Horror in the Archives

 

Transnational Folklore, Politics, and Horror Film

The academic study of horror cinema has become increasingly established in recent years (with the Horror Studies journal launched in 2010, the Horror Studies book series from University of Wales Press launched in 2015, and the SCMS Horror Studies SIG launched in 2016), yet the study of the transnationalism of horror cinema has still been relatively limited. While the approach was discussed in the two anthologies on international horror co-edited by Stephen Jay Schneider in the early 2000s (Fear Without Frontiers, 2002; Horror International, 2005), and a handful of later collections devoted to particular national horror traditions (Korean Horror Cinema, 2013; Italian Horror Cinema, 2016; Hong Kong Horror Cinema, 2019), there is still much to be said about the specifically transnational dynamics of horror film production and reception. By investigating case studies of contemporary horror films produced in Sweden, Turkey, India and Southeast Asia, and tracing how they draw upon local folkloric and mythological traditions, this panel (proposed by Professor Chris Holmlund, Professor Rosalind Galt, Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar and Dr Iain Smith for SCMS2021 Virtual Conference) grappled with the cultural politics underpinning these complex interactions of the local and the global.

Chris Holmlund discussed the representation of the troll in Gräns (Border, 2018) and how Iranian/Swedish director Ali Abbasi presents an outsider’s perspective on Nordic folklore and Scandinavian values. Rosalind Galt followed with an analysis of the Malay folkloric spirit penanggalan and how the films Tamnan Krasue (Thailand, 2002) and Penanggal (Malaysia, 2013) deploy the figure in strikingly different political contexts. Cüneyt Çakırlar presented an analysis of the post-millennial emergence of horror films in Turkish cinema and how the djinn figure of Islamic mythology relates to the politicization of Islam in contemporary Turkey. Finally, Iain Smith investigated the invented mythology of the Goddess of Prosperity in the Indian folk-horror film Tumbbad (2018) and demonstrated how its specific combination of global/local characteristics has helped it overcome the traditional exclusion of Indian films from the international horror canon. Building on recent interventions in the field of transnational horror studies (Choi and Wada- Marciano, 2009; Och & Strayer, 2014; Siddique & Raphael, 2016), this panel therefore meet the pressing need for scholars to address exactly what the transnational turn in film studies scholarship means for the study of contemporary horror cinema.

Çakırlar's paper, titled "Djinns of Post-millennial Turkish Horror Film: Gender Politics and Toxic Kinship in D@bbe (2006-15) and Siccin (2014-19)", argues that the popularisation of the traditional and religious imagery in Turkish visual culture is symptomatic of the post-millennial politicization of Islam in Turkey following the electoral victory of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in 2002. The shift from militarist secularism to neoliberal Islam in Turkish politics unsettled the Kemalist foundations of Turkishness, and provoked anxiety and polarisation. Reflecting on this anxiety, this paper focuses on the post-millennial emergence of horror films in popular Turkish cinema to locate them within Turkish political culture and its restoration of Muslimness. These films authenticate their horror by exploiting an image of Turkey as a new autocracy that has antagonized the state’s secularist republican legacy. Investing in the figure of the djinn of Anatolian folklore, Turkic shamanism and Islamic mythology, the films tell paranormal stories of witchcraft, black magic, demonic possession and exorcism. Hasan Karacadag’s D@bbe and Alper Mestçi’s Siccin have been the most popular horror series. Inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo (2001), Karacadag’s D@bbe films refer to the Quranic verses on the summoning of all djinns (to lead the judgment day) by the creature Dabbe’t-ül Arz, which these films seem to depict as an evil force haunting people through digital media. While Karacadag’s transnational style appropriates a Japanese and American supernatural horror aesthetic, his use of the djinns of Turkish folklore and Islamic mythology narrates stories that represent toxic relations of family, kinship, class, and property in contemporary Turkey. In these films, demonic femininity, especially via vengeful mothers, mobilises djinns and demons across generations. Thematically resonating with the D@bbe series, Mestçi’s Siccin movies move from the found-footage “techno-horror” to hybrid “horror dramas” of familial grief, revenge, jealousy and class conflict, i.e. amorous and familial relations cursed by djinns and demons. Çakırlar's study discusses the ways in which the two most popular auteurs of this new genre cite folklore and religion to entertain, if not confront, their audiences with the contemporary horrors of gender politics and kinship relations in post-millennial, post-secular Turkey and its Islamic liberal-conservative project of rebuilding the nation.          

