國立交通大學
外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
再現離散的家園記憶: 以《愛無止盡》
、
《娘惹
滋味》、
《我的強娜威》三部電影為例
Filming Homes:
The Politics of Representing Diasporas in
Head-On, Rasa, and My Imported Wife
研究生: 賴佩瑩
指導教授: 馮品佳 教授
Table of Contents
Table of Contents i
Acknowledgement i
English Abstract i
Chinese Abstract i
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Chapter Two: Blending Music—Hybridity and Homecoming in Head-On 27
Chapter Three: Representing the Globalization of Migration in Rasa and My Imported Wife 52
Chapter Four: Conclusion 75
Acknowledgement
After years of writing this thesis, on top of all things, I would like to show my gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Pin-chia Feng. Prof. Feng not only gave me a lot of help in the writing process, but also tolerated my procrastination due to many personal reasons. During these years, there had been so many ups and downs happened when I was struggling in the labyrinth of writing. I encountered a lot of difficulties and there is also a lot of people come or leave in my life, but the most important person that never abandons me is my dear professor. Therefore, I could definitely say I cannot finish this thesis without her unconditional support.
Then, I would also like to thank Prof. Ying-hsiung Chou, and Prof. Shih-szu Hsu. They both offered a great deal of help giving suggestions as for my later revision. I would also like to thank my friends, Peter Deayton and Kevin Tang, for they proofread my thesis and gave me a lot of helpful suggestions.
And at last but not the least, to those who believe me I can go through this and support me anytime I am in need of help, you people are always on my mind.
English Abstract
This thesis aims to explore the transnational diasporic people’s unfulfilled desire of homecoming by discussing how these de-territorialized people were represented in Fatih Akin’s Head-On, and two Taiwanese films, Rasa and My Imported Wife
respectively. While the host society tends to use integrationist or separatist notion to deal with the newcomers, this thesis seeks to provide a “third-space” narrative which transcends the two former notions to represent the diasporic people. Furthermore, my analysis of their different routes in terms of searching for home, shows that these films represent the idea of “home” through the politics of hybridization.
The thesis consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I try to highlight the saturated relationship of the dominant and the dominated in hegemonic formation to suggest a possible counter-hegemonic narrative in these three films. In chapter two, I analyze how Akin’s “blending music” and spatial construction successfully formulate such a counter-hegemonic narrative in which he emphasizes the mobility of diasporic characters in the film as a way to break down the status quo. In contrast to my
position as an outsidercriticizing the issue of Turkish immigrants in Germany, I turn to analyze different politics of representation of new immigrants and foreign brides in Taiwan from an insider’s viewpoint in chapter three. Although the directors of Rasa and My Imported Wife both start to make their films from a liberal perspective, their strategies of representing the new immigrants are completely different. Finally, in chapter four, I conclude this thesis by giving examples of the culinary scenes in the three films, and explain how the space of kitchen and culinary skills could be a site of domestication for women as well as a form of resistance to the dominant in different contexts.
Keywords:
中文摘要 本篇論文藉由探討導演法堤．阿金的作品「愛無止盡」，與台灣影像作品「娘惹 滋味」、「我的強娜威」這三部電影中對於離散主體的再現政策以探討對於家園意 象無法實現的渴求。此外，企圖在接待社會(host society)中強勢二元化論述下對 於離散群體同化，抑或排他兩種選擇之外，開創出第三論述。更進一步地分析這 三部影像作品中對於尋根之旅的不同路徑中，共同存在的揉雜(hybridity)美學策 略來再現其多元性。 整篇論文共涵括四個章節。在第一章中，藉由強調霸權結構下統治者與被統治者 兩方位置的交互滲透性，以提供後續章節對於再現離散群體的政策，能夠跨越被 霸權意識框架禁錮的可能性。第二章則主要討論法堤．阿金混合跨界音樂與顛覆 傳統影像下的空間意象，並在影像與音樂兩者交互貫穿整部電影的過程下，成功 地打破影像再現機制的現況。然而本人從一個全然第三者的角度下，切入分析「愛 無止盡」這部探討土耳其裔移民的德國電影後，回頭在第三章中，以自我反涉的 角度解析台灣影像工作者對於離散群體的再現政策。並同時藉由分析「娘惹滋 味」、「我的強娜威」這兩部台灣影像作品的脈絡下，最終發現兩位導演雖源自相 同創作動機，但以不同角度再現異己的結果。最後在第四章裡，藉由三部作品中 皆曾出現的烹飪場景為例，來總結全文，並討論廚房與烹飪技能對於離散女性主 體，是如何在不同影像文本中，扮演著歸化馴服與抵抗不平兩者迥異的角色。 關鍵字:離散、混雜性、霸權、揉雜音樂、離散空間
Pei-ying Lai
Advisor: Prof. Pin-chia Feng
Filming Homes:
The Politics of Representing Diasporas in Head-On, Rasa, and My Imported Wife
Chapter 1. Introduction
In the age of globalization and the flow of capitalism, people migrate from one place to another under different contexts and formulate different diasporic communities. Whether it is of one‘s free will or not, many members of the ―people flow‖1 are constantly in a state of homelessness and lack of a sense of belongingness because their external displacement is deeply interwoven with internal anxiety. The vigorous development of the contemporary film industry makes film the most efficient and effective medium in transmitting modern culture and its ideologies. As transnational migrations have increased due to the ―global cultural flow‖ stemming from globalization, the persistent desire of these deteritorialized people to maintain contact with their homeland provides a new market for the film industry (Appadurai 36). Therefore, the issues of diaspora have gained a lot of attention from different
1
filmmakers and producers. However, what I would like to explore in this thesis is to investigate the different kinds of aesthetic perspectives adopted by filmmakers to represent the diasporic issues, such as the interaction between different diasporic groups and the ways in which they struggle with the control of mainstream society. Another important issue is that if the term ―diaspora‖ has been used so extensively as a category for the ethnic minority in a displaced host society, does it also provide the channel through which the dominant power can easily categorize and control the minority people?
In order to unravel these problems about diaspora, I will use Fatih Akin‘s Head-On (aka. Gegen die Wand), Chih-yi Wen‘s Rasa (The Taste of Nyonya), and Chung-lung Tsai‘s My Imported Wife as textual examples for exploration. The film Head-On (2004) highlights the conflicts between Turkish immigrants and their children while living in a highly modernized and unfriendly society within Germany. Rasa discusses foreign workers and the ―maid trade‖ in Taiwan, while My Imported Wife uses the filmic genre of documentary to ―record‖ the case of a trans-cultural marriage between a disabled Taiwan husband and an eloquent Cambodian wife. All three films concentrate on the issues of diaspora, ethnic relations, and cultural conflicts within global contexts. Furthermore, each director uses a different style of aesthetic framework to present their unique vision of diasporic identities.
