The Search for a Pre-Traumatized Childhood

Abstract

This chapter explores feature films that view the 1970s as a precursor to the trauma of the coup. Many of these films suggest connections with traumas that go beyond the 1970s, finding kinship in the suffering of Turkey’s non-Muslim-minorities and population “exchangees”. Using iconic landscapes with empty, derelict mansions, and references to unspoken pains, they address themes like the burial of innocence, the loss of clarity, and the sense of entrapment. The films looking at the ‘pre-history’ of the coup search for a period of childlike innocence. But with dark, shadowy characters and unknown malicious forces lurking in the background, they fail to locate such an innocuous state in this pre-history. Instead, they position the coup on a historical trajectory of other, unspoken traumas.