Tag: cinema turkish movie Fetih

  • Turkey’s Ottoman revival

    Turkey’s Ottoman revival

    Turkey’s Ottoman revival

    Daniel Craig may have revamped the Bond franchise but, for all the praise, Skyfall isn’t being credited with reviving interest in the British empire’s foreign policy, or in black knitted ties worn with cream shirts and dark blue suits, or even in scrambled eggs à la Bond (incessantly stirred, not shaken), a recipe Ian Fleming actually attached to the short story, 007 in New York, and which he was photographed cooking.

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    The production values of the ‘Ottomanalia’ industry are much higher today

    – Ranier Fsadni

    But something like all that is being attributed to the Turkish film, Conquest, 1453 (Fetih, 1453 in Turkish), about the Ottoman capture of Constantinople. The film came out in February and since then has fired hearts, minds and loins. The film has spawned a TV show.

    There are clubs dedicated to historical enactments of glorious Ottoman victories. There is a flourishing taste for Ottoman beards, decorative motifs (walls, offices and even business cards) and dressing up as sultans and nobles.

    Conquest is hardly the first feel-good Turkish film set in the glory days of empire. The popularity of such films has waxed and waned. But this epic, released in 12 countries (Middle East, Germany and the US) has become the highest-earning Turkish film ever: its cost of $18.2 million was a record but so was the $40 million grossed in Turkey and Europe. The buzz has earned it a feature in the New York Times.

    Our own Maltese experience with Great Siege enactments should tell us that, no matter how earnest the ‘historical research’ is claimed to be, what emerges tends to be schlock and myth, more to do with our own fantasies than life back then. It’s the same with Conquest and its brethren.

    A few years ago, the Cypriot anthropologist, Yiannis Papadakis, wrote about the experience of watching such films as part of his compelling account of discussing identity with Turks and (Turkish) Cypriots in Istanbul.

    His friends and acquaintances often treated their identity with irony and amusement and, in his Echoes from the Dead Zone (2005), Papadakis himself gives a tongue-in-cheek film guide to help non-Turkish speakers distinguish the heroic Ottomans from the dastardly Byzantines.

    On the one hand, Turkish men are the good looking ones, with decent table manners; they win battles even when outnumbered by 20 to one (thanks to expert skill in karate, swordsmanship and American wrestling). All women – even the jaded, debauched Byzantines – fall in love with them.

    On the other hand, Byzantine men are ugly and, when bald and bearded to boot, are inevitably torturers. They dribble while eating meat with their dirty hands and rape the beautiful-but-chaste Turkish women. In the end, they get what they deserve because they can’t help but stand frozen in amazement as their artful opponent leaps towards them with a number of forward somersaults before delivering the fatal blow.

    The Byzantine women, meanwhile, are never chaste and their parts were played (at least in the late 1980s) by soft-porn actresses.

    No great surprise, then, to learn that Conquest presents the court of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, as pullulating with nubile dancing girls and punch-drunk hedonists.

    Papadakis hastens to add that when he was living in Turkey two decades ago almost no one watched such films. The only people who watched did so to laugh and catch the director’s mistakes (the watch on the hero’s wrist, the telephone lines behind the rushing chariot…). So why the popularity in 2012?

    The production values of the ‘Ottomanalia’ industry are much higher today. Still, the industry has many critics in Turkey itself, people who frown at the jingoism. The critics of the critics, in their turn, say that too much is being read into what is essentially entertainment. They can also point to last year’s $70 million earnings from Turkey’s soap opera exports.

    Being low-brow entertainment, however, does not make it insignificant. Popular entertainment is often the theatre where culture idly plays with new possibilities.

    In this case, renewed popularity is no doubt partly a matter of fashion. But not only. The last 10 years of the Islamist Erdogan government have seen Turkey recover strongly from the economic bust of 2002. A new, affluent middle class is culturally comfortable with Erdogan’s brand of Islamist nationalism and consumerism; it is ready to re-interpret the Ottoman past in the light of its own experience.

    And that experience includes the country’s re-assertion on the regional stage. While the Syrian crisis is a potential threat to Turkey’s own unity (given the impact of Syria’s increasingly unbound Kurds on Turkey’s minority), the turbulence of the region also highlights Turkey’s prosperity and relative stability, while Europe grows pale beside it.

    Turkey doesn’t welcome the wedge that the crisis is driving between its interests and Russia’s, yet, the fact that Turkey is ready to criticise Russia’s role on the UN Security Council does highlight its growing confidence. Any wonder why the latest Ottoman craze is accompanied by a popular amateur interest in ancient foreign policy?

    We may yet look back at Conquest as the watershed that, for all its kitsch, stood for the indefinable moment when the debate on EU membership in Turkey began to swing decisively against membership.

    via Turkey’s Ottoman revival – timesofmalta.com.