Theoretically, my thesis seeks to delineate a ―third-space,‖2 in Homi K. Bhabha‘s terms, which transcends the two strategies that mainstream society use whilst living in the same society: one is assimilation, and the other is separation. Through an analysis of the aesthetic representations of diasporas in Head-On, Rasa, and the documentary
My Imported Wife, I will highlight the cultural flows and their connections through the
politic of hybridization. Furthermore, the hybridity in films not only attracts audiences from all over the world under the ideology of global capitalism, it is also the site of resistance that shatters ethnic, national, sexual and spatial boundaries through the exchange of culture.
The reason I would like to investigate the diasporic group of Turkish-Germans from an outsider‘s viewpoint comes from my personal experience while traveling around Munich several years ago. One day during my tour around the city with my family, I walked down a street filled with restaurants and souvenir shops. I saw a waiter of obvious Middle-Eastern origin waving his hands and saying ―kon-ni-chi-wa‖ to me, which means ―hello‖ in Japanese. I happened to know some basic Japanese and realized he had mistaken us for Japanese people, so I corrected him in English: ―Thank you, but we are from Taiwan.‖ I was very surprised that the next thing he said
to me was in perfect Mandarin: ―ni-how-ma,‖ which means ―how are you.‖
Later on I found out that the waiter was a Turkish guest worker, like millions of other Turkish people who come to Germany in search of a better living. This incident provoked my interest in the Turkish-German community and their immigrant culture in a highly ―non-acceptant‖ European environment which ironically has higher immigration rate than those ―nations of immigrants‖ such as Australia, the United States, and Canada (Penninx 2-3). When I look back to my home country, Taiwan, recruiting lots of people from Southeast Asian countries to fulfill the shortage of labor performing ―3-D jobs,‖ it is in some ways similar to Germany‘s system of guest workers (Castles 107).3 These foreign workers in Taiwan have been under severe legal restrictions and they are required to rotate and leave Taiwan every few years so that they will not have permanent residence in Taiwan. These restraints indicate that they are regarded as ―an economic buffer of labor which can be brought in as needed and sent away‖ at anytime when they undergo unemployment, a practice that exploits and fragmentizes people into the reductive representation of a labor product (Castles 2). However, taking the history of Turkish immigrants in Germany as a model, we can understand that whilst the recruiting country only ―wanted labor, not people,‖ it would still ―end up with new ethnic minorities‖ (Castles 8).
3 Stephen Castles defines ―3-D jobs‖ as ―dirty, dangerous, difficult‖ jobs. This Asian phenomenon
happens in highly industrialized Western European countries as well such as when West Germany encountered a great labor shortage during the mid-1950s because of the ―economic miracle‖ which stemmed from the national reconstruction after WWⅡ (29).
The exploited condition of ―immigrant workers‖ and ―foreign brides‖ in Taiwan is an important phenomenon that echoes the situation of Turkish immigrant workers in Germany.4 Although migrants both in Germany and Taiwan suffer state-sanctioned oppression, they are represented from different points of view in these three films, which express heterogeneous social outlooks in Germany and in Taiwan. In Germany, people traditionally take their country as an ―ethno-cultural‖ society, the so-called ―Volk‖ (Castles 18). If we examine the immigration policy between the 1970s and
1990s, we can conclude that Germans usually take an exclusionary attitude toward their immigrants. This exclusionist practice means that they only recognize citizenship through descent and take their immigrants as temporary residents or sojourners and usually refuse to grant immigrants citizenship even after a long period of residency.
The immigrant policy in Taiwan began in a similarly exclusionist way to that of Germany, but recently the general social atmosphere in Taiwan toward treating labor diasporas has evolved into a more liberal attitude. In the beginning of 1970s, most of the industrialized Asia Pacific countries such as Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan all used the exclusive immigrant policy to prevent the permanent settlement of guest workers. However, because of the rapid development of global economy, these countries can no
4 The idea of articulating Turkish-German diaspora with the issue of ―the new immigrant‖ in Taiwan
benefited from the discussion I attended in a symposium entitled ‗E/Im/Migation and Culture‘ held in Istanbul, Turkey. (Sept.15-17, 2007)
longer ignore the growing tendency of cross-cultural marriage that comes along with the recruitment of foreign labor (Castles 114-16). Therefore, in a multicultural society like Taiwan, which had been colonized many times over, the general social attitude toward immigrants is supposedly becoming more and more liberal.
At present, the different social atmospheres toward treating labor diaspora in Taiwan and Germany are also reflected in the different aesthetic constructions that filmmakers deploy to represent the diasporic issues in these two countries. Most importantly of all, I admire the energy and courage of diasporic people with which they deal with oppressions from the dominant group. Therefore, I wish to study the vibrant scenes of these cultural conflicts and discuss the potential counter-hegemonic politics, as well as the problematic multiculturalist notion of representing these diasporic minorities in these three films.
The term ―diaspora‖ is important in my thesis since I adopt it as my framework to define and articulate the dilemmas of these immigrants. Originally, ―diaspora‖ is a Greek word which comes from the Greek tradition of gardening. The term ―diaspora‖ in Greek combines two words—speiro meaning ―to sow,‖ while dia indicates ―over‖ (Sheffer 9). The term ―diaspora‖ therefore refers to the dispersed state of scattered seeds. Later on, due to the metaphorical meaning of seeds as the carriers of culture, the meaning of ―diaspora‖ also indicates the forced expulsion of Jews since the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians Conquest in the 6th century (Kalra et al. 9). However, the term has also been more broadly applied to describe the conditions of other ethnicities that also go through massive dispersions. Consequently, ―diaspora‖ becomes a term indicating people with ―deterritorialized identities‖
because of the experiences of migration and displacement (Kearney 526-27).
However, not all immigrants can be termed as ―diasporan.‖ We need to clarify the differences between a diasporan and an exile. In Hamid Naficy‘s definitions there exist both similarities and differences between the two terms. Naficy clarifies that the term diaspora refers to a group of displaced people who ―have an identity in their homeland before their departure, and their diasporic identity [in the host society] is constructed in resonance with this prior identity‖ (14). While exiles can be individualist or collective, the exilic identification process remains a ―vertical and primary relationship with their homeland,‖ whereas the identification process of diaspora goes to a ―necessarily collective‖ and maintains a ―horizontal and multisited‖ relationship with their native country (14).
