View - OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center

View - OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center

HOLLYWOOD ALLA TURCA:
A HISTORY OF POPULAR CINEMA IN TURKEY
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of
Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Savaş Arslan, M.F.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
2005
Dissertation Committee:
Approved by
Professor Ronald Green, Adviser
Professor Stephen Melville
Professor John Davidson
_________________________
Adviser
History of Art Graduate Program
ABSTRACT
This study deals with the history of popular cinema in Turkey, called Yeşilçam.
Yeşilçam’s dawn, rise, and fall extended over four decades, from 1950 to 1990. Yeşilçam
is discussed through four notions: Turkification, hayal, melodramatic modality, and
özenti. While cinema started in Turkey by interweaving two screens, the traditional and
the modern, Yeşilçam had a dream (hayal) of making films similar to Western cinemas,
especially Hollywood. But the presence, combined with the technologically belated
arrival, of this Western medium in a non-Western land brought about its own
particularities and peculiarities, reflected by Turkification (practices of translation,
transformation, and restitution).
Yeşilçam represents a transitory state enmeshed with the drama of nation building
and characterized by an aggressive attempt to unify multiplicities. The dubbing of films,
both foreign and domestic, led to Turkification, a process of making films ideologically
“proper” to Turkey. Yeşilçam also “Turkified” the Western cinematic language through
remakes and adaptations, producing not only a non-realistic, postsynchronized
filmmaking, but also an active (mis)translation and transformation, thus inventing a
popular cultural synthesis, a cinematic amalgamation of the West and the East.
ii
In the meeting of a two-dimensional Eastern scopic regime with a threedimensional Western one, özenti (imitation or pretension) indicates a perpetual
movement from Eastern self to Western other in Yeşilçam’s desire to be like the other,
i.e., Western popular cinemas. But a return to original self is impossible in this
movement, and through özenti, Yeşilçam continuously transformed itself. Thus özenti
suggests a rhizomatic existence, not being one nor being the other but being in a
continual movement, in between two cultures.
Yeşilçam’s “melodramatic modality” deals with a particular history of
filmmaking that combined realistic film language with non-realistic and anti-illusionistic
traditions in its various genre films. Specific analyses of these films address the changes
in both the socioeconomic and the cultural milieu, and the cinematic practices and their
consumption. Through the introduction of these four notions, this study not only attempts
to revise the Turkish histories on popular cinema in Turkey, but also aims to introduce
the English-speaking audience to this under-explored field.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my adviser, Ron Green, for the intellectual support,
encouragement, and enthusiasm which made this thesis possible, and for his patience in
correcting both my stylistic and scientific errors.
I thank Stephen Melville and John Davidson for their comments and support for
the realization of this thesis.
I also wish to thank my wife Wendy and all my family members who supported
me during this process which is full of obstacles.
This study would not have been realized without the support and grants of The
Ohio State University’s various departments and branches.
iv
VITA
March 8, 1973
Born – Manisa, Turkey
1995
B.A. Political Science, Bilkent Univ, Turkey
1997
M.F.A. Graphic Design, Bilkent Univ, Turkey
1997-2000
Ph.D. Program, Graphic Design, Bilkent Univ, Turkey
2000-2001
M.A. Program, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, OSU
2001-present
Ph.D. Program, History of Art, The Ohio State University
PUBLICATIONS
Research Publication
1.
Melodram. İstanbul: Leyla ile Mecnun Yayıncılık, 2005.
2.
“Zorro of the East, between the Western and the Eastern” in Cinemascope:
Bilingual Quarterly (Independent Film Journal) 2 (Spring 2005). Available online
at http://www.cinemascope.it.
3.
“Kara Sevda: Melodram ve Modernleşme.” (Blind Love: Melodrama and
Modernization) in Türk Film Araştırmalarında Yeni Yönelimler 4 (New
Directions in Turkish Film Studies 4). Ed. by Deniz Bayrakdar. Istanbul: Bağlam,
2004.
4.
“Sinemayı Yazarken Kültür ve Siyasetin Halleri: Refiğ, Erksan, Özön” (The State
of Culture and Politics in Writing Cinema) in Halit Refiğ. Ed. by Ali Karadoğan.
Ankara: Dünya Kitle İletişimi Araştırma Vakfı Yayınları, 2003.
v
5.
“Sinema ve Millet: Bir ‘Derin’ Söylem Makalesi” (Cinema and Nation: An Essay
on ‘Deep’ Discourse) in Türk Film Araştırmalarında Yeni Yönelimler 3 (New
Directions in Turkish Film Studies 3). Ed. by Deniz Bayrakdar. Istanbul: Bağlam,
2003.
6.
“Şeytan ve The Exorcist: Yeniden Çevrim, Din ve Kültür” (Şeytan and The
Exorcist: Remake, Religion, and Culture” in Türk Film Araştırmalarında Yeni
Yönelimler 2 (New Directions in Turkish Film Studies 2). Ed. by Deniz Derman.
Istanbul: Bağlam, 2001.
7.
“Türk Tapon Filmlerini Oyun Olarak Okuma Denemesi” (Reading Turkish Trash
Films as Ludus) in Türk Film Araştırmalarında Yeni Yönelimler (New Directions
in Turkish Film Studies). Ed. by Deniz Derman. Istanbul: Bağlam, 2001.
8.
"Kitap Eleştirisi: Bakhtin, Kültürel Eleştirellik ve Sinema" (Book Review:
Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Cinema). Toplum ve Bilim (Society and Science)
79, 1998.
9.
"Popüler Yeşilçam Filmlerinin Eleştirilmesinde Bir Sanat Sineması Söyleminin
Oluşumu" (The Discourse of Art Cinema in Criticizing Popular Turkish Films).
25. Kare (25th Frame) 20, 1997.
10.
"Sanatın Yapabileceği En İyi Şey Metaforik Olmamasıdır: Jimmie Durham’la
Söyleşi." (The Best Option for Art is being non-Metaphorical: Interview with
Jimmie Durham). Birikim (Recollection) 104, 1997.
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: History of Art
Minor Fields: Film Studies, Visual Studies, Contemporary Critical Theory
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract
.....................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................iv
Vita .................................................................................................................................v
List of Tables ....................................................................................................................xi
Chapters
1.
Introduction
..........................................................................................................1
1.1. Couch Grass
..............................................................................................1
1.2. Cinema and the Republic of Turkey
..........................................................3
1.3. Yeşilçam: The Popular Cinema of Turkey
..............................................8
1.4. Addressing Yeşilçam
................................................................................13
1.5. The Practice of Filmmaking in Yeşilçam
............................................16
1.6. Yeşilçam and Melodramatic Modality ........................................................18
1.7. Door with Couch Grass ................................................................................21
1.8. To Be Continued ............................................................................................23
2.
Cinema in Turkey Until The Late 1940s
........................................................27
2.1. Periodization
............................................................................................27
2.2. Early Turkish Cinema: The Problem of Origins ............................................30
2.2.1. First Film Screenings: Beer Halls to Coffee Houses ....................30
2.2.2. Traditional and Modern Theaters and Performances ....................32
2.2.3. The First Film Theaters
........................................................37
2.2.4. Discussions Concerning the First Turkish Film
....................39
2.2.5. Nationalism and Belated Modernity ............................................43
2.3. Early Turkish Feature Films and Film Import ............................................45
2.3.1. The Army and Cinema: The First Feature Films
....................45
vii
2.3.2. Cinema and the Republic
........................................................48
2.3.3. Film Importation and Hollywood
............................................49
2.4. The Advent of Sound Film and Dubbing
............................................52
2.4.1. Silent Films and the Problem of Intertitles
................................52
2.4.2. Sound Film
................................................................................53
2.4.3. Dubbing: (Mis)translation, (re)writing and “Turkification” ........54
2.4.4. Dubbing Hollywood ....................................................................56
2.4.5. Dubbing and Censorship
........................................................59
2.5. Early Feature Films
................................................................................61
2.5.1. Early Film Studios
....................................................................62
2.5.2. Muhsin Ertuğrul – The One Man of Turkish Cinema ....................63
2.5.3. Turkification-from-above as hayal
............................................68
3.
The Advent of Yeşilçam in the 1950s
........................................................70
3.1. The Trans-ing of Yeşilçam
....................................................................70
3.2. Towards Yeşilçam: Egyptian Films and arabesk
................................72
3.2.1. The Popularity of Egyptian Films in the 1940s
....................75
3.2.2. The Response to Egyptian Films and arabesk ................................79
3.3. Towards Yeşilçam: Film Industry “Turkified” ............................................81
3.3.1. A Short Note on Cinema Organizations and Laws
....................83
3.3.2. The Conditions of Filmmaking
............................................84
3.3.3. Film Exhibition
....................................................................88
3.3.4. Film Consumption and Criticism
............................................90
3.4. Turkification and the Melodramatic Modality ............................................94
3.4.1. Grades of Turkification in Yeşilçam ............................................97
3.4.2. Turkification and Melodrama ........................................................99
3.4.3. Melodrama and Modernity
......................................................102
3.4.4. Melodramatic Modality
......................................................106
3.4.5. Is There a Nationality of Melodramatic Modality? ..................110
4.
Yeşilçam I: Industry and Dubbing
..................................................................114
4.1. Yeşilçam’s Hayal ..........................................................................................114
viii
4.2. The Periodization of Yeşilçam’s Golden Age ..........................................117
4.3. The Popular Film Industry
..................................................................123
4.3.1. Toward a Working System of Production
..............................123
4.3.2. Bonds, Loan Sharks, and Taxes
..........................................124
4.3.3. Regional Distributors and Fourwalling
..............................127
4.3.4. Majors and Minors: Quality Films and Quickies
..................135
4.3.5. Exploitation Cinema as a Survival Tactic
..............................137
4.3.6. Sexploitation Films
..................................................................139
4.4. Melodramatic Modality, Turkification and Hayal: Knotted in Dubbing ......143
4.4.1. Earlier Practices of Turkification and Dubbing
..................144
4.4.2. Turks Voicing Their Own Films
..........................................146
4.4.3. His Master’s Voice, His Slave’s Body
..............................148
4.4.4. Cinematic Sound and the Illusion of Voice ..............................150
4.4.5. Close-up on Noise
..................................................................152
5.
Yeşilçam II: Genres and Films during the High Yeşilçam
..............................156
5.1. Karagöz and Punch
..............................................................................156
5.2. Genrification and the Recycling of Genres
..........................................159
5.3. Yeşilçam’s Özenti
..............................................................................163
5.3.1. Nationalism, Colonization, and the Third World
..................165
5.3.2. Colonial Selves, Postcolonial Others ..........................................168
5.3.3. Yeşilçam and Özenti ..................................................................171
5.3.4. In Passim
..............................................................................178
5.4. Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır (Life is Sometimes Sweet, 1962) ..............................181
5.5. Kara Sevda (Unrequited Love, 1968) ......................................................197
5.6. Bir Teselli Ver (Give Some Consolation, 1971) ..........................................206
5.7. Oğlum Osman (My Son Osman, 1973) ......................................................214
5.8. Şeytan (Satan, 1974)
..............................................................................223
5.9. Turist Ömer Uzay Yolu’nda (Tourist Ömer on Star Trek, 1973)
......229
5.10. Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi (Kara Murat, Fatih’s Defender, 1972) ......243
5.11. Canlı Hedef (Live Target, 1973)
......................................................252
5.12. Demiryol (Railway, 1979)
..................................................................264
5.13. Takma Kafanı (Don’t Bother, 1979) ......................................................273
5.14. A Last Word on the Golden Age of Yeşilçam ..........................................283
ix
6.
Yeşilçam Melts into the 1980s
..................................................................288
6.1. Turkey and Yeşilçam in the 1980s
......................................................288
6.2. Crises, Questions, and Reflections
......................................................297
6.3. Öğretmen Kemal (Teacher Kemal, 1981)
..........................................306
6.4. Çarıklı Milyoner (The Millionaire with Sandals, 1985) ..............................317
6.5. Gülüşan (1985) ..........................................................................................322
6.6. Filim Bitti (The Film Is Over, 1989)
......................................................332
6.7. “The People of Our Street”
..................................................................341
7.
Conclusion
......................................................................................................348
List of References
......................................................................................................353
x
LIST OF TABLES
Table
Page
Table 4.1. Number of Films and Production Companies in 1962 and 1972
129
Table 4.2. Number of Theaters and Spectators in the Regions
131
Table 5.1. Characters in Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır
184
Table 5.2. The Genres of Films in 1979
270
Table 6.1. Characters of Film Bitti and FB1
334
xi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The Heart of the Couch Grass
It was a couch grass living silently on the Anatolian plain
Before the famine.
It thrived from the smallest things
For example when a bird flew towards Kızılırmak
It was happy as if water had flooded its roots.
When a cloud passed overhead
It stopped being couch grass.
The earth, it would say, the earth
I would not change it for anything.
Now, it does not want to live.
İlhan Berk1
1.1. Couch Grass
One of the most prominent living figures of modern Turkish poetry, İlhan Berk
(b. 1918) wrote a series of poems under the subtitle of the “Berk Dictionary,” the second
part of which is about “Grass.” There, in a long prose poem, Berk talks about couch
grass. In the Oxford English Dictionary, couch grass is defined as “a species of grass
(Triticum repens) with long, creeping root-stocks, a common and troublesome weed in
1
The translation is mine. The original is as follows: AYRIĞIN YÜREĞİ / Sessiz sedasız yaşayan / bir ayrık
otuydu Orta Anadolu'da / Kıtlıktan önce. / En küçük bir şeyden coşardı / Mesela bir kuş uçmasın
Kızılırmak'a doğru / Köklerine su yürürmüş gibi sevinirdi. / Bir bulut geçsin üstünden / Ayrıklıktan çıkardı.
/ Dünyayı, derdi, dünyayı / Hiçbir şeylere değişmem. / Şimdi yaşamak istemiyor.
1
cornfields.” In Latin, couch grass is also referred to as Agropyron repens (also referred to
as quack grass, quick grass, dog grass, witch grass, etc.) because the Triticum family
includes wheat grasses, i.e., useful grasses like wheat, barley, and oat, whereas couch
grass, which belongs to the Agropyron family, does not produce grains. Couch grass, in
other words, is a grass native to Europe that grows and spreads quickly (hence the name
quick grass), with creeping rhizomes which are jointed and which can produce roots from
these joints. Since its crown is reminiscent of a witch-hut and perhaps its only historically
known medical use is related to urinary organs, it is also referred to as witch grass. When
eaten by dogs, it produces vomiting (hence the name dog grass). In short, it is a rapid
growing, aggressively spreading grass which is not considered very useful.
Berk starts his text on couch grass with a quotation from the seventeenth century
British philosopher Francis Bacon who compares man’s personality to couch grass.
Bacon says: “Man’s personality either grows useful grass or couch grass; one must water
the useful grass on time and must uproot the couch grass.” Berk uses this quotation as the
launch pad to write on couch grass – “I might not have thought of writing on couch grass
if Bacon had not slandered and despised couch grass this much. I would have spared it
for myself, without sharing, like many other ordinary grasses that are silent, living on
their own and that I love. Besides I would not have been offended or carry this burden, if
he did not say that it was useless” (2003, 640). Then Berk discusses how Bacon preferred
palace gardens over all gardens, palaces over all houses, urbanized/domesticated flowers
over rural/wild flowers, and slender looking, columnar cypress trees over other trees.
Describing these trees, Berk uses the analogy of the Eiffel Tower, seen from a distance
with a dominant, arrogant look. “That was enough for Bacon to love the cypress: that it
looked upon everything from above” (2003, 641). To this, Berk adds a line from a
nineteenth century Ottoman poet, Tevfik Fikret: “For the last gleam, two whispering
black cypresses.” 2
Berk then talks about how useless cypress trees are. He claims that Bacon would
not understand this. He argues that Bacon’s dislike of couch grass might be because of its
2
Cypress trees are associated with death in traditional Turkish culture because they are commonly planted
in cemeteries by the end of graves.
2
aggressiveness. Yet, even though this aggressiveness may look like that of Hitler,
Mussolini, or Franco, couch grass is not racist like them: “It wants to hug the earth with
everyone else, to live on this earth, all together.” For Berk, Bacon is not at all devoid of
aggression – Bacon tried to extend his reach into the court of the Queen to be a minister
like his father. “Like other island nations,” Berk laments, “why did he not live only on his
island!” (2003, 643) Berk’s criticism of Bacon relates to the colonization of other lands
by Bacon’s Britain. Britain may have made itself a great power, looking on the world
from above, Berk suggests, but it has done it at the price of overtaking the couch grass of
the world: in his eyes, it committed the crime of judging the couch grass as useless.
1.2. Cinema and the Republic of Turkey
As couch grass is to the useful plants which so delighted Bacon, the plants that fill
the gardens of palaces, dominant like men’s domination of nature, so is popular cinema in
the non-Western world. Burdened by the projects of modernization and westernization in
the newly founded nation states of the twentieth century, popular cinema emerged against
and despite the projections and ascriptions of the educated elite in non-Western countries.
Their projects disregarded various aspects of tradition and ethnicity as they were
reconceived by the elite, often along artificial nationalist lines. Such projects of the third
world elite arose from their education either in Western countries or in western(ized)
schools in their native countries that were run through their close ties to the bourgeoisie
and/or the ruling class. The envisioning of a path of modernization and westernization
owes a lot to positivist conceptions of the social sciences that arose from the history of
sciences in the European world which date back to the Renaissance, which then came to
be formulated through the path of empiricism. In this picture of positivistic social
engineering and in the specific case of Turkey, there was no place for Islam and
traditional culture. A series of reforms in the 1920s replaced the sultanate by a republican
democracy; abolished the caliphate, religious orders, and religious schools; gave the
control of religious institutions to the state through laicism; and westernized the
education system. republican reforms have also worked through a visually coded system,
3
with the replacement of the fez and traditional Ottoman-style clothing with hats and
Western style clothing, the replacement of the Arabic script with the Latin script, and the
creation of a new capital city in Ankara, a small town where a comprehensive project of
city planning and concentrated architectural development allowed it to replace Istanbul,
the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Along with such sociopolitical reforms, a new definition of national culture as
“Turkish” came to the fore in an attempt to create a modern, civilized nation. This new
conception of westernization was supported by the bureaucratic elite and by a large
portion of intellectuals. Such accounts of modernization through a particular
understanding of westernization goes back to mid-nineteenth century Ottoman reforms
that crystallized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Ottoman
bureaucrats, military officers, and intellectuals who called themselves “Young Turks.” In
1913, one such figure, Abdullah Cevdet wrote, “There is no other civilization:
Civilization means European civilization and it must be imported with its roses and
thorns” (in Halman 1982, 24). This import was not simply to be limited to the
sociopolitical and economic aspects of life, but also involved a redefinition of arts and
culture. This was in part due to the work of Ziya Gökalp, one of the founding fathers of
the cultural policies of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s, who underscored the German
Romantic understanding of culture as Kultur rather than as a general understanding of
culture that includes human activity as a whole. This limited view of culture served to
produce a vision of a reified and originary national culture that could have been created
only through a process of categorization and segregation of units of what hitherto had
existed as culture. Under the guises of Gökalp’s writing on “the essentials of Turkism”
and his actual political influence, the field of and policies about six arts were strictly
defined along the lines of Western conceptions of humanism, high art, canons and
conventions, originality, authenticity, artistic creativity, and so on. Gökalp’s definition of
appropriate culture and civilization involved Western genres and a modernized version of
traditional folk genres in the arts while disregarding Ottoman or Islamic genres.
According to this classification, a synthesis between the West and the origin (i.e.,
traditional Turkish culture) should be sought and the East (i.e., the Ottoman Empire and
4
Islam) should be disregarded (Tekelioğlu 1996).
To illustrate this in music, Gökalp first delineated three types of music available
in Turkey in the 1920s: Eastern music, Western music, and folk music. Then he asks the
question: “Which one of these might we call national for us?” (1974, 130) Not
surprisingly, Eastern music is what is foreign to Turks, while folk music belongs to the
Turkish Kultur, and Western music to the new civilization of Turks. Thus genres like
classical Ottoman music or traditional folk music were banned from radio broadcasts for
a while in 1933 and 1934 while in the meantime Western classical music and opera,
tangos, waltzes, and polkas, along with modernized versions of folk music were
broadcasted. This also involved a new understanding of Turkey within its new borders,
which were mostly determined in 1923. Characterized by protectionist and defensive
post-war policies, the young nation not only had to define itself within its new borders
and in opposition to the lands beyond them, but to disseminate a new, homogenized
national culture to all regions of the country. This insulation also involved a new
categorization of Turkey into seven main regions or cultural provinces with one or two
artificially created central cities in each region. The new geographical divisions actively
disregarded the ethnic and local characteristics of these regions. Interestingly enough,
however, these regions did not define political or bureaucratic divisions which were set
through a contemporary interpretation of centralized state power. As part of this
provincialization, each region became associated with particular types of folk music.
Those songs which did not fit the categories were disregarded in the patterns of
centralized dissemination of this new national culture. During the same era, Béla Bartók
was invited to Turkey to give advice on the development of a Turkish national music
from Turkish folk music, i.e., to modernize Turkish folk music. This attempt owes a lot to
Bartók’s use of Hungarian folk music in his own compositions and his success in the
creation of a certain synthesis of classical music with folk elements. However, Bartók in
1937, two years after his visit to Turkey, commented that “Turks were not able to realize
many of their fine plans” (Bartók 1976, 147). This was partly due to the coming Second
World War and partly to the deficiencies of Western music education and tradition within
Turkey.
