Frames in Flames: Anxiety in Kaygı / Inflame (2017)

by: Tuğçe Kutlu , February 6, 2024

On the 2nd of July 1993, anti-secularist and Islamic fundamentalist protesters set alight Hotel Madımak in Sivas, central-eastern Türkiye ‘in front of inactive law enforcement officers, thousands of mostly supportive onlookers and live TV cameras’ (Ağil 2014: 58; Çaylı 2019: 1106, 1113). 37 people died, the majority of whom were of Alevi faith. The Alevis were gathered together at the hotel to celebrate Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth century dissident Alevi poet ‘considered by Alevis as a symbol of opposition against the injustices of authority’ (Özkul 2015: 89). The Alevis are a ‘demographically minor’ social group ‘whose practices and rituals differ fundamentally from those associated with Sunnism—the predominant denomination of Islam in Turkey and in central Sivas’ (Çaylı 2019: 1113). On March 31st, 2012, the case against the Sivas massacre defendants was dropped due to the statute of limitations (Akdenizali 2015: 149), an act that would not have been possible if ‘the judiciary  treated  the  atrocity  as  a  crime  against  humanity  rather  than an ordinary homicide’ (Çaylı 2019: 1106). The psychological horror film Kaygı/Inflame (2017), written and directed by Ceylan Özgün Özçelik, explores the Sivas massacre.

Inflame follows the story of Hasret, a video editor, whose trauma is triggered when she is transferred to a television news unit. As an editor working on the news, she is constantly asked to distort and twist reality. Her trauma then manifests in her dreams, in which she sees visions of an angry crowd. Hasret lives in an apartment in a historical neighbourhood, and her home is due to be demolished for urban transformation. But Hasret will not evacuate, as this is where the memories of her parents are. She begins to smell burning in her apartment. She keeps telling her friend Gülay, ‘the walls are too hot’, a phrase she repeats several times, but she doesn’t know why. She also struggles with memories about her dead parents, who were folk musicians, and who—officially—were killed in a car crash twenty years earlier. At work, while editing, she hears a woman say ‘remember’, but this is in fact Hasret’s own subconscious effort to remind herself of what has happened to her. Hasret is at a point where her understanding of past and present is blurred, but everything is about to come into focus. She finds the pictures she drew as a child, then looks up, at the ceiling, into the camera lens. Under the wallpaper of the empty room, she finds a picture of a burning building. She is ready to remember. In remembering the day of the massacre and the angry crowd, Hasret is then not only the victim but also the witness of this trauma. A witness is ‘a person who has experienced something and can witness it because he has experienced the event himself from beginning to end’ (Agamben 2017: 17). In regaining her memory, Hasret also frees herself from the demands of her local urban transformation.

As a director, Özçelik is ignored in the mainstream media because what she talks about is political. In a recent interview with Bant Mag, she asks, ‘could we forget the massacres? This question scared me. The issue of erasing and reconstructing history was troubling me a lot. The governments make us forget the past by taking the media and urban transformation behind them’ (quoted in Atılgan 2020). The spaces of the city are central to this film. We see buildings and parks and hear the sounds of construction. Urban transformation is an important element of  Özçelik’s work, as she explains: ‘the constant change of our streets, our names, our cities, our beaches, and the destruction of our vineyards, gardens, mountains and forests create a lot of tension in us. After a while we start to forget. These are severe traumas!’ (quoted in Atılgan 2020). Here, Özçelik establishes a link between the trauma forgotten in the film and the trauma arising from the transformation of her city.

There are many other political references in Inflame. While Hasret is working in TV news, the phrase ‘people gave the punishment’ is seen in the newspaper headlines, which is an indirect reference to the Sivas Massacre. In the film, a character named Hüseyin Uğur is described as wanting ‘to write what could have been erased from our memory’, while a government official states ‘we do not allow freedom of thought to insult the moral values of the country’. This comment can be read as drawing parallels with the Gezi Park event on 31st May 2013, when a local demonstration against demolishing a public park in Istanbul ‘to make way for a grandiose urban renewal project’ became a nationwide series of protests (Gürcan and Peker 2015: 321-322).

In Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, Adam Lowenstein suggests that horror films do not compensate for the traumatic experience, they only question the desire for compensation (2005: 8). In contrast, Özçelik believes that films can heal people (Gündüz 2019). The purpose of making my video essay was to talk about this repressed trauma, and to explore the anxious feelings that this film creates (the Turkish word kaygı translates as ‘anxiety’). The Sivas massacre is an open wound in Türkiye, but it is rarely talked about.  Like Özçelik, I want to reiterate that the Hotel Madımak fire was real. It actually happened. The massacre was viewed as ‘a major assault on free speech and human rights’ in Türkiye (Akdenizli 2015: 149), yet the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) government advised that commemoration of the Sivas massacre ‘could be prohibited or hindered through the legislation of “organised crime”’ (Özkul 2015: 89). As Kaygı/Inflame ends, information about the massacre is displayed on screen.