Some theoretical discussions of diaspora as a way to discuss cultural identity tend to construct a fixed/homogenized identity for one specific ethic group. However, it jeopardizes the capacity of one group to affiliate with another group. Lisa Lowe, for instance, points out the problem of essentializing a cultural identity for Asian
Americans and argues that interpreting the identity of diaspora only through vertical (filial) transmission of generational conflict risks ―obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among Asians. […And it also] displaces social differences into a privatized familial opposition‖ (135). Lowe believes that the cultural identity of Asian Americans is not only transmitted through vertical relationships but also through horizontal diffusion amongst communities. In this way, we can see that the process of constructing cultural identity is not fixed or pure. Instead, it is always in the state of incompleteness and ―becoming‖ with the historical background, external environment, and material condition.
Stuart Hall‘s statement about cultural identity is quite similar to Lowe‘s position. Hall argues that cultural identity is
a matter of ―becoming‖ as well as ―being.‖ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. […] Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being externally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ―play‖ of history, culture and power. (236)
Thus following the argument, we can see that the heterogeneity and the state of constant changing and mixing of racial minorities destabilizes the dominant culture‘s construction of ethnic minority people as one homogeneous group.
singularity and conceptions of race as the material locus of differences, intersections, and incommensurabilities‖ (Lowe 136). The quasi-colonial hegemonic narrative of constructing one race into a ―singularity‖ can also be seen in Rasa. In the beginning sequence in which Sari meets her Taiwanese boss for the first time, a female agent of a human resources company introduces Sari in front of the disabled grandmother and her granddaughter, describing her as an Indonesian. The agent characterizes Indonesians as the kind of people having a ―mild temper and being quick-learners,‖ while she describes Filipinos as a group of people who are ―smart and calculating.‖ The agent even goes on to tell the family that the company can provide any type of personnel according to the family‘s demand. This kind of reductive narrative echoes exactly the pattern used by the dominant (majority) culture to control minority communities. The separatist logic corresponds to the structure of colonialism that ―does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces and separates them‖ in
order to subjugate them (Fanon 94). Nowadays, the rise of global capitalism replaces the arbitrary military domination of colonialism. Global capitalism has become a kind of ―neo-colonialism‖ that follows the same ideology to control people‘s political and economical status in the former colony, though in a more implicit way (Castles 163).
While emphasizing the fluctuation and heterogeneity of the racial minority, I also realize that the dominant culture, which has continual relations to the minority, is also
unsteady and closed (Lowe 139). I propose to understand how subaltern groups like ethnic minorities can stand out and influence the existing (dominant) culture through Antonio Gramsci‘s concept of hegemony. Throughout his analysis of the social construct of class in Italy, Gramsci argues that the political rising of the working class in Italian society during 1850-1920 is a noticeable phenomenon that empowers subordinate people. Gramsci discovers that the lower and working classes within the mechanism of capitalism reverse the subordinate position because they ―succeed in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State‖ (Pre-Prison 320). In this way, the working class becomes the new dominant (hegemonic) bloc and is also able to speak for the minority people that are often oppressed in the apparatus of capitalism.
However, in order to retain the primacy of the hegemonic group, Gramsci points out that the dominant culture must engage with the worldview of its subalterneity because a successful hegemonic formation relies on a minimum of conflicts and expands its leadership peacefully before the antagonists consent (Selections from the
Prison Notebooks 125). As a result, before the dominant group exercises power, the
interests of the dominated group must be taken into account and even concessions within a reasonable range may be needed to be made in order to seek the support of
the subalterns to expand the realm in which the leading group dominates.5
Gramsci‘s theory of hegemony proposes a certain optimism because he seems to believe that the hegemonic process endows the subaltern with a certain kind of agency. It is because the process of hegemonic formation provides some sort of agency to subalterns, lifting up the position of the minority from a lifeless ―thing‖ that is socially constructed as always dominated by the leaders to ―a historical person, a protagonist‖ who can actively threaten the hegemonic bloc (Jones 47). This kind of optimism is based upon the supposed hegemonic process in which the dominant group asks for consent from the dominated, antagonist group. Otherwise, if the dominant group decides not to give voice to those whom it rules, the primacy will not last. In other words, the concept of hegemony is
[…] not only the political process by which a particular group constitutes itself as ‗the one‘ or the ‗the majority‘ in relation to which ‗minorities‘ are defined and know themselves to be ―other,‖ but is equally the process by which various and incommensurable positions of otherness may ally and constitute a new majority, a ―counter-hegemony.‖ (Lowe 140)
The subaltern is the group that Gramsci defines as ―not unified‖ and prehegemonic; however, his notion in the final transforming phase of the subaltern classes would
5 Gramsci explains the compromises the leading group can make to satisfy the need of the minority
group are those that could not endanger the central value which has ―the function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity‖ (Selections from the Prison Notebooks 161).
grant the subaltern its ―integral autonomy‖ (Selections from the Prison Notebooks 52). This integral autonomy also indicates that through articulating the needs of different minority groups, a new hegemonic party will be formed. The saturated, inter-dependent relationship between the hegemonic group and the subaltern can be regarded as the starting point upon which we can find hybrid connections and use it as a tool for resistance. While using the term hybridity, it seems to suggest that there are supposedly pure entities before the process of hybridization. For example, Paul Gilroy argues against the insinuated purity underlying the term ―hybridity‖: ―the idea of hybridity, of intermixture, presupposes two anterior purities…. I think there isn‘t any purity; there isn‘t any anterior purity‖ (54-55). Likewise, as Gramsci points out, the hegemonic group needs to include part of the interests of the dominated group; while the minority also needs to affiliate with other minorities to increase their spectrum of power, this interdependent relationship in a way corresponds to the cultural politic of hybridity. On the other hand, the fact that the cultural politics of hybridity can be deployed by both sides reminds us to be aware of the contexts within which the politic of hybridity is used and also the motivation behind the employment of this term.
Thus, I want to use the saturated relationship between the hegemony (majority) and the dominated (minority immigrants) to be the point of departure for my argument to constitute a discourse of ―counter-hegemony‖ by evaluating aesthetic
representations of the diasporic minorities in these three films and the dynamic that might disrupt the majority. I will focus on the different aesthetic politics these directors adopt to represent the processes of identification that a diasporan incessantly encounters whilst negotiating between their ethnic homeland and host society under the hegemonic structure of global capitalism.
