TÜRKISCHER MARSCH
Feature-Length Documentary & Video Installation | 84 minutes
Türkischer Marsch (Turkish March) is a feature-length experimental documentary about national stereotypes, collective memory, and cultural prejudice. Combining street interviews, staged performances, documentary footage, and satirical animation, the film juxtaposes Austrian sterotypes of Turkish people with the often equally stereotypical images that Americans and other foreigners have of Austria.
While Austrian interviewees express their perceptions, fears, and assumptions about Turkish immigrants, American/British interviewees and tourists in Salzburg frequently resort to singing Edelweiss or quoting scenes from The Sound of Music. Interviews conducted in Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Vienna and Salzburg reveal how national identities are often reduced to a handful of persistent clichés, shaped as much by historical narratives and popular culture as by actual encounters. In London, the film even ventures inside the Prince Charles Cinema during a raucous Sing-a-Long-a Sound of Music screening, capturing British fans dressed in elaborate costumes to participate in a highly stylized, collective celebration of a fictional Austria
Animated interludes revisit the “Türkenbelagerung”—the Ottoman campaigns against Austria, particularly the sieges of Vienna, in a deliberately tongue-in-cheek style. The film shows that although the Ottoman armies never succeeded in capturing Vienna, they seem to have left remarkably persistent traces in the Austrian collective psyche. Centuries later, the spectre of a new Türkenbelagerung (Turkish siege) resurfaces in public discourse—not through armies and weapons, but through the perceived presence of Turkish migrants, whose actual lives and identities often remain unknown to those who fear them.
By juxtaposing these historical anxieties with the cheerful Hollywood fantasy of Austria as a land of mountains, music, and singing families, Türkischer Marsch examines how nations construct images of themselves and others, and how easily inherited narratives can substitute for lived experience.
The film was written and directed by me. The animated inserts were put into life by the wonderful Xaver Boehm.
FROM DOCUMENTARY TO VIDEO INSTALLATION
For the group exhibition AUTOdikdat, the 84-minute documentary was reconfigured into a twelve-part video installation. The individual sequences were displayed simultaneously on a wall, each with its own headset, allowing visitors to move between them and determine their own viewing order. This transformation challenged the conventions of linear documentary storytelling by transferring editorial control from the filmmaker to the audience.
ONLINE VIDEO INSTALLATION
The 12 part video installation was subsequently adapted into an online format that could be watched sequentially, in any order, or simultaneously. You can watch the film from beginning to end, jump between segments, or play several at once. 👇
SPIN OFFS
Several of its staged and animated sequences—including Türkischer Marsch (the animation) and Black-Veiled Women—were presented independently at festivals and in exhibition contexts, including at dOCUMENTA (13). More info here.
