The Material Fabric of the Haunted House: Security / Fear

In Shadows and Faces, the material fabric of the Turkish-Cypriot’s haunted house is constituted by walls on which ghostly shadows move; an interior space in which shadow puppets, white sheets, old family photographs and other kinds of uncanny objects take place and in which disembodied voices resonate; and the windows of the Greek-Cypriot neighbour’s house from which a spectral gaze is directed to the Turkish-Cypriot’s home. According to Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of intimate places, the house is more than its physical space since it is partly built in the imagination, constructed of dreams and anxieties, which are often at odds with the structural fabric: ‘the imagination build[s] “walls” of impalpable shadows, comfort[s] itself with the illusion of protection – or, just the contrary, tremble[s] behind thick walls, mistrust[s] the staunchest ramparts. In short, in the most interminable of dialectics, the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to his shelter.’⁴⁰¹ In Shadows and Faces, the Turkish-Cypriot’s home is depicted as a house that is haunted by the ‘expressionistic shadows’ of suspicion and fear and the ‘disembodied voices’ of a ruinous future. Zaim uses the figure of the haunted house to explore the themes of not-being-at-home, homesickness, and trans-generational haunting.

401 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5.

Figure 11 – The shadow of a gravedigger, an allegorical image of death that stunningly reflects the specter of intercommunal violence to come. A screenshot from Derviş Zaim’s

film Shadows and Faces.

Let us start with walls and shadows: Under the horrific conditions of intercommunal mistrust, the walls of home no longer protect one from the hostile reality of the world. Instead, walls turn into ghostly screens where shadows of fear, animosity, and atrocity begin to play, and where disembodied voices of a ruinous future echo. However, in the film world, shadows do not only appear on the walls of haunted houses, but rather they are everywhere. In one of the early scenes of the film, we see Veli digging up a hole in the front yard of his home in the dead of night. He calls Cevdet, a comic character who is partially mentally disabled, to assist him with a pickaxe. But Cevdet seems a bit startled and confused: ‘Are we going to dig? But why?’ Veli replies moaning, ‘Just get moving!’ He then gives Cevdet a dry white bedsheet and asks him to hang it up to conceal things he doesn’t want his Greek-Cypriot neighbours to see from a distance. After a while Cevdet appears again carrying a gas lamp in his hand. Veli gets upset: ‘Why did you bring that? You want to whack your foot? Get out of here! You want everyone to see us? Go!’ We suddenly realise that the garden of the house is the place where the guns are hidden after decolonisation. Veli’s body casts a shadow on the white sheet just as it would appear on a shadow puppetry screen: what we see, however, is an allegorical image of death where the shadow

of a man is digging a grave and no one knows if it is for himself or for his neighbour. After finding what he seeks, Veli hastily brings the excavated guns into the house. When Salih, Ruhsar, and Cevdet see the rifles in Veli’s hands, they look at each other with a horrified expression on their faces. This frightening image, the shadow of a gravedigger, stunningly reflects the specter of intercommunal violence to come, marking the transitional moment in which the sense of security turns into fear, then fear into vengeful anger, neighbours transmute into monsters, friends into enemies, and men into wolves.

Zaim revisits the image of uncanny shadows in another scene where we see Ruhsar having a nightmare. Lying in her bed in the middle of the night, Ruhsar is haunted by a menacing dark shadow. During her sleep, her own shadow unexpectedly leaves her body and begins roaming on the walls of her bedroom, then disappears behind a white sheet hung in front of the corner. Later, the sheet gets illuminated and immediately turns into a shadow play screen. Two uncanny shadow puppets, Karagöz and Hacivat, appear afterwards, repeating⁴⁰² the conversation that we heard in the beginning of the film:

Karagöz—Hacivat, what would people do if they were invisible?

Hacivat—They’d steal, make trouble and kill.

Karagöz—Hacivat, why would people do terrible things like that?

Hacivat—Because they wouldn’t worry about being caught.

Karagöz—Well, Hacivat, is it possible to be invisible and a good person both at once?

Hacivat—You must watch your shadow. You must master your dark side. Come into this cave now and have a look at your shadow.