5
As noted above, Ziya Gökalp’s project was one which involved all the arts as well
as the creation of a new national taste. Ottoman literati were far from this projected
national taste, for they imitated first Persian and later French literature. Instead, Gökalp
offers that a new culture should be produced which would be founded in the folk arts,
through the use of forms of Western high arts. What is interesting in Gökalp’s arguments
and their application during the republican period is the glaring absence of cinema,
especially when contrasted with the concurrent use of cinema as a political tool in the
young Soviet Union. One might relate this either to the technological underdevelopment
of Turkey at that time or to the then-worldwide perception of cinema as low-class
entertainment, instead of as the seventh art. Nonetheless, cinema was not absent from
Ottoman and Turkish life. The first exhibition of Lumière films took place at the Ottoman
court late in 1896. Since then, film theaters became an integral part of everyday culture
starting first in Istanbul and other big cities.
While issues surrounding the first Turkish films remain up for debate, it is
generally accepted that its first documentary films date to the 1910s, while the first
feature film was made between 1916 and 1918. Apart from a number of feature films
made in Istanbul during the invasion of the Allied Forces, Muhsin Ertuğrul, the first
dominant figure in the history of Turkish cinema, shot his first film in 1922 and directed
30 films before his death in 1953.3 Ertuğrul was a theater actor and director by
profession, and even though he directed many films, he did not give up his primary
occupation and relegated his interest in cinema to a secondary status. He considered
theater as the primary performing art, conceiving of film in relation to theater and as a
means of producing filmed versions of plays acted by theater players. He was the
dominant filmmaker in Turkey until the early 1950s, paralleling the single party rule of
the Republican People’s Party, the party of the founders of the Turkish Republic, led by
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Thus not only was film ignored by the cultural reformers and policy makers of the
republican regime, it was even relegated to subordinate status as a profession by the
3
In this text, Turkish cinema or Turkish popular cinema and their respective histories are limited to feature
films.
6
country’s dominant filmmaker. Starting as a stunt player for Istanbul theaters, Ertuğrul
had brief stays in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. While his first stay abroad was only for the
theater, he shot a number of films in Germany and Russia, in 1919 and 1925 respectively.
However, according to his own accounts, he worked in the cinema business in Europe
just to make money and sustain his life while he was trying to develop himself in terms of
theater (Scognamillo 1998, 61). In line with Gökalp’s cultural dicta, he did not at all
favor Ottoman theater forms such as theater-in-the-round or shadow plays. Instead he
favored Western-style plays performed and directed by non-Muslims during the Ottoman
era and also by Turks, especially after the 1910s. Eastern theaters were not in any way
within his purview – even Japanese theater, in spite of its greatness and amazing
influence in Europe, was not of interest to Ertuğrul (Scognamillo 1998, 61). In short, like
his counterparts among sociopolitical, economic, and cultural policy-makers, Ertuğrul’s
position in relation primarily to theater and secondarily to cinema is not very avant-garde
in that he reproduced the cultural ideology of the republican elite.
The history of Turkish cinema is not limited to the period between 1920s and
1940s, as were the politics of the one-party regime of the period. Nonetheless, this period
of cinema in Turkey stands as the formative era during which the films of Ertuğrul and
other filmmakers set a number of basic genres not very different from their Western
counterparts, such as action-adventure films, family melodramas, comedies, urban and
village dramas, and adaptations from theater plays, vaudeville, novels, and foreign films.
More importantly, the general disinterest in cinema, both on the part of Ertuğrul and of
cultural policy-makers allowed for a relative independence from the concerns of
westernization and high art, especially after the 1940s, which led to a rather spontaneous
development of popular cinema that was unique and uncharacteristic of a country where
everything, including cultural production, was centrally managed and mediated. “Cinema
entered Turkey through private enterprise,” says Giovanni Scognamillo, a Turkish film
historian of Italian descent: “The earliest theaters and the first imported films were also
the products of free enterprise” (1998, 97). In other words, the direct intervention of the
state in other arts was not replicated in the case of cinema except through a continuous
and politically volatile and changing system of censorship. Turkish cinema has both
7
benefited and suffered from this general neglect. Since it had to make money by
satisfying its audience, it enjoyed an opportunity unique in Turkey to reflect a grassroots
rather than an elite culture. On the other hand, as many filmmakers have often
complained, it had to develop in the absence of any state support for production, often
leaving it bereft of funds as well as unable to experiment with non-populist forms. Given
the lack of economic or ideological state support, the Turkish film industry had to rely on
private entrepreneurship from its earliest days and the burgeoning of the film market in
Turkey had to wait until the 1950s. This era was marked by growth among the Turkish
bourgeoisie due to relative economic liberalization coupled with the U.S. economic aid
that came after Turkey’s membership in NATO, which led Turkey to send a couple of
thousand soldiers to the Korean War.
1.3. Yeşilçam: The Popular Cinema of Turkey
As one of the most acclaimed early historians of Turkish cinema, Nijat Özön,
notes in the preface to his history of Turkish Cinema, many people who see a book on
this subject would ask, “Is there such a thing?” (1962, 6) The question, “Is there a history
of Turkish cinema?” might have been a fair question to ask until the publication of
Özön’s book in 1962. For him, those who ask this question are divided into four groups:
those who are pessimistic because of the weak progress of Turkish cinema as an art form;
those who are influenced by negative interpretations of domestic cinema; those who have
not seen or who do not know domestic films; and those who ask this question just to say
something intelligible. Özön remarks that all of these groups share one thing: a lack of
knowledge about Turkish cinema. Özön’s book attempted to erase this lack. In it, he
proposes a periodization of Turkish cinema. For him, the initial steps of Turkish
filmmaking date back to the Ottoman era, between 1914 and 1922. The period of the
“theater-makers”4 starts one year before the 1923 foundation of the Turkish Republic and
continues to 1939, one year after the death of the founder and the first president of
4
Özön refers to those filmmakers who had a background in theater and who also continued to work
primarily for theaters as tiyatrocular (theater-makers) as opposed to the 1950s generation of filmmakers
who solely interested in filmmaking, whom he refers to as sinemacılar (cinema-makers).
8
Turkey, Mustafa Kemal. Between 1939 and 1950, in the period of transition, the theaterbased producers/directors/actors gave way to the ‘cinema-makers,’ who did not
necessarily have a background in another art form. The last period between 1950 and
1960 in Özön’s book is called the period of filmmakers. Even though the dates Özön
gives are contestable, the late 1940s marks more or less the vanishing of the dominance
of Ertuğrul and a change in film production and exhibition. While the years of the Second
World War created a serious decrease in the films imported from Europe, it also paved
the way for the import of American and, interestingly, Egyptian films. These were either
examples of classical Hollywood cinema or examples of Egyptian popular cinema.
Thanks to an early nationalization effort in the 1920s, Egyptian cinema was flourishing in
the late 1930s and 1940s, peaking in the late 1940s in terms of film production (Shafik
1998, 12). In the meantime, the number of films produced in Turkey until 1950 was
around a hundred. The makeup of Turkish popular cinema beyond that constructed by its
earlier filmmakers owes a lot to these two imported sources.
To begin with, cinema is a Western medium and the source of this imported
technology is effective in relation to cultural and political colonialism. The makeup of a
national cinema owes a lot to the films and equipment available to the filmmakers, who
had to learn their trade from films or through their visits to Western film studios.
Filmmakers of the non-Western world mainly produced films for a national market
which, as in Turkey, was often just in the process of being created along national lines
during the mid-twentieth century. Therefore they accepted cultural entries coming from
different sources – it is not very coincidental that various nineteenth century European
novels were adapted into films both in the West and in the non-Western world around
this time. This, according to Roy Armes, can be explained in relation to the educational
makeup of filmmakers in the non-Western world. “In respect to the gulf between rulers
and ruled, those concerned with culture…are inevitably closer to the rulers” (1987, 24).
This proximity shows itself also in filmmakers’ conceptions of national culture, its
modernization and westernization. In contrast to this trend of westernizing influences, the
entry of Egyptian films and their surprising popularity among Turkish filmgoers of the
1940s at that particular time marks an incisive moment in popular filmmaking in Turkey.
9
According to Özön, this decade is the period of transition from filmmakers whose
primary interest was in theater, to filmmakers who were in the market solely as
filmmakers. For Özön, the existing studios of the period followed conventions set before
them without adding much. This pattern changed in the 1950s thanks to newcomers on
the cinema scene. Özön discusses Egyptian films as making it very difficult for the
directors of the transition period because the consumers of these films were “a backward
(my emphasis) group of spectators who had grown up with and who were used to
Egyptian films or to the films of theater-makers” (1962, 145). Here, Özön obviously talks
about a relative insufficiency of cinema culture on the part of both filmmakers and
spectators and he underlines the importance of film critics and writers for such
‘development’. An alternative reading of these two foreign film entries might be argued
as follows: While the examples of classical Hollywood cinema opened a path of ‘learning
by watching’ for these newcomer filmmakers, the popularity of Egyptian films, in
opposition to Özön’s negative view of their low quality and exploitative character,
suggested the possibility of producing homegrown popular films and of making money
from them. 5 Thus as Özön follows a periodization based on progress towards realism, he
excludes much of popular cinema. One of the central issues this work takes up is how a
more inclusive history might address the issue of periodization within Turkish cinema.
One indicator of such shifts in periodization might be addressed by taking up
changes in the technical and economic aspects of filmmaking, and tracing their effects on
film production. For instance, another critical and highly pragmatic development that
opened the path for the burgeoning of Turkish filmmaking took place in 1948 in the form
of a decrease in the municipal entertainment tax taken from ticket revenues. Four years
after this tax adjustment, the number of films made in 1952 was fifty-six, more than three
5
Özön refers to an interesting film while he is talking about religious exploitation films: Hac Yolu (The
Path of Pilgrimage, 1952). This film was marketed as a Turkish film but it was indeed an Egyptian
documentary film with added scenes. The original documentary, al Hajj (1936) was shot by Egyptians and
a reedited version of it was shown in the 1937 Venice Film Festival, as Le Pélérinage Musulman à la
Mecque (The Pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca). However, what is particularly interesting is the rumors
about this film which made it into a box-office hit: watching this film seven times equals to a pilgrimage to
Mecca, which is one of the pillars of Islam. Obviously, spectators had to pay for a new ticket in each of
their viewings! (Özön 1962, 150) This story is very telling about the exploitative character of popular
cinema and also about the practices of the “Turkification” of foreign films as will be dealt in the following
chapters as a common tactic of Yeşilçam.
10
times the eighteen films made in 1948. This development culminated in a gradual
increase in the number of films made throughout the 1950s – between 1958 and 1961,
approximately 100 films were made per year. The number of films rose above 100 in
1961, above 200 in 1966 and peaked around 300 in 1972, while remaining at around 200
until the 1980 military intervention prevented almost all independent cultural activity
from continuing. Between 1980 and 1983, around seventy films were made per year.
During the mid-1980s, the number of films made was around 150, with a big fall from
grace in the late 1980s, which finally brought about the end of an era in Turkish popular
cinema. Throughout the 1990s, the number of films made started to revolve around 40 or
50. Moreover, only around 25 or 30 percent of the films made in the 1990s were
exhibited in theaters, which came under the control of the U.S. production and
distribution companies. For many people, the period of ‘New Turkish Cinema’ starts in
the second half of 1990s, just around the centennial of the first exhibition of films both in
France and in Ottoman Turkey.
This periodization sets out dates from the rise and decline of popular Turkish
cinema, which is also called Yeşilçam (lit. green pine, the name of a street in downtown
Istanbul around which the majority of film production companies, film agencies, and also
studios were located). As much as it is a locale, Yeşilçam was also a name given to a
certain type of popular filmmaking – in a way, comparable to the name Hollywood,
especially classical Hollywood cinema. It finally gave way to other forms of popular
filmmaking in the 1990s. The golden years of Yeşilçam lasted for two decades, 1960s
and 1970s. These years were marked by three military interventions: one of them opened
a decade of limited artistic freedom after 1960; the second, in 1971, divided the two
decades by limiting the openings created by the previous decade; and, in 1980, the last
and the most reactionary one triggered a period of decline. Given these historical
developments, this study will deal with three periods of Yeşilçam cinema under three
names: “Early Yeşilçam,” the 1950s, as a period of opening and laying out of a certain
cinematic pattern of production, distribution, and exhibition; “High Yeşilçam,” the 1960s
and the 1970s, as a period of ‘the classical’ or ‘golden age’ in popular cinema (hence the
similarity to classical Hollywood cinema), and “Late Yeşilçam,” the 1980s, as a period of
11
change and of decline in film production, distribution, and exhibition – perhaps also a
decline in a particular popular film form.
Before delving into the whatness of Yeşilçam, I must underline a couple of points
about popular cinema in Turkey. First, such a period extending across four decades is
also coupled with important sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and technological
changes. The 1950s marked a remarkable increase in migration from rural areas to urban
areas which continued gradually throughout the four decades of Yeşilçam. This internal
migration was also complicated by a wave of immigration to European countries, mainly
Germany, starting in the mid-1960s. The largest wave of migration interacted with a
period of Yeşilçam filmmaking in the second half of 1970s, during which the patterns of
family spectatorship declined due to television’s rise as entertainment and to economic
hardships felt especially by migrant families from the countryside. It gave way to the
rising popularity of films not appropriate for home settings, thus requiring the cinema: 16
mm sex films aimed at a young male group of spectators who mainly belonged to migrant
families in the cities. A later wave of migration created a videotape market for the films
shot in the 1980s, initially in Europe and later also in Turkey. Thus a remarkable number
of the films made in the 1980s were not exhibited in theaters but rather went directly onto
the videotape market. Finally, the decline of Yeşilçam does not point to a decline of
popular filmmaking in Turkey or a decline in the “quality” of films. Instead it is a decline
coupled with a variety of developments in the sociopolitical and cultural life of Turkey
which to some extent led to the exodus of a portion of Yeşilçam filmmakers to the
broadcasting industry for the production of television series, while the rest retired.
Popular cinema in Turkey felt rivalry initially with the state broadcasting company, TRT
(Turkish Radio and Television) throughout the 1970s and 1980s and later with private
television channels which started in the early 1990s. Private broadcasting companies
started showing Yeşilçam films which had been totally ignored by TRT during the late
1980s and early 1990s. After observing average to good ratings of these films, private
channels started to invest in television series which frequently remind spectators of the
golden age Yeşilçam films.
12
1.4. Addressing Yeşilçam
When I first started to write about popular films which have been seen as “bad” or
“trash,” I fell into a longstanding binary opposition between good and bad. To complicate
this binary opposition, I attempted to introduce a third term: “ugly,” by alluding to a
famous film’s title, Sergio Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly, 1966). However, such a third term invited a fourth term: beauty, a venerably
anachronistic and normative concept of Western aesthetics. However, this brought my
discussion back to binary oppositions: good/beautiful versus bad/ugly. So the
introduction of a third term, if it is possible at all, into a binary opposition did not bring
about any theoretical opening in my case. Rather it pushed the argument back into the
very discourse of the evaluation of art in terms of beauty. The categorical or
compartmental separation between the good and the bad/evil/trash has already been there
and the choice of bad films for a study is already stigmatized with this discursive
violence. Such a choice may hardly make sense apart from discovering the worthy
elements in bad films. However, a study of bad films showing their worthiness is also
another way of reproducing the same discourse: it might be possible to take out a couple
of trash films from their lesser compartment to transfer them into a higher-level
compartment, from the grass fields of laymen into the royal gardens of the good and
beautiful, but that does not address the system upon which such a hierarchy is based.
Another type of re-evaluation or re-valuation (or perhaps, revelation) of films has
been working through the discourse of cult and trash films. There has been a serious
growth of cult film fan communities in the last two decades, especially after the growth
of Internet fan groups. These communities are mostly composed of young film viewers
who did not have a chance to watch many of these cult movies in theaters at the time of
their release. I belong to this group. Such films were brought to the attention of this
young community through friends and fan magazines which led to the word of mouth
popularization of these films. Films that are discussed in Internet newsgroups or mailing
lists created a certain cross-cultural and international interest which eventually led to
trading between fans, first through VHS tapes and later through digital image
13
compression technologies and internet file transfers. This interest in cult films creates an
alternative identity claim on the part of fans who intentionally or unintentionally refuse
the “classics” of a “sophisticated” film culture which more or less serves as a canonical
culture with a certain knowledge of film history as it might be deciphered from
textbooks. There is also a reflection of this interest in universities in the relationship of
power between faculties, advisors and graduate students. Jeffrey Sconce (1995) names
this new interest on the part of graduate students as a “paracinematic aesthetic,” which
involves a study of films that have not been accepted as worth studying within traditional
academia, such as exploitation films, low-budget science-fiction or horror films,
government hygiene films, etc. Thanks to such interventions into the academic discourse
of film studies, nowadays the films, which once the academy regarded as trash, have
become a valid part of film histories. For example, the 2004 edition of David Cook’s A
History of Narrative Film includes a number of new discussions on Italian Exploitation
cinema, Japanese roman porno and horror, and Hong Kong action films, which were not
available in the 1996, third edition of the book. Even though this interest in the lowbudget cinema among cult or trash film fans seems to have produced such positive
results, now that these films have become readily available, they have been redeemed and
have lost their outlying and potentially oppositional status. This has exposed their cult
qualities to the mainstream of film and ultimately resulted in their integration.
In both of these cases, the criteria through which the films are categorized need to
be questioned. What films have particular values and what films do not? This is a
question that has to be answered by dealing with what the mainstream is or what the
canon of film studies involves. Previously, low-budget or exploitation films were ousted
from mainstream discourses on film through a discussion of good and bad films, similar
to a distinction between high art and low art. However, the last couple of decades have
brought about serious criticism of these borderlines between high and low art, beautiful
and ugly, and good and bad, in both art and culture. Similar arguments and debates can
be found in film studies and film criticism. However, a distinction between film studies
as a rather recently validated field of study in the academia, and film criticism as a
longstanding discourse on films in newspapers and magazines, seems necessary since
14
“good” films and those worthy of academic study are not necessarily the same.
In film criticism, the evaluation of films brings about a problem of choice on the
part of both the critic and the spectators. Film critics evaluate films depending on their
film culture, which might be a combination of their readings on film history and general
culture and of their own personal histories in relation to the cinema industry. Individual
links to the industry, which Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the “vagaries of promotion and
criticism,” as well as issues of personal taste become problematic. Filmmakers are well
aware of the influence of critics on potential spectators and are very careful about
promoting their films through well-known critics, as has been part of the film practice for
a long time. In this respect, Rosenbaum, a film critic himself, asks a valid question about
another film critic, Roger Ebert: “How much freedom would he have to assign a thumbsdown to everything three or four weeks in a row without getting his show canceled?”
(Rosenbaum 2000, 54) For Rosenbaum, given the capitalist film critic’s connection with
multi-corporations, this is not possible. Moreover, he adds that the current practice of
hiring journalistic film critics in the United States is not established “on the basis of their
knowledge about film but because of their capacity to reflect the existing tastes of the
public” (2000, 57). Obviously, the personal taste of Rosenbaum is different from what he
refers to as the “public,” and he is not ready to make himself available to the discourse of
popular film. Art or international films shown in small theaters, rather than Hollywood
films in multiplexes, are to Rosenbaum’s taste more often than they are to the public’s
taste. Film critics in Turkey make a similar distinction to that made by Rosenbaum, often
affiliating art cinema with the elitist cultural projects of the Turkish state. Such a position
is not at all surprising, especially in non-Western countries. As Roy Armes notes,
“Whatever their particular class origins, third world filmmakers and critics concerned
with cinema as an art form are, in terms of achieved social status, members of the
intellectual petty bourgeoisie and hence inevitably closer to the rulers of the country than
to the mass of population (1989, 7). Therefore, both their dislike of popular films and
their relegation of Yeşilçam films to a lower status are understandable in many respects.
However, such a stigmatization has its own problems in relation to filmmaking practice
and to the filmmakers of the Yeşilçam era.
15
1.5. The Practice of Filmmaking in Yeşilçam
While the problems of Yeşilçam film are clearly apparent in nearly all of its
productions, perhaps an award-winning film made under far better conditions best
illustrates the stark contrast between Yeşilçam and the Western cinemas it was supposed
to emulate. In 1983, a year after gaining international renown by winning the Golden
Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for the film Yol (The Road, 1982, d. Şerif Gören)
Yılmaz Güney, the Kurdish actor-writer-director known as the “ugly king” of Turkish
cinema, made a film in France, Duvar (The Wall, 1983), without acting in it and with the
support of two million French franks. This was far beyond the budget of any Turkish film
at that time. So what did Güney do with this magnificent opportunity? Duvar presents a
story about the harsh conditions of correctional facilities for children in Turkey at that
time. Since he was in exile in France, the film was shot at a French monastery by Turkish
actors and crew. A documentary about the making of the film shows a tracking shot in
which one of the kids carries coal in a wheelbarrow. At the premier of the film, after
seeing this scene filmed with a rocking camera attached to the wheelbarrow, director Atıf
Yılmaz notes, “I could not understand why this scene was not shot with a steady-cam or a
crane but with a camera attached to a wheelbarrow with wire.” After noting the sheer
strangeness of such equipment for Turkish filmmakers Atıf Yılmaz adds, “But given that
he [Güney] had good finances and vast technical resources in France, and that he knew
that this scene was not ok, I could not understand why he did not consider these
[technical] possibilities” (1995, 215). Soon after Güney had asked his fellow Turkish
director’s opinion of the film, as he accepted a warm hug by Fernando Solanas for his
film at the premier, Yılmaz recalls that he wanted to talk with Güney later to discuss the
problems in the film. In addition to such technical deficiencies, on an ideological level,
Güney scandalized the leftist community in France who had previously supported him
when he warmly invited the ostracized director Elia Kazan to the set. Perhaps less
obvious but more shocking, Güney scandalized the parents of his child actors when he
sought realism by abusing them on the set so that their tears would look real.
