WHAT A PAIR

AYSEL, THE GIRL FROM THE SWAMPY ROOF (AYSEL BATAKLI DAMIN KIZI), 1935
Turkiye | Digibeta, B&W , 80’ | Turkish
Director: Muhsin Ertuğrul
Cast: Muhsin Ertuğrul, Ergun Köknar, Talat Artemel, Cahide Sonku

EMINE THE PROSTITUTE (YATIK EMİNE), 1974
Turkiye | HDD, Colour, 84’ |
Director: Ömer Kavur
Cast: Necla Nazır, Serdar Gökhan, Bilal İnci, Nubar Terziyan, Mahmut Hekimoğlu, Güzin Özipek

Is it just a coincidence that Muhsin Ertuğrul, the first director in Turkish cinema who approached to the cinema of the West, and Ömer Kavur, our first director with formal film education with a long-lasting career, have each made a “woman trouble” film that have never been surpassed? Woman trouble is one of the first “troubles” that imposed themselves on our cultural lives and film in the Republic era. Male directors, especially, have circled around this issue; sometimes opportunistically and other times mercifully. Woman trouble is both titillating and heart-wrenching. In his 1934 film Aysel, the Girl From the Swampy Roof, Muhsin Ertuğrul, who came from a theatre background and worked as an actor and director in Sweden and Germany during 1910s and 1920s, adapts Victor Sjöström’s 1919 melodrama Tösen från Stormyrtorpet . The film specifically resembles the Russian cinema of the era which examines rural life–such as Dovzhenko’s certain films. Ayselstars Cahide Sonku, the only blonde star at the time, the Marlene Dietrich of Turkish cinema, whose role as the titular character at the mercy of the men in her village brought her huge success. The film not only includes observations on woman trouble, but also polarities such as landlords vs. villagers, educated urban women vs. illiterate village girls, being a master of one’s destiny or not. In that sense Aysel is a “homeland film”. Ömer Kavur’s Yatık Emine (1974), which he directed immediately after graduating from IDHEC film school, is an adaptation of the story of the same name from Refik Halit Karay’s book Memleket Hikâyeleri / Tales of Homeland. The story chronicles the last days of Emine who is exiled for prostitution to a remote town in Anatolia during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Yatık Emine is not only the story of a woman coinciding with the modernisation period of the Ottoman Empire, but also a first in our cinema with its Bressonesque minimalist storytelling and perhaps an indirect expression of a feeling which Nuri Bilge Ceylan named as “passionately loved, lonely and beautiful country,” at the awards ceremony at Cannes…
Taking off from this character, who is left alone in a far-off place–a touching example of woman as representation of country/nation–we can say that “we are all still Yatık Emine, we are all exiles in a provincial place”. -Fatih Özgüven