Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College

Deniz Göktürk - Dressing up in Uniform in Search of a Passport: Attacks on Authority in Film Comedy

Imitation and role-play in comedy can be read as performative attacks on categories of identification, temporarily unsettling established hierarchies. Dressing up in uniform to appropriate a social role mobilizes masquerade and mimicry for purposes of mockery; such carnivalist acts challenge rituals of governance and images of authority. The Captain of Köpenick and his German, American and Turkish reincarnations provide a rich body of material for investigating these performances.

Polizei (Turkey, 1988), set in Berlin-Kreuzberg, is one of the few films of the late cold-war era that humorously stages Turkish-German encounters. The comedy's protagonist is the kind, naive street sweeper Ali Ekber (played by popular comedian Kemal Sunal) whose passion for acting drives him to join a community theater whose director is German, but speaks Turkish - one of many acts of cultural mimicry in this film. Ali is given a small role as a police officer and likes the uniform so much that he continues to wear it on the street. Finally, his countrymen pay him respect and keep him in good spirits with petty bribes.

Polizei references Carl Zuckmayer's Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1931), a tragic-comic satire on high-handed bureaucrats and military officers in Wilhelmine Germany. Zuckmayer's play, based on a true event of 1906, revolves around the arduous process of obtaining a passport and raises equally interesting questions about vagrancy and belonging. By featuring Jews as the providers of uniforms in and around Berlin, the play suggests a relationship of symbiotic compliance between a racialized minority and the ruling class. The play was adapted for cinema shortly after its publication, remade as in 1941, and corresponds with anti-Nazi comedies such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). A later remake of The Captain of Köpenick was nominated for an academy award for best foreign film in 1957.

By contextualizing these enactments of impostors in uniform, my paper will introduce a historical and intertextual perspective into discussions of migration, nation-state bureaucracy, and minority acts. These anarchic masquerades will resonate with current debates about territory, authority, and rights.

Related link: Deniz Göktürk's home page at UC Berkeley