AbstractsPhilosophy & Theology

This thesis explores recent Turkish-German film through a radically postrepresentationalvision of aesthetics and ethics. Post-representationalism as amethodology involves confronting conventional cognitive and hermeneuticapproaches to film, and going beyond representational schemes and nationalparadigms for a closer engagement with the aesthetic. This thesis puts emphasison tropes such as movement, gesture, process and becoming through anengagement with the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as analternative to the theoretical models that dominate the scholarship on migrant anddiasporic cinemas which place emphasis on dualisms and notions such as culturaland national identity. It attempts to broaden the discussions on post-ReunificationTurkish German cinema by exploring a wide range of works including fiction,documentary and artist films dealing with labour migration from Turkey toGermany. The first chapter focuses on Thomas Arslan’s Berlin Trilogy andChristian Petzold’s Jerichow (2009) as ‘Berlin School’ films that convey adistinct aesthetic approach to labour migrants and their second generationoffspring in Germany, which tends to focus on questions of work and thechanging nature of labour under globalisation. The second chapter looks atdocumentary films by Thomas Arslan, Aysun Bademsoy, Harun Farocki andSeyhan Derin to re-evaluate the dominance of historical narratives and reassessthe documentary form as an archival and creative practice through new politicaland ethico-aesthetic paradigms. The third chapter investigates social realist genrecinema through Feo Aladağ’s Die Fremde (2011) and Yüksel Yavuz’s KleineFreiheit (2003) to explore whether new encounters with conventional aestheticsthat zoom in on gestures and movements can call into question the limitation oflinguistic and semiotic terms and categories of analysis. These chapters aim tomove beyond representational and definitive frameworks in favour of a creativecritical engagement with migrant film as a political vocation, which carries withinitself the potential to invent new forms of thought, resistance, movement andpeople.