Barbara Mennel (Gainesville, Florida) p.40-55
2010 Issue 3
Cultural Encounters in Contemporary German Cinema
Abstract
This article offers a reading of three films associated with migration and mobility between Turkey and Germany organized around the cinematic representation of space. Focusing on the politics of space, instead of national and/or ethnic identity, I propose, allows us to account for larger cultural shifts from a national to a transnational framework for cultural production, but also to be mindful of representational continuities from filmmaking in Turkey to Germany. My reading of Tevfik Başer’s 40m² Germanyem> (1986) in the context of Yilmaz Güney’s The Father (1973) and Fatih Akın’s Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) proposes that the film was significantly misread by the West German public at the time. The comparison of the three films reads their spatial aesthetics as responding to the shift from national to transnational contexts and left-wing ideological to multicultural politics.