Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama

Abstract

In a memorable scene in his cross-Balkan road movie Im Juli/In July (Germany 2000), the director Fatih Akin cast himself as a gum-chewing, chess-playing customs officer at a makeshift Hungarian-Romanian border, who would not let his protagonist Daniel pass the toll-gate: ‘No passport, no Romania!’ At this moment, Daniel’s lost travel companion Juli surprisingly appears out of a little hut on the other side of the border. Their unexpected reunion culminates in a strange rite of passage. The border guard/director conducts a wedding ceremony at gunpoint, declares them married, and opens the toll-bar — not before acquiring Daniel’s vehicle as a ‘present’. In this absurdist enactment of border control, the director’s cameo appearance and mockery of his own role introduce a moment of authorial self-irony, implying a tongue-in-cheek complicity with an initiated audience. Such ironic moments have become a trademark for Hamburg-based Turkish German director Fatih Akin’s film style. For his award-winning film Gegen die Wand/ Head-On (Germany 2004), he also acted in a short cameo scene as a drug dealer in Istanbul, but he ultimately decided to cut the scene,² as he wanted to avoid replicating the brief role that he had previously played in his debut feature Kurz und schmerzlos/Short Sharp Shock (Germany 1998). In the following, I will argue that dramatic irony in Head-On operates on a different level than authorial self-insertion.

Sounds can be superimposed just like images. Contrast and similarity bring out deep, subconscious connections and resonances in meaning. Just like in images.

Béla Balázs, Der Geist des Films (1930)¹