Abstract
Orientalist art played an important role in the orientalist knowledge base. Depictions of the East, especially in the art of painting, have created a representation of the East in the West's mind. However, this representation is exactly what the Westerner wants to see. One of the subjects that Westerners want to see and hear most is the harem. In orientalist art, women are depicted here as if they were always standing naked for their masters. Whereas harem is a place of pleasure and delight for the West, it is a family institution for the East. There is a transition from orientalist paintings to cinema in harem representation. For this reason, this transition from painting to modern art needs to be read intertext. In this study, the reflection of the harem institution from painting to the cinema in the Ottoman Empire is examined. Ferzan Özpetek's movie Harem Suare (1999) was examined together with the paintings of orientalist painters, and intertextual reading was made.
TopOrientalist Art And Oriental Woman
The ideological reasons behind how the West portrays the East are related to colonialism. The West has always consideredthe East with sexuality and portrayed it as female. In its encounter with the East, it feels almost like the groom lifting the bride’s veil. In paintings, travel books, stories, poems, fascinatingly and exoticly beautiful women are depicted in the harems of ugly, vulgar, sluggish, immoral, barbarian Eastern men. Thus, there is a Europe that builds its own civilization against the barbarism of the “other” (Bulut, 2002: 25).
Although many European painters did not see the inside of the harem, they presented paintings from Eastern harems containing eroticism, mystery and lust. In these paintings, the Eastern woman in the harem is more like the property of the Western bourgeois man rather than the private property of the sultan (Kontny, 2002: 129). As French painters could not model Muslim women, they modelled French women; these painters, who had never been to the East, drew Ingres’s Turkish Bath painting based on Lady Montagu’s impressions; they created stereotypes about the East before Gros, who was invited to Napoleon’s Egypt expedition, set foot in Egypt; British Bonnington, on the other hand, drew pictures on the harem without going beyond Italy (Kömeçoğlu, 2002: 45).
The first examples of orientalism emphasized by Said can be seen in Eugène Delacroix's paintings. The Death of Sardanapalus painting depicts a pre-Islamic period and emphasizes the tyranny of Eastern rulers. The painting tells that as soon as Sardanapalus realizes that he is defeated, he takes the horses, dogs and the women in his harem to death with him (see Benjamin, 1997; Lemaires, 2001).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Harem: Section dedicated to women in the palace in Eastern culture.
Orient: The definations related to Eastern civilization.
Harem Suare: It is a film shot by Ferzan Özpetek in 1999.
Ottoman: Turkish and Islamic State that existed between 1299-1922.
Orientalism: It is a critical theory, which is reconsidered by E. Said and which describes the way the “West” discursively constructs and represents the “East.”
Intertextuality: It is the shaping of the meaning of the texts by other texts.
Orientalist Painting: Western painters' paintings depicting the East, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Gender: The definition of sexuality in the social process.