Andrei Tarkovsky by Robert Bird

Author:Robert Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

5 Gender, Sexuality and Morals

in Transition

The provincial girl: Who said I’ll marry you?

Her boyfriend: But we slept together.

The provincial girl: Just because I slept with you once,

do I have to sleep with you for the rest of my life?1

Women have been the focus of Turkish cinema since its beginnings, although their visibility has not always been beneficial to their identity. Cinema arrived in Turkey as an entertainment for men by men and remained so for many years. At the beginning of the twentieth century armed fundamentalists were occupying theatres threatening to knife any woman who dared to enter. Women had to wait even longer to become actors. All female roles were played by non-Muslims until the foundation of the secular Turkish Republic in 1923.

As early as 1917 the ‘fallen woman’ motif was established with Pençe / The Clutch, by Sedat Simavi, which featured two ‘promiscuous’ women, one with an insatiable appetite for men and the other an adulteress. This was followed by Ahmet Fehim’s sex vaudeville Mürebbiye / The Governess (1919), presenting Angélique, an amoral French beauty, who seduced all the men in a rich household. Filmmakers habitually exploited the female body through the medium of comedy, the camera objectifying the female and turning her into a spectacle, confirming Laura Mulvey’s contention that the spectatorial look in mainstream cinema is implicitly male; the image represents the ideological meaning that ‘woman’ has for men: the male as active and powerful and the female as passive and powerless as a subject, on which power is exercised, either as a victim or as an object that needs to be protected, and the spectator identifies with the male look.2

Yeşilçam portrayed love as the first condition of marriage in a period when marriages were still arranged; love involved individual choice and paved the path for the emancipation of women. Ironically, for the majority of society love was not considered as necessary for marriage and in fact was a threat to morals. Although films showed love that ended in marriage as a victory for the woman, the same love would limit the woman’s freedom and reinforce the man’s dominance. The woman who fought familial and societal pressures to marry the man she loved was expected to adhere to the patriarchal laws of society or she would pay for her misdemeanour.3

‘Women’s films’ dominated the industry in the 1950s and ’60s when the female audience was a gold mine for the producers. The star system born in the 1960s typecast four top stars according to audience expectations: Türkan Şoray, the oppressed sexual woman; Hülya Koçyiğit, the oppressed asexual woman; Filiz Akın, the well-educated asexual bourgeois woman; and Fatma Girik (who became the mayor of an uptown municipality in the 1990s), the honest ‘manly’ asexual woman, known as erkek fatma (male Fatma, which did not mean masculine, but rather honest and straightforward like a man). According to Atıf Yılmaz, these stars represented masks similar to those worn in traditional Eastern arts, such as the Kabuki theatre of Japan. When communications advanced with television, the Internet, etc.

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