16
Despite the exceptional circumstances of its production in France, ample financial
resources, and reception as a politically charged art film, the above problems with the
film’s production present a very telling story through which to understand the tradition of
popular Turkish cinema out of which Güney emerged. It shows how a filmmaker of the
period understood and experienced the making of a film. It shows a technical
incompetence resulting from shooting chronically low-budget films in Turkey. In
Yeşilçam, all films were dubbed to save on audio equipment costs, were shot very
quickly, in a period ranging from a couple of days to a month or more, and all involve a
seemingly endless number of technical mistakes when compared to contemporary notions
of “proper” filmmaking, particularly in the Hollywood tradition. Many of the films have
a very simple story line that narrates the eternal clash between good and evil, staying true
to a melodramatic modality. Nonetheless, such simplistic and incompetent filmmaking
was sufficiently rewarded at the box office to prevent the dominance by Hollywood films
of the national cinema market.
Since the demise of the Yeşilçam film industry after the 1980s, these films have
become a staple of the daytime and late night television which took the place of film in
many people’s entertainment practices. Today, some of these films, produced as regular,
popular entertainment have gained cult status among some spectators, particularly young,
educated and often ironic cineastes, for precisely these low-budget effects. A reemerging
interest in these films both nationally and internationally is at hand, as suggested by some
recent Turkish films that make fun of Yeşilçam’s popular melodramas and historical
adventure films. But what was that industry? What made Yeşilçam films popular and
what were the characteristics of popular film that made it so controversial at the same
time? What does this discomfort with the popular reveal about the interests of various
spectatorial groups in Turkey? This study will attempt to outline a history of Yeşilçam
and what made it persistent over a four decade long period.
17
1.6. Yeşilçam and Melodramatic Modality
The concept of modality emerges in multiple analytic realms, particularly in the
study of poetry and music, and has recently been applied to the study of film as well. The
concept of modality as a ground is similar to metered poetry which involves a rhythmical
flow of meter and accent. Following the conventions of Eastern poetry in general,
Ottoman and early republican poetry in Turkey relied on meter as well as a determinate
set of themes such as the everlasting love between the rose and the nightingale.
Traditional Turkish shadow plays or the theater in the round had a similar structure of a
ground-setting modality and the actual performances of players or puppeteers. Finally,
classical Turkish music has a similar form that involves a modality or a rhythmic pattern
preserved during the performance, even if the sounds of the instruments or the voices of
the singers have a chance to float or fluctuate at different “altitudes” or pitches. Modality
sets a basic pattern or ground by providing a set of aesthetic articulations, while specific
performances float in, on or around the boundaries of this ground. The words such as
altitude, accent or performance mark particular instances of the reproduction or
transformation of this ground.
In “Remapping Hollywood,” Christine Gledhill notes that modality “defines a
specific mode of aesthetic articulation adaptable across a range of genres, across decades,
and across national cultures. It provides the genre system with a mechanism of ‘double
articulation’” (2000, 229). As I will argue in the following chapters, Yeşilçam relies upon
the articulation of a melodramatic modality that not only has a particular history in the
Western countries, but also has a variety of traditional occurrences in Turkey. In this
respect, Yeşilçam combines melodramatic modality with the storytelling conventions of
Turkey that rely upon oral narration. Also as will be discussed, Yeşilçam produced a
combination of a two-dimensional way of seeing with a perspectival one by the way of its
translation and adaptation of a Western medium into a domestic visual set of practices. In
this respect, a variety of visual and oral storytelling conventions coexisted in Yeşilçam.
Technically, many popular Turkish films of the golden age, or Yeşilçam, were
made with handheld cameras without the assistance of dollies, cranes or other
18
professional equipment. Even if some technical gadgets were in use, they were either
very limited in number or invented on the spot, with a number of shortcomings as a
result. For example, Seyfi Havaeri, the director of Unrequited Love, talks about one of his
inventions that served as a substitute for the crane shot. When the zoom became a part of
regular cameras in the 1960s, many films employed a highly distracting, even amateurish,
use of the zoom for close ups. In terms of editing, continuity editing with shot
distribution and orientation was the underlying practice without much attention paid to
rules such as the 180 or 30 degree rules of classical Hollywood film. Kunt Tulgar, the
director of Superman Returns, notes that the director of the first Turkish Tarzan film,
Orhan Atadeniz, was very careful in editing. While shooting, Atadeniz carried single
frames from the original Hollywood Tarzan or wildlife documentaries in his pockets and
before shooting a scene, he took out a frame in order to arrange the mise-en-scène. By
specifically blocking the players for orientation, he could make the actors fit into scenes
of the footage already at hand and then edit the frames from this footage into his own
production.
Film staging and production was fraught with budget-related difficulties from
beginning to end. Most of the actors did not go through a formal education process, but
were recruited either through star contests organized by popular magazines, through
connections, or even chance encounters with filmmakers. Most of the time, except with
historical or period films, the players would bring their own costumes. Even the actionadventure star Cüneyt Arkın says that he had his own trampoline, fireman’s net, and even
his own horse to shoot such scenes. When color films became widespread around 1970, it
was rumored that some film production companies brought clothes for their star players
from Paris. Inspired by the idea of shooting in color, they bought clothes in solid, bright
colors to take advantage of the new medium. All of these films were dubbed at the
studios during the post-production stage, in many cases by professional theater players
temporarily working as dubbers for foreign films. In order to save film, filmmakers
would cut normal 35mm film in half, making 17.5 mm filmstrips with which to edit the
dubbed sound onto visual footage. Matching reels were then sent to Italy to be edited
together. Thus problems of lipsynch arose as well as the distortions in the first syllable of
19
words. 6 Film production companies did not use established studios, with the exception of
some scattered attempts such as a western town set. Instead, they rented lavish bourgeois
houses mainly for melodramas; they used actual historical sites for historical films. Many
of the desert scenes in different films were shot at the beach of a small town close to
Istanbul. The lighting equipment was simple and basic; natural light was often preferred.
Because the camera equipment was not very well-kept, Havaeri tells how he and his
cameraman unsuccessfully attempted to make a wooden box covering the old, damaged
camera to prevent exposing the film to light. Since the amount of fresh film was so
limited and domineering producers so prone to scold over every wasted frame,
filmmakers had to use many rehearsals before shooting a scene.
While production quality was often low, the period of high Yeşilçam included
many varieties, such as mainstream films with or without stars, low-budget productions,
and to some extent auteur or art films. This diversity includes a variety of filmic genres,
such as family melodrama, action, adventure, comedy, and fantasy, as well as spaghetti
(or “kebab”) westerns, sex, and horror films. Though many of these films rely upon the
Turkification of Western films, they also present a melodramatic modality that enmeshes
elements of a melodramatic narration with an authentic practice of realism. In this
respect, a poor mise-en-scène or poor quality of shooting and editing did not present a
direct problem because the traditional performing arts in Turkey, such as theater-in-theround, did not rely upon the sets but mostly on the explanation of the situation and the
start of the play through a series of descriptive instructions. Similarly, Yeşilçam’s
presentation of its stories was based on oral more than visual narration. It was the story
that was of interest and therefore the deficiencies of visual narration were eliminated
through oral narration.
Thus Yeşilçam, if looked at from a Western and westernized perspective, did not
present a realistic language or high-quality filmmaking, but instead a series of
discontinuities and failures. A remarkable amount of literature on these films has been
published in magazines, newspapers, and books, providing an initial basis for the
6
For a detailed account of dubbing and the use of voice in Turkish cinema, please see Nezih Erdoğan’s
(2002) article on sound in Turkish popular cinema.
20
divisions and practices of segregation in Turkish film criticism. The popular press, such
as star magazines, newspaper columns, and magazines intended for intellectual circles,
has taken varying degrees of interest in the film industry. Yet apart from popular
magazines intended mainly for promoting films and stars, the literature on Turkish
popular cinema has disregarded a remarkable number of films. The absence of overt
sociopolitical issues as a part of filmic plots has been a serious criticism directed at
popular films. Critics who have promoted mainstream popular cinema in Turkey centered
their attention only on famous filmmakers and stars, generally disregarding “minor”
figures and films. The films I will deal with in this study will constitute examples of both
groups. Instead of looking at the best-films-of-Turkey lists or at the canonical examples
in the existing film histories in Turkey, here I will focus on the examples of different
genres of Yeşilçam extending across a period of three decades. In this respect, I will try
to focus on how various aspects of Yeşilçam exist in films ranging from actionadventures to science-fiction or social realist films, with a discussion on the mechanisms
of genrification and recycling. I will also try to elaborate on the workings of the
production, distribution, and exhibition network of Yeşilçam and the ways in which this
affected Yeşilçam’s filmic texts. My selection of films is thus a conditioned practice in
the sense that I plan to study films that have not been considered in detail by film writers.
But what has conditioned this selection?
1.7. Door with Couch Grass
At this point, I want to return to the beginning of this chapter: to couch grass. The
Turkish poet İlhan Berk was not the only figure who had an interest in the vices and
virtues of couch grass. The French painter Jean Dubuffet, the infamous painter of ‘Art
Brut’, i.e., raw art, also has a painting titled, Door with Couch Grass, painted in 1957.
Dubuffet was obviously in stark opposition to the classical renderings of beauty in
Western art, and to this end he was interested in the painting produced by uneducated and
primitive painters. For him, the dominance of culture over artistic creativity produced a
sense of history which gave primacy to canonized works of the past over simple creative
21
activity. “What culture lacks is the taste for the anonymous, innumerable germination.
Culture is smitten with counting and measuring…its efforts tend…to limit the numbers in
all domains; it tries to count on its fingers. Culture is essentially eliminating and thereby
impoverishing.” (Dubuffet 1988, 14) According to Dubuffet, because of its classifications
and canonizations, culture has come to be associated more and more with indoctrination
and pressure. (1988, 25) Thus, away from cultural segregation and the canonizations of
the history of art, Dubuffet directed his interest towards paintings which cannot be found
in museums. He was interested in pathological art produced by the inmates of the
institutions for the mentally impaired. In this respect, Dubuffet was openly against the
rationalizing, hierarchical, and empirical tendencies of Western culture and directed his
energies toward subversion. Clearly, it was a rebellion against the institutionalization of
art. Dubuffet, with his friends, announced their interest in works of art beyond the reach
of museological canons and free from habitual means of creation; they invite all sorts of
works to their non-profit, non-commercial association, The Company of Raw Art, which
was started in 1947. Their interest was “in these types of works even if they are sketchy
and poorly made,” involving “abilities of invention and of creation in a very direct
fashion, without masks and constraints” and as they noted, they placed “little importance
on manual aptitude.” (1988, 109-10) Dubuffet’s own works had a similar interest in
primitive and direct creation, as well as a particular use of found objects and materials in
his painted assemblages. Door with Couch Grass is a painting produced along these lines:
it is made out of an assemblage of numerous paintings cut and pasted or assembled
together as he applied layers of paint and sand on or between the assembled pieces, some
of which were also scratched with a fork.
The creeping aggression of the commoner, “couch grass,” in Dubuffet’s painting
is related to his tactic of subversion in order to get away from the conventions of
institutionalized high art. Couch grass invades the doorsteps of high art as if it is about to
open the doors of museums and snatch the beautiful flowers of Francis Bacon’s noble
gardens. However, as was indicated in the opening of this chapter, couch grass does not
kill all beauty around itself. Instead as Berk said, “it wants to hug the earth with everyone
else,” to share it with the beautiful ones. It has what normal culture lacks. In the words of
22
Dubuffet, it has “the taste for the anonymous, innumerable germination.”
Couch grass is very comparable to the disregarded examples of Yeşilçam because
of its uselessness in comparison to good cinema, as if good films are comparable to wheat
and barley or as if good films embellish the imperial gardens of high culture. Good films
or works of art belong to museums and popular films do not have any problems with
those except that, by nature, popular films grow aggressively (quick grass) and germinate
innumerably through rooting from rhizome joints – by creating imitations, adaptations,
hybrid structures, and cultural dis- and re-locations; and finally because of silently living
on the Anatolian plain away from the interest of filmmakers and film writers beyond the
borders of Turkey and also away from the blissful gaze of the proponents of good, quality
films in Turkey.
Following Deleuze and Guattari who talked about cinema’s potential of capturing
the movement of madness through its “exploration of a global field of coexistence,” it
may be argued that Yeşilçam presented a delirium which is invested in the “social,
economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, and religious” fields (2003,
274). In this respect, this study of Yeşilçam, its history and films, aims to underline the
pragmatics of popular cinemas which grow quickly and aggressively against the closed
doors of high culture. In such a pragmatics, Yeşilçam offers a field of coexistence for
different aspects of the culture through a series of combinations and contradictions
embedded in itself. Various aggressions, violent practices and hierarchies could be found
in Yeşilçam as well as perpetual change in such processes. In such a flow, the West and
the East coexist and contradict and as such Yeşilçam produces ambivalent responses.
Thus instead of taking Yeşilçam as a unified and coherent entity, I argue that it is similar
to couch grass which exists side by side with other plants, growing and expanding with or
without them.
1.8. To Be Continued
In this study, I will argue that Yeşilçam may be seen in relation to the following
notions: Turkification, hayal, melodramatic modality, and özenti. In each chapter, I will
23
introduce these notions in relation to the historical processes of popular cinema in
Turkey. As I will elaborate in the next chapter, the history of traditional performing arts
and the history of cinema in Turkey will present a convergence of the two screens, i.e.,
some Western Lumière films were shown on the Eastern screen of Karagöz shadow play,
called hayal (image, imagination, dream, and specter). Cinema started in Turkey by
interweaving two screens, the traditional and the modern, the realistic and the spectral. To
this, also a dream of making films similar to those of Western cinemas is attached
through the history of Yeşilçam, which attempted to be a “small” Hollywood. However,
the makeup of cinema in Turkey, the presence and use of a Western medium in a nonWestern land brought about its own particularities and peculiarities, through practices of
translation, transformation, and restitution, but with the belated arrival of all cinematic
novelties of the West.
Hayal underscores a transitory state enmeshed with the drama of nation building
which involved attempts at the invention of a nation and its culture, an aggressive attempt
to unify all the multiplicities of a country under a single, unitary national umbrella. This
also had its effect on the production and consumption of the cinematic products in
Turkey. In this respect, dubbing of films in Turkish has been a standard practice
throughout Yeşilçam’s history. But the postsynchronization of the films in the Turkish
language was not only limited to foreign films that were shown in Turkey, but also all of
the Yeşilçam films. In Yeşilçam the sound was not recorded live during filming. Instead
it was synchronized during the post-production of films, in many cases by employing
professional dubbing artists. But during this dubbing process, while foreign films were
translated and Turkified through a series of modifications or omissions of characters,
dialogues, and storylines, Yeşilçam films were also frequently modified during the postproduction stage. Moreover, Yeşilçam utilized not only cinema as a Western medium, but
also Western films themselves through remakes and adaptations. So I will deal with
Turkification, not only a translation and transformation of the West through Yeşilçam’s
own terms and terminology, but also a practice of nationalization which carries with itself
the violent and aggressive elements of nationalism. I will call this latter Turkification as
“Turkification-from-above.” But such practices of Turkification in Yeşilçam are not
24
limited to an anti-realistic, postsynchronized filmmaking, but also an active
(mis)translation and transformation presenting a popular cultural synthesis. In this
manner, Turkification may be thought of as a process of coexistence between the West
and the East, with various failures, novelties, and aggressions.
Enmeshed with the practices of hayal and Turkification, I will introduce özenti
(imitation or pretension) in an attempt to understand the meeting of the Eastern and twodimensional Karagöz shadow play with the Western and three-dimensional Punch puppet
play. Yeşilçam’s özenti is about a perpetual movement from self to other in an attempt to
be like the other, i.e., the Western popular cinemas, especially Hollywood. Özenti is
about desire – a desire to be like the other, the West, the superior instances of the
cinematic practice. But Yeşilçam’s filmmakers were always aware of the impossibility of
being equals with Hollywood, though they attempted to be equal regardless. In this
movement from self to other, a return to original self is impossible and through özenti,
Yeşilçam continuously, rhizomatically transformed itself. Through özenti, Yeşilçam kept
producing a double existence, not being one nor being the other but in continual
movement between the two.
While hayal, Turkification, and özenti will give clues about Yeşilçam’s workings
and being, its “melodramatic modality” will also be introduced to read how Yeşilçam
constructed its filmic texts. This analysis will not rely on a limited view of melodrama as
a particular genre, but rather as a spectral genre, a modality that encompasses a particular
history of entertainment and arts through the practices of filmmaking. Thus, Yeşilçam’s
melodramatic modality will be tested in different films that will be chosen from a variety
of genres. Certainly, the discussion of modality will raise problems of boundaries and
analytical classifications or categories in relation to strict modes, but instead of offering
first a mode or model and then looking for the dissolution of it through subversions or
excesses, the arguments on genres of high Yeşilçam will deal with the above-cited
doubling between ground and altitudes, between overlappings across different generic
instances and the specificities of particular films. Moreover, the period of late Yeşilçam
will deal with how various aspects of Yeşilçam have been recycled and transformed not
only through the changes in terms of the socioeconomic and cultural milieu, but also the
25
cinematic practices and the consumption of films. In discussing these films, I will trace
the persisting elements – those related to the ground – of the melodramatic modality of
Yeşilçam, as well as the changes – the new altitudes – that came about in the vanishing
years of Yeşilçam.
Finally, the conclusion will consider the metaphor made possible by the following
line of Berk’s poem: “Now, it does not want to live.” What made couch grass quit its
desire for living? Does refusing to live mean the death of couch grass? Or is it living
silently, during the times of famine? In other words, I will first deal with a frequently
asked question in Turkish cinema circles throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s: “Is
Turkish cinema dead?” In response to this question, I will try to outline the
transformation or metamorphoses of Yeşilçam cinema which in this instance might be
compared to an amphibian existence or to an expert of survival in the wild world of
private broadcasting companies – even though full of agricultural poisons and
insecticides designed to get rid of couch grass. Into this discussion, I will integrate the
recuperations of Yeşilçam cinema after its alleged death or suicide. This recuperation will
come in two forms: nostalgia and cultist and ironic revival. I will conclude with an
argument on Yeşilçam’s rhizomatic existence through its capacity to adapt into new
forms such as television series and serials.
26
CHAPTER 2
CINEMA IN TURKEY UNTIL THE LATE 1940S
2.1. Periodization
While the true development of Turkish cinema as a popular industry did not begin
until the 1950s, the roots of its unique cinematic language developed from its inception in
the late Ottoman era and during the early years of the republic. The half century of this
early period coincides not only with the two world wars which colored the experience of
Europe and the US, but also of a long war for independence which resulted in the
inception of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and ensuing reforms of westernization and
modernization. While there have been several histories of this early period in Turkish
cinema, none have taken an interest in film in relation to the non-cinematic processes and
developments that influenced the course of filmmaking in Turkey. The first and very
short history of Turkish cinema by Rakım Çalapala, was published as early as 1947, as a
part of a booklet prepared by the Domestic Filmmakers Association (Yerli Film Yapanlar
Cemiyeti). Two other short essays were written by Nurullah Tilgen in film magazines
Yıldız (Star, 1953) and Yeni Yıldız (New Star, 1956). A third short history was written by
Zahir Güvemli in 1960 in the form of a chapter on “Cinema in Turkey” in his mostly
translated and adapted book on the History of Cinema. For most part, these studies name
some filmmakers and give some dates for films which are only briefly considered. Not
only do they lack analysis of the films, they consider neither any classificatory schemes
nor periodizations for Turkish cinema.
27
Today, however, an analysis of this period also must consider the existing analytic
structure which has been developed around these films by subsequent authors. The first
really extensive study on the history of cinema in Turkey was written by Nijat Özön and
published in 1962. Özön proposes the following periodization of Turkish cinema:
1. The initial steps of Turkish filmmaking, which date back to the Ottoman era,
between 1914 and 1922;
2. The period of the ‘theater-film-makers’ starting one year before the 1923
foundation of the Turkish Republic and continuing to 1939, one year after the
death of the founder and the first president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal;
3. The period of transition, which he situates between 1939 and 1950,
indicating the beginnings of the era of the ‘cinema-makers’ who did not
necessarily have a background in another art form. While these filmmakers
continued to produce films after 1950, this sharp delineation was created in
light of the first elections in Turkey, which led to a change in the dominant
party and politics in the country.
4. Finally, Özön considers the period of cinema-makers, between 1950 and
1960.
This has been a generally accepted periodization by some other writers such as Salih
Gökmen (1973), Mustafa Gökmen (1989), Alim Şerif Onaran (1994), and to some extent
Giovanni Scognamillo (1998). In a recent piece, Özön extends the period of cinemamakers to 1970 and adds a new period named Young/New Cinema between 1970 and
1987 (1995a).
While this study will follow a similar path for the earlier eras of Turkish cinema,
it will at once construct nuances based on changing contemporary local and global
political contexts, and will propose an alternative periodization for the later period.
