Identifying Kurds In Bahman Ghobadi’s Films: A Film Semiotic Study

Abstract

Identifying Kurds since the beginning of the 20th century is challenging. Kurdistan has been separated between four different countries, the national identities of the Kurds have been re-shaped, and four different borders (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria) have become their life stories. One of the most famous Kurdish film directors Bahman Ghobadi depicts the Kurdish identity through these borders in his A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004). The goal of the present study is to provide a brief insight into Kurdish culture and language and analyze the Kurdish identity through the borders of four different countries in Ghobadi’s films by a Film Semiotic approach. The theoretical basis of the research relies on Umberto Eco’s types of codes introduced in ‘Articulation of Cinematic Code (1967)’, Laura Mulvey’s male and female gaze theory in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), and syntagmatic types of shots introduced by French Film Semiotician Christian Metz in his analysis of Adieu Philippine (1962) in A Semiotics of the Cinema (1982). Thus, the present study aims to investigate the signified cultural aspects of Kurds through moving images in Ghobadi’s selected films.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.26.12427