Amongst these three films, Head-On was the recipient of a number of international awards after its release in 2004, including the Golden Bear at the International Film Festival in Berlin. It was the first German film to win the prestigious prize in eighteen years (Berghahn 141). The director Fatih Akin is a Turkish immigrant who grew up and studied filmmaking in Hamburg. However, Akin does not want his film to be categorized as among Sarita Malik‘s ―cinema of duty‖6 made by other first-generation Turkish-German filmmakers such as Tevfik Başer and Hark Bohm. Both Başer‘s and Bohm‘s films represent cross-cultural conflicts in a documentary style. Başer‘s most famous work Vierzig Quadratmeter Deutschland/Forty Squaremeters of Germany (1986) depicts female Turkish
immigrants living under the oppression of Turkish patriarchy in Germany; Bohm‘s work Yasemin (1988) suggests a problematic multicultural integration by ending the
6 Sarita Malik defines the term ―cinema of duty‖ in her article ―Beyond the ‗Cinema of Duty‘? The
Pleasure of Hybridity‖ as a cinematic style that mainly centers on the issue of ethnic relations and insoluble conflicts in a realistic style during 1970s to 1980s. Although some of the works included were under attack of embodying ethnic stereotypes, there were still other works answering back to the national narrative of ethnic relations and also ―offering an alternative view of the diasporic experience‖ (204).
intracutural conflicts in the film with the last scene in which the title character, a Turkish girl, jumps onto the backseat of her German boyfriend‘s motorcycle and symbolically escapes from her Turkish patriarchal home. Film critic Deniz Göktürk points out that Forty Squaremeters of Germany and Yasemin strengthen the stereotypical dichotomy between a liberating, progressive German culture, and a backward, patriarchal Muslim Turkish culture by sketching out the colonial fantasy ―of victimised Turkish women, who, especially when young and beautiful, need to be
rescued‖ from their patriarchal ethnic family (―Turkish Women‖ 69).
In Chapter Two of my thesis, I will analyze the aesthetic style in Head-On the filmmaker manipulates in order to provide a different representation of diasporic people to counterpoint the Eurocentric paradigm in the previous films. Fatih Akin refuses to represent Turkish immigrants in Germany by following the ideological framework of his forerunners, who in the past few decades choose to present the image of Turkish diaspora ―in one disguise: as a problem‖ (Burns 142). Akin, on the other hand, tries to represent Turkish immigrants differently through highlighting the dynamics of their ―experience of rootlessness, of culture clash and of living between or in two worlds‖ (Berghahn 143). Akin‘s intention to represent the struggle of diasporic life between two cultures can be reflected in the two strategies he uses in
configurations that both echo the recurrent motif of homecoming.
For instance, the techno song which appears in one scene when Cahit is drunk in an urban pub embodies the inner dialogue of his mental loss and the cultural value carried by this musical genre with which he identifies while simultaneously playing the role of background music in the pub. Akin also repeatedly inserts the scene of a Turkish musical band throughout the film in which a Turkish female singer sings a traditional story of a girl searching for her true love that parallels the main storyline in the film.
On the other hand, while talking about the recurrent motif of homecoming that exists in almost all of the diasporic filmmakers‘ work, the diasporic ―double consciousness‖ of home should also be noticed. Naficy points out that ―accented filmmakers are structurally outsiders, however much they desire to be considered insiders, either within their own native culture or in the host society‖ (70). Therefore,
the accented filmmaking communicates the controversial feelings between imagined home and encountered society through cinematic production, combing all sorts of elements such as the use of a hybrid narrative to reflect the filmmaker‘s multifocality while struggling between two cultures. Moreover, the aesthetic style derived from their works connects all the other displaced filmmakers together with a collective desire centering on the imagined homecoming. We need to realize that the accented
filmmaking underscores ―visual fetishes of homeland and past‖ and ―visual markers of difference and belonging‖ (Naficy 22). These accented filmmakers tend to present their work filled with doubleness to show their ambivalent feelings about home.
Furthermore, I will also discuss the aesthetic value of spatial representation in the three films and how the external spatial arrangements of mis-ce-scéne make spectators identify with the internal yearning for the imagined homeland. For Naficy, spatial configuration in diasporic films is an important perspective to analyze diasporic filmmaking. Mikhail Bakhtin suggests using the concept of the chronotope,7 or ―time-space,‖ as a critical term to study the spatial and temporal configurations in the
novel and also examines the forces in the cultural background behind these configurations. Naficy follows Bakhtin‘s footstep and uses the concept of the ―chronotope‖ in theorizing accented (diasporic) filmmaking and turns it into the idea
of the ―cinematic chronotope‖ to refer to the ―temporal and spatial settings in which stories unfold‖ in diasporic films (152).
I will use Naficy‘s theorization about ―chronotopes of imagined homeland,‖ in which he differentiates between ―home-seeking journey,‖ ―journey of homelessness,‖ and ―homecoming journey‖ to study the framework of spatial and temporal settings and analyze the forces behind this construction in the accented filmmaking
7
See Mikhail Bakhtin‘s ―Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel‖ in Dialogical
exemplified by Akin‘s Head-On (152, 222-38). According to Naficy, the concept of chronotope in film relates closely to cinematic form – it is normally divided into the open and closed forms. Open cinematic form is usually ―represented in a
mise-en-scéne that favors external locations and open settings and landscapes, bright
natural lighting, and mobile and wandering diegetic characters‖ (153). The openness in cinematic form suggests the use of long shots to situate characters in open settings and therefore preserve their integrity. On the other hand, the spatial representation of the closed cinematic form is composed by the mise-en-scéne with closed settings such as the space of a small room with dark lighting or any other factors that can formulate a psychological feeling of restriction (153). We can see at this point it is important to pay more attention to the mise-en-scéne in diasporic cinema, because the configuration of space carries the message of placement and displacement whether the characters dominate the space or are dominated by it (Naficy 154).
Furthermore, Naficy adopts Louis Gianneti‘s analysis that the connotation of the open form is ―in general recessive, appears to be spontaneous and accidental, and can be associated with realism,‖ while the closed form suggests ―conspicuous, self-conscious and deliberate, and may be associated with formalism‖ (154). In short, the open form implies the autonomy of one‘s choice while the closed form suggests the passivity of fate. Besides the open and closed forms, there is a ―thirdspace
chronotope‖ which engages with transitional sites like airports, bus stations or borders and also other symbolic icons that can represent the mobility transporting people from one place to another (Naficy 154). The thirdspace chronotope could also be called a ―border chronotope‖ since the spatial configuration of border-crossing is a motif that
substantializes the psychological process of the diasporic experience struggling between the internal loss of displacement and the eternal yearning for returning to their homeland (Naficy 237).