Indeed, the first five decades of Turkish film can easily be read as a period of
development culminating in a prolific popular film industry that increasingly speaks in
the voice of the people rather than in the voice of elites. Its development was closely
marked by numerous economic and political changes. After a long period of single-party
leadership, extended due to the uncertainties surrounding World War II, Turkey held its
first multi-party elections in 1946. While upholding the reforms instated by Atatürk, the
Democratic Party which subsequently came to power in 1950 paid more attention to
28
popular desires, traditions, and voices. The instatement of the Truman doctrine in 1946
led to the Marshall plan in 1948, which suffused the Turkish economy with American aid
during the 1950s. The resulting growth in infrastructure, particularly roads, coupled with
the upsurge in industry led to the beginning of mass migration to the cities, creating a
much wider and less elite audience for Turkish cinema. Ties between Turkey and the US
grew even stronger as Turkey sent troops to the Korean War and thus secured its
membership in NATO. After decades of post-war economic struggle, the population had
risen to 21 million by 1950, from a little over 10 million in 1923.
The world of Turkish cinema was protected, however, by protectionist economic
programs designed to ensure competitive prices for Turkish products. In 1948, the
reduction of sales tax from 75% to 25% of the sales price on tickets for locally produced
films made them more affordable for audiences seeking entertainment. During the same
era, film production companies began to gather on and around Yeşilçam Street, which
would gave its name to a popular film industry that started after the Second World War.
Among the twelve film production companies listed in 1947 in Filmlerimiz (Our Films),
the publication of the Domestic Filmmakers Association, nine were located in Beyoğlu
around Yeşilçam Street while five were on it. While the first Turkish theater owners, film
importers, and producers association was established in 1932 (Türkiye Sinemacılar ve
Filmciler Birliği, Turkey Filmmakers and Theater Owners Association), the Domestic
Filmmakers Organization (Yerli Film Yapanlar Cemiyeti) was founded in 1946 and
organized the first domestic film contest in 1948, in which 36 films made between 1946
and 1948 competed. Such markers all indicate that until the late 1940s, cinema in Turkey
was mostly experienced through imported films while domestic films were scarce and
had not yet evolved into what Yeşilçam would offer in the coming decades. In the import
film market, Hollywood dominated the cosmopolitan and elite theaters of Beyoğlu in
Istanbul during the 1947-1948 season during when 100 of the 118 films shown were
Hollywood films, while the influence of Hollywood was also shared with Egyptian films
in other parts of the country. This chapter will outline the roots of this popular cinema as
a foreign form merged with local performing and visual arts within a context that
29
experienced two world wars, the first as a revolution that led from empire to republican
nation state and the second as a largely neutral party.
2.2. Early Turkish Cinema: The Problem of Origins
2.2.1. First Film Screenings: Beer Halls to Coffee Houses
In the portion of the Ottoman Empire that would later become the Turkish
Republic, the earliest known public screening of “photographie vivante” (living
photography) took place in Salle Sponeck, a beer hall in the most cosmopolitan quarter of
Istanbul, Pera, in 1897. Before that, in 1896, there had been a number of private
screenings of Lumière films which took place at the Ottoman palace and probably at
some other aristocratic residences, making it also possible for some female viewers to see
them in the privacy of their homes. Since Sultan Abdulhamid forbade the use of electric
generators in Istanbul, these first public screenings relied on oil-lamps to project the
films, resulting in a heavy smell in the small, dark screening room. Ercüment Ekrem
Talu, who attended one of these screenings at the Salle Sponeck, also talks about how he
and his friends discussed cinema at school, noting that it had become a popular subject
throughout Istanbul society (in Özön 1962, 22). While some claimed that to watch films
was a sin, others were happy that another element of civilization had arrived in Istanbul.
Such reactions were a typical element in the ongoing debate between Islamic
conservatism and westernizing modernism. While some argued that Western technology
could and should be adopted without its culture, others argued that this would be
impossible. In light of the Islamic reluctance to use large-scale representational imagery,
film could at once be seen as sacrilegious and as technological.
After the initial screening at the Salle Sponeck, more screenings took place at
different venues in Pera, such as the Concordia Entertainment Palace. There is some
debate concerning who was behind these screenings. According to most sources, these
early screenings were done by Sigmund Weinberg, a Polish Jew from Romania, who was
the representative of Pathé Fréres in Istanbul (Güvemli 1960, Özön 1962, Scognamillo
30
1998). Others suggest that someone by the name of D. Henri was responsible (M.
Gökmen 2000, 59; Evren 1995, 34). In the same year as these early screenings, a French
citizen by the name of Cambon started to show longer films, probably by the Lumière
brothers, which then led Weinberg to bring better Pathé equipment and films the
following year (Scognamillo 1998, 17).
Soon after these early screenings in Pera, in 1897, “projections animées de
grandeur naturelle” (animated projections of natural size) arrived in old Istanbul, where
most of the population was Muslim. This time, however, the screening was in a coffee
house, the Fevziye Kıraathanesi, which was known for its Karagöz shadow play shows.
Çalapala notes that the film was projected on the small white screen of Karagöz artist
Katip Salih (1947). The technology of traditional shadow puppetry was based on
projection of semi-transparent, two-dimensional puppets to create moving effects on a
screen. This gradually gave way to a new technology of moving images, cinema, creating
an animated or life-like effect, unlike the anti-illusionistic character of Karagöz. While
there are no records directly suggesting the motivation of those who projected Western
films on puppet screens, it is tempting to imagine the mindset of those who thus
amalgamated two very disparate traditions. The obvious similarity between Karagöz and
cinema also led Cecile B. deMille, after seeing a Karagöz show in his 1931 visit to
Istanbul, to say that cinema had possibly been born out of Karagöz (M. Gökmen 1989,
54). Yet while both are projected on a white screen one from the back and the other front,
the relation between Karagöz and cinema is more interesting in terms of their differences
than their similarities, the one an anti-illusionistic and presentational Eastern
entertainment, while the other is an output of Western technologies of vision which has
its roots in the Renaissance. In other words, rather than presenting film as a new medium
on a fresh screen draped against the wall in mimicry of Western screenings, those who
presented the show at the Fevziye Kıraathanesi made a deliberate choice to use an
existing setup – and a presumably smaller screen – to incorporate film into existing
spectatorial practices with their portable projection machines. Thus the import became
local, in much the same way as many Ottoman families sat in traditional cross-legged
fashion on their newly purchased Western-style armchairs.
31
This part of the city was also the site of similar entertainment practices
augmenting traditional forms of theater and festivities particularly popular during
Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. During these early years, cinema became one of
many such entertainments available on the evenings of this festive month, in which the
restriction on daytime eating and drinking led to entertainment and celebration in the
evening and at night. At the Fevziye and other locales where film was shown alongside
shadow plays or other entertainment programs, an interesting relationship emerged
between the two. Like the early film shows attached to vaudeville shows, the exhibition
of films in Turkey is also tied to existing practices of entertainment. While shadow plays
were known as hayal, (i.e., shadow, dream, specter, imagination, and mirror) frontally
projected black-and-white films brought an aspect of reality to the same screen. Noting
that Karagöz and cinema belong to two different worlds, Özön nonetheless claims that
the elements of traditional theater – including shadow puppetry, outdoor theater that took
place in town squares, and other forms of public narration (such as Tuluat, story-tellers,
and other forms of mimicry, which I will address later) – led to a “cinema of Karagöz”
loaded with the speaking-style of the stock characters shared by these forms. For him,
Turkish cinema would become “true” cinema only to the extent that it escaped from these
elements of traditional entertainment (Özön 1995a, 11-12). Yet on the contrary, as I will
argue in the following chapters, Turkey’s national cinema emerged not despite the
incorporation of these traditions, but because of them.
2.2.2. Traditional and Modern Theaters and Performances
Özön’s ideal of a ‘true’ cinema is not very different from that of André Bazin – a
continuous evolution toward complete realism, defined as perfect illusionism. However,
apart from the stock characters of traditional theater, what remained intact in the Turkish
cinema is hayal which literally means not only dream, but also shadow, specter,
imagination, and mirror. “Theatrically speaking, it means nothing more than imitation or
mimicry; plays or acting based on imitation. It is a general term, such as wayang, used for
many forms of the performing arts” (And 2002, 998). In other words, what Özön aspires
32
to as the “Turkish cinema” is not what the “popular Turkish cinema” achieved. The
preservation of this tradition was directly opposed to the aesthetic expectations of
Kemalist intellectuals who may have felt that popular Turkish film’s failures are related
to its traditionality, in contrast to the attempts of modernization in other arts. Other
modern arts in Turkey generally emerged in complete segregation from their traditional
counterparts. For example, the emergence of watercolor and oil painting in the nineteenth
century signaled the demise of miniature painting; classical music was imported to
construct a culturally elite form, supplanting Ottoman court music and existing in
contrast to folk forms. In contrast to Özön’s interpretation of an art that failed to achieve
equivalence with its Western models, Turkish cinema is unique in that rather than
diverging from traditional forms and relegating them to pre-modern or folk traditions as
was prescribed by the republican cultural reform projects, it often incorporated them into
a specifically local and popular vernacular. As will emerge through this text, this not only
is a symptom of the tensions created by rapid modernization coupled with westernization,
and it also reflects the complicated position of intellectuals and elites in relation to the
arts, both of the West and of their own country.
It could even be argued that film not only incorporated traditional theatrical arts,
but also maintained relationships with other arts that were otherwise relegated to
museums. For example, miniature paintings use a mode of realism distinct from that of
the Western perspectival tradition. While in post-Renaissance Western art, the truth of
representation relies on the gaze, in miniatures realism often relies on content or the
story. Thus, in the miniature genre, the interior and exterior of a building are equally
visible; a scene can be seen both from across and from above at the same time. Thus a
single image can incorporate more than can be encompassed by normal human vision,
and thus is not realistic in terms of everyday temporal experience. It is a narrative
realism, in which the conventions of expression supersede those of positivistic
experience.
Likewise, traditional theatrical performances shared an eclectic narrational
sequentiality. Both in shadow plays and in theater-in-the-round, there was not a single
storyline but a series of different performances loosely knit together. In any given
33
performance, an introduction was followed by a dialogue which had no storyline. These
dialogues were mainly based on two characters but not limited to them and at times might
have been loosely related to the story which followed the dialogue. Generally they are
developed through wordplay, misunderstandings and puns, which can often carry doubleentendres and prurient appeal (And 2000, 52). Before the main story was introduced in
the theater-in-the-round, there was a transition with music and dances attended by all the
players (Kudret 2001, 28). In these performances, the characters would already have been
familiar to the spectators and they would assume a role based on the main story. Most of
the time the stories come from famous folk tales, but performances were eventually
adapted from various sources including some Western plays. After the main story, the
performance would be finalized with a concluding section similar in format to the
introduction. In shadow plays, these structural frames involved a repartee between the
duo of Karagöz and Hacivat in shadow plays and Kavuklu and Pişekar in the theater-inthe-round.
Apart from these two main characters, the majority of the ethnic populations of
the Ottoman Empire were represented through characters representing ethnic identity,
such as the Greek, Jew, Arab, Albanian, Kurd, and so on. Because there were no women
actors in the theater-in-the-round, the roles of women were played by male actors, called
“zenne.” Roles like the wives of main characters, black nannies, and the female leads of
the main stories were performed by zennes. Among the important stock types is also
Çelebi who is a rich and polite guy who inherited his wealth. “He is always very wellmannered, polite, fashionable and has refined tastes” (Türkmen 2001, 64). Though
Karagöz or Kavuklu makes fun of his way of talking and his finesse, he often represents
the main male lead in folk love stories, such as Leyla and Mecnun or Tahir and Zühre, in
which he is coupled with a zenne type in a relationship full of desperate romance.
The stage of theater-in-the-round is set in the open-air, often a town square, and
“with minimal sets and props, they summoned up a world in which the spectator’s
imagination had free rein. When the hero climbed up on a chair, the audience understood
that he had reached the second floor of a house” (And 2002, 1007). For And, this brings
about an anti-illusionistic and presentational character in theater-in-the-round and shadow
34
play, both of which involved minimal sets or stages, female roles acted by men, and lots
of music and dancing. The language of the pairs or their repartee generally included slang
and obscenity. More importantly, especially in the sections based on dialogue, language
itself was what counts. Without any storyline, “meaningless words, fabricated sayings,
and cacophonous sounds” came together to make the language itself the instrument of
laughter (And 2001, 143). Both in the dialogue sections and in the main story, there were
lots of non-diegetic intrusions to the story and illusionism which created an effect of
alienation. For instance, after the introduction to the audience of a prop as a house in, say,
a love story, Kavuklu later emerges out of nowhere, interferes in the storyline, and points
out that this is not a house, but just a prop (And 2001, 144). In other words, the realistic
illusionism of stories is frequently undermined by Kavuklu or Pişekar who, as characters,
had no place in the stories where they nonetheless appear as tricksters, disturbing any
potential illusionism. This brings an element of surrealism into the stories which at times
are themselves enmeshed with dream sequences within the stories. As in dreams,
exaggeration and false conflicts produced between the lead characters also aimed to
increase the laughter of the audience. But such practices did not come into the world of
modern, westernized theater in Turkey. These traditional forms of theater were severely
criticized by the intellectuals and the reformers of the republican era as antiquated, and
they tried to replace them with the practices of performing arts of the West. But in terms
of cinema, such aspects of hayal, anti-illusionism and presentationality persisted to some
degree in popular films of Yeşilçam.
While Ottoman citizens started to translate and perform popular texts such as
those of Molière, European theater and opera troupes performed periodically in Istanbul
and in some other big cities. The earliest Western-style theater buildings with a
proscenium, intended for circus shows by traveling European troupes and theater plays,
were built in the 1830s. Many of these early Ottoman theaters were founded and run by
non-Muslim minorities who performed either in Ottoman Turkish or in their own
languages. Turkish actors and writers also participated in these theaters. One such theater,
the “Ottoman Theater,” founded by the Armenian Güllü Agop, performed works in both
Armenian and Turkish, as well as performing popular plays of European theaters (And
35
1999, 22). Rather than creating direct translations of European performances, these
theaters often adapted them to Ottoman life. Such adaptations were done from the works
of Molière, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire. One writer of the late 19th century (probably
Savfet Nezihi) mentions prose and musical genres which were most probably available to
the audience at the time. Among the prose genres, he lists tragedy, old comedy, haute
comedy, play (pièce), drama, melodrama, comedy bouffe, comedy burlesque, vaudeville,
farce anglaise, farce Italienne, and pantomime. He also lists musical genres including
grande opera, opera legér, lyrical drama, comic opera, lyric, slapstick opera bouffe,
operetta, ballet, comédie musicale, and pantomime (in And 1999, 185). While both
Muslim and non-Muslim authors had begun to produce domestic plays in Western
genres, at this time most of the staged works were still direct translations from European
works.
While shadow plays and theater-in-the-round had many common characteristics, a
similar relationship might also be drawn between puppetry and Tuluat theater in which
the performers improvised their lines. More importantly, Tuluat may be viewed as a
combination of Western theater and the theater-in-the-round, as it was staged in a
Western style theater building with adaptations or borrowings from Western texts.
Similar to commedia dell’Arte and theater-in-the-round, Tuluat was improvisational with
music, dance, vivid narration and mimicry. The Ottoman Theater of Güllü Agop not only
performed examples of Western theater, but it also was partly a Tuluat theater which
coupled its improvisational character with slapstick-like comedy and obscene language
(see And 1985). What was important in Tuluat was a common knowledge of the main
characters, the genre and the general storyline or the text to be performed on stage.
However, the dialogues, the name and traits of the characters, and even the storyline were
all subject to change during the performance based on the flow of a specific performance
or the audience reaction. The performance was often interrupted by a series of musical
performances which might or might not be related to the story. In accordance with the
Western texts contributing to these performances, its characters were updated with
contemporary types and the increasingly Western-style clothing of the last quarter of the
19th century. Among these characters were İbiş (servant), Tirit (old man), Sirar (son),
36
Kız (girl), and Tiran (tyrant) (Nutku 2000). İbiş, the main character, is a buffoon-like
simpleton who is in love with the maid Fatma of the mansion of Tirit who is rich and
stingy. Tiran is generally the villain of comedies and melodramas, while the love between
Sirar and Kız provides romantic motivation. Other characters included Tirit’s wife, and
the mansion’s cook, steward and gardener, similar to the puppet plays of İbiş (Oral 2002,
23). While theaters devoted to Tuluat were opened throughout Istanbul in the late
nineteenth century, the plays were also performed in more traditional venues like coffeehouses and appeared in other towns through the efforts of traveling troupes. Tuluat
presented a correlate to cinema that came later with the film screenings in venues
combining Western and Eastern entertainment practices. Apart from shadow plays and
theater-in-the-round, Tuluat also had a narrative structure which would be adopted by the
Turkish cinema.
2.2.3. The First Film Theaters
In old Istanbul, especially during the month of Ramadan, film screenings quickly
became a part of the longer entertainment program that involved these traditional forms
of Ottoman theater and shadow plays. However, as Özön puts it, these screenings
remained a “refugee” (sığıntı), “a foreign made entertainment” (gavur işi eğlence) (1962,
24). Except during the month of Ramadan, the screenings of this “spectacle merveilleux
et saisissart” (marvelous and amazing spectacle) took place mostly in the Pera area, the
cosmopolitan part of Istanbul. In this part of the town, these screenings were also a part
of the shows of different variety theaters, circuses, and other popular entertainments. The
majority of ads and other printed announcements of film screenings were in French,
Greek, Armenian, and German, which is also indicative of the profile of the early
spectators, (Scognamillo 1998, 18) who were either the non-Muslim dwellers of the Pera
area or the upper-class Muslims who lived in or frequented this part of town.
Although film screenings were very popular, spectators in Istanbul had to wait
until the fall of the conservative Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1908 for the first film theater
which was opened by Weinberg under the name of Cinéma Théatre Pathé Fréres
37
(Çalapala 1947). Before the construction of such a permanent venue, all of the projection
machines were transportable and the venues were only open to men. At first, film theaters
were mostly in the area of Pera, now known as Beyoğlu, which would eventually become
the center of film production and still serves as the primary location of first-run movie
theaters and film festivals. While the film theaters in this area have kept much of their
importance, the film industry dispersed throughout Istanbul in the 1990s. While many
early theaters opened in Pera during the 1910s – including the Ciné Éclair, Ciné
Cosmographe, Ciné Centrale, Les Cinémas Orientaux, Ciné Gaumont, Ciné Lion, and
Ciné Palace (Scognamillo 1991, 20), around the mid-1910s film theaters were opened in
other parts of Istanbul as well as with other major towns of the empire. One of these film
theaters was the Milli Sinema (National Cinema) which was opened in 1914 at the former
location of the Fevziye Kıraathanesi and which was run, for the first time, by Turks
(Çalapala 1947 and Özön 1962, 25). However, before that privately run film theater,
there was also another film screening hall opened at the new Military Museum by an
Ottoman general, by the name of Ahmet Muhtar Pasha. Mustafa Gökmen notes that
Pasha tried to encourage film viewing and tried to promote this new medium in old
Istanbul. (1989, 37-38) While making film available to the Muslim elite in old Istanbul,
the new cinema also created a specific domestic, nationalistic intervention into the film
screenings by having the Ottoman military band perform during the screenings of silent
feature films.
Only after the opening of such theaters, daytime screenings solely for women
provided regular daytime screenings for female spectators of the middle-classes on
specially reserved days of the week. Some other theaters, as well as open-air screenings
during Ramadan, also instituted such gender-segregated screenings (Çalapala 1947).
Thus theaters not only increased their spectatorial base by including a previously
untapped audience, they also added to the range of activities available to women in the
empire by mimicking existing practices of temporally segregated gender inclusion
already commonplace in public spaces such as public baths. These early cinemas also had
spaces allocated for orchestras and had musical scores performed during the films.
38
Cinema, first as a side attraction to other shows, started out in the beer halls of
Beyoğlu (Pera) and then moved to the coffee houses of old Istanbul. Indeed, Mustafa
Gökmen claims that the Fevziye Kıraathanesi was right at the geometric center of the
historical citadel marked by a column that stood by the coffeehouse (1989, 27). Neither
beer nor coffee in this context can be thought of as simply beverage alternatives. They
represented opposite tracks of socialization, the one Western in style, and the other
Eastern. After noting that coffeehouses were “taverns without wine” (or beer) Ralph
Hattox argues that coffeehouses have been masculine places for political and cultural
conversations, gaming, performances of storytellers, shadow plays, and musical bands
(1996). Like cinema, coffee and coffeehouses were initially taken as bid’a (a religiously
improper novelty) in contrast to sunna (customs and traditions with a religious backdrop).
However, this was not the case for beer halls, since they were located in cosmopolitan
Pera, they did not infringe on the traditional and conservative parts of the city. Cinema
was a novel form of entertainment for the cosmopolitan part of Istanbul which would
then become the center-stage for first run theaters and the film production companies of
Yeşilçam.
2.2.4. Discussions Concerning the First Turkish Film
While initially the new theaters made do with imported films, the presence of
cinema in the country inevitably led to the production of local film. Yet the question of
the first Turkish film, one needs to consider issues of identity and nationhood. Generally
the debates focus on a short, documentary film shot by a Turk in Istanbul. While there is
some written information about the otherwise lost first Turkish film, another film by the
Macedonian Manaki brothers, about an Ottoman Sultan, may shed some light on the
debates concerning identity issues. The shift in identity of the locale of the film’s
production, from Ottoman to Macedonian, and the difficulties of Macedonian identity
politics which continue today, allow one to interpret this film, at once cited as the first
Turkish, Macedonian, and Greek film, beyond and in contravention to narrow nationalist
frameworks. In the following sections, I will attempt to understand the processes of
39
nation building and the rise of nationalism in the empire as a backdrop for these films.
