Crossing the Bridge: The Music of Istanbul – Akin

This doc was directed by Fatih Akin, who also directed the much-praised Head-On. (I have a borrowed copy of Head-On at home, but havent seen it yet.) Akin is a German national of Turkish descent, and the film is largely directed at a German audience. The narrator is Alexander Hacke of Einsturzende Neubauten, whose love of unusual music shows through, and he’s a scruffy presence that seems at home among the cig’-smokin Istanbul musicians.

In a well-paced 90 minutes, Akin discovers 15 musicians or groups, from drug addicted buskers to tuxedo wearing ballroom singers whose peak of popularity was 40 years ago.

The beginning of the film focuses on Western influence; grunge, hip-hop, psych rock… Fine, but those cultural mutants can be found in most any cosmoplitan city in the world. Later they start to explore the older music and you get a sense of the slow simmer of cultures – Asia, Europe, Middle East – that have come together in Istanbul (or Constantinople before it) for centuries. There’s a handful of memorable characters; a rapper who is incredibly fast, so it seems, but not knowing the language it may have been a bit of an audio illusion. A film icon from the 60s who suppsedly has released 1,000 (!) albums, yet never performs live, agrees to do a set for Hacke and Akin. A ’70s pop singer and film star, who was gorgeous, also grants a rare performance – with Hacke sitting in – in her “family palace,” and a woman named Aynur who performed a dirge in Kurdish in an acoustically perfect centuries old empty bathhouse, which was beautiful. The Kurdish language was literally illegal in Turkey until 1991, and she said in her early performances, people would rush the stage and literally tear the instruments from out of their hands. Wow, right?

So Arnab, let me take a stab at a geo-political thought here (though nothing is wrong with just focusing on the music). Germany has gone through their own xenophobe crisis with Turkish immigrants; the similarties to our situation with Mexican aliens are many. Germany needed the cheap labor to keep the economy growing and the prices low, same as we do. Then they’re stuck with them; there are claims they refuse to assimilate and you get nationalism raising its head, except America has never beeen smacked around for its nationalism the way Germany has. It seems that Akin wants to demonstrate that Istanbul, the most modern facet of Turkey, is a great city in no small part because of its unique spot among three disstinct mega-cultures, all of which have dozens of offshoots. It’s a bit of a hard sell, if that’s what he’s doing because of Turkey’s treatment of Kurds, Armenians, Greeks (who were all deported) and so on. But hey -everyone makes mistakes; that’s why pencils have erasers! (and no one who speakss German can be evil!) Hacke speaks mostly German in the film, and while Turkish relations with Germany are not brought up explicitly, (nor is the Muslim sharia law againt music) the film really does feel like a plea for tolerance on a lot of levels, its title included.

It sounds great – Hacke took his recording duties as seriously as any fan of folklore collector Alan Lomax -and it looks great. (Hacke takes every opportunity to not just take in the music but join in on bass and guitar, which is impresive.) And anything that leads to a little more understanding riight now without beating us over the head with war, oppression and genocide is a good thing.