Responding to Naficy‘s argument, Akin‘s film uses the chronotopes of homeland to reflect his ―double consciousness‖ as a diasporic filmmaker living between two cultures. The plot of Head-On also echoes the persisting motif of ―Heimat‖ in German film history – a German word that describes the ―nostalgic memories of fantasies precisely of what is lost or absent‖ invoked by the experience of migration or reluctant exile (Berghahn 145-46). In Germany, Heimatfilm became a popular film genre in the 1950s, which reflected post-war trauma due to the massive in-flow of refugees relocated from Eastern Germany after the end of WWⅡ. Both accented cinema and Heimatfilm emphasize the desire for belonging and identity. However, the ―Heimat‖ in accented cinema refers to a country that is located faraway, and always ―a structuring absence, an unattainable utopia‖ because the secure roots in a homeland
Heimatfilm in Germany conveys a romantic ideal in which the characters in these
films can find their new ―Heimat‖ through an idyllic depiction of a rural village in West Germany (Berghahn 146-47). This romantic ideal continually exists in the cultural construct of present Germany and expands its connotations to provide a ―trope for identity politics in an increasingly multicultural society‖ (Moltke 7).
In the process of globalization, the traditional spatial construction that helps define one‘s identity is undermined by the breakdown of distance and boundaries because of rapid technological development, so we can feel a growing need for people to find a sense of belonging and security. It is also the second filmic strategy leading to the success of Head-On, because the motif of homecoming recalls the common desire of audiences from all cultures to retrieve the ―imagined homeland‖ (in Rushdies‘s terminology), only to realize the impossibility of coming back to the utopian space in the end.
This desire of homecoming contrasts sharply to the multiculturalistic representations in Rasa in which the characters find a new home in Taiwan. I want to talk about whether the identity as a diasporan transcends the general division of gender, if it can provide liberation for women and if it also problematizes the integrationist perspective of Rasa. The English title Rasa comes from the Malay language, which means ―taste,‖ while the Chinese title The Taste of Nyonya, signifies
the theme of cultural hybridity in this film, which allegorizes the process of cultural clashes throughout the film. ―Nyonya‖ in the Chinese title is a term for the daughter in a Chinese-Malaysian transcultural family. Later on it also referred to the cuisine made by these Nyonyas. Nyonya cuisine combines Chinese cooking style with food elements from Malaysia and spices from Southeast Asia (Huang). The director wants to use this kind of metaphor to describe the fact that even though clashes between different cultures could be painful, as exemplified by the sequence in which Sari‘s Muslim daily prayer is misunderstood as conducting some kind of diabolical ritual, everything will turn out sweet and harmonious like Nyonya cuisine.
In my analysis of Rasa, I want to argue that the director Chi-yi Wen tries to juxtapose the hybridity of culture in a globalized Taiwan society by using a problematic way that seemingly ―naturalizes‖ all these new immigrants and ―assimilates‖ them under the cover of multiculturalism. For instance, the
representations of the female characters are submissive and docile, while the plot leaves the desire of male guest workers such as the Thai worker Tsai-yo unresolved. Therefore, I will begin my analysis with discussing the gender relations within a diasporic group in Rasa. It is also interesting to note that in Head-on, the inhibited gender relations encourages the female protagonist Sibel to pursue her freedom and sexual autonomy exceeding the Muslim cultural restraints on females, but in the end
she chooses to stay with her new family in Istanbul, to be a wife that she does not want to be at the beginning with Cahit. I believe it is because the director tries to tell us it is a bildungsroman for Sibel that she finally realizes that persistent escape would end up taking her nowhere. In other words, if she chooses to elope with her true love Cahit, this act just shows she will be permanently away from her new family, her sense of ―home‖ that she struggles with and finally finds a place she belongs to. She understands that the freedom she asks for all the time does not mean to abandon her diasporic identity or cultural limitations but to ask herself where her right to ask for it comes from. As spectators watching Sibel‘s revolting and irresponsible behavior in the first half of the film, she understands at last that freedom to her is how she defines herself and the will to make an effort for it. Floya Anthias argues that there are two sets of gender relations which a diasporic woman needs to confront. One is the relation to the host society and the other is the relation to her ethnic community (560). Diasporic men are ―most empowered in the household due to patriarchal norms,‖ but disempowered in the host society because of antagonism originating from sexual competition with other local males, whereas the situation of diasporic women is the opposite. While a diasporic woman is disempowered in the household due to the patriarchal order in the house, she might be ―potentially empowered in the wider society where discourses of ‗rescuing‘ vulnerable and oppressed female members‖ is
pervasive in the dominant society (Kalra et al., 52). Although this kind of female empowerment is limited under the patriarchal norm and its colonialist superiority, it gives somewhat more mobility to diasporic women than to men.
Furthermore, in a diasporic household women are usually considered as the ―carriers of culture.‖ This is because in the domestic arena, the pressure to raise
children and pass down cultural heritage to the next generation is usually the responsibility of the mothers. The role of cultural carrier for diasporic women can be both limiting and empowering. It is a limitation when it becomes a way of oppression to those women who question the role of being a ―carrier of culture‖ and also becomes an obstacle for them to fit into the host society; on the other hand, the role is empowering when it grants women ―positions of community authority‖ (Kalra et al., 57). In the film Rasa, Sari is employed to do domestic work as a maid, but she chooses to take the role of a cultural carrier by making South Asian delicacies and thereby receives the recognition (consent) of the host family. Finally, she takes control of everything, from domestic work to economical responsibility, by supporting the family of her boss and becoming the locus of power to convince the majority to accept the culture from which she originates.
The role of ―cultural carrier‖ meets its challenge when one chooses to deny the role that the ethnic society imposes on her. Especially for those second-generation
diasporic women who grow up in a foreign society, there is a need to develop an expedient way to fulfill expectations from both sides of the cultural system. Eventually, these second-generation diasporic women live a ―double life‖: they choose the lifestyle of host society to fit in the public sphere, while privately they follow the aspirations of their ethnic parents when they come back to the household. They are under double pressure and having double lives, which is the reason they are usually labeled as a ―double victim‖ (Göktürk 250-51).
Nevertheless, Wen‘s storyline seems to assert an integrationist notion and tries to naturalize these characters through replacing them with the ordinary position in our daily life to build an emotional bonding with the audience and to persuade them to accept these ―new immigrants‖ as local people and thus should be treated accordingly. By contrast, My Imported Wife uses the genre of documentary to record the struggle in a transnational marriage, which in a way complements the lack of the misconceived multiculturalist notion in Rasa and genuinely retains the incoherence between different cultures.
