Taş Mektep

Watched Taş Mektep (Stone School), a 2012 Turkish film, on the flight from Gatwick to Istanbul. It is set in 1921-22, a decisive passage in the formation of the modern Republic of Turkey. With the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire during WWI, Anatolia was occupied and broken into sections by the Allied powers. Greece overplayed its hand, not surprising given what was already longstanding animosity between Greece and the Ottomans, and bit off much more of Anatolia than the treaty of Sévrés had actually granted, unleashing bitter ethnic violence in the process.

The film begins with the Greeks (or the Hellenes, really, by which I mean Greeks serving under the Greek flag, to distinguish them from all the ethnic Greek residents of Anatolia, many of whom were part of families who had been there for centuries and were mostly minding their own business) rampaging in Eşkişehir, commiting mayhem and dishonoring humble Turks in the process. (For some reason, the Turkish elders in the film try to defend Eşkişehir by darting into narrow alleyways carrying farm implements, a tactic that fails to intimidate or check the rifle-bearing Hellenes, who cut them down mercilessly.)

The film then cuts to Kayseri, at that time a small town in central Anatolia. From that point on, we follow a group of schoolboys who abandon the classroom to fight a guerrilla war against the Hellene occupation, along with the more seasoned fighters who teach them the solemn ways of war, and the noble, high-cheekboned teacher who at first tries to convince them not to go off to war, then follows them and serves as field nurse and witness to their suffering and ultimate triumph.

It was in Turkish without subtitles, so I could only understand every tenth sentence or so, mostly obvious contextual phrases such as "ekmeği var mı?" (Is there any bread?)

But as it was a classic melodrama I didn't miss much—the music, gestures and scenery carry 90% of the narrative. You may be surprised to learn that the chubby kid gets shot, the wispy kid discovers unsuspected courage in battle, and the poet with the forlorn gaze survives to help liberate Kayseri and, by implication, all of Turkey. And the schoolteacher memorializes their valor and sacrifice for the next cohort of children, who will be the first of the modern Republic of Turkey (and who seem immediately to grasp and adhere to that Republic’s predilection for recitation of inspiring slogans).

Although set in 1921-22, it is very much a movie of the present. This must be the first Turkish film that not only portrays the foundation of modern Turkey without featuring Atatürk, but does not even mention Atatürk. At least as far as I could tell, but then again, my comprehension was definitely limited, and I admit to fastforwarding through much of the slow marching across the Anatolian plateau.

The nation in Taş Mektep is not willed into modern form by the secular Atatürk and his fellow officers, but bequeathed by a ragtag group of students from an observant Muslim town. This fits more neatly with current AKP narratives of what it means to be Turkish than with the version recited in unison by previous generations of Turkish schoolchildren.

While fastforwarding through those marching scenes, I was reminded of the film-within-a-film in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat. Egoyan is a Canadian filmmaker of Armenian descent, and his film-within-a-film portrays the Armenian death march at the hands of merciless Ottoman officers in Eastern Anatolia in 1915. Egoyan’s film-within-a-film shows the suffering of the march in melodramatic segments that look, superficially, very much like those in Taş Mektep, albeit with heroes and villains of crucially different ethnicities. But for reasons of his own as a filmmaker—reasons that clearly have nothing to do with the general preferences of the Armenian diaspora—Egoyan frames those segments within the context of a film that—like all his movies—is cerebral and ambiguous. The melodrama of the film-within-a-film is contained, boxed-off and held at a distance by the frame tale, set in current-day Canada.

As a typical cerebral and ambiguous scholar, I could not help wishing for the same thing in Taş Mektep: I wanted the film to cut to the studio, where the director and actors and producers and sponsors of Taş Mektep must have been Iiving out their own dramas, very much bound by the demands of current-day Turkey.

Of course, for all I know, the subtleties of the dialogue I missed revealed a hilarious recasting of the narrative itself, in the vein of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? But I don’t think so.

In any case, the connection between Ararat and Taş Mektep is not coincidental. For Turkish filmmakers, a glorious melodramatic reenactment of 1922 is a way of not talking about what happened 1915. Which is not to say, by any means, that everything should be about 1915. But to understand Turkey in 2014, we probably need films about both 1915 and 1922. And 1923, for that matter....