Abstract
During the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the children of the so-called Turkish "guest workers" exploded onto the German film landscape. By then "guest worker" had become an outdated term from the vocabulary of the West German government's recruitment program from the late 1950s to the early 1970s addressing the labor shortage produced by the "economic miracle" and exacerbated conventions, perception of time and space, and the structure of intimacy and familial relations. The film portrays the interconnected local belonging and global mobility characteristic of transnational culture and captures what geographer David Harvey has labeled the "time-space compression" of globalization, the result of increased speed of transportation and communication technologies (see particularly 260-323). The film's alternative familial arrangements reflect the restructuring of social relations as result of migration, which produce fantasmatic long-distance intimacies and substitute-kinship affiliations in localized places. The film's multi-faceted representation of globalization moves beyond the simplistic position articulated by its character Ayten in the film: "It is globalization and we are fighting against it." The Edge of Heaven captures the effects of globalization in its non-linear narrative structure, the mobility of the figures, and their accents and dialects. But the film also engages in a seemingly paradoxical reaction to the digitalization of communication technology's association with globalization: a narrative organization according to music and literary forms, the film's bibliophilic aesthetics, and its evocation of earlier models of temporality. It would seem paradoxical that The Edge of Heaven also values what many theorists posit as that, which globalization has left behind: the bibliophilic worlds of books, national high culture based on a canon, traditional left-wing politics defined by a distinct philosophical-political system, regional attachments, an understanding of space and time rooted in pre-scientific knowledge and lack of surveillance technologies, and foundational religious and mythical beliefs that underwrite humanist values and enable human encounters. But The Edge of Heaven neither presents globalization as all-encompassing totalizing world view, nor does it disavow its social reality by creating the illusion of a lost whole and resurrecting a national grand narrative, as in the European heritage cinema, for example (see Koepnick, Higson). Consequently, The Edge of Heaven exceeds the different academic categories of national, European, or minority cinema. With its multilingual dialogues, actors and actresses, and its multinational locations and relationships, the film questions the traditional category of national cinema. While the film includes a lesbian love story, it does not belong to the classic lesbian and gay cinema based on identity politics. And even though the importance of tropes of "the journey" and "the jail" in the emblematic Turkish landscape, as well as the film's proximity to melodrama, conjure up the work of Turkey's most famous filmmaker and actor Yılmaz Güney, in Germany and that she has lost contact with her. In a drunken and jealous fit, Ali unintentionally kills Yeter and is sentenced first to prison in Germany and later deported to The Edge of Heaven is not rooted in traditional-left cinema's political imaginary and ideologies of 1970s Third Cinema (see Pines and Willemen). The category of Turkish-German cinema with its biographical dimension and emphasis on cultural encounter has also become inadequate to account for the film's transnational complexity of relationships and centrifugal power of references. 1
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