The promising liberal notion of multiculturalism is always under attack because the politics of integration and assimilation it deploys come with a ―patronizing Eurocentric distance and/or respect for local cultures‖:
―authentic‖ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a
distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position […] from which one is able to appreciate properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for the Other‘s specificity is the very form of asserting one‘s own superiority. (Žižek 44)
In Rasa, we can see this underlying superiority exist and being revealed throughout the film.For instance, Sari‘s love for her boss is depicted as a form of salvation, and the sequences in which she falls down the stairs, has a miscarriage and finally becomes the wife of her boss bespeak that for Wen to be a ―docile sacrificer‖ is the only path to gain recognition into the dominant culture. Finally, if we look retrospectively we can understand the reason why Rasa won the 2007 Golden Bell Award. Its multicultural notion corresponds to the the image of a liberal attitude that the Taiwanese government endeavors to create. For all its conservative politics, Rasa is a film that successfully brings the issue of immigrant workers into the attention of Taiwanese viewers; yet it is what it has sacrificed to receive the common embrace of Taiwanese audiences that we need to pay attention to.
Overall, I want to use ―diaspora‖ as a critical term to discuss the representations of dynamic mobility in films to articulate the differences in culture, class, gender, and other modalities that relate to the struggling for power and hegemony. The word
―diaspora‖ often invokes the image of traumatic experiences of dispersion and
psychological alienation from the receiving society. However, diaspora can also be the site of new beginning which ―places the discourse of ‗home‘ and ‗dispersion‘ in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins‖ (Brah 193). It is this ―creative tension‖ that situates the concept of the diaspora in a ―relational positioning,‖ and transcends the socially constructed binarism in the regime of power (Brah 183). In this way, the concept of ―diaspora‖ begins to deconstruct and interrogate the hegemonic primacy in the
dominant culture from a multilocational perspective inscribed in the politics of diaspora and thus formulate a ―third space‖ beyond the majority/minority dichotomy. In the following chapters, I want to discuss the possibilities of constituting the ―third space‖ through analyzing the aesthetic representations in the three filmic works
In ―Blending Music: Hybridity and Homecoming in Head-On,‖ I highlight the use of music in the film, and how the hybridized music of the film such as punk rock or third world music that seem to be artistically contradictory but coexist in Head-On smoothly. Therefore, Akin blends different music styles as a way to influence spectators‘ identification with his displaced characters. In the third chapter, ―Representing the Globalization of Migration in Rasa and My Imported Wife,‖ I want
subjectification of the so-called ―New Immigrants‖ in Rasa and My Imported Wife. In this chapter, I argue that Wen‘s multiculturalist narrative in Rasa fails to achieve her proposed intention of telling the story from the perspective of foreign labor immigrants. On the contrary, the docile characters in Wen‘s film are mostly naturalized and also assimilated by the host society, and thereby losing diasporic ―relational positioning‖ in the end. Nevertheless, I want to complement the
problematic multiculturalist representation by taking the documentary film My
Imported Wife as my exemplary text to elaborate on the politics of difference in the
discourse of diaspora with Avtar Brah‘s analytic term ―diaspora space.‖ By using the idea of diaspora space, what I want to emphasize is that besides Bhabha‘s notion of third-space and hybridization, it is also important to note that the local people also undergo the continuing hybridized process in Brah‘s immanent ―diaspora space‖. At last, in chapter four, I would conclude the previous chapters by comparing the culinary scenes in these three different movies and discuss how cooking can be used to represent different diasporic identity.
Chapter 2
Blending Music: Hybridity and Homecoming in Head-On
Fatih Akin is undoubtedly the mostly popular Turkish-German director in the contemporary European film industry. This director of Turkish descent was born in Hamburg and studied visual communications in Hamburg‘s College of Fine Arts.8 After winning several festival prizes with his short films and directing some feature films, the award-winning Head-On made Akin a highly-recognized international filmmaker. Head-On is the first part of Akin‘s ―Love, Death, and the Devil‖ trilogy, with the three films in the trilogy sharing a common interest in the identification of immigrants and their ideas of home. In 2007, Akin impressed the world again with his second film of the trilogy, entitled The Edge of Heaven. Unlike Head-On, which concentrates on the theme of love, The Edge of Heaven discusses the theme of death. The basic plot of The Edge of Heaven tells the story of Turkish immigrants and their second generations in Germany while also highlighting the political and cultural interaction of people struggling in two cultures. The last piece of Akin‘s trilogy is still in production and the producer of the third film Klaus Maeck affirming that it would still be a "big migration drama which will travel from Germany to America‖ (Blaney).
The film Head-On describes a male protagonist Cahit Tomruk, who comes from Mersim (the middle part of Turkey) but abandons his Turkish roots entirely after he migrates to Hamburg. He is in his forties and yet he has no decent job; he lost his beloved wife and consequently became an alcoholic and a drug addict. Cahit decides to commit suicide out of desperation by deliberately crashing his car into the wall. However, his suicidal act fails and is then sent to hospital. There he meets the heroine Sibel, who also attempts to terminate her own life.
Sibel is the second-generation daughter of a Turkish immigrant family in Hamburg, and is brought up in a western democratic/individualist culture. But her Turkish background holds her against her will of pursuing individualist freedom since her traditional Turkish parents only permit her to marry with a man of Turkish origin. Therefore, Sibel asks Cahit to have a fake marriage with her while they can still keep their own original single lifestyle. As Cahit and Sibel‘s fake marriage become more and more ―real,‖ Cahit falls in love with his wife and accidentally kills one of Sibel‘s
lovers out of jealousy. After several years of life in prison, Cahit regains his freedom and tries to reunite with Sibel. But at that time she has already had a new family in Istanbul.
In a well-known film like Head-On, the director opens a new path for presenting immigrants in a highly-unfriendly environment like Germany, yet surprisingly it still
wins over most of the picky viewers in Germany and in Europe. I believe the effective use of music contributes to this success. In this chapter, I want to discuss the aesthetic techniques of ―blending music‖ that Akin successfully manipulates to present varied diasporic images of his characters in Head-On.
One of the most artistic techniques in Head-On is the way in which it combines sounds and images to enable spectators to transcend the dichotomy of insider vs. outsider. But before we talk about the music in film and how it brings an emotional effect to the audience, we need to examine the historical status of scoring first. In the era of the classical studio system, critics declared that ―film music should be unobtrusive‖ because the composition of images and visual pleasure that movies bring are the main reasons that audiences come to the movies (Gorbman 43; Adorno 29). And in the essay ―Prejudice and Bad Habits,‖ Adorno and Eisler suggest that the initiative concept of film music comes from ―leitmotif.‖ The word usually associates with Wagner‘s opera to indicate a short piece of melody that constantly appears during the performance, so that the repetition of this short melody could recall audiences‘ attention to the theme in the opera. However, because of the differing natures between opera and cinema, the insertion of leitmotif has a different symbolic meaning. In Wagner‘s opera, which has a ―symbolic nature,‖ music played by the orchestra is equivalent to verbal conduct on the stage (Adorno 27). The repetition of
leitmotif in Wager‘s opera is to parallel the heroic theme of the composition, such as the music in Tristan and Isolde, and build up events on stage that have a metaphysical meaning. If we look into the nature of cinema, we see that music plays a completely different role in film since film primarily depicts reality, not to mention that a single rudimentary leitmotif could not fit in with the changing scenes of the motion picture (Adorno 27).
