Two Oriental Images of Istanbul: Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle and Erksan’s Time to Love

• Main Author: Aslı Daldal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association pour la Recherche sur le Moyen-Orient 2018-09-01
• Series: European Journal of Turkish Studies
• Subjects: Istanbul Studies; Orientalism in Film; Time to Love; L’Immortelle; Turkish Cinema
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/5590

This essay aims at comparing Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle (1963) and Metin Erksan’s Time to Love (1966) in terms of their depiction of Istanbul that holds a central place within both films’ plots. Both films have been made in the aftermath of the 1960 coup d’état in Turkey which repositioned the ‘power’ of the capital city of Ankara and the modernist aspirations of the neo-Kemalist elites. So both Erksan and Robbe-Grillet are recreating the Ottoman past (as opposed to the aspirations of the neo-Kemalists) in peculiar Orientalist tropes. While the image they develop for the city is basically an ‘Oriental image’ that excludes the documentary, realistic aspects, their orientalism diverges greatly. Erksan wishes to retreat from the westernized modern life of Istanbul and thus sublimates old Eastern philosophical traditions to find some Platonic ‘truthfulness’ within the old imperial city. Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, in search of the immortal passion and exoticism, recreates the Oriental ‘myth’ of Istanbul within a modernist guise. Robbe-Grillet’s parallel depiction of the femme fatale Leila with the mysterious city also contrasts to Erksan’s ‘Occidentalist’ emphasis upon the ‘nobility’ and ‘naivety’ of the lovers within the ‘sublimated’ image of the old imperial city, Istanbul or Dersaadet [the door of happiness].