This will lead to a discussion about nationalism, modernization and westernization as
attempts to allay a sense of “belatedness” perceived in comparison with the West.
Perspective, or the imitation and illusion of a three-dimensional world on a twodimensional surface, much like Bazin’s “myth of total cinema” or Özön’s ideal of
cinematic realism, was introduced to the Ottoman Empire much later than in many other
regions (Bazin 1967). Even though perspective painting had been available to Ottoman
lands since the Renaissance, it only began to be practiced by Ottoman artists trained by
the military, the avant-garde of Ottoman modernizing reforms, in the early nineteenth
century. With the rising attraction of positivist ideology among reformists in the military,
perspectival depiction became a necessity for teaching basic logistical maneuvers,
cartography, and about modern weapon technology (Cezar 2003, 91 and Tansuğ 1996,
51). Likewise, the military was among the first institutions to take a formal interest in
film. When the Ottoman Empire suddenly decided to side with the Germans in World
War I, an enormous upsurge of religious and nationalist fervor led to a popular attack on
a monumental building just outside of Istanbul in Ayastephanos (today, Yeşilköy) which
the Russians had built to commemorate their march on Istanbul in 1877. While the
zealous crowd attempted to burn it down, the building survived the fire without
collapsing. When Ottoman army officers decided to destroy it by dynamiting its
foundations, they also decided to film the event for propagandistic purposes. They hired
an Austro-Hungarian film company, Sacha Messter Gesellschaft, to film the event.
However, again as a sign of rampant nationalism, a Turkish citizen was asked to use the
camera once it had been set up by the foreign crew (Özön 1962, 37-8 and 1970, 3-5).
Fuat Uzkınay, the first Turkish filmmaker, who had worked as a projectionist for
Weinberg and others, and who had some interest filmmaking but never used a camera,
got a crash course about how to use the camera from the Sascha crew and shot the
actualité film, Ayastefanos’taki Rus Abidesi’nin Hedmi (The Demolition of the Russian
Monument in Hagia Stephanos).
In the period between 1910 and 1914, Uzkınay ran a Cinema Society at Istanbul
High School (Sultani) where he was the director of internal affairs. (Çalapala 1947)
40
Indeed Uzkınay learned how to operate a projection machine from Weinberg who used to
make film screenings at Istanbul High School. There he worked with Şakir Seden who
later started the first Turkish film import and production company with his brother
Kemal. (in Scognamillo 1998, 32) After the start of war, following the German example,
the Ottoman Army also initiated a Photo and Film Center in 1915. A citizen of Romania,
against which the empire was at war, Weinberg soon had to quit his job, at which point
Uzkınay took over the operation of the center in 1916 (Scognamillo 1998, 30). This
center made various propaganda and newsreel films during the war, as well as with two
feature films, and another military-based association also started to make feature films.
Uzkınay remained as a documentary filmmaker who worked for the Army Photo and
Film Center until 1953. He documented various stages of the War of Independence and
stayed outside the popular film industry that developed on its own, without the patronage
of state. The presence of Uzkınay as a documentary filmmaker with state support as an
outsider to the nascent film industry underscores the independent path which the industry
was to take.
While Uzkınay’s film is lost, in the last couple of years there have been several
discussions about another film, a documentary about the visit of Ottoman Sultan Reşat
Mehmet the Fifth to Salonica and Bitola (Manastır), by Manaki(a) Brothers – as the first
film shot by Ottoman citizens (Evren 1995, 94). This film was not the first film done by
the Manaki(a) brothers. The names of these filmmakers were either written as Milton and
Janaki Manaki (Macedonian version) or Miltos and Yannakis Manakia (Greek version) or
even Milton and Yanaki Manaki (Turkish version). While no claims have been made that
they are Turkish, they were at the time both Macedonian and citizens of the Ottoman
Empire. For Evren, Manaki(a) Brothers’ 1911 film about Sultan Reşat’s visit may be
accepted as the first “indirectly” Turkish film.
However, that film was not the first film done by the Manaki(a) Brothers.
According to the Macedonian Cinema Information Center, the brothers bought their first
film camera, a Bioscope, in 1905 and shot their 114 year old grandmother weaving: The
Weavers is then the first Macedonian film. But for Greek sources, it is “the first Greek
film…made in 1905 by the Manakia Brothers, whose work would be the subject of Theo
41
Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)” (Georgakas 2002-3, 2). Interestingly enough,
Angelopoulos’s film seems to indirectly place the Manaki Brothers as the beginning of
Greek cinema as well as of Balkan cinema. This led Macedonian filmmakers to protest
the film during the Cannes Film Festival where it was shown in 1995 and received the
Grand Prize of the Jury. While another Macedonian source states that their films were
“the first filmed scenes in the Balkans, on Macedonian soil,” (Vasilevski) a Greek source
states that “they were born in Abdela, a tiny village in the Ottoman Empire that was
annexed to Greece in 1913” (Constantinidis 2000, 3). But Constantinidis also adds that
their Greekness depends on how one defines the Greek nation and that “they lived and
worked in a multi-ethnic environment, and they spoke Vlach, Greek, Romanian and
Turkish.”
This also has to do with a similar problem relating to the early years of Turkish
cinema not only during the Ottoman era, but also with the subsequent identity of the
Turkish nation-state. Greece, Macedonia and Turkey all share a belatedness in terms of
nation-building. While Ottoman identity was based on religious communities, the
dissolution of the empire resulted in the creation of a number of nation-states throughout
the Balkans and the Middle East. The imagination of national communities based on
ethnic identities and languages, as well as religious differences, entered the agenda of
these nation-states in the 18th and 19th centuries. Coupled with territorial demands, these
nation-states all experienced and have still been experiencing difficulties due to the
fictive territorial divisions that have not met the ethnic demands of conflicting
nationalisms. While Macedonian lands were divided among Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia
during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 (Roudometof 1996, 264), various territorial claims
arose for Macedonian nationalists, while the nationalists of other countries counter such
claims. “For Greeks, Macedonia is a name and a territory that is an indispensable part of
the modern Greek identity. For Macedonians, it provides the single most important
component that has historically differentiated them from Bulgarians” (Roudometof 1996,
285). How is this then be relevant to Turkish film history, which may or may not have
anything to do with the films of Ottoman citizens?
42
2.2.5. Nationalism and Belated Modernity
Since 1996, November 14th has been generally accepted by some film
organizations as “Turkish Cinema Day,” which is based on the date of Fuat Uzkınay’s
first and lost film, Ayestefanos’taki Rus Abidesinin Hedmi. However, several alternative
dates have been proposed, including that of Mustafa Gökmen who has suggested the date
of the foundation of Army Photo and Film Center; the date of Manaki Brothers’ 1911
film about Sultan Reşat’s visit to Salonica and Bitola (or Selanik and Manastır, one now a
Greek town and the other a Macedonian town); and the date of the first film screening,
December 13, 1896, at the Salle Sponeck (Bozdemir 2001). All such dates are proposals
about the debatable beginnings and origins of a film history that is termed and that I will
refer to as “Turkish.” But all of those dates predate the Republic of Turkey which was
founded in 1923. These were during the times of a collapsing Ottoman Empire that was
multi-ethnic and multi-cultural and that defined itself along the lines of religion. Now
there are many nation-states spread around the Balkans and the Middle East all of which
were defined along national identities and cultures, based on their common ethnic, lingual
and religious backgrounds. And all of these states also share differing degrees of
problematic relations to the West: while some were and have been a part of the East,
others have become a part of the West after the Ottoman rule. Nevertheless, both shared
various modernizing and westernizing interventions that aimed to catch up with the West.
The persistence of such problems of territoriality and nation building might be
related to what Gregory Jusdanis calls “belated modernity.” The belatedness and
incompleteness of modernization in non-Western countries has to do with a problem
integral to imitation and duplication of Western models. “The imported models do not
function like their European counterparts. Often they are resisted. The project of
becoming modern thus differs from place to place” (1991, xiii). While the West is
perceived as the ideal model, each and every new phase of modernization creates a
redefinition of the model, thus making it impossible to reach due to irregularities in the
project of modernization itself. In other words, it lingers between the traditional and the
modern without completely creating a Western duplicate and also without totally
43
destroying the indigenous culture. While national unification and culture might be taken
as the primary concern of such modernization projects, the structural attributes of the
often alien Western societies were taken to be parts of the model, thus problematizing
unification. Among these, Jusdanis names industrial expansion, constitution, civil
bureaucracy, urbanization, secularism, mass education, individuality, and autonomy of
institutional spheres, etc. (1991, xii). Coupled with this sort of a relation to the West in
terms of modernization, the building of respective national cultures goes through fictional
lines that have to do with invented and constructed histories. An imagined community in
Benedict Anderson’s (1983) terms owes its identity to various fictions about the origins
of a national myth that binds its members to each other. As with the discriminations and
exclusions integral to this originary myth, there is an inherent violence attached to
nationalism based on a shared silence of the excluded tales about the suppressed
communities and ethnicities.
The origins of a national cinema, the first screenings, theaters, and films all are
parts of a narrative about national cultures. Therefore, the location of the first Turkish
film and the business of tying it to a particular canonical history of a national cinema
have to do with the definition of a frame of reference for a history of that cinema. If one
looks at the issue in relation to the problematic of a locus that stands out as the origin,
such a claim about the origin of a cinematic practice becomes treacherous. Without being
based on historical facts, which are themselves arguable in terms of their factuality and
(mis)uses, origins can be viewed in terms of the way they are related to national
narratives. The placement of the origins in the respective histories of nation-states
involves various discriminations and exclusions which serve well with individual claims
of identity in respective nation-states. Under these circumstances, the first Turkish, Greek
or Macedonian film in a land of nascent nation-states needs to be considered as part of a
multi-cultural environment which allows various national cultural myths to arise from it.
Moreover, the archeology of early film is still open to the possibilities of finding new
films to be the first, to be the origin of a given national cinema. Regardless of what the
different nationalist myths narrate, these films might also be seen as records of a life
44
shared by different communities in the middle and on the verge of wars that defined and
redefined the borders of these countries.
But this study is about the history of feature films in Turkey. Does this mean that
it is about Turkish cinema? What is Turkish cinema? Should not one include
documentaries or other forms of recorded film? Should not one define what “Turkish”
stands for, before calling it “the Turkish cinema?” These are the questions I will tackle
throughout this study. This study only deals with feature films. I talked about the origins
of cinema in Turkey both in terms of film screenings and of first films shot by the
Ottoman citizens, just to set out the contested characteristics about what constitutes a
national culture. While one may talk about “Turkish feature films,” one may also talk
about “the feature films of Turkey.” While the first deals with a national history of
feature films, the second one might also ask questions about “the national” and what is
included in and excluded from it. Films related to oppressed ethnicities and suppressed
languages remained outside the discussions of Turkish feature films until recent years
because of the sheer fact of being violently restricted. In a nation-state which came to
become partially aware of its internal others only in the recent years, films within Turkey
that include identity claims other than that of the nation-state is also a recent
phenomenon. Unfortunately, there have not been many such films until recently, up until
Yeşilçam’s exodus from the world of cinema to that of television series, giving way to
what some chose to call “New Turkish Cinema,” but not “New Cinema of Turkey.”
2.3. Early Turkish Feature Films and Film Import
2.3.1. The Army and Cinema: The First Feature Films
How, then, did film become properly Turkish? In the West, film emerged after
photography, which in turn emerged through a perspectival tradition of representation
within the medium of painting. This tradition in large part informed the evaluation of
both photography and film as art and as document. In contrast, film emerged in Turkey in
the absence of such a tradition. As I noted earlier, perspective drawing and early Western
45
style painters of the Ottoman Empire learned Western techniques in a military school,
combining the positivistic urges and necessities of westernization. As the engineering of
guns required knowledge of the Western painting, the engineering of the society also
required a similar knowledge. The majority of late Ottoman reformers and the rulers of
early republican Turkey were high to mid-ranked members of the army. Any attempt of
reform, for them, also had an aspect of engineering and could then be applied to societies
through the principles of positivistic sciences. While maintaining a distance from cinema,
especially feature films, throughout the republican era, in the years preceding the
formation of the Republic, the army nonetheless had a close interest in cinema. They shot
newsreel actualités and produced a handful of documentaries and feature films both of
the army fighting the war for independence and as internal propaganda.
Sigmund Weinberg and Fuat Uzkınay were involved in the making of the first
Turkish feature film through the army’s film center. Weinberg began working on two
feature films, one, Leblebici Horhor, (Nutmaker Horhor, 1916), which was not completed
due to the conscription of its actors, and the other, Himmet Ağa’nın İzdivacı (The
Marriage of Himmet Ağa, 1916-1918), which was completed by Uzkınay due to the
departure of Weinberg from the center. The former film was an operetta produced and
performed by the then popular troupe of the Armenian Arşak Benliyan. The second one
was an adaptation, in the style of Tuluat theaters, of Moliere’s Le Mariage Forcé, again
performed by Benliyan’s troupe (Özön 1970, 14). Naturally these early films, like those
of Western countries, were based on theater plays. But, like the performances in theaters,
they were not just any filmed theater plays, but “Turkified” adaptations of the popular
Western forms of entertainment in terms of performing arts.
The National Defense Organization (Müdafaai Milliye Cemiyeti), which was
founded in 1911, was primarily interested in supporting the armed forces, but also funded
and helped the production of works of art. For this end, Kenan Erginsoy shot actualités
about the war and some sights of the Bosporus. But what they got in return from theater
owners was not enough to cover production costs. According to Muzaffer Gökmen, who
wrote a biography of Simavi, the screening of films in theaters at that time involved three
parts: sights/landscapes, short comedies, and feature/narrative films (in Scognamillo
46
1998, 34). All of the feature films were narrative films of the Western cinema which
shifted the interest and expectations of early spectators from a “cinema of attractions” to
the beginnings of a conventional, narrative film. As the number of films coming from
Italy, France and Western countries other than Germany decreased due to the war, the
Organization accepted Sedat Simavi’s offer to make a feature film (Çalapala 1947). They
opened a studio to this end and made three full length feature films: Pençe (Claw, 1917),
Casus (Spy, 1917), and Alemdar Vak’ası (The Alemdar Incident). The first two films
were shown in film theaters, making Pençe the first locally-made film ever screened.
However, the editing of the third one was not completed due to the invasion of Istanbul in
1917 by the Allied Forces following the end of the First World War.
Following the closure of the studio of the National Defense Organization, a new
studio with equipment from the old studio was formed by the War Veteran’s
Organization (Malül Gaziler Cemiyeti). Upon his return from military service, Uzkınay
produced and filmed a series of films in this new studio along with the director-actor
Fehim Efendi: Mürebbiye (Governess) and Binnaz. With Şadi Fikret Karagözoğlu, he
also filmed a short comedy film, Bican Efendi Vekilharç (Mr. Bican the Butler). He also
produced Istanbul Perisi (Fairy of Istanbul) directed by Fazlı Necip. After a number of
screenings in Istanbul, Mürebbiye was banned by the Allied Forces because the French
governess in the film was considered too loose for public mores, and thus was perceived
as belittling the occupying nations. (Özön 1970, 19) Like their earlier counterparts, these
films were also inspired by or based on popular theater plays of the era. While they were
for the most part made with the use of sets similar to those in theatrical production, they
also included some scenes set on location. Despite the unavailability of a copy of
Murebbiye, Özön notes that it was under the influence of theater (1970, 25). Except for a
few close-ups and a few general views of Istanbul, these films were mostly composed of
long or medium long shots much like the French films d’art or filmed plays. After
making various short comedies and propaganda films, in 1927 this studio reverted to the
army, now under the aegis of the Republic of Turkey and its short stint about making
feature films came to an end for good, allowing narrative cinema in Turkey to develop on
its own without the direct involvement of the state.
47
2.3.2. Cinema and the Republic
Filmmaking in Turkey remained limited in scope until the end of the Second
World War – only 60 feature films were made before 1945, while 55 films were made in
the four years following the war (6 in 1946, 12 in 1947, 18 in 1948, and 19 in 1949)
(Özgüç 1998). There were only around 30 theaters in the year when the Republic of
Turkey was founded in 1923. This number rose to around 130 in 1939 and 200 in 1949
(Özön 1995a, 49). When the republic was founded almost 80 percent of population was
rural and 90 percent was illiterate. This could have been a great incentive for the
republican reformers to use cinema for education and propaganda by producing domestic
films through state institutions and studios, as it was the case in the Soviet Union.
However, the republican elite did not focus on film production. Instead, to some
extent they supported film exhibition through the People’s Houses, organized centers
throughout Turkey for adult education and the dissemination of the republican reforms.
When they were shut down by the Democratic Party in 1950, there were 474 houses and
4,036 People’s Rooms which were smaller branches. Özön notes that almost all of the
houses had a screening hall while some of the People’s Rooms had small 16mm
projection machines that ran on oil. Mostly foreign films played in these screening
rooms, and there was even an agit-train, based on the Soviet example, organized by the
People’s Houses in 1933, which traveled between Ankara and Samsun. However, these
film screenings were not planned very well and they showed mostly whatever films were
available to them. Even though there were some tax cuts intended for educational
documentaries and there was a law requiring private theaters to show educational films
before the main features, private film import companies and theaters did not benefit
financially from these laws and thus were reluctant to adhere to them except by showing
newsreels.
Republican reformers considered the educational potential of films as an aid to
disseminating the reforms throughout Turkey, but this interest did not develop into the
film production. Among the most commonly shown films at the People’s Houses were
48
two documentaries shot by Soviet filmmakers who were invited to Turkey by the
republican rulers: Ankara, Türkiye’nin Kalbi (Ankara, the Heart of Turkey) was made by
Sergei Yutkevich and Lev Arnstam during and after the 10th anniversary celebrations of
the Republic in 1933. The other one was a documentary done by Esther Schub, Türk
İnkılabında Terakki Hamleleri (The Leaps of Progress in Turkish Reforms, 1934-1937).
There were some other documentaries produced by Turkish film companies about the
republic in the 1920s and 1930s, but according to Özön, these documentaries were
heavily criticized in the parliament for some suggestive scenes included to enhance box
office revenues (Özön 1995a, 56). Yet while republican reformers, aimed at the education
of Turkish artists in other fields of art either abroad or by foreign artists invited to or
fleeing from their countries to Turkey before or during the Second World War, they did
not take this track in cinema: no film schools were opened, no studios were founded.
2.3.3. Film Importation and Hollywood
Under such conditions, cinema in Turkey was primarily based on the consumption
of imported films until the late 1940s. After a brief dominance of German films during
the First World War due to the exigencies of alliance, American films started to corner
the film market in Turkey as they did elsewhere. However, during those years Western
European and Soviet films were also imported. Scognamillo (1991, 53) notes that while
American companies started to dominate the Turkish film market after 1925, this
dominance peaked during and after the Second World War when European cinemas
literally came to a halt. While French, German and British films of companies such as
UFA and Gaumont were also shown in the 1920s and 1930s, all of the Hollywood majors
such as Metro, Paramount, Fox, United Artists, Warner Brothers, Universal, and First
National were present on the Turkish market in the 1930s, either independently or
through Turkish distribution companies. A list provided by Scognamillo indicates that
over 60 percent of the films shown in Beyoğlu theaters during the 1935-1936 season were
Hollywood films (1991, 133-136). In 1931, a weekly film magazine by the name of
Holivut (Hollywood) started to be published and it continued until 1937. The coverage of
49
Hollywood films and stars was not just limited to this magazine, but served as a primary
interest of other film magazines and newspapers. The addresses of Hollywood stars and
film production companies were published regularly in these magazines. There were even
star albums devoted solely to Hollywood stars published at the time. One such book from
1934 is Sinema Yıldızları (Cinema Stars), which gathered the print materials of film
importers in Turkey from the likes of Fox and MGM, as well as the Turkish companies.
Later the Hollywood’s star system became a driving force in the import market as these
stars were also known and consumed by the educated people who followed print
materials. Moreover, fourwalling was also employed by the majors in their film sales to
Turkey.
Despite the enormous economic and cultural gap between Turkish film and
Hollywood, Hollywood became a dream for Turkish filmmakers as early as the 1920s.
Not only did magazines promote American films, they also organized contests to send
Turkish actors to Hollywood. Many actors and directors tried their chances in Hollywood
unsuccessfully, while the Oscar awards and even nomination to the best Foreign Film
Award have remained a dream for many Turkish filmmakers. While this relationship of
distant dominance will recur as a theme throughout my argument, here I would like to
underscore the dominance of Hollywood in spectatorial practice. An integral drive behind
this intense, perhaps excessive interest was an attempt to remove the stigma as the sick
man of Europe, to represent Turkey as a developed country, as equal to Western nations.
This dream, the lack it suggests and the sense of belatedness it represents have always
stayed intact for the spectators and for the majority of popular filmmakers in Turkey.
Before organizing star contests for the domestic film industry, there were contests
done by some film magazines to choose actors to send to Hollywood or a Western
European country. One such contest for starring in Hollywood films was organized in
1929 by Sinema Gazetesi, with the title: “We will Send Two Young People, a Man and a
Woman, to Hollywood, the American Capital of the Kingdom of Cinemas.” As stated in
the magazine, “almost every nation has film stars known by the world, but we do not
have one yet” (in “Amerika Sinemalar Paytahtı Holywood’a…,” 8). Thus this lack drove
them to ask for photos of their readers to be published in the magazine and then to be
50
voted on, again by their readers those who received the highest number of votes would
enter into a contest that would be juried by journalists, filmmakers, and the
representatives of German and American companies in Turkey. Two successful
contestants, a young man and a young woman, were eventually to be sent to Hollywood.
