GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE December 26, 2003

eveningsout

U.S. has changed for the worse, filmmaker says

by Kaizaad Kotwal

Turkish born filmmaker and media artist Kutlug Ataman was in Columbus as part of a Wexner Center symposium about film and video as museum commodities on November 6, competing with the traditional media of painting, sculpture and photography.

Ataman, who is openly gay, and who spends his time between Istanbul, Turkey, and Barcelona, Spain, sat down at the Wexner Center to talk about his art and his politics. Born a Muslim and raised in one of the most secular Islamic countries in the world, Ataman at 42 today has seen the world through those eyes. At the age of 18 he left Istanbul to pursue his studies in America at UCLA, where he took to film and the theater arts. He also went to the very prestigious Sorbonne in France to study film theory, but after a year, finding that he "didn't like the program at all mainly because of the bad instructors there," he left and became a selftaught student of the film arts by watching lots of cinema.

What led Ataman to filmmaking in the first place is that his "mother started renting out their home to film crews" to use as locations in many Turkish films. "Since the age of ten," Ataman said, "I was around the making of films and found it to be a lot of fun."

Even today, when Ataman is channel surfing in Istanbul, he will often see his mother's home, the place he grew up, right there on the screen. When asked how this made him feel, Ataman said that "It's very pleasant, actually."

Ataman's second feature film, Lola and Billy the Kid, which is an astute and power-

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ful piece of cinematic storytelling, is probably what he is best known for around the world, although his forays into video and film pieces for museums are gaining the artist a new and different level of visibility and recognition.

Lola and Billy the Kid is about the clashing of cultures and sexualities in Berlin, a hotbed of political, sexual, social, and cultural upheaval in the post-Nazi era. Berlin has in the last few decades become one of the largest melting pots in Europe, if not the world. Ataman moved to the city in 1996, after he had written the script in Los Angeles, to do research and to authenticate the screenplay.

The film tackles the experiences of being an immigrant in Berlin, coupled with the turmoil of a macho Turkish man having a torrid love affair with a transvestite. The film is a colorful, bloody, and acute portrait of what happens when multiple worlds collide---when the sexual becomes political, when the racial intersects with the sexual, and when love bisects the tumultuous topographies of sex, race, gender, sexuality, economics, and power.

"I was trying to make certain parallels between racism and homophobia," Ataman said, "and therefore it was important to set it up in Germany."

Ataman doesn't necessarily feel that Germany is racist, but is rather ignorant about the edgy dimensions of race. When asked if Lola could just as easily have taken place in the U.S., also a country befuddled by racist impulses and an ignorance about the complexities of race, he answered in the negative.

"No," he said, "because the United States

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"Ah, my beloved, pity me, ah pity me."

Kutlug Ataman's Semiha B Unplugged

does not have the trauma of the Holocaust embedded in its psyche and national identity.'

Germany, after World War II, was "internationally shunned and exposed" for its atrocities and as a result "generation upon generation had to be re-educated" and reform their national image. Ataman feels that this international ostracizing of the Germans has led to a very interesting landscape where current issues of race and sexuality are played out in ways that are different than the U.S.

In the U.S., according to Ataman, even though there have been hideous atrocities like slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, America has never been ostracized or been held accountable by the international community of nations for these crimes against humanity.

"In that regard," Ataman continued, "America is more dangerous because there have been no consequences" for such actions here.

Ataman believes that one of the consequences faced by Germany for its actions during the Nazi regime was the "amazing brain drain," particularly in art and cinema. "I mean just look at what happened to German film and art after the war," he said, "and that the country is just now beginning to find its footing again in the international respectability of movies and art."

"I was always aware of my gayness," he said, "but I was not necessarily political till the early 1980s when I became politicized very quickly."

Ataman, like most gay men living in America during the onset of the AIDS crisis following quickly on the heels of the burgeoning gay civil rights movement, found himself swallowed up in that energy and passion for change and awareness. That was followed by a huge disillusionment in the 1990s.

Ataman believes that "the Clinton years were horrible" for gays, AIDS and other related social issues.

"At least during the Reagan years people had a distinct target," Ataman said, “but when that 'evil' government disappeared" things got a lot more subversive and dangerous in his estimation.

What Ataman bemoans most about the Clinton years is that people who were fighting passionately in the 1980s against homophobia and AIDS-related bigotry and crises lost "their camaraderie and stopped fighting together." Ataman believes that the same problems of the Reagan years "replicated themselves in more sophisticated ways."

"Instead of people saying, 'You dirty fag, we don't want you,' things got more cynical and people started to say, 'We're so sorry, we'd love to hire you, but we are all full right now'," Ataman said.

And now, during the Bush regime, Ataman finds himself still thinking that these policies and ideologies are also “horrible." The silver lining he sees, in all this global doom and gloom, is that the Bush administrations policies will energize "a new generation of political fighters who will take the society further for the better." Ataman refers to the anti-globalization and anti-war movements across Europe, Latin America and Asia as a new possibility of "revisiting the sixties" and fighting again to give the world back to the people.

"There was no real effect on my art," Ataman said of his reaction to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, "but as in individual I was affected in a strange way." "Actually," Ataman specified, "it wasn't so much 9-11 itself but what happened after that has changed me tremendously. I used to be very, very pro-American in my ideals because it was after all, this country that allowed me to recreate myself" as an artist and a gay man, he said.

"But I realized," he continued, "that I had been dreaming under the illusion of the American dream."

Even though Ataman had been hugely at odds with the Clinton years, and was paranoid that he had been left out to dry on his own, "after 9-11 I lost my sense of security here," he claimed.

Prior to this, Ataman had held the belief "that if someone does you injustice you can go all the way to the Supreme Court," but no so any more, he believes, implying the way in which the Bush administration had eroded people's civil liberties and rights is unAmerican.

Ataman had a personal experience with this post-9-11 paranoia and sense of complete and utter insecurity when he was crossing into Montana from Alberta, Canada in 2001. Ataman has a U.S. passport, which indicates that he was born in Istanbul, and his partner of ten years, Martin, has a British passport.

"When we were crossing the border the U.S. officials let Martin through but questioned me for over an hour," Ataman said, "and this caused a reaction in me where I started to believe that America is no longer what I think it is."

Ataman still loves to visit the U.S. but is adamant that he could never live here again. "I don't like what people are doing," he said, "because the land of the free has turned into the land of the fearing, the land of the afraid. And you simply can't have fear and freedom, because being free takes a lot of courage."

Ataman's video installation, a part of the Wexner Center's Image Stream exhibit, continues to be on display at the Belmont Building, 330 E. Spring Street, Columbus, through January 3. Call 614-292-0330 for more information.