 

The Monogamous/Promiscuous Optics in Contemporary Gay Film

Cüneyt Çakırlar & Gary Needham (2020) The monogamous/promiscuous optics in contemporary gay film: registering the amorous couple in Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), New Review of Film and Television Studies, 18:4, 402-430

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1800329

This article explores representations of same-sex intimacy in contemporary gay cinema by focusing on two films, Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016). Both films spatialise intimacy, which is reflected in a formal appeal to monogamous and promiscuous optics. What interests us here is how the rela- tional politics of monogamy/promiscuity can be considered as stylistic and ideological registers in gay filmmaking. Informed by Leo Bersani’s work, we investigate how gay cinema tests the social viability/intelligibility of same-sex intimacy against a centring of the self. Furthermore, we explore how gay films use form and style to situate both their politics and their spectators through specta- cles of erotic relationality. Following Bersani, the article proposes a theory of cinematic optics that privilege the impersonal over the personal, and the onto- logical over the psychological. Weekend ‘ovalises’ intimacy and locates the couple formally and ideologically. The couple in Weekend’s space of sociality operates within a monogamous optic that presents intimacy through stabilising identities and psychologising subject positions. Théo & Hugo, however, reorients spectator- ship as impersonal and promiscuous in finding a way to express the experience of cruising and sociability in ways that are dispersed and extensible.

Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in Documentary

 Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016) 

published in The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, Issue 01 ‘Transitory Parerga: Access and Inclusion in Contemporary Art,’ edited by Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds): pp. 245-263. [open access link]

Cüneyt Çakırlar's study critically analyzes the themes of queer migrancy and homecoming in two recent documentaries. Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner in Mecca (2015) documents the filmmaker’s journey from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia for his hajj pilgrimage. Using an essayistic, first-person documentary register, Sharma constructs a tension around his attachments to nation, religion, and sexuality. While the film offers a critique of religion as a punitive state apparatus, Sharma’s pronounced proprietorial relation to a migrant gay Muslim identity functions in progressive counter-valence. Tomer and Barak Heymann’s portrait documentary, Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016), tells the story of Saar, an Israeli gay man who was expelled from his Jewish community in Israel and has emigrated to London. Treating Saar’s HIV diagnosis as the marker of an affective crisis, the film oscillates between two distinct spaces of domesticity: Saar’s family in Israel, and his circle of friends in the U.K. In both films, the conflict between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrancy. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the constitutive attachment of the queer migrant.

 

Keywords: affect, essay film, first-person, intersectionality, LGBTQ documentary, migration, religion, sexuality, transnationalism

To access the open-access journal, visit https://thegaragejournal.org/en/

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture is an independent interdisciplinary academic platform that advances critical discussions about contemporary art, culture, and museum practice in the Russian and global contexts. It publishes original empirical, theoretical, and speculative research in a variety of genres, celebrating innovative ways of presentation. Fully peer-reviewed, The Garage Journal provides an open-access source book of ideas for an international audience.

Translating Girlhood in Mustang (2015): Locations of Style, Political Context and Audience Reception

As part of the conference "Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television", which took place at Istanbul Bilgi University (April 11-13, 2018),  Cüneyt Çakırlar presented his paper in the panel "Translating Girlhood in Mustang (2015)" with Özlem Güçlü (MMGSU) and Elif Akçalı (Kadir Has University). 

Focusing on the Turkey-born French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang (2015), the panel explored diverse modes of critical analysis to locate the film’s national and transnational framings of gender politics. Mustang tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. Focusing on these five characters’ rapport with the conservative and segregated gender order in which these girls are “trained for” and forced into arranged marriages, this unconventional coming-of-age story capitalises upon solidarity, agency and resistance rather than a defeatist drama of spectacular victimhood. However, the film has received differing reviews: while the international reviews were celebrating it as a feminist text of rebellion and female empowerment, the local (i.e. Turkey-based) reviews were more sceptical of the film’s engagement with the national political context. The panel questioned the functions of film style, the political context of cinema, and audience reception in locating Mustang’s ideological operations in terms of national politics, (trans)national feminism, and the theoretical frameworks of national/transnational cinemas. Özlem Güçlü argued that Mustang’s formulation of female agency and subjectivity can be considered as exemplary of new female narratives in the contemporary cinema of Turkey. Cüneyt Çakırlar focused on the film’s formal/stylistic choices and the extent to which these choices reify a transnational feminist accent while undermining the local intricacies of gender politics. Finally, Elif Akçalı discussed the differences in the film’s reception by critically exploring local and international reviews of the film.        