  • Turkey: Epic movie highlights Ottoman conquest

    Turkey: Epic movie highlights Ottoman conquest

    Turkey is on a roll these days, uplifted by economic growth and regional diplomacy; now comes an epic about the 15th century fall of Constantinople that fuses national pride with Hollywood-style ambition

    AP
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    Young Turks look at an advertisement for “Conquest 1453” displayed outside a cinema in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012. (Photo by AP)

    “Fetih 1453,” or “Conquest 1453,” casts good guys (read Muslim Ottomans) against bad guys (aka Christian Byzantines), transforming a clash of empires and religions into a duel between right and wrong. The capture of what is today Istanbul set the stage for centuries of Ottoman rule over the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe.

    Director Faruk Aksoy’s $17 million extravaganza, Turkey’s most expensive movie, is not just a popularized account of history, spiked with romance, swordplay and gaudy costumes. It also matches a modern identity that elevates an imperial past once held in disdain, and reinforces faith, ethnicity and a message of tolerance in an often contradictory brew.

    Turkey eludes easy definition. It looks eastward, projecting soft power across an unstable region, but it is part of NATO and a candidate for European Union membership. Its biggest city, Istanbul, is divided between the Asian and European continents. Its population is mostly Muslim; the constitution is secular.

    So many Turks look to history, or at least a comfortable version of it, for a reassuring answer to the question: Who are we?

    Films from Turkey have done well at international festivals for years. But “Conquest 1453” is something new, a homegrown echo of “Troy,” ”300″ and other dramas that pit ancient civilizations against each other in panoramic, digitally enhanced scenes of blood-soaked glory.

    The Turkish film lacks the polish and crossover appeal of a global hit. However, it has broken Turkish box office records since opening two weeks ago. It was released in some European countries, including Germany, home to a large ethnic Turkish minority, and producers say it will be shown in the Middle East and elsewhere later this month.

    The film tells of Sultan Mehmet II, a national icon today, and his 50-day siege of Constantinople, the last bastion of the Byzantine empire. It depicts real events: the raising of a giant chain across the entrance to the Golden Horn inlet to block Ottoman ships, the overland transfer of Ottoman vessels on wooden rollers to the harbor, and the construction of a monster cannon to punch holes in the city walls.

    The movie indulges in caricature. The Ottomans are devout and resolute; the Byzantine emperor, Constantine, and his aides drink and lounge with women in wispy outfits. When Mehmet finally enters the gates, he tells cowering Orthodox Christians that they are free to worship.

    They smile in wide-eyed, wondrous gratitude. Then the sultan, just 21 years old when Constantinople fell, hoists and kisses a child like a modern politician angling for the cameras.
    While the Ottomans exercised a religious tolerance generally lacking in Europe at the time, the movie does not mention the sacking of Constantinople — a ritual event cut short by Mehmet — nor the edict that turned the soaring Haghia Sophia church into a mosque. Today, it is a museum, and worship is barred.

    The film’s publicist, Filiz Ocal, said in an email that it had rectified a “very important deficiency” because the Turkish public had yearned for such a portrayal, and that every nation wants to introduce its “magnificent achievements” to the world.

    “It is a production for us that focuses on one of the most important stages of the rise of a people, who again have started to rise on history’s stage,” critic Atilla Dorsay wrote in Turkey’s Sabah newspaper. However, he said the movie got stuck “in some excessive nationalism and nationalist propaganda in some places.”

    David Cuthell, an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City, compared the Turkish emphasis on triumph and sacrifice in the forging of a national identity to the 1836 fall of the Alamo fort, where Texan defenders entered American lore by fighting to the death against an overwhelming Mexican force.

    He also saw parallels with actor Sylvestor Stallone’s “Rambo” movies, stalwarts of American pop culture that indulge in themes of victory and vengeance.

    “It makes the Turks feel better about themselves culturally and gives them a sense of grounding,” said Cuthell, who teaches a seminar in Turkish diplomacy. He said Turkey’s emerging pride in the achievements of the Ottomans, whose failure to modernize was denigrated in the early years of the secular republic, dovetails with the current government’s economic successes since it came to power a decade ago.

    Turkey is more democratic than many neighbors, but there are concerns about the religious freedom of minorities and other rights. Constantinople was the headquarters of Orthodox Christianity, and today’s Ecumenical Patriarchate operates under restrictions.

    Islam was the glue binding the Ottoman empire; a forcibly recruited unit, the janissaries, were converts from Christianity. In “Conquest 1453,” the sultan and troops kneel in prayer. In another scene, Ottoman sappers tunneling toward the walls discover they are trapped, shout “God is Great” in Arabic, and ignite gunpowder, blowing up themselves and some enemy soldiers.

    One newspaper in Greece, a historical rival of Turkey, said the movie was “Turkish propaganda,” and a Christian association in Germany also criticized it. Ocal, the publicist, said criticisms of the film “broaden our horizons.”

    Baki Tezcan, who is researching Ottoman history in Istanbul, said Turkey traces its history to Manzikert, a battle in 1071 in which Turks defeated a Byzantine force in what is eastern Turkey today.

    He said the legacy of prior civilizations, along with intermarriage and religious conversions, is usually sidelined in favor of a defensive, ethnically based vision.

    “It is posed as if: ‘There were some people here, and then we came, and now it’s our history.’ This movie is kind of like that,” said Tezcan, an associate professor of history and religious studies at the University of California, Davis. “Turkey has a lot of trouble narrating a past in which there are other than ethnic Turks.”