Adorno and Eisler go on to claim that all music in cinema is utilitarian and subordinate, to grease the gap between the image and the viewers‘ eyes. Following Adorno and Eisler‘s argument, we realize that ―the function of leitmotif has been reduced to the level of a musical lackey,‖ which indicates the fact that music in motion pictures becomes subservient or even exploited to fill in the lack of visual images and verbal narrative presented on the screen, forming a ―visual justification‖ to grease sequences in which images might disrupt spectators‘ identification with the characters during the viewing process (28-30). Adorno and Eisler also question the prevailing prejudice that music in cinema should be unobtrusive. They argue that whether film music should be unobtrusive or not depends on the scriptwriter; I, on the other hand, believe the arrangement of music and image is also decided by the director‘s artistic interpretation of the script. They believe that the obtrusiveness of film music could be an effective artistic device to create another kind of aesthetic
intention, a point I will come back to later with the scene of the Blue Mosque in
Head-On.
While Adorno and Eisler analyze film music from an instrumentalist perspective, Claudia Gorbman tries to delineate film music in ―The Sound Film and Its Spectator‖ from a psycho/analytic perspective. Gorbman explains first how music participates in our daily life as easy-listening or so-called background music. These kinds of utilitarian music like jazz or bossa nova songs being played in coffee shops such as Starbucks or bookstores bear a common feature in trying to relieve the pains in our life. While background music plays a role in easing people‘s pains in public places like hospitals, film music also wards off two aspects of possible pains that might be engendered during the viewing process. The first is to ward off the displeasure of ―uncertain signification,‖ and the music here tries to have the connotative meanings to
the images on the screen (Gorbman 40). Therefore, the music interprets or even ―supplies information to complement the potentially ambiguous diegetic images and
sounds‖ and ―anchors the image in meaning, throws a net around the floating visual signifier, assures the viewer of a safely channeled signified‖ (Gorbman 40). This diegetic music eases viewers‘ anxiety and also supplements the understanding of ambiguous visual signification that the film might bring out. The other displeasure that music tries to ward off is the spectator‘s ―potential recognition of the
technological basis of filmic articulation,‖ which means the editing techniques such as the cutting, framing, or any other camera movements that might involve jeopardizing the process of the viewers‘ identifying with the characters in film—that is ―the formation of subjectivity‖ in filmic discourse (Gorbman 40-41).
Throughout the history of the film industry the role of film music has been constantly redefined. After fifty years of cinematic development during which time synchronized sound was adopted in filmmaking and the collapse of the studio system in 1970s, the unobtrusiveness of film music is no longer the predominant rule, and the supporting role of music in film has evolved into only one of the possible handlings of the soundtrack. Royal Brown states that ―postmodern scoring‖ has a ―tendency toward prominent and self-conscious use of music‖ and this kind of development shatters the aesthetic value of classical film scoring (cited in Gorbman 43). Significantly, postmodern scoring allows the music to ―occupy a ‗parallel universe‘ to the film‘s visual narrative rather than function illustratively and subordinately […]‖ (Gorbman 43). We can see the two different deployments of film music coexist in Head-On. While the punk music comes out in the bar scene as the compensating role for depicting the visual narrative as in classical scoring, the postmodern scoring of music creates a parallel narrative in the cross-cuts of the Turkish musical band and a female singer beside the river bank silhouetted by the iconic Turkish landscape of the Blue
Mosque.
Akin begins constructing his soundscape of Head-On in the first shot of the Turkish folklore orchestra playing on the bank of Bosporus with the female vocalist Idil Ü ner singing a traditional Turkish love song ―Saniye‘m‖ (My Saniye) from the 1930s. In this opening shot we can hear the vocalist singing the Turkish love song with lyrics going like:
Ç aya iner gezerim
(I go down the river and walk around) Çayda balık izlerim
(I watch the fish in the troubled water) Balık da değil efkarım, Sancak saçlı Saniye'm
(My worry is not about the fish, but my Saniye with your wind-blown hair) Beyhude gözleri.
(and saddened by your eyes...)
The melancholic lyrics of the song accompanied with the mellow sound of a clarinet, wooden drum, and other string instruments in the orchestra are used preliminarily to create a framing aura for Head-On, and to suggest the movie is about a sad, unfulfilled love story of a Turkish couple. The director uses this scene as the opening shot and recurringly intercuts the scene recurrently to accentuate its importance. Although cross-cuttings of the scenes of Turkish musical band tend to disrupt the spectators‘ viewing experience, it also reflects the de-centered position
which has been subconsciously repressed by the alienated characters yet aesthetically emphasized by Akin throughout Head-On. The next shot jumps to the underground club with the male protagonist Cahit walking around and picking up trash since it is the way he earns his living. He then goes to a bar alone and has a quarrel with another customer there and gets kicked out by the owner in the end. After being deserted on the street alone, he drives furiously and the 1980‘s rock band Depeche Mode‘s ―I Feel You‖ comes out to accentuate the scene because this song starts the piercing sound of
skid, which happens to connect to the scene that Cahit starts off his car. Here, the song complements the scene with the lyrics beginning with ―I feel you, each move you make. I feel you, each breath you take. Where angels sing, and spread their wings, my loves on high. You take me home, to glory‘s throne. This is the morning of our love, it‘s just the dawning of our love.‖ We find out later in the film that Cahit has lost his wife, which makes him completely rootless in Germany and even gives up his former career in the music business. So if we look retrospectively to the song ―I Feel You,‖ the lyrics in the song describe the psychological sufferings and also his yearning for his late wife. Here, the music plays the role of ―connotative meaning,‖ as suggested by Gorbman.
The punk rock music reflects the bitterness in his heart as we see tears running down his face before he crashes his car into a wall. The last scene of his suicidal act is
a high-angle shot outside the window of the building into which he drives directly. This elevated angle makes audiences feel as if they are witnessing the incident from an omnipotent and indifferent viewpoint. Akin uses this shooting angle to create a viewing distance to express Cahit‘s feelings of desperation developed from his being devoured by the alienating people and environment. The music ends with the last sentence ―this is the morning of our love, it‘s just the dawning of our love,‖ which symbolically tells us it‘s going to be a goodbye to his past and the beginning of his unexpected love relationship with Sibel in the future.