402 Derrida notes that the question of ghost is ‘a question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.’ He goes on to say that each repetition in the event itself is both ‘a first time’ and ‘a last time,’ because ‘the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.’ See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10-1.

Figure 12 – Ruhsar and two uncanny shadow puppets. A screenshot from Derviş Zaim’s film Shadows and Faces.

After this mirroring talk, Ruhsar slowly wakes up from sleep and walks toward the sheet. As soon as she passes behind it, she sees a shadow person, a tall silhouette of a man, holding the puppets in his hands. She becomes extremely terrified and starts screaming, then the dark shadow jumps over her and she disappears in the dark of this growing shadow. Later we see her waking up from her nightmare, but the ghostly presence of the two puppets appears behind her again on the illuminated shadow play screen. The imagined voices of Karagöz and Hacivat are the most frightening sounds of all as their actual source of origin on the screen is difficult to locate. It is obvious that hearing disembodied voices is a sign of troubles to come. Shadows and disembodied voices in this scene appear as metaphorical images and sounds for the tension between Ruhsar’s suspicions and fears and the voice of her conscience, although we can never trust what the protagonist hears from these disembodied voices and what we can hear that the protagonist cannot. As Barry Curtis explains in his Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, ‘The haunted house film plays a game of alternating what can be seen and what is hidden, what is inside the mind and what is happening in

material spaces.’⁴⁰³ However, this scene also implies that ghosts are more than simply psychic entities as they have social and moral dimensions.

Elaborating the affective use of light and shadow contrasts, Zaim makes an implicit reference to the gothic aesthetics of German expressionist cinema.

However, Zaim also deconstructs the narrative conventions of Western gothic fiction, transforming the paradigmatic polarities of angel-like protagonist and monster-like antagonist into the undecidability of fractured, discordant and dispersed characters who are emotionally diffuse, morally fragile, driven by spectral forces and subjected to internal and external impulses. In other words, there is no hero or villain in Shadows and Faces, all the characters are just ordinary people haunted by ‘ghostly shadows’ – the impulses of fear – that lead them to actualise their potential to become a virtuous person or a monster. Within the ethico-political framework of the film, virtue is based on an affective economy and characters are the ethical subjects who make decisions at undecidable moments and whose subjectivities are perpetually constructed and deconstructed by their moral decisions, namely egoistic or altruistic responses to both their own fears and the social world. That is, a virtuous person must struggle with his own violent nature, which is governed by his own shadows, or dark side, namely his own fears. As is said in the opening dialogue of the film between Karagöz and Hacivat, ‘One must watch his or her shadow. One must master his or her dark side.’ Therefore Zaim inherits a morally ambiguous character type from Ottoman-Turkish gothic fiction instead of a binary structure of character relations (i.e., the good protagonist vs. the evil antagonist), which dominates classical Hollywood cinema.

403 Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 20.

Figure 13 – Karagöz and Hacivat, two uncanny shadow puppets as the specters of intercommunal violence to come. A screenshot from Derviş Zaim’s film Shadows and Faces.

The primary difference between Western and Ottoman-Turkish gothic traditions, as Ayşe Didem Uslu explains in reference to shadow play, is that in the former, ‘fear and horror are occasioned by a sinister “other”,’ and ‘the equilibrium of an organized civilization is threatened by an externalized villainy;’ namely, all forms of Western gothic texts ‘exude primarily horror of the “other”,’ and ‘with different narrative registers and values, this diabolic repertoire of the gothic remains constant and unchallenged.’ In Ottoman-Turkish gothic texts, on the other hand, ‘self and otherness’ are not viewed ‘as opposites and hence, existing in tension.’ She goes on to say that ‘That there is fear is due to a tacit realization that there is no amelioration of evil, because it persists alongside goodness. At the end of the day, ambiguity is an accepted state of being and not a threat to alleged stability and coherence. […] A logical extension to this philosophy is the acknowledgment of “otherness” within the self, and the stranger who is also a friend.’⁴⁰⁴ In accordance with this theoretical explanation, Zaim’s gothic film narrative is not structured by the tension between the protagonist and the antagonist, the angel and the villain, good and evil, friend and enemy, but by what 







404 Ayşe Didem Uslu, ‘Grotesque and Gothic Comedy in Turkish Shadow Plays,’ in Asian Gothic:

Essays on Literature, Film and Anime, ed. Andrew Hock Soon Ng (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 231-2.

Derrida calls ‘enemy/friend,’⁴⁰⁵ namely, by the dissolution of characters through contradictory (terrorising) affections and moral decisions.

Secondly, we need to scrutinise another element of the material fabric, the interior space of the Turkish-Cypriot’s haunted house in the film, with a specific attention to ghostly presence and objects, namely uncanny puppets and disembodied voices. Karagöz and Hacivat, two puppet characters notorious for their quarrels with each other, are the legendary figures of traditional Ottoman shadow play. In Shadows and Faces, these two ‘antagonistic friends’ are re-contextualised in a postcolonial gothic aesthetics quite independent of the traditional meanings and values usually attributed to them: Like Derrida’s ‘two marionettes whose fables intersect;’⁴⁰⁶ Karagöz and Hacivat appear in Zaim’s film as ghosts of a catastrophic future, as a presencing of a mass atrocity to come – as Royle notes in relation to Derrida, ‘ghosts don’t belong to the past, they come from the future.’⁴⁰⁷ Throughout the film, the uncanny puppets, Karagöz and Hacivat, exist amidst Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots as the ghostly presence of ethnic violence, as auditory and visual signals of an event coming to a close, with their shadowy images and acousmatic voices that call for a mode of listening for a yet-to-be-seen – that is, ‘both sensible and insensible, neither sensible nor insensible, sensible-insensible, […] living dead, spectral, uncanny, unheimlich.’⁴⁰⁸ According to popular belief, when a puppeteer dies, his puppets 







405 ‘Every time, a concept bears the phantom of the other. The enemy the friend, the friend the enemy.’ See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 72.

406 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL:

The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 187.

407 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 67.

408 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, 187.

must also be buried to keep bad luck at bay. Salih the Puppetman once asks Veli to bury these puppets if he does not return from the hospital alive: ‘Take this and when I die, bury it far away on the plains, or it’ll torment my soul and bring trouble on everyone else.’ Ruhsar insists on burying the puppets after her father Salih becomes a missing person, assuming him to be dead. Veli, however, considers it to be a kind of ‘superstition’ and ‘old wives’ tales’. In the end, however, he surrenders and asks Cevdet to bury the puppets in a remote location.

Cevdet takes the puppets along and gently buries them under a tree in the fields, but Christo spies on him and unearths the puppets, supposing that Cevdet buried weapons. The uncanny puppets remain unburied and, as a sign of bad luck, Christo’s suspicion leads to the death of Cevdet.

We should note that the intermediality, namely Zaim’s translation of shadow play into cinema, has a strategic importance. In the film narrative, the binary opposition of these quarreling puppets reminds us not only of the bipolar world of the Cold War, the exclusive struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also the increasingly violent relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, the British and the Cypriots, in the 1950s, the historical dispute between Turkey and Greece starting in the early nineteenth century, the ethno-nationalist clash between EOKA/EOKA-B and TMT from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, the ethnic conflict between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots in 1963-64 and 1974, and the ongoing power relations between West and East.

Throughout the twentieth century, Cyprus has been at the very centre of all these tensions. But more importantly, the primary issue with puppets, as Derrida points out, is that ‘it’s difficult to know who controls them, who makes them speak or who lets them speak, who gives them to speak, who is the boss, the author, the

creator or the sovereign, the manipulator and the puppeteer.’⁴⁰⁹ At this point, we should keep in mind that there was more than one puppeteer behind the curtain pulling the strings during the ethnic violence in Cyprus. British Empire was the most important puppeteer who prepared the conditions that would lead to intercommunal ethnic strife between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. We also know that behind EOKA there was the government, and then the ‘military junta’, of Greece and that TMT was also backed by the ‘deep state’ in Turkey. The 1963-64 Turkish massacres were also engineered by the horrendous pro-enosis regime of Makarios and Yorgadjis, in accordance with the Akritas Plan. And last but not least, many historians and scholars are suspicious of the role of the United States in the 1974 Turkish military intervention, given that American policymakers were deeply concerned with Archbishop Makarios’s flirtations with the Soviet Union (and indeed the Americans later on thought that Makarios was ‘the Castro of the Mediterranean’ or the ‘Red Priest’).⁴¹⁰ Europe, after all, is more than a puppet master, it is the creator of postcolonial Cyprus, with a recognized south and unrecognized north, as what Navaro-Yashin calls a