This did not take place but Hollywood has remained a site of desire and of lack from the
earliest days of feature film in Turkey. It was the capital of cinemas to be captured by the
Turks, either by Turkish film industry or by the Turks working there. They just had to
figure out a way of arriving.
However, Hollywood was not a dream above all criticism. There was still some
belief in the might of European cinema, and the involvement of European filmmakers in
the ranks of Hollywood gave some power to such arguments. Still, despite criticisms
about Hollywood’s factory style production, which was thought to be based on a simple
model similar to the assembly-line production of the Ford Company, Hollywood’s
influence was not rejected at all. One such critic, Nuri Ahmet notes, “in the stories of
American films, the names of characters, the place where the story takes place and the
date may change but not the main traits of the story” (3). Then, he describes the typical
storyline in which two people love each other, an intrigue leads to their break up, then
right when you start to get saddened by this a coincidence reconnects them and as they
kiss each other, the film finishes with a happy ending. Ahmet also notes a couple of other
storylines that were also repeated. But this “moldism” (kalıpçılık) was not limited to
storylines; it also contaminated the stars. There were many actors who modeled
themselves on Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Emil Jannings: “These moldists
wear clothes like their examples, grow moustaches like them and finally they act like
them” (1929, 3). But he also noted that these model actors, who were mostly foreigners,
had started to go back to Europe due to sound film. Because of this, he thought that the
American sound films would only be copies of the old ones until they found new models.
What makes this assertion particularly ironic is that such critiques of standard film
categories has been one of the most constant critiques leveled against Turkish cinema
which pretended to be a “little” Hollywood.
51
2.4. The Advent of Sound Film and Dubbing
In silent films, the problems with intertitles came to the fore especially after the
republican reforms about the use of Latin alphabet and the purification of the Turkish
language. Though the bilingual character of intertitles intended for the cosmopolitan
filmgoers of Istanbul was criticized, that turned into a null problem with the coming of
sound. While it was relatively easy to replace written segments with translations, sound
technology required extensive translation, and beyond it, extensive adaptation in many
cases. Sound films were consumed in Turkish, which helped the development of a
dubbing industry and which also helped to disseminate a mainstream accent of Turkish,
used by Istanbulites and by the Turkish actors of Istanbul theaters. While dubbing was
exploited by the importers and theater owners, it also offered further possibilities of
Turkification, akin to what had happened in Tuluat theaters. This adaptational potential of
dubbing, which disturbed the borders between cultures and blurred identity claims, with
its lowering of costs for domestic films, would become the mainstream practice of
Turkish cinema starting after the mid-1940s. In this section, I will trace the coming of
sound and dubbing with both its supposed vices and virtues.
2.4.1. Silent Films and the Problem of Intertitles
Until the mid-1920s, when the influence of Hollywood started to become
apparent, cinema only served as entertainment for the cosmopolitan upper-classes living
in big cities, and the majority of the population was still living in rural areas. Like the
films themselves, film magazines were mostly bilingual. Regardless of the site of
production of the film, intertitles were most often in French, sometimes in English, and
were usually followed by Turkish ones with smaller fonts, bad translations and shown for
a shorter duration. When no Turkish intertitles were available, spectators who did not
know a foreign language were given a synopsis in Turkish before the show (in
“Sinemalar ve Seyirciler” 1929, 4). Because of the high illiteracy rate in some theaters, a
staff member read intertitles to the spectators. Especially after the introduction of Latin
52
script in 1928 and the attempts to increase the literacy rate, this became a hotly debated
issue. For the writers of Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema Newspaper), the dissemination of the
Latin script was a very important reform and they urged film importers to use bigger
fonts for the Turkish intertitles and to get rid of the French ones (in “Sesli Filmlere Dair”
1929, 7). They also criticized the conditions of film theaters in Istanbul. The high price of
both first and second class tickets, the placement of seats very close to the screen, the
poor quality of the light, the dim and out of focus images projected on the screen, the
absence of fire exits, and the French intertitles were among their criticisms (in “Cinema
tickets are expensive!” “Sinema Biletleri Pahalıdır!” 10). In line with the republican
reforms, the defenders of the new Turkish national identity that turned its face to the
West with modernization and westernization attempts had a distaste for the foreign
language intertitles. The coming of sound or the end of intertitles was a good
development in the eyes of these reformers, but it also laid the groundwork for the
dubbing industry.
2.4.2. Sound Film
By the time sound film arrived in Turkey, Beyoğlu theaters had already become a
central attraction for filmgoers. Fikret Adil notes that Beyoğlu of 1930 was known for
“internationally famous nightclubs, variety theaters, and the competition between film
theaters, to have the best galas, to show the first sound films, and to import the best
projection machines (in Scognamillo 1991, 59). When the first sound films appeared in
the US, theater owners were aware of this novelty, not considered anymore as
transgressive innovation, or bid’a, but as a new incentive to attract and often even exploit
unwitting spectators. In one such instance, a writer with the pseudonym of Seyirci
(spectator) criticizes Beyoğlu Şık Theater for its sound films which were “created” with
the help of a gramophone for music, and a couple of kids for sound effects. These kids
knocked on a piece of wood when someone knocked on a door in the film, or whistled
when a train was seen on the screen (1929, 4). Apart from its importance in terms of
sound film, this tactic would also become an important device for popular filmmakers
53
who claimed to present their spectators things that were otherwise unavailable to them, be
it in the form of a supernatural world or a new technology that had not yet arrived in
Turkey.
In other words, the exploitative tactics of a popular film industry existed from its
earliest days. While, for instance, Sinema Gazetesi claimed a distaste for nudity, at the
same time it promised to publish examples of the nudity trend that it claimed was
spreading around the world (1929, v.13, 5). Hollywood films and other Western films
presented a Western style of life that was emulated and often adapted by the upper
middle-classes of the big cities who were the majority of filmgoers at the time. Yet such
cultural novelties were also taken with a grain of salt, like the bilingual intertitles. The
advent of sound film raised issues of identity which had remained literally unspoken in
the silent era. The first sound films were not dubbed, which gave rise to a discussion of
nation building and the creation of pure Turkish, because some critics/reformers were
naively afraid that with the aid of sound film, English and German cultures were going
“to invade the earth.” Still the writers of Sinema Gazetesi assured their readers that a
solution would be found (in “Tenkit”1929, 3). That solution came two years after 1930,
when Elhamra film theater, opened in 1922, showed The Jazz Singer (1927) for the first
time. With the opening of the first sound film studio by İpek Film in 1932, the practice of
dubbing in Turkish became a standard element of showing films. In the meantime, the
names of Beyoğlu theaters were also Turkified in line with the republican language
reforms and with the “Citizen Talk Turkish” (Vatandaş Türkçe Konuş) campaign that
started in 1933 (Özuyar 1999, 34).
2.4.3. Dubbing: (Mis)translation, (re)writing and “Turkification”
The dubbing of foreign films involved two stages: first, the original scripts were
translated into Turkish; then these translations were worked over by dialogue writers who
adapted them for a new audience. The process of rewriting – adaptation – inevitable in all
translations and enhanced by this double process brings to mind postcolonial states of
mimicry, where the colonized native must act the part belonging to the colonizer while
54
never quite able or willing to step into his shoes. While Turkey was not colonized per se
by the Western powers, the nation-state and its identity claims had a lot to do with a selfcolonizing cultural mentality built upon the premises of an anti-imperialist discourse
presupposing unevenness between the empires and the colonies. Indeed, no foreigners
had politically colonized the country, yet as in colonized countries, the elite who led
modernizing reforms in Turkey had Western educations and ideals in relation to
modernization and development. The republican elite first presupposed a belatedness and
then found the cure in the westernization and modernization of the nation-state. As Rey
Chow points out,
In the history of Western imperialism, the Chinese were never completely
dominated by a colonial power, but the apparent absence of ‘enemy’ as such
does not make the Chinese case any less ‘third world’ (in the sense of being
colonized) in terms of the exploitation suffered by the people, whose most
important colonizer remains their own government…While the history of
Western imperialism relegates all non-Western cultures to the place of the
other, whose value is ‘secondary’ in relation to the West, the task of
nationalism in the ‘third world’ is that of (re)inventing the ‘secondary’
cultures themselves as primary, as the uncorrupted origins of ‘third world’
nations’ histories and ‘worth’. (2001, 407)
Like Chinese intellectuals, those in Turkey remained obsessed with constructing a nation
not so much of the people as they were, ethnically and religiously diverse, and above all
rural, but as they imagined them from an urban vantage point. The claims of nationalism
toward an origin and an inward turn, involved a violent oppression of its internal others,
while, for Chow, its narcissism (mis)translates into an oppositional alterity to the West.
Cultural production based on an essential nation, then, is based on the assumptions of the
local elite who themselves are westernized and alienated from their own public. In
reading cinema in Turkey, dubbing is then not just a matter of rewriting and adaptation of
the othered West, but also tied to internal mechanisms of othering that involve the violent
aspects of nationalism, both in terms of ethnic identities and class positions. By not
simply translating but also adapting these films to Turkish cultural codes, Western films
55
could begin to provide models of the modernizing ideal as if they did indeed represent the
Turkey of the not very distant future.
As indicated above, while many of the reforms in the cultural field did not touch
on cinema, still there was control and censorship exerted on cinema. But there was also
some sort of self-control and self-censorship going on alongside the premises of Kemalist
ideology. This multiplication of relationships involving a language that was in the
process of recreation and purification, westernization in the field of arts and culture
involving the use of Latin alphabet, and films translated, adapted and rewritten in
Turkish, i.e. “Turkification-from-above,” might be thought of as an oppositional alterity
from the West and a violent othering in Turkey simultaneously. While nationalism’s
internal othering worked toward a violent unification and standardization of a national
identity, the elite’s modeling of westernization and modernization undermined traditional
social life creating a double bind on the lower-classes. A positivist national project in
social engineering solidified the westernized elite’s class position through its own
reforms. In this respect, filmmakers and producers, who belonged to the elite in differing
degrees, either controlled their own texts or stayed cautious about censorship. However,
beyond these predictable and intentional controls, the process of dubbing itself introduced
nationalist urges through a vernacularization which created a closed world for the
Western eye while opening up the text to the indigenous culture. While the value of this
vernacularization is contested in its own borders, it is attractive in terms of cultural
exchange. The naïve anxiety about the invasion of English and German languages not
only resulted in a tactic of re-writing, but also led to a readjustment of the language of the
internal center and external other that is claimed to be the enemy. But this enemy, this
other, be it the West or Hollywood, is itself what is adored by those who presupposed an
oppositional alterity thanks to the West’s or Hollywood’s success in making all other
forms of cultural production secondary to its hegemonic status.
56
2.4.4. Dubbing Hollywood
One of the most famous dubbers and dubbing directors, Ferdi Tayfur, remembers
that he started by dubbing Adolphe Menjou’s character Major Rinaldi in Silahlara Veda
(A Farewell to Arms, d. Frank Borzage, 1932). Even though he stated that lipsynch and
correct translation are the most important traits of their business, when the interviewer of
Son Saat newspaper asked him in 1951 which character he liked the most among the ones
he “created,” he did not seem to think that the creation of new characters out of original
films contradicted the idea of a correct translation. For instance, he expressed pride in
creating Arşak Palabıyıkyan, an Armenian with a bushy moustache, out of Groucho
Marx. “This character has become so famous that even some Armenians in Istanbul
claimed that they are his relatives. But our Arşak is indeed a Jewish by the name of Kruso
Marks” (Tayfur 1985, 82). For Nezih Erdoğan, apart from serving as a translation,
dubbing “was also the means by which adaptations and imitations were assimilated,
creating identifiable characters and plots for the audience” (2002, 237). But Erdoğan
stops his otherwise extremely useful analysis there, without pointing out what is
identifiable and what is assimilated. This practice of dubbing is not just a translation but a
case of (mis)translation tied to the narcissism of a proposed national culture. This
(mis)translation is not only a case of intercultural adaptation marked by a resistive
potential with oppositional alterity to the West, but also a marker of what happened to the
minorities of a nation-building project. In this respect, what I call “Turkification-fromabove” is a double mechanism that “others” the West and its own minorities
simultaneously, by turning a Jewish American character into an Armenian Turk.
Nationalist claims always bring about the questioning of its others, i.e., either the
Americanness of Jews or the Turkness of Armenians who are imagined belonging to a
national identity to which they do not quite belong.
Another story told by Tayfur brings about a further aspect of dubbing, in terms of
its relation to Western imperialism. To get over the box-office failures of Laurel and
Hardy films, Tayfur proposed a solution to the İpek Film Company after seeing a copy of
Lorel-Hardi Hindistan’da (Bonnie Scotland, d. James W. Horne, 1935) in French where
57
the French dubbed Laurel and Hardy with a British accent. Getting his idea from that
copy, he went to Robert College, an American high school in Istanbul, and talked with a
British teacher in Turkish about learning English from him. But Tayfur was there not to
take language classes but to secretly pick up the teacher’s accent (Tayfur 1985, 82). Not
only did Tayfur follow through on this idea, he also replaced the original jokes with
completely new ones specific to the culture of his audience. He did not even stop there
but he himself dubbed both Laurel and Hardy simultaneously (Cimcöz 1970, 8). This
may be taken as a further case of “Turkification,” which also begs the question of the
film’s original relationship to colonialism.
Bonnie Scotland was part of a series of Anglophile films which appeared before
the Second World War. M. T. Bennett sees this film as an attempt to capitalize on the
success of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (d. Henry Hathaway, 1935), which openly
supported British imperialism through the story of a Scottish Canadian fighting against
the Indian resistance (1997). Not only was the film officially protested by the Indian
authorities, it was also rejected by the censor boards of Muslim North African countries
but shown in Egypt and Turkey with slight alterations. Similarly, Bonnie Scotland, by
producing stereotypical images of Scots with heavy accents, served as an escape from the
economic powerlessness of depression era Americans through popular imperialism of its
allies (Richard Hofstadter, in Bennett 1997, 5). While the imperialist text is obvious in
this film, the republican elite had inherited an imperial past altered into a narcissistic
nationalism that stayed foreign to the Indian cause or the third world in general. They
proposed that Turkey set an example for the third world countries in the creation of an
independent state, but thus at the same time also imagined themselves as above other
third world countries, closer to Western countries and only slightly less developed than
they. It is no wonder that while sending troops to Korea in return for being a NATO
member, Turkish politicians never tried to participate in the the Bandung Conference of
1955. Therefore, Turkification-from-above is not quite an anti-colonial rewriting with a
resistive potential; instead it is rewriting that gives a primacy to the Western example or
is blinded by its own nationalist ideology that does not let itself see such a (dis)position.
This aspect of “Turkification-from-above,” however, would ultimately produce a further
58
discord between the westernized Kemalist intellectuals who led the republican regime
and popular filmmakers.
2.4.5. Dubbing and Censorship
In the first decade of the republican regime, there were no central control
mechanisms concerning film production or exhibition. However, governors were made
responsible for controlling films in each city. In addition, as members of the republican
elite, filmmakers often practiced self-censorship. Almost no films were made during this
era. While not very much is known about them, it is likely that the content of Turkish
intertitles of foreign films was probably controlled, particularly in relation to issues of
national identity and culture. However, with the advent of sound films and with the
development of dubbing practice, a need for more comprehensive control emerged. For
example, even before a law was passed regarding film content, in 1932 Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk specifically requested that importers stop showing All Quiet in the Western Front
(Lewis Milestone, 1930). According to Pars Tuğlacı, after watching Milestone’s film in
1930, Mustafa Kemal first talked about how touching and accurate the film was in its
portrayal of the effects of war, and went on to say that it would not be helpful for the
Turkish nation, who had recently emerged from war, to see the film (in Scognamillo
1991, 36). The republican elite’s reforms towards modernization and westernization
always took a paternal attitude and attempted to provide a correct education for the
Turkish people. While such reforms strengthened the quick secularization and
democratization of the country, such attitudes also reflect the totalitarian tendencies of
the Republican People’s Party, which got some of its political inspiration from the Soviet
Union and from Italy. Turkey was controlled by single-party rule until 1946 and limited
attempts to have multi-party regimes in these early years ended quickly, showing the
failures of what Erik J. Zürcher calls “tutelary democracy” (1994, 185). The control and
censorship of films started within this context of tutelage of people.
In 1932, the “The Directive concerning the Control of Cinema Films” (Sinema
Filmlerinin Kontrolüne Dair Talimatname) was based in large part on this concern with
59
teaching the nation. As a part of the law concerning general police duties, a new
regulation was prepared in 1934 and finalized in 1939, which established a board of
controllers selected from public officials. According to Özön, this board had a double
standard: while foreign films were loosely controlled, domestic films were controlled
starting with the film script and the board’s verdict on them was permanent (1995a, 61).
As A. Ş. Onaran notes, controllers did not usually know foreign languages and they did
not usually bother to read the Turkish translations of the films. What they were looking
for were stances against militarism, religious propaganda, communism, words and deeds
against Turkey, and obscene scenes that might go against customs and mores (1968, 60).
Moreover, while film importers were responsible for making changes if necessary, since
there were no controls during the screening of films, most of the time these films were
screened without any changes. In reality, this was the case for many of the Turkish films
as well. What the censorship boards cared about most was political content based on the
Turkish government’s political stance of the day. Even though this led to differences in
terms of strictness from time to time, social realist films were the most censored. While
there were some changes done to the above Regulation in 1977, 1979, and 1983, it was
effective until 1986, when a new law transferred the duty of control from the Ministry of
Interior to the Ministry of Culture. While there were few changes in terms of content,
some representatives of the film industry were added to the board. Despite the lack of
legal changes and a few highly controversial decisions, the censorship of the board has
been far less restrictive since that time.
Both the ideas of tutelage and loyalty to Kemalist principles led to selfcensorship, especially during the early years of post-synchronization (dubbing) of foreign
films. According to Sacide Keskin, who started working as a dialogue writer during the
years of the Second World War when there were lots of American, Arab and Indian films
on the market, she would receive foreign films that had already been translated and write
new dialogue for them. As dubbing actors worked from these dialogues, they often made
further modifications to enhance synchronization. She also explains that she used to make
changes in these dialogues by doing things like changing anti-Turkish statements to proTurkish ones in a Bulgarian film or by completely altering the story of Çanlar Kimin için
60
Çalıyor (For Whom the Bell Tolls, d. Sam Wood, 1943) to eliminate its communist
propaganda (Keskin 1985, 82), a move particularly ironic when one considers the direct
role of the US in censoring communism in Turkey during the 1950s. While the Turkish
censors were strict in controlling films from Eastern Bloc countries in the 1950s,
Turkey’s and Turkish film importers’ increasing debt to the U.S. due to currency
devaluations gave the United States Information Agency a chance to control American
film exports to Turkey. The USIS’s Information Media Guaranty program thus also
banned Hollywood films such as Rebel Without a Cause (d. Nicholas Ray, 1955), Around
the World in 80 Days (d. Michael Anderson, 1956), and Baby Doll (d. Elia Kazan, 1956)
(Erdoğan and Kaya 2002).
Until the 1980s when the system began to change, the dubbing of foreign films
which had passed the censorship board introduced an intricate practice of film
preparation including not only speaking actors who gave local voices to foreign bodies,
but also including a political process that combined Kemalist ideology, nationalism,
conservative morality, and anti-communism triggered by both the Turkish right and US
agencies in Turkey. The post-synchronization of films was not just a process of
(mis)translation, (re)writing, and Turkification, it also brought about the instruction and
creation of a new society that has remained divided between a westernized, modern
identity and an Eastern, traditional one which would continue to reappear in Turkish
cinema despite the obstacles placed in its path.
2.5. Early Feature Films
In 1952, Vehbi Belgil made the claim that Turkish films were instruments for
propagating Turkey abroad. If Turkish films reached a particular standard of quality, they
would attract Western spectators and the rest of the world would learn that “the Turks
were clothed like civilized men, they were not blacks, and that Turkish girls had
unmatched beauty” (21). But, for him, this would only become possible by taking the
following measures: The state had to decrease taxes on films, build a modern studio, open
an institute for film to go with the State Theater and Opera which had already been
61
established, limit the dubbing of foreign films, reward producers who export films, and
give annual awards to filmmakers. A constant theme of Turkish film writing has
expressed a desire for direct involvement of the state along the lines listed above. Not
only does such a desire reflect support of Statism, a faith in centralized state control
inherent to the Kemalist ideology of the Republican People’s Party, it also reflects a
desire that state support elevate the status of film as an art by giving it official
recognition. In addition, it reflects the cultural project of the republic to raise the level of
the arts and cultures to standards set by and measured against Europe. However, such
direct support failed to materialize from either the Kemalist, republican elite or from the
center-right parties that came to power after the institution of a multiple party system.
While this slowed the development of filmmaking in Turkey, it also created a safe haven
for popular filmmaking outside the staples of cultural westernization in other arts.
However, even though the state was not directly involved in cinema, it maintained a
certain amount of control through censorship. Even more effective was the selfcensorship of filmmakers who, like translators, dialogue-writers, and dubbers reflexively
ensured that film content would support a Kemalist stance. Nonetheless, the reliance of
cinema in Turkey on private capital made it into a profit-driven industry which had to
place audience desires above all else.
