Representation of European Utopia and its Discontents in the Films of Fatih Akın

Abstract

In this article, I contemplate the questions of “Europeanness” through the prism of Fatih Akın’s films. His works can be considered as being representative of European urban cinema, as he skillfully questions “European identity” through the cosmopolitan urban landscape and multicultural identities he employs. Such scrutinization of identities, be it on the level of individual, national, and/or postnational, are emphasized by the sampling of various eclectic music genres. Just as the identity of Europe has been shifting, Akın’s filmic representations have been successful in capturing the postindustrial cityscapes of certain European cities. Moreover, through the music and sounds he deploys, Akın opens up a “third space.” This unfolds through his cinematography, which aurally and visually reflects on cityscapes, immigrant and nonimmigrant identities, as well as emotional geographies created through his various subjectivities. Such a third space is also constituted by the flow of desire of his characters through their temporal displacements between (European) cities such as Hamburg and Istanbul, and their attachments to “places” through music. I thus discuss how Akın engages with the meaning of “Europeanness” and European identity in relation to the “Other,”—in other words, how this director tackles the issue of identities through the socio-political and cultural spaces of his protagonists. This also overlaps with how he utilizes music in his movies, as well as how he represents the idea of a utopia and dystopia through the social world of his diasporic characters.