‘make-believe space,’⁴¹¹ or the ‘imaginative geography,’ in Said’s terms: ‘It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents,

409 Ibid., 189.

410 Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig, The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage, and the Turkish Invasion (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999).

411 Navaro-Yashin explains the notion of make-believe space as ‘spectral territory’, which is a kernel constituted by real (material and tangible) and fictional (imaginary and unrecognised). See Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 10.

animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries.’⁴¹²

Figure 14 – The dead body of Cevdet, the first victim of intercommunal violence. A screenshot from Derviş Zaim’s film Shadows and Faces.

In accordance with these facts, Zaim reformulates Derrida’s significant question of sovereignty and power games – ‘who controls the puppets, who is the manipulator and the puppeteer’ – in the film in a dialogue between Cevdet, Veli, and Ruhsar in the most sarcastic manner with reference to the janus faces of the 1963-64 intercommunal civil war. While Salih the Puppetman refers to the

‘ethical responsibility’ of both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots in the production of a political space of fear, Cevdet implicitly mentions the ‘invisible’ actors behind the

‘visible’ conflict, which reminds us of both the internal actors (i.e., Makarios, Yorgadjis, and other Greek-Cypriot officials) and external powers (i.e., the United States, the former Soviet Union, Britain, Greece, and Turkey):

Cevdet—They don’t allow shadow plays these days, right?

Ruhsar—It’s rubbish anyway.

Karagözcü Salih—It’s not rubbish. It’s to train the soul.

Cevdet—To what the soul?

Karagözcü Salih—Train it. It’s to train the heart and mind.

412 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), 57.

Veli—Leave the man in peace, Cevdet!

Cevdet—When I was a kid, they used to do shadow plays in the teahouse. And I always wondered who was behind the screen making this. I thought I’d go and see. On the way there, I knocked down the screen. The puppet man slapped me. After this, ‘Bravo!’

he said. ‘You won’t believe in shadows. You’ll seek the truth with your mind,’ he said. I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand.

In reference to this dialogue, Zaim describes Cevdet as ‘a Cypriot peasant, a mad man’ in an interview, ‘the only one who is able to go behind the shadows.’⁴¹³ Indeed, Cevdet is depicted in the film as a parrhesiastes, in Foucault’s terms, who has ‘a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger;’ that is, he is the only film character who speaks about the puppeteer, the only one who ‘chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security.’⁴¹⁴ Maybe for this reason, he is chosen as the first victim of intercommunal violence.

As for the phonographic ghosts, the disembodied voices of Hacivat and Karagöz resonate fully within the Turkish-Cypriot’s haunted house. Both of the uncanny puppets are examples of what Michel Chion calls an acousmêtre, a character who appears in a film as a voice without a body, a voice that ‘we cannot yet connect […] to a face […] a kind of talking and acting shadow,’⁴¹⁵ and it is the puppeteer’s absence from the image, his invisibility, that makes these voices function powerfully. Chion notes that ‘everything hangs on whether or not the 







413 Derviş Zaim, ‘Karagöz Perdesi Bir Sonsuzluk Perdesidir [Shadow Play Screen is a Screen of Infinity],’ interview by Barış Saydam and Celil Civan, Hayal Perdesi 21 (2011): 34-5.

414 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001), 19-20.

415 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 21.

acousmêtre has been seen,’⁴¹⁶ and the mystery that the acousmêtre creates can dominate the drive of the narrative: ‘An entire image, an entire story, an entire

acousmêtre has been seen,’⁴¹⁶ and the mystery that the acousmêtre creates can dominate the drive of the narrative: ‘An entire image, an entire story, an entire