Lost Voices of Kurdish Cinema

Abstract

The belated emergence and the visibility of the cinema by Kurdish filmmakers is widely interpreted as a reason to categorize it as part of transnational cinemas characterized by a lack of standardized language and national domestic industry. This contributes to a negation of the promise of a cinema that specifically caters to a Kurdish public in terms of enunciation and reception. Considering Kurdish cinema outside transnational conditions, this paper examines enunciation in cinema of (national) subject through an audiovisual analysis of three feature-length films equipped with acoustic means in Kurdish: Voice of My Father (Dengê Bavê Min, Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Doğan, 2012), Song of My Mother (Klama Dayîka Min, Erol Mintaş, 2014), and My Sweet Pepper Land (Hiner Saleem, 2013). I employ Mladen Dolar’s concept of voice in understanding enunciation of subject through body and language and Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic voice in understanding the constitutive division of the subject by means of suture. Through this analysis, lost memories, absence of the father (read as nation-state), and fetishization of mother(land) emerge as icons of the past haunting the present on behalf of recognition. In this regard, I address Kurdish cinema as a force of subjectification that transcends and transforms the experience of trauma through an impure production of meaning. Accordingly, the paper concludes that a primary characteristic of Kurdish cinema is its potential as a self-reflexive means for recognition and identification.