Soufiane Ababri's solo show at The PILL, Istanbul

Following his solo show, Here is a Strange and Bitter Crop, which was on display at the Space in London last year, the French-Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri has recently launched an exhibition of his recent work at the gallery The PILL (Istanbul & Paris) titled Memories of a Solitary Cruise (10 January - 23 February 2019). Through his use of the spectacular scene of traditional Turkish wrestling, Ababri's project intervenes into the racialised and sexualised modes of Orientalism. Exploring male friendship and homoeroticism in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures through the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, Ababri's art of appropriation creates a productive friction by depicting Arab or "Oriental" with the aesthetic tools of Western canons/masters of homoerotic arts.

The gallery commissioned Cüneyt Çakırlar to author a piece that introduces Ababri's art practice to the Istanbul audience. The English version of Çakırlar's piece can be accessed from this link. The Turkish translation has recently been published in Manifold.

Islam in the River of Wisdoms

Professor Wendy Shaw (Freie, Berlin) delivered the first talk of the House of Wisdom public programme (curated by Cüneyt Çakırlar) - on the 3rd of October. 

Modern celebrations of the 8th century library “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad often paint it as the symbol of an Islamic golden age: a shining light of the East against the dark ages of the medieval West; and a shining light of the past against the dark ages of modern associations between Islam and terror. But history is much more complex. More than a single institution, the House of Wisdom was a practice of transcultural transition and layered translation, where antique philosophy rejected by Christian Rome persisted through the funnel of Sassanian Iran and informed a nascent Islam hungry for knowledge, regardless of origin.It calls on us to imagine not a golden age of Islam as distinct from its surroundings, but as part and parcel of late antique cultures whose overwhelming interest in discovering truth is all too often erased in our modern concern for authenticity. Situating the House of Wisdom not as a golden age of Islam but as a transcultural inheritance, this talk explores how the early Islamic state enriched its coffers of wisdom through recognising the value of knowledge regardless of nation or creed. Focusing on music, epics, and fables, it looks at practices of internalisation at the heart of early Islam that modernity has all too often forgotten.

Wendy M. K. Shaw (Ph.D. UCLA, 1999) is Professor of the Art History of Islamic cultures at the Free University Berlin. Her work focuses on the impact of coloniality on art-related institutions and pre-modern discourses of perception, with emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and regions of Islamic hegemony. She has written Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003), Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2011), and What is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

For the video documentation of this talk, please click here. 

This event is part of the public programme curated by Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar for the exhibition House of Wisdom Nottingham (28 September 2018 – 27 October 2018). Sponsored by Arts Council England, the exhibition is on display at NTU’s Bonington Vitrines and Atrium (School of Art and Design), Primary, Five Leaves Bookshop and Bromley House Library. House of Wisdom’s public programme is supported by the School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University.

Visiting Bibliophiles: Fellowship of Book [IQAC with Prof Greg Woods]

Part of the exhibition House of Wisdom Nottingham's public programme (curated by Cüneyt Çakırlar), members of Istanbul Queer Art Collective, Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül, visited NTU Emeritus Professor Gregory Wood's house on the 25th of September, and had a conversation on their passionate attachment to books and personal libraries/ For the video documentation of this performance titled "Visiting Bibliophiles: Fellowship of Books (2018)", please click here. 

House of Wisdom: Public Programme

House of Wisdom Nottingham: Exhibition Public Programme

Programme Curator: Cüneyt Çakırlar 

Didem Erk, “Black Thread”, installation, 2017.

Istanbul Queer Art Collective

Performance

Visiting Bibliophiles: Fellowship of Books

Following their performance of Psychic Bibliophiles: What the Cards Say in Amsterdam, Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül will visit NTU Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Gregory Woods. Presenting their Just in Bookcase, they will have a conversation on queer archiving and memory. The video documentation of this event will be available after the performance. 