2.5.1. Early Film Studios
As in early Western cinema, commercial interests were of the utmost concern
from the very beginning of cinema in Turkey. After having run a film theater since 1914,
the first Turkish film production company, Kemal Film, was established in 1919. While it
first imported films, in 1922 it decided to build a studio and hired the already well-known
theater director and actor, Muhsin Ertuğrul, who had already made three films in
Germany. One of the first films shot by Kemal Film was Ateşten Gömlek (Shirt of
Flame), an adaptation from a novel by one of Turkey’s first women novelists, which
included the first Turkish actress in a Turkish film (Çalapala 1947). Around the same
time, İpek Film also opened a film theater and began to import films before beginning to
62
produce them as well. In 1928, they hired Muhsin Ertuğrul as their director for the first
Turkish sound film İstanbul Sokaklarında (On the Streets of Istanbul). Because the first
Turkish sound studio only opened in 1932, this film was dubbed in Paris with the
presence of all but one of the actors, thus making this the first partly dubbed film in
Turkey, a practice which would soon become a standard element of Turkish films
(Muvahhit 1973, 91). İpek Film also produced many short films, including recordings of
Karagöz shadow plays, theater-in-the-round shows, and performances of singers such as
Münir Nurettin and Deniz Kızı Eftelya (A. Ş. Onaran 1981, 140). In the movie Düğün
Gecesi, they tried to edit together musical scenes of famous singers and scenes of
performers known for imitation or mimicry (taklit). A third film company, Ha-Ka Film,
established in 1938, also passed into the business from the track of theater ownership and
film importation. An important practice instigated by this studio was a “Turkified” postsynchronization which entailed the dubbing foreign films combined with the montage of
short sequences shot in Turkey (Çalapala 1947). They thereby made some “Turkified”
foreign films by dubbing them into Turkish and adding scenes played by Turkish actors
and musical scenes with Turkish singers. Three such films are Yeniçeri Hasan (Janissary
Hasan), Zeynep, and Memiş. In addition to these fiction films, a documentary using a
similar style Türk İnkılabında Terakki Hamleleri (The Leaps of Progress in the Turkish
Revolution) combined footage taken from foreign and Turkish newsreels and worked it
into a narrative scheme visualized by a history teacher.
This short overview of the earliest studios presents a number of cues with which
to understand the Turkish cinema which would follow from these earlier practices. First
of all, none of these studios were comparable in size to those in US or in Germany,
France, or Italy. They opened with minimal equipment. They mostly worked with
Muhsin Ertuğrul or other theater actor-directors who saw cinema as a secondary business.
Unlike in the United States, where as a result of the nickelodeon boom film was
associated with lower-class entertainment, in Turkey both its production and its
consumption were relatively upper-class activities in the early years of cinema.
Nonetheless, the limited conditions of production and its secondary social role resulted in
a low quality of film production. Not only was film technology imported as a Western
63
product, but few early filmmakers traveled to Europe to learn filmmaking. Upon their
return, even they did not fully benefit from their travels, either because of the limited
conditions of filmmaking or because of their own skills. Thus the economic conditions of
filmmaking affected the product, and a low-budget was central to the experience of
filmmaking in Turkey from the very beginning in a way not the case in Western
countries. Writing in 1918, Muhsin Ertuğrul claimed that it was not possible to make
films in Istanbul because there were no cameramen, no studios, no directors, limited
stages and costumes, and inept artists (in Özön 1962, 57-58). While the history of cinema
in the West goes back to late 19th century, the first films made in Turkey came almost
two decades after the invention of the medium – i.e., it is belated like other technologies
in Ottoman lands. The republican elite, who espoused a positivist, evolutionary model of
society and history, considered this belatedness as the sole reason behind the poor quality
of Turkish cinema. As Roy Armes puts it, “in respect to the gulf between rulers and
ruled, those concerned with culture…are inevitably closer to the rulers” (1987, 24). They
had a tendency to reproduce the cultural makeup of the ruling classes, as seen in the films
of Muhsin Ertuğrul.
2.5.2. Muhsin Ertuğrul – The One Man of Turkish Cinema
An analogy between the political and cinematic histories of Turkey may be drawn
between the Republican People’s Party that ruled the country between 1923 and 1950 and
Muhsin Ertuğrul who made 30 films between 1922 and 1953. Historians of Turkish
cinema generally accept Nijat Özön’s (1962) criticism of Ertuğrul for aiming to create a
one man rule in cinema by preventing others from making films, and Ertuğrul was more
successful in this than he was in the making of many of his films. Many directors who
started their careers during Ertuğrul’s last years talk about his unwillingness to let City
Theater actors play in other directors’ films (Kamil 2000, 19 and Kenç 1993, 27).
Starting as a stunt player for Istanbul theaters, Ertuğrul was first and foremost a theater
actor and director. During his brief stays in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, he tried to
develop his skills in theater, although at the same time he shot a number of films in
64
Germany and Russia. However, according to his own accounts, he worked in the cinema
business in Europe just to make money and sustain his life while he was trying to develop
himself in the theater (in Scognamillo 1998, 61). Thus his interest in cinema was
secondary at best, and was largely motivated by a desire to make money for the high art
of the City Theater through the popular art of film. While he became best known for his
films, his interest in cinema did not develop. This prejudice against film by Turkey’s first
film director in a sense marked the perception of Turkish film in general as a second-rate
commodity.
In 1953, Muhsin Ertuğrul made his last movie, Halıcı Kız (Carpet Weaver Girl).
Funded by a bank, it was the first color film in Turkey. Yet it did not do well at the boxoffice, and Ertuğrul therefore decided to quit making films for good. In the same year, he
was also preparing a remake of Hugo Haas’s 1951 film, Pickup, but this project was later
completed by Baha Gelenbevi, under the title, Kaldırım Çiçeği (Sidewalk Flower, 1953).
Özön notes that both directors, Ertuğrul and Haas, had a variety of similarities but he did
not refer to what they were. Instead he just says: “To introduce Ertuğrul to Americans,
saying the ‘Turkish Haas’ would suffice and Haas to Turks as the ‘American Ertuğrul’”
(1962, 109). In the All Movie Guide, Hal Erickson notes that Haas was a Czech-born
movie Renaissance man generally excluded from scholarly auteur film histories. Already
a scriptwriter and actor of Czechoslovakian comedies, Haas escaped to the US from the
Nazis during World War II. While in the US, he wrote, directed and acted in various
melodramas that he made in the 1950s. Erickson notes “a lonely middle-aged man
(always played by Haas) is lured into an ill-advised sexual relationship with a blonde
trollop (nearly always played by Haas’ protégée Cleo Moore) with fatal results” (2005).
In Pickup, after his puppy dies, an old man marries a young blonde who later
plans to kill him for his money and runaway with her lover. In the meantime, the old man
experiences psychosomatic hearing loss but regains it in a car accident! In the end, he
gets a divorce from his vamp wife and finds himself a new puppy. Despite being the
dominant figure of early Turkish cinema, despite directing films in Germany in 1919
such as Samson, sein eigener Mörder (Samson, His Own Murderer) and films in the
Soviet Union in 1925 such as Spartakus, and despite having the best available conditions
65
to make film in Turkey, Ertuğrul’s last project was a remake of a melodrama with
mundane intrigue, tawdry coincidences, and sleazy sentimentality – a film modeled on a
film of Hollywood’s “East European Ed Wood” or trash filmmaker. Why would Ertuğrul
produce remakes of a low budget independent Hollywood melodrama writer-directoractor’s films, when as early as 1924 he had written on melodramas of the Ottoman
Melodrama Company as follows: “Today there is no more taste and patience left to see
any of these works” (in Sevinçli 1990, 126).
Ertuğrul was the director of Istanbul City Theaters which dominated the theater
world of the republican era during the early decades of the republican regime. City
Theater had a drama and comedy department under Ertuğrul, in addition to an operetta or
revue department which did popular plays. Ertuğrul generally seemed to tend toward
playing and directing classical and serious plays in line with his education in the West
and with the republican cultural projects that aimed to nurture the high culture of the
West in Turkey. He also did not have any proximity with the traditional theatrical forms
which were totally suppressed by the republican modernization projects. Moreover, he
claimed that he was not under the influence of the West and of the lowly genres of
Western theaters by distinguishing himself from popular Ottoman theater-makers.
Similarly, such a distinction is presupposed by the republican elite between the
traditional, Eastern and lowly Ottoman culture, and the modern, westernized and higher
republican culture. Eastern theaters were not in any way within his purview – even
Japanese theater, which was valorized and utilized by Sergei Eisenstein, was not of
interest to Ertuğrul (in Scognamillo 1998, 61). In short, like his counterparts in areas of
republican culture under state control, he reproduced the ideology of the republican elite
despite his actual independence from the state. Last but not least, Ottoman theaters
modeled on Western examples either involved mostly non-Muslim actors because there
were no female Muslim actors, or were directly run by non-Muslims. Ertuğrul’s criticism
of these theaters was also based on the missing nationalist ingredient of these theaters.
When asked about the acting style and pronunciation of early Turkish films done by
others, Bedia Muvahhit, an actress both of City Theater and Ertuğrul’s films, says that the
mainstream style was the style of late 19th century Ottoman theater, especially of the
66
Ottoman Melodrama Company, but not that of the City Theater. This style, for her, was
based on Ottoman syntax involving the influences of Arabic, Persian, and French, and
more importantly of the accented speech of Ottoman Armenians (1973b, 94). This claim
about the “clear” pronunciation of “pure” Turkish must be thought in a similar vein with
the republican reforms concerning the creation of a national culture.
While he criticized melodramas, Ertuğrul nonetheless made a number of black
and white adaptations or remakes of Western melodramas and was also responsible for
the first color film in Turkey (processed in Germany), Halıcı Kız (1953). It was a
melodrama filmed as stiffly as the silent French films d’art. Interestingly enough, this
film reflected Ertuğrul’s oeuvre as a filmmaker very well. Ertuğrul’s proximity to the
republican elite and his respectable position as a man of theater, provided him with
relatively good funding for his films and also with renown in Turkish film history, giving
him the opportunity to be the director of the first sound and first partly dubbed film,
İstanbul Sokakları (Streets of Istanbul, 1931), and first color film in Turkey, Halıcı Kız
(Carpet-Weaving Girl, 1952).
Like the historians of Turkish cinema, filmmakers such as Şadan Kamil, who had
been to film school in Germany and worked at the RCA Studios in England and Pathe in
France, saw Ertuğrul’s films as theatrical and historical, with actors entering the scene as
they did on a theater stage (2000, 15). Like the operettas, i.e., light operas or musicals
with spoken dialogues, of late Ottoman and early republican popular vaudeville and
variety theaters, Ertuğrul did a number of films modeled on German operetta films and
French vaudevilles as well as famous operettas of the Turkish scene. For Alim Şerif
Onaran, these films were just “filmed vaudevilles” or “filmed operettas” that served to
bring the scene of the Istanbul City Theater to the screens of different film theaters
throughout Turkey (1973, 82). For instance, concerning his Söz Bir Allah Bir (One Word,
One God, 1933), Atilla Dorsay noted that the camera was fixed, without any movement.
There were pans during dialogues, without shot-reverse-shot editing, but these pans were
not even done with care: they frequently showed the actor who did not talk while one
heard the other actor talking. In the scenes with singing, Ertuğrul only shot the singer
(1986, 110-111). Thus Ertuğrul’s films were a combination of adaptations, remakes, and
67
theatrical elements. However, he also adapted a number of Turkish novels about the War
for Independence and the building of a new nation which were the films that strengthened
his position both as a filmmaker and in terms of his relation to the republican elite.
Still, when one looks at his career as a filmmaker, apart from his highly criticized
dominance, his films reflect the dualities and dilemmas of Turkish cinema. In line with
the dicta of republican cultural projects, many Turkish filmmakers claimed that they
wanted to make realist films about sociopolitical and economic issues that would aid in
the education of the masses and the dissemination of republican reforms. But they were
unable to do so due to insufficient infrastructure and the profit-driven economics of the
cinema market. Ertuğrul’s films share these qualities. Given the conditions of the era in
which he worked what could he have done other than continuing to make similar films?
2.5.3. Turkification-from-above as hayal
Writing on Söz Bir Allah Bir, Atilla Dorsay criticized Ertuğrul for not
domesticating the French vaudeville work on which the film was based. The husbandwife-lover triangle, notes Dorsay, was not at all suitable for Turkish customs. This idea of
suitability had to do with the modernization efforts of the republican elites, including
modifications of social life (1986, 111). The republican elite did not just attempt to take
the technology of the West as did early westernizers, but tried to adopt a Western style of
life, beginning with the elites and intended to trickle down to the masses. Republican
reforms concerning civil law, modernization of clothing, and the introduction of various
cultural novelties such as republican balls and parties coupled with Western dance music,
such as tango or waltz, can all be viewed as the elements of a total visual revolution
which attempted to change the look of the country. The visualization of the reforms, such
as the introduction of hats in the place of fezzes, the banning of headscarves in official
public spaces, and the spread of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk portraits and statues as an
integral part of the interior and exterior decoration of public buildings, was also
introduced in films and influenced the controllers of the censor boards. This led to naïve
68
reactions against showing arid lands of the Anatolian plateau to requiring the
representation of rural life with a mechanized agricultural practice.
The imagining of scenery that is comparable to the industrialized West was
merely a visual image or dream in contrast with the harsh realities of a country that was
exhausted after many decades of wars. However such an image is not only about
“dreaming” and “imagining,” but it “mirrors” the reality of being an underdeveloped nonWestern country, that continuously led to a “specter” haunting the republican elite. In
other words, the application of the West to a non-Western country had to be captured in
the conditions of its own non-Western environment. While this environment was an
idealized rural and backward country, it was constructed through an image of the
picturesque and industrialized Western countryside. Dorsay’s criticism of Ertuğrul for not
“domesticating” French vaudeville bears the marks of this duality – the image of the
West and the West itself which cannot be assimilated altogether. In this respect, in its
relation to the West and its cinemas, Ertuğrul, and the filmmakers, film historians and
film critics who came after him, all shared a common dream which is barred by the films
themselves, that continuously reminds them of not-yet-being-there, of their belatedness.
But this dream is spectral: whenever you come close to where it is, it vanishes by
reiterating the condition of not-yet-being-there. This is what is shared by republican
intellectuals and filmmakers – a primordial situation that conditions artistic production
either by incessantly attempting to be there (westernization) or by attempting to deny the
attempt to get there (anti-westernization). Yet cinema, a product of Western technology
and an imported Western medium, does not give one a chance to deny its identity, a
humanistic history of visual technologies since the advent of perspectival vision. It is in
this vein that “Turkification” will be taken as a defining trait of Turkish cinema in the
next chapter not much different from what Ertuğrul and other filmmakers did – they tried
to translate, adapt, remake, vernacularize, domesticate or respond to a medium that is
inherently Western and that demands a response just because of its otherness.
69
CHAPTER 3
THE ADVENT OF YEŞILÇAM IN THE 1950S
3.1. The Trans-ing of Yeşilçam
In the previous chapter, I tried to place hayal and Turkification in a relational
framework by referring to the various meanings of the Arabic word hayal including
dream, imagination, mirror, specter, and shadow or wayang. I first tried to locate two
different screens – one was that of the non-Muslim, westernized, and cosmopolitan space
of the Sponeck beer hall and the other was that of Muslim, Turkish old Istanbul’s Fevziye
coffee house and the first filmic projection on the screen of shadow plays known as
hayal. While the process of nation-building and the creation of a national culture as
imagined (again a form of hayal) by republican reformers gradually limited the presence
of non-Muslim minorities, the republican elite’s dream of westernization aligned itself
with a secular, Western framework imbricated within the entertainment practices of
cosmopolitan Istanbul by mirroring or imitating those of the West. The other realm, that
of traditional and Muslim Istanbul, however, initially remained parallel to the traditional
entertainment practices which later evolved into a popular cinematic practice called
Yeşilçam. In this respect, Yeşilçam, as I will suggest below, offered a different path of
translating or transforming the West, which resembled the cultural current flowing from
the Fevziye coffee house, instead of the Sponeck beer hall.
My premise is based on two different ways of “trans-ing,” i.e., transferring,
translating or simply moving across or beyond, while finding yourself in an intermediate
state, between waking and sleeping – perhaps, in the most Orientalist sense, between an
70
awake, enlightened West and a sleepy, dark East. The republican elite’s image of the
West is not just articulated through Enlightenment ideas and a positivistic social
engineering project, but also through attempting to reflect and visualize those in their
everyday life and cultural practices. Kemalism relied on a metaphor of light – the
republican officials, teachers and soldiers, bringing enlightenment to the farthest parts of
Anatolia where traditional and backward forces of religion, feudal economic and social
systems, and traditional rural life persisted. However, such a dream of evolving into
being equal to the West by mirroring it necessarily involved translations and
transformations. The republican elite’s image of the West (its rendering of the ways of
westernization and modernization) was dictated to the people from above through an
elaborate reform program. However, the people’s translation, adaptation, or Turkification
of these reforms did not always produce what the republican reformers envisaged.
Instead, the other current of responding to the West and to the Republic’s westernization
project, as mirrored by the people, led to quite a different kind of Turkification, a
Turkification-from-below, as may be seen in Yeşilçam or arabesk music, both of which
did not belong to the realm of high culture, but popular culture as I will elaborate below.
These may be thought of as alternative ways of translation, but what both currents share
is a constant state of “transition” in a sociological sense. Ravi Vasudevan noted with
reference to the cultural “peculiarities” of Indian popular cinema that Bollywood’s
narrative form has a special resonance in “transitional” societies (2000, 131). Through a
sociopolitical perspective, transition might be taken in terms of linear progress from one
historical stage to another or from traditional to modern, and Vasudevan warned that this
view implied that these societies and their cinemas are destined to follow the EuroAmerican examples. But such a view of transition implied a clear and precise path of
modernization, which was not the case in those “transitional” societies. At the same time,
in this transition they presented different solutions to the problems that might have
already been experienced by Western cinemas. In other words, though they may be seen
in terms of transitionality, “third world” popular cinemas offer various ways of
translating, transforming and mirroring the West, and in the way these societies and
cinemas claimed, at times violently, their national identity and culture. “At issue, then, is
71
how traditions of identity, aesthetic form, and cultural address are deployed for a politics
of creative adaptation and interrogation of social transformation in a colonial and
postcolonial world” (Vasudevan 2000, 131).
In this vein, I will try first to understand various ways of “trans” as an
intermediate state between the West and the East – not quite being one or the other
anymore; once the presence of the West is felt through its colonial presence, technology
or through the westernization and modernization projects of the Eastern elite. My second
argument is marked by a continuous transfer, translation or transformation of the West,
by imagining or mirroring it in a non-Western context. Both of these belong to
Turkification, which will be discussed in this chapter with reference to the possible links
between popular cinemas of the West and the East and to further aspects of Turkification
in relation to cinematic adaptations, domestications, and imitations, as well as with the
melodramatic modality.
3.2. Towards Yeşilçam: Egyptian Films and arabesk
The Organization of the Friends of Turkish Film was founded in 1952. The
following year they organized the first Turkish film festival, following a contest
organized in 1948 by the Domestic Filmmakers Organization to determine the best
Turkish films. Among the friends of Turkish film were writers, filmmakers and
journalists such as Burhan Arpad, Lütfi Ö. Akad, Aydın Arakon, Orhon M. Arıburnu, and
Hıfzı Topuz. Later in 1959, Arpad wrote that the first indications of cinema as an art form
came about in the years between 1947 and 1953. Among the things he noted were the tax
cut of 1948, the halting of the exhibition of Egyptian films, the increase in the number of
people who disliked American and European films, the increase in the number of films,
and thus the increase in the number of films which involved artistic realism by staying
away from the influences of theatrical filmmaking, realistic films such as Vurun Kahpeye
(Hit the Whore, d. Lütfi Ö. Akad, 1949), Yüzbaşı Tahsin (Captain Tahsin, d. Orhon M.
Arıburnu, 1950), Vatan İçin (For the Motherland, d. Aydın Arakon, 1951), and Efelerin
Efesi (The Best Buccaneer, Şakir Sırmalı, 1952) (in Scognamillo 1998, 137). Arpad was
72
definitely not fond of adaptations, Turkifications and other domestic films which aimed
to present a complete form of entertainment for spectators. Instead, he identified
originality and authenticity as the criteria of propriety within the Kemalist reform
program. Arpad made three important points in this short quotation. The first was related
to the economics of filmmaking. With the help of the recent tax cut, mentioned in the
previous chapter, various investors appeared and started film production companies with
the hope of making films and getting instant returns. The second point concerned
Egyptian films, which invaded the Turkish film market during the years of the Second
World War and thus produced a differentiated pattern of spectatorship in Turkey
dependant on socioeconomic class and political position. His last point concerned the
choice of films based on their outstanding quality and artistry. He preferred films with
nationalist sentiment especially those about the War of Independence that led to the
foundation of the Turkish Republic.
