Turkish-German Traffic in Cinema: A Critical Review

The Turkish-German axis is not the first route that comes to mind when rethinking German cinema in a global perspective. Turks in German cinema have tended to be cast in one-dimensional roles, as victims on the margins of society, unable to communicate and integrate. After more than four decades of Turkish presence in Germany, can we finally observe a new trend in representation, focusing more on playful enactments, mutual mirroring, and border-crossings? In an era of increasing global mobility of people and media, questions about the status of transnational cultural productions by travelers, emigrants, and exiles have achieved a new intensity. Film critics, concomitantly, have begun to call for a new genre category, one which explodes the boundaries of “original” national cultures as well as those of cinematic conventions. This new genre is variously labeled “independent transnational cinema,” (Naficy, 1996) “postcolonial hybrid films” (Shohat and Stam, 1994) or simply “world cinema,” (Roberts, 1998) a descriptor which, in contrast to older separatist categories such as “third world cinema” (Pines and Willemen, 1989) or “sub-state cinema” (Crofts, 1998), stresses the universality of mobility and diversity.