3 October 2018 Wednesday

Prof. Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany)

Talk

Islam in the River of Wisdoms [event details and booking]

Venue: Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH

Time: 19:00-21:00

Modern celebrations of the 8th century library House of Wisdom in Baghdad often paint it as the symbol of an Islamic golden age: a shining light of the East against the dark ages of the medieval West; and a shining light of the past against the dark ages of modern associations between Islam and terror. But history is much more complex. More than a single institution, the House of Wisdom was a practice of transcultural transition and layered translation, where antique philosophy rejected by Christian Rome persisted through the funnel of Sassanian Iran and informed a nascent Islam hungry for knowledge, regardless of origin. It calls on us to imagine not a golden age of Islam as distinct from its surroundings, but as part and parcel of late antique cultures whose overwhelming interest in discovering truth is all too often erased in our modern concern for authenticity. Situating the House of Wisdom not as a golden age of Islam but as a transcultural inheritance, this talk explores how the early Islamic state enriched its coffers of wisdom through recognizing the value of knowledge regardless of nation or creed. Focusing on music, epics, and fables, it looks at practices of internalization at the heart of early Islam that modernity has all too often forgotten.

10 October 2018 Wednesday

Misal Adnan Yıldız (ASA Berlin, Germany)

Talk

A Feeling of Loss: Mutterzunge [event details]

Venue: Primary, Reading Room, 33 Seely Road, Nottingham NG7 3FZ

Time: 18:00-20:00

Misal Adnan Yıldız will present a lecture, which is based on his curatorial project entitled Mutterzunge. The project is composed of seven chapters and it engages in conversations with the book of the same name by Berlin-based author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Yıldız’s research draws upon mostly primary sources including studio visits and interviews with the author and participating artists, research and production notes, as well as everyday life anecdotes focusing on politics of silence, feeling of loss and biographies of transition. Presenting several new productions from Mutterzunge’s Berlin programme, the lecture will look at recent works of Şener Özmen, Mehtap Baydu, Mohammad Salemy among others with critical questions about the close connections between the global memory, transnational dynamics and how to narrate social changes within personal traumas.

17 October 2018 Wednesday

Film Screening (introduced by Cüneyt Çakırlar, NTU)

Gürcan Keltek’s Colony (2015)  [event details and booking]

Venue: BON143, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 18:00-20:00

The sun rises at the Beşparmak Mountains. The autonomous Missing Persons Committee is conducting excavations at these mountains along with scientists and undercover witnesses. Skeletons will be exhumed and delivered to the families. The ghosts of unopened mass graves wander in evacuated villages, valleys. 'Colony' is a film about psychogeography, the memory of landscape, trauma and remembrance.

22 October 2018 Monday

Talk/Workshop

Dr Aylin Kuryel (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

UPLEFTER: Workshop on Political Depression [event details and booking]

Venue: BON146, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 18:00-20:00 

Over the years, we have witnessed, across cities and groups, a decrease in the motivation to act together and the belief in the possibility of influencing change, especially after right-wing victories and internal conflicts within the left. Political depression might induce feeling of anxiety and hopelessness and can lead to nostalgia, sarcasm and eventually cynicism. It is a less personal but more collective experience, which is not adequately and collectively addressed. The aim of this workshop is helping contextualize political depression, rather than isolating it as a personal and negative feeling that should be gotten rid of. It will provide a platform on which we will contemplate on the diverse but related reasons behind political depression and attempt to find various ways to deal with it and act upon it. With the participation of people from diverse backgrounds, following a set of questions prepared in advance, it will allow a debate on political depression as an affective condition that influences the ways in which we relate to ourselves and others.

24 October 2018 Wednesday

Exhibition Walkthrough with Mine Kaplangı & Cüneyt Çakırlar

Meeting Point: Bonington Gallery (entrance), NTU, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 13:00-15:00

24 October 2018 Wednesday

Film Screening (introduced by Cüneyt Çakırlar, NTU)

Shevaun Mizrahi’s Distant Constellation (2017) [event details and booking]

Venue: BON143, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG

Time: 18:00-20:00 

This haunted reverie drops us inside an Istanbul retirement home, where the battle-scarred residents bask in the camera’s attention. A creaky- voiced woman confides her personal account of the Armenian genocide. A sweetly deluded pianist performs a composition before confessing his love. A blind photographer fiddles with his flash as he points his own camera back at us. Shevaun Mizrahi’s playful, immaculately controlled film finds hypnotizing rhythms in the residents’ limbo-like state. Meanwhile, outside, ominous construction equipment transforms the land.

The public programme events for the House of Wisdom Nottingham are sponsored by School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University. Sponsored by Arts Council England, the exhibition and its programme are also supported by Bonington Gallery, Primary, Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, and Bromley House Library.