edward Said’s notion of positional superiority applied in the film to both women and to Turks. The film’s generic polysemy, combining romance, melodrama, costume drama, spy thriller, and noir film, deploys sets typical of Orientalist films, while the centrality of a female harem fantasy reflects the West’s infatuation with Asian culture’s presumed gender power dynamics and cross-cultural representations. The chapter argues that Abdul the Damned reconfigures categories of West and ‘Asia’ through this fantasy, counterbalanced by the film’s vision of the Westernization of Turkey.