The next shot switches to an asylum in Hamburg, where Cahit meets Sibel, who has also commited suicide by cutting her wrist. The scene begins with several close-ups on different medical equipment to indicate the location and at last the camera stops on a photograph of insect hung on the wall. The mise-en-scene in this sequence depicts the asylum as a cold, indifferent environment that would probably treat their patients like the insects pictured on the wall. The next scene goes to a face shot of Sibel smiling at the camera and then pans to Cahit who sits across her. The German doctor calls Cahit‘s full name and brings him into the consulting room. After Sibel hears Cahit‘s last name and realizes he is Turkish like herself, she approaches Cahit and asks him if he can marry her. Cahit denies her request at first, but after a visit to a pub where Sibel cuts her wrist again with a broken beer bottle right in front
of him, he ponders Sibel‘s situation. Following Sibel‘s failed suicide, they both leave the pub and quarrel about the fake marriage on the city bus. The driver pulls the bus over and kicks them out by shouting discriminative words that go like ―there‘s no room for godless dogs like you on my bus.‖
In this end of their first blood-stained quarrel, Cahit asks about her name on the street because he finally agrees to have a fake marriage with her. The next scene then shifts back to the orchestra on the banks of Bosphorous with the female singer singing ―Find yourself a love, too. And make her your wife.‖ The lyrics mirror Cahit and Sibel‘s marriage that later comes into being. The camera goes back to depict Cahit
walking to his messy house trying to dig out a decent suit to wear for his first meeting with Sibel‘s parents, with the punk rock song ―Ho Ho‖ from a defunct band ―The Birthday Party‖ as the background music. In this scene, the song ―Ho-Ho‖ resembles
the deserted environment around Cahit‘s place, because viewers can hear the vocalist sing the song in a grumpy tone, as if he is releasing all the rage in his life through this song with mocking lyrics that go like ―yo-ho-hole, yo-ho-hole, through which blow, a small sick wind‖ to build up the deserted social environment in which Cahit dwells.
The punk rock music inserted here carries a certain kind of cultural value which Cahit identifies with, supplementing the aura that the screen cannot directly represent, and also articulates the politics of the punk rock to speak to what is on the mind of the
character. Rock music is initially a musical genre that derives from the music industry under the Anglo-American hegemony. However, the rebellious and revolutionary ideas that these songs want to convey encourage the proliferation of peripheral voices (Chambers 77). Following this path, punk rock tends to speak out for those in subordinated positions in a society, and most of these musicians are young people who have complaints about society.
In ―The Cultural Study of Popular Music,‖ Simon Frith takes Sarah Cohen and Ruth Finnegan‘s survey to analyze the rising phenomenon of young people assembling a rock band. Gathering Cohen and Finnegan‘s opinions from these surveys about amateurs, Frith comments that the appealing aspect of rock music comes from its mode of learning, because the learning mode of rock music is ―unlike the classical mode of apprenticeship and slow progress through fixed grades of performing difficulty, [rock music] is by its nature individualizing‖ (175). That means that they learn music spontaneously, and they do not learn how to play music under formal music training, but rather learn how to play it in endless experiments in places such as the basement in a house. This explains why rock musicians always believe they have the ability to say something in their music without any kind of limitation and at the same time, they also always need to practice with other band members in a group so that it endows them with a sense of identification for being able to play a part in this
collective.
Therefore, music is not just something that people like to do, it is through their music performance that these musicians also try to show their ―involvement in culture‖ (Frith 177). Their performance works out because ―in speaking to the crowd the musicians come to speak for them,‖ therefore the music ―both creates and articulates the very idea of community‖ (Frith 177). Because of this political message that rock music tries to convey, it attracts supporters from across different ages and social backgrounds to identify with Cahit even though he represents the decadent lifestyle of a disappointed immigrant.
The punk rock that is connected with Cahit also reveals the fact that his ethnic identification is different from someone who is rooted in ethnic culture, such as Sibel‘s brother. We can see that from the conversation in which the doctor asks about
the meaning of his first name in Turkish and Cahit carelessly replies that he does not know. Throughout the film, he is one of the living dead before he meets Sibel. He can hardly control his temper and easily comes into conflict with other people. By using such an uninviting character like Cahit as the protagonist, the director tries to externalize the internal pain of being a Turkish guest worker in Germany. John Berger calls these people the ―seventh man‖: ―His migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another. The migrant‘s intentionality is permeated by historical necessities
of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware. That is why it is as if his life were dreamt by another‖ (43). The life of being a guest worker in Germany or any other
host society is never easy. Once you think of yourself as having adapted to the environment, there come more problems, such as getting interrogated by native people about your patriotism or people of the new environment consciously or unconsciously treat you as an outsider. These disoriented diasporic immigrants have a life journey often involved with ―trauma, rupture, and coercion, and […] the scattering of populations to places outside their homeland‖ (Naficy 14).
The diasporic background, yearning for homecoming, and his deployment of ―blending‖ music to accentuate the protagonist‘s position as a displaced outsider make
Akin‘s Head-On an ―accented film.‖ A diasporic film like Head-On can get the approval and praise of both Germany and Turkey because throughout the film the director never tries to demonize or show his preference for any society in his film. Instead, Fatih Akin keeps an intermediary position to appreciate both the beauty and the imperfections in the two societies.
From the perspective of accented filmmaking, we can see the reason Akin uses a lot of rock music in the first half of Head-On to portray Cahit‘s character as a diasporic Turk in Germany. Despite that fact that rock music comes from the tradition of Western hegemony, most of the band members come from a subaltern group who
are trying to express their thoughts through music. Thus here rock music evolves into ―a global language and institution, a communicative practice, it stands in an analogous
relationship to other worldly languages, offering both a shared grammar and network, and a shifting historical cultural syntax in which meanings are contingent and identities contextualized. It is both held in common and differentiated‖ (Chambers 83). Analogous to the relational positioning of diaspora, the multi-faceted character of rock music provides a channel that can bring the voice of de-centered people into the center and even de-center the center in the end.
At the beginning of the film, Akin often crosscuts the scene of Turkish folklore band near the Blue Mosque with Cahit‘s lower-class living style in Germany accompanied with rock music on the soundtrack. This technique makes most of the spectators think that the two cultures are seemingly quite opposite and irrelevant to each other. Yet as the plot goes further after their wedding ceremony, the cross-cuts of the orchestra appears less and the music in the later part of film blends more and more tunes from a much more diverse cultural backgrounds in response to the harmonious emotional development between the protagonists. For instance, the song ―The Temple
of Love‖ appears in the scene when Sibel dances in their small room with Cahit before she takes him out clubbing. The song is a 1992 re-recorded version by the Gothic rock band ―The Sisters of Mercy‖ from Britain, but in the film it is infused
