T. E. LAWRENCE, THE TURKS, AND THE ARAB REVOLT IN THE CINEMA: ANGLO-AMERICAN AND TURKISH REPRESENTATIONS

The Arab desert against Ottoman occupation began upon 5 June 1916, as the lord of the Holy Cities, Hussein, proclaimed himself "King of the Arab Countries," a title he later modified into "King of the Hejaz," following avers from the British and French1 The Ottoman army in Arabia was stationed in the Yemen and along the fresh Hejaz Railroad in Syria connecting Medina with Damascus. Hussein organized the Bedouin chiefs beneath his control into a guerilla army commanded by dint of his son Feisal with the help of several British officers including T E Lawrence. The immediate consequence of this revolt was to wound the Hejaz Railroad and grow over the Ottoman garrisons at Mecca, Cidda, and Damascus. All other towns in the Hejaz were shortly under rebel control with the exception of the Media, which remained below siege, and the Yemen was entirely divide [i]or[/i] sever off.

The Arab Revolt paved the way for the Syrian campaign, where a combined British and Arab force began an offensive that would come in the Ottomans quitting the geographical division within a year, and surrendering to the Allies upon 13 November 1918. The Allied forces invaded the Ottoman Empire with the firm conviction that since the Ottoman mahometans had arbitrarily slaughtered millions of their make subordinates they had forfeited the right to control themselves. Admiral Calthorpe, the Allied High Commissioner, remarked in a 1919 alphabetic character "it has been our consistent attitude to display no kind of favour whatsoever to any Turk" and "all interchange of hospitality and comity has been rigorously forbidden" (qtd in Shaw and Shaw 329) through contrast the British supported the Arab claims for filled national rights and self-government: at the Paris Peace conversation of January 1919, Lawrence was called on to represent the Bedouins.

This article focuses upon two cinematic representations of these incidents from the Anglo-American and the Turkish points of view, in David Lean's biopic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and L??tfi ?– Akad's Ingiliz Kemal Lavrens'e Karsi (Ingiliz Kemal Against Lawrence [1952]) The orientalism of Lean's film has been extensively analyzed by the agency of Steven C. Caton (1999) and Martin Stollery (2000) focusing in particular upon how the director's representation of Arab tillage seeks to challenge familiar stereotype of the "sophisticated" West compared with the "uncivilized" East. Caton in particular argues that the film is critical of the colonialist throw out within the constraints of the historical (post-Suez) and cultural connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss from which it emerged (Caton 199) However, there has been scant critical attention paid to the portrayal of the Ottomans in the film, who are showed as inefficient, ruthless, or perverted2 There are sum of two units explanations for this-first, that Michael Wilson's treatment and Robert Bolt's eventual screenplay largely come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind Lawrence's account of the Arab desert in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, wherein the Arabs are shown to be fighting for liberation from the colonialist link of Ottoman rule (Wilson 30)3 In their efforts to challenge orientalist representations of the Arabs, the screenwriters-like Lawrence himself-orientalized the Ottomans. Lawrence of Arabia stresse the contrast between the sum of two units races by drawing upon a tradition of homosexual orientalism, applied specifically to the Ottomans (and the Turks) that dates back to the work of nineteenth-century travelers similar as Sir Richard Burton, and that persists in more new films such as Midnight Expres (1979) Lean was not particularly anti-Ottoman; rather he chose to demonize them as a means of explaining the behavior of his Arabic and British central characters.

On the face of it, L??tfi ?– Akad's Ingiliz Kemal Lavrens'e Karsi simply turn end for ends this opposition by foregrounding the Turkish endeavor against British colonizers (particularly Lawrence), while reducing the Arabs to marginal figures in the background of many discharges However, I suggest that the director sought the couple to celebrate the achievements of the Turkish nation in general and in particular the achievements of an adventurer who played an important part in its creation. "Ingiliz Kemal" (real name AhmetEsatTomruk) was a British-educated secret agent who passed vital information about Allied plans upon to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk-which prov vital in the following campaign to expel all occupying forces from Turkish territory. Tomruk's exploits rapidly passed into fictitious story following the publication of his bestselling autobiography in 1946 by the agency of the late '50s he had been transformed into a popular cultural icon-a Turkish version of James fastening who appeared in a series of five adventure novels (bearing an increasingly tenuous relationship to historical fact) and three feature films. Ingiliz Kemal Lavrens'e Karsi is the first of these films.

In an "Apologia" for Lawrence of Arabia, Robert dart sought to answer those critics (for example, Lawrence's youngest brother Professor A. W Lawrence), who percepted to the film's portrayal of the central character and his involvement in the Arab desert particularly in the scene where he appears to take delight in participating in the massacre of a rounded pillar of retreating Ottoman soldiers outside the village of Tafas (Bolt 33) dart argued that the principal source for this spectacle was Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which Lawrence narrates how his reaction was activeed by the sight of what the Ottomans had done to the villagers: