If you want to understand a people, Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge advises early on, listen to their music. It’s good advice that Akin follows to some remarkable places in this, his exploration of the wildly varied music of Turkey. Following their successful collaboration on the soundtrack of his critically acclaimed Head On – my review here – Turko-German director Akin enlisted the help of Einsturzende Neubauten bassist Alexander Hacke to conduct a musical tour of Turkey, a tour that took them from underground rock clubs, to street musicians, to Romany parties, to Kurdish folk singers, to electronic Dervishes to, somewhat bizarrely, a Canadian folk singer leading a revival of Turkish classics.
Crossing the Bridge is a loose, rambling affair. Though a great deal of preparation and planning was obviously required the film is presented as an exploration, Hacke moving from region to region with a portable recording rig to capture the sounds of as broad a range of performers as possible. The trip starts in the underground rock club district surrounding Hacke’s hotel and proceeds organically from there with each encounter leading naturally to the next. The film is more a string of experiences than it is any sort of organized study with Hacke functioning somewhere between tour guide and fellow explorer and he fills the role admirably, a consummate fan and collector of global sounds who, even after a lifetime spent making music professionally, is still just a giddy kid at heart stumbling across a particularly good and unexpected present.
While a music documentary may seem on the surface to be an odd choice for Akin who has made his name with biting fiction, soon moves into territory fans of the director will find familiar. In the stew of influences that make Turkey what it is we are forced to challenge the idea of eastern and western culture; we hear first hand stories of cultural oppression from the Kurdish singer whose native language and songs were illegal until surprisingly recently; we get the politics of Turkish hip hop; we get the pain and confusion of those who have been forced out into the fringes of society and we also get the joy of those who have challenged convention and overcome.
But, politics aside, there is no doubt that the music is the star of this film and the music is spectacular, whether the psych-rock of Baba Zulu, the arabesque of Orhan Gencebay, the experimental rock of Replikas, reknowned clarinetist Selim Sesler – another previous Akin collaborator who is all over the place in this, or – my personal favorites, street performers Siyasiyabend with their raspy voiced singer Bison. The music is energetic, provocative, haunting and beautifully captured by both Akin’s lens and Hacke’s microphone.
The recent Soda Pictures DVD release does an excellent job on the feature, the transfer crisp, clear and anamorphic, the sound mix a remarkably full 5.1 Though the feature disc is light on extras – I would have loved to have had Akin discussing botht he music and the issues raised by the film at length – it does come with an excellent booklet detailing the backgrounds of each of the performers and – most importantly – a complete soundtrack CD.