Arpad and other friends of Turkish film announced that the aim of their
organization was “the advancement of Turkish filmmaking in terms of art and to raise its
level of respectability in the world of international filmmaking, as well as determining the
best domestic films of the year” (“Türk Film Dostları…” 1952, 11). In other words, what
they envisaged for Turkish cinema was not very different from the republican projects in
the field of fine arts. In noting the tax cut, Arpad is careful enough to note that this cut
was made possible by the government of Republican People’s Party (RPP), which ruled
the country until 1950. With the elections of 1950, the Democratic Party (DP) came to
power with more liberal economic policies, basically taking the power out of the hands of
the republican elite that constituted the secular center. The Democratic Party came to
power with the traditional and more religious peripheral political forces that were coupled
with populist policies and the wave of migration from rural areas to urban centers. The
crises in the republican reforms became more visible especially after the migration to big
cities like Istanbul and Ankara, making the failures and limitations of republican reform
projects immediately apparent. The proponents of the RPP saw this as the embodiment of
regressive forces or reactionaries symbolized by the rule of the DP. This indeed was the
early construction of what Reşat Kasaba called “the Turkish experience,” of “the old and
73
the new – existing side by side and contending with, but more typically strengthening,
each other” (1997, 17). The binaries of the Turkish experience are not very different from
those of modernity and modernization processes in many nation-states: Western and
Eastern, Turks and non-Turks (Kurds and other ethnicities), secular state and religious
masses, center and periphery, urban and rural, high class and low class. Taken in this
vein, Arpad’s choice of films, and his view of what Turkish cinema should be, both
become meaningful: he was yearning for a cinema that was artful and that idealized the
republican regime, its reforms, and its fight against its enemies perceived as the others of
the nation-state, both external and internal. The tax cut and the increase in the number of
films made marked the inauguration of a popular film industry parallel to the increased
visibility of the others of the republican regime. In other words, while the republican
cultural program created its own loyal supporters who shared a dream of westernization,
the traditional culture of people first became visualized and then was interwoven with
other cultural traditions by creating an alternative path of westernization and
modernization. While the republican project involved a dream of mimicking the western
perspectival and illusionistic tradition, the traditional theatrical forms persisted in
Yeşilçam through their anti-illusionistic and nonrepresentational practices.
While the rise of such Turkified popular cultural forms as an alternative path to
the republican cultural reform program became more visible after the 1950s, the rule of
RPP envisaged a Turkey which turned its face to the secular West without having any
relation to its Eastern and Islamic past. Though there were not many examples of film in
the years before the Second World War other than those of Muhsin Ertuğrul, the films
made during the 1940s were not just adaptations; some were films that presented a
complete promise of entertainment, such as comedies and melodramas, all of which
involved different grades of Turkification. One such film which was started by Muhsin
Ertuğrul but finished by the dubbing artist Ferdi Tayfur, Nasreddin Hoca Düğünde
(Hodja Nasreddin at the Wedding, 1940), was very interesting in its presentation of a
complete entertainment venue much like vaudeville or revue theaters. This venue was
characterized by the joining together of different performances such as traditional Hodja
jokes narrated by Reşit Gürzap, songs of Müzeyyen Senar filmed during a circumcision
74
ceremony, the shows of magician Zati Sungur, and Tayfur’s performance of his dialogues
from Laurel and Hardy films (Özön 1962, 108). In other words, such films, which
combined the traditional with the modern in their own way, aimed at the entertainment of
middle-classes living in urban areas with no consideration of the aspirations of republican
reforms. However, the real arrival of Turkified melodramas supported by song scenes had
to wait for the years following the Second World War and the popularity of Egyptian
films.
3.2.1. The Popularity of Egyptian Films in the 1940s
During the Second World War, the importation of feature films, celluloid films,
and other equipment from European countries came to a halt, which later led to an
alternative importation route through Egypt. While many U.S. films came through this
route, Egyptian films also arrived through this same route and became very popular.
Özön noted that in the years between 1938 and 1944, while only 17 domestic feature
films were made, 16 Egyptian films were shown. Levent Cantek recounted that there
were around 100 or more Egyptian films shown in Turkey during the 1940s (2000, 34).
The first Egyptian film shown in Turkey was Dumu al-hubb (Tears of Love, d.
Muhammad Karim, 1936). According to Özön, when this film was shown for the first
time in a part of old Istanbul, Turkish spectators who had not seen a domestic feature for
three years at the time, rushed to Şehzadebaşı, stopped traffic on the street and broke the
windows of the film theater to get in and to see famous Arab singers and people in fezes
and robes (1962, 117). Then the film became very popular and it was shown in different
theaters in Istanbul, as well as in other Turkish cities. While the earliest Egyptian films
which involved sequences of songs sung by famous singers of the Arab world such as
Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab and Umm Kulthum were shown with these song scenes,
most of the later films were dubbed with Turkish singers singing in Turkish. The practice
was based on keeping the melody more or less intact while writing lyrics in Turkish and
having a Turkish singer perform. Thus this was not very different from other adaptations
and Turkifications done for films of other countries. However, this Turkification was then
75
supported by a ban on the songs sung in Arabic by the Film Control Commission, which
probably became active after 1942. In 1942, the General Secretariat of the RPP warned
the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the popularity of Arab films as a threat to the
Turkish language in the areas bordering Syria (in Cantek 2000, 35). This ban, then, was
not just a result of the conditions of war but more importantly of Turkish nationalism,
which had become more fervent during the war. The creation of a “secular Turkish”
country came also with the discrimination of ethnic and religious identities. Apart from
the threat coming from Arabs, non-Muslims living in Turkey were subjected more
heavily to a special wealth tax in the same year.
Dumu al-hubb belonged to the genre of Egyptian melodramas that involved
elongated scenes of singers performing popular songs of the time. Viola Shafik called this
genre “musical melodramas” and tied it to a tradition of singers reciting or singing poetry
stemming from pre-Islamic Arab culture (1998, 109). Shafik claimed that musical
melodramas carried elements of traditional Arabic music which intended to produce
moods and emotions. But she did not elaborate on this point because Ahmed Badrakhan,
an Egyptian director, noted that tarab, excitement or delight attained through repetition,
tied to maqam, or the melodic mode of traditional music, is detrimental to spectatorial
motivation because such a repetition of the most exciting part over and over again until
the attainment of tarab is not viable in popular cinema (Shafik 1998, 112). Indeed what
Shafik called musical melodramas were not quite musicals, for the songs did not
generally serve a narrative function tied to the plot, but were there at times to create
mood and at times to be listened to as such with no particular purpose. Much like
Bollywood or Yeşilçam films, these scenes with singing, which in a formalist rendering
would have created a discontinuity in terms of narrativity, were a part of the attractions or
spectacle offered by cinema. Similar to the distinction between Bollywood and Calcutta
or between Yeşilçam and the republican cultural project, Egyptian cinema was not devoid
of such an ideological controversy between what is and what should be: “Since its
emergence, Egyptian cinema has preferred to produce (or reproduce) emotions rather
than the real,” writes Abbah Fadhil Ibrahim (in Shafik 1998, 110).
76
In Turkish cinema, there was not only a controversy between realist and
melodramatic modalities, but also another one between approaches to westernization, one
from above and the other from below. While Muhsin Ertuğrul’s closeness to the
republican elite aligned him with the adoption of Western high arts in terms of theater,
likewise he degraded filmmaking as entertainment. Moreover, his filmmaking involved
adaptations of the examples of popular European theater such as vaudeville. Hürrem
Erman, a film producer, claimed that his first film, Damga (Stamp, d. Seyfi Havaeri,
1948) ran against Ertuğrul’s Halıcı Kız which involved such traits of republican
reformism based on a mounting of Western arts. He also added that during the gala of
Ertuğrul’s film in a first-run theater in Beyoğlu, a spectator from the second balcony,
after hearing a long tirade by a shepherd in the film, shouted sarcastically: “Oh man, are
you shepherd or Shakespeare?” (1973, 27) Indeed so! The republican project was about
creating Shakespeares, Mozarts, and Swiss villages throughout the war-torn and barren
lands of Anatolia. To this end, they did not refrain from applying the most severe and
violent tactics to dismantle what ran counter to their project. Anatolia, as the part of the
Republic on the continent of Asia, was the place of republican dream: uproot the couch
grasses of Anatolia to create a garden of flowers that would please Bacon! In this respect,
Egyptian, Indian or popular Turkish films opposed this project. They became popular and
their popularity at the same time offered ambivalent and alternative routes of
westernization. The increasing popularity of these films came also with the rise in the
number of film theaters in Anatolian cities, while Ertuğrul’s films were mostly watched
by urban spectators. Much like Ertuğrul, these spectators were also close to the
republican elite and its ideology. Therefore, starting with Egyptian melodramas, a
spectatorship that was rural, lower-class, peripheral to urban centers, and/or female came
to be addressed. As the religious and lower-class residents of old and peripheral Istanbul
and those of Anatolia started to come and see films such as Dumu al-hubb, in Erman’s
words, the practice of filmgoing for entertainment started in its most “primitive” form
(1973, 26). It was the melodramatic modality of these films which attracted these
spectators.
77
As I will elaborate below, the melodramatic is contrasted against the realistic, for
the latter is frequently taken by Third World intellectuals as the true and proper form of
producing culture. Yet processes akin to Turkification introduced the element of hayal or
wayang in the contexts of popular cinemas in a geography ranging from Arab countries to
Iran, India, and Southeast Asia. The significance of this geography for Turkish film
emerges through a variety of ingredients: colonial experiences, projects and violent
practices of nation building, definitions of a national culture, attempts to realign the limits
of the modernity, and the fight against traditional elements. In these geographies, popular
cinemas were consumed not only in their country of production, but also in their regional
vicinity, suggesting that the mode of their address resonated not simply within national or
cultural borders, but in societies that shared a particular relationship to modernity.
Throughout this geographic spectrum one may also talk about the persistence of
traditional forms of storytelling (both folk and religious) and performances which shared
a similar narrative formation. Wayang or hayal, as forms of traditional performances,
relied upon performers who told their stories with anecdotes, narrative gaps and breaks,
repetitions, and minimal props that stood for various things. Coupled with their
nonrepresentational mise-en-scene and anti-illusionistic narrationality, such performances
had very flexible plots based on a minimal set of recurring themes and narrative
elements. Common to these forms also, there is an element of the journey that is more or
less related to the journey of spirits (or specters) without much loyalty to spatiotemporal
consistency. Such presentations were divided into narrational units which were accepted
as singular entities not necessarily related to each other. In other words, an introductory
part might have been followed by a completely different sequence intended for totally
different ends. Then, it was up to the performer or puppeteer whether to add or omit
elements from the basic frame, depending on the performance. In particular, the Egyptian
melodramas which became popular in Turkey in the 1940s and later some Bollywood
films involved various scenes of singing which were not directly related to the plot.
Instead those scenes were singular units or episodes that stood on their own in many
cases, without having any direct relation to the story, and did so by breaking the
representationality and illusionistic characteristics of cinematic realism, reclaiming hayal
78
as their defining quality. This spatiotemporal irrelevance to the story is a reminder of
both the journeys of spirits across time and space and the offer of a spectatorial attraction
through music that involved the promise of entertainment and ecstasy.
3.2.2. The Response to Egyptian Films and arabesk
Despite the bans and other reservations of the republican elite against Egyptian
films, these films were not just popular but also had a role in the rise of arabesk
(Arabesque, or deemed to be like Arab cultural forms) music and culture, which became
a truly popular cultural response of the migrants living in the peripheral parts of the urban
centers, especially Istanbul after the late 1960s. In the introduction to this study, I talked
about how Ziya Gökalp and the republican elite modeled an idea of synthesis between the
West and the “Turkish” folk culture, while disregarding elements of the East, which were
represented by the Islamic and the Ottoman. I also noted that they preferred Western
musics such as classical music, tangos, polkas, and waltzes over local forms. In an
attempt to synthesize Western classical music with Turkish folk music, they also invited
Béla Bartók to modernize and polyphonize Turkish folk music to solve the supposed
backwardness of monophonic Eastern music. With this in mind, both the popularity of
Egyptian films and the rise of arabesk music, as well as many examples of Yeşilçam
cinema, were not favored by the “progressive” republican establishment. Much as
arabesk music and culture was deemed backward, rural, and fatalistic and therefore
excluded from state radio and television broadcasts during the 1970s and early 1980s, its
arbitrary but effective combination of Western and Eastern musical instrumentation and
singing styles produced a hybrid form representing the ever-present clashes and
controversies of Turkish culture. Arabesk’s Turkification process was not unique, for it
again involved a translation and transformation of modernization and westernization
projects into the practices of everyday life, culture, and music of the peripheral urban
areas. In its ambivalent relation to the West, arabesk culture came about following
migration from rural areas to shanty towns or squatter settlements (gecekondus) that
popped up in urban peripheries and then started to infiltrate urban centers. However, not
79
only did the form respond to internal migration directly, it also initially protested urban
culture and later began to capture and align with it. With this migration of an initially
marginal cultural product towards the center of cultural life, arabesk culture eventually
came to be incorporated into the upper-class urban practices. Such an increased visibility
of arabesk, initially a protest about the conditions of urban life, did not succeed in
producing much change in class positions and patterns. The lower-classes of Turkey still
reside in the peripheries of urban centers and commute to the center during the daytime
before their daily return to the periphery.
Arabesk seems to have a double significance in relation to Turkish culture: if it is
not totally exterminated, whatever was repressed by the projects of a national culture
returned as a “specter” and haunted these projects in one or another form. The presence
of arabesk music also coincided with the increasing “visibility” of Kurds in supposedly
Turkish urban centers, where the clash of ethnic identities which had been subsumed by
the national narrative became apparent. The Turkification practices of popular Turkish
cinema created alternative syntheses of the East and the West to that of arabesk, more
akin to, yet a degree more popular than, those of the republican elite. Seen from this
perspective, the much disliked influence of Egyptian cinema or Arab culture through its
films or music, and the ever-present attempts to purify the Turkish language by stripping
it of Arabic and Persian words, served as a backdrop that highlighted arabesk musicians
as representing a crisis in the republican cultural project. Similar to Arab singers of
Egyptian cinema, today, some Turkish or Kurdish arabesk musicians have become
incorporated as cultural “classics,” much like the earlier Turkish performers who
translated and then performed Arabic songs in Egyptian films, and also much like the
earlier representatives of Ottoman court music. Although the purification and
westernization attempts of the republican cultural project disregarded or countered such
popular musical forms, they are now considered to some extent mainstream forms,
existing side by side with other high and low Western forms, such as classical music and
pop or rock. The resonance of Yeşilçam and arabesk, with a backdrop of Egyptian films
and their “Turkified” songs, offered an alternative route of cultural modernization and
westernization.
80
This is not surprising in the sense that, though they were interpreted as backward
and Eastern, the songs in Egyptian films also involved a practice of westernization and
modernization: Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab – who helped make, acted in, and performed
songs in Dumu al-hubb – was responsible for various innovations and changes in music.
“He introduced various dance rhythms, like tango, rumba, samba, and foxtrot, and was
the first to use song duets…derived from the conventions of operetta” (Shafik 1998, 113).
This was not very different from what Turkish popular music and cinema were
experiencing. However, the problem was with what the republican cultural project
included and excluded from national culture: while Western forms and “purified” Turkish
folk culture were construed as the building blocks of republican synthesis, the cultural
entries related to Ottomans and Islam were left out. This discrimination was then
translated into what Yeşilçam cinema and arabesk music was: they both belonged to a
similar locus of spontaneous synthesis or hybrid of West and East; not as dictated from
above, but emerging in their own flux. It is also not surprising that Yeşilçam quickly
integrated arabesk into its filmic practice starting in the early 1970s by producing films
with famous arabesk singers such as Orhan Gencebay or Ferdi Tayfur. As a result,
Yeşilçam’s process of Turkification is not a clear-cut linear and progressive project but
an ambivalent, heterogeneous, and ruptured practice that cannot be reduced to a
genealogical model, but thrives with a pragmatics of modality marked by multiple and
illimitable performances.
3.3. Towards Yeşilçam: Film Industry “Turkified”
“Why are our films not as perfect as those of America, Europe, and even our
neighbor Egypt?” To those who asked this question, the Domestic Filmmakers
Organization gave an answer that depended on their experience in the film business: “Our
domestic films are forced to gather financial returns to compensate for production cost,
only from the box office revenues in our country” (Yerli Film Yapanlar Cemiyeti, 1947).
While Hollywood films were shown everywhere and Egyptian films were also shown in
other Arab countries, very few Turkish films were shown in countries such as Greece,
81
Syria, Iraq and Cyprus. So the film’s cost was only recouped by the tickets sold in
Turkey. However, following the end of the Second World War, there was some activity
in filmmaking in Turkey which showed filmmakers that they could make considerable
profit by making and selling domestic films. To further their profits and to increase the
number of films made in Turkey, the Organization felt the need to make some demands
from the government such as to reduce the income tax on domestic films and filmmakers,
to cut the tax on ticket revenues from 75 percent to 20 percent, and to cut the taxes on the
imports of film equipment. According to the Organization, this was a task which needed
to be taken on by the government because domestic filmmaking would present the
abilities of Turkish filmmakers and artists to other nations by making the whole nation
proud and also by bringing back revenues through the exportation of the films. Not
surprisingly, in the eyes of the Domestic Filmmakers Organization, cinema was a
combination of art and business which could make a nation both proud and rich.
Such lobbying by film producers who were members of this Organization was
also voiced and supported in film magazines of the period. Sezai Solelli, the editor of
Yıldız (Star) magazine, noted that the Turkish filmmakers were not asking for the direct
support of the state as in Egypt but only a tax cut, because there were a lot of taxes
imposed on the film industry in Turkey, including the contracts of filmmakers, ticket
prices, and the revenues of production companies (1948, 38). Under such conditions,
even the cheapest Turkish movie cost three times more than the import and dubbing costs
of an Egyptian film, which put the Turkish filmmakers into a very disadvantaged
position. To protect its own industry, Egyptian taxes on domestic films were lower than
those in Turkey, and Egyptian theaters were required to show a specified number of
domestic films, as was the case in some European countries at the time. But as Solelli
emphasized, what Turkish cinema asked for was no more than a cut from 75 to 25% in
the taxes levied on ticket revenues. That very year, a new tax regulation designed to these
specifications created an important impetus for the popular Turkish film industry. This
led to a remarkable increase of domestic films in the following years.
82
3.3.1. A Short Note on Cinema Organizations and Laws
One of the complications in the production of Turkish film was the multitude of
organizations that were established, often without success, to promote and support
filmmaking. In addition to the Domestic Filmmakers Organization, the Cinema and
Filmmakers Organization (Sinemacılar ve Filmciler Cemiyeti) was established in 1946,
which gathered together producers, importers, and filmmakers. Though such
organizations started to emerge, the evolution of cinema into a more defined business
took place in the late 1950s through the clarification of production, distribution, and
exhibition networks as distinct entities. As the industry became more stabilized, a number
of other filmmaker organizations were founded such as the Producers Organization in
1962 and the Union of Cinema Workers (Sine-İş) in 1963. Despite a number of attempts
at unionization, the Turkish film industry, much like some of the other industrial sectors
such as textiles and agriculture, has avidly fought against workers rights and
unionization. Several organizations founded in the1970s, including the Film Industry
Foundation (Film-San Vakfı, 1975) and the Film Workers Union of Turkey (Türkiye Film
İşçileri Sendikası, 1978) ceded their functions to organizations established in the 1980s,
such as the Film Producers Organization (Film Yapımcıları Derneği), the Professional
Association of the Owners of Cinema Works (Sinema Eseri Sahipleri Meslek Birliği), the
Film Actors Organization (Sinema Oyuncuları Derneği), the Modern Film Actors
Organization (Çağdaş Sinema Oyuncuları Derneği), the Cinema Workers Union (Sinema
Emekçileri Sendikası), and the Film Critics Organization (Sinema Yazarları Derneği). As
seen from the proliferation of such organizations, the Turkish film industry was not a
very clearly regulated and organized industry in terms of the relations between
production companies and workers, and in terms of the basic rights of the workers,
including fair contracts, insurance, and the like. Such organization and regulation has
only emerged over the past two decades. Mahir Özerdem, who acted in a Turkish-Italian
co-production, Safiye Sultan, wrote in 1954 that Italians worked with strict contracts.
Moreover, actors and crew, all of whom were unionized, were always on schedule. In
Turkey, however, actors worked on multiple contracts at the same time, and went from
83
one film set to another. Such differences between the work habits of Western and Turkish
film industries were always striking for the Turkish filmmakers, yet nothing changed
even as they bemoaned the differences: Such changes would have run the risk of
increasing the cost of films and thereby decreasing profits.
Likewise, the first Turkish law concerning cinema and films (other than
censorship laws) as well as video and audiotapes was passed in 1986, when Yeşilçam
was already fading. This law reflected a meeting point of various interests: filmmakers
and importers were not happy when their films were pirated in the videotape industry and
shown in public places such as coffee houses, bars, and restaurants without their
permission; and the state was not happy with the circulation of pirate videotapes of films
with “divisive ideologies” such as the later films of Yılmaz Güney that were banned in
Turkey at the time (Özön 1995a, 58). In this respect, while filmmakers were happy when
they were openly stealing from foreign sources, they became unhappy when their films
were pirated by others. And the state represented its usual interest in cinema, which
mainly focused on taxation, control, and censorship, thereby letting the industry evolve
on its own.
3.3.2. The Conditions of Filmmaking
The disorganization that continued throughout the early years of the Yeşilçam
industry had its roots in the 1948 tax cut that created a world of instant profit for many
film producers, allowing them to try their luck at large-scale businesses. Like the early
years of cinema in the U.S., filmmaking was not an attractive profession for the elite, so
the film industry relied upon instant capital coming from various sources. Film
production companies, which started to gather in the vicinity of Yeşilçam Street, grew
continually during the 1950s, from around 10 in 1948 to over 100 in 1961 (Sason 1961,
101). However, this increase in the number of production companies was not
accompanied by an increase in the quality of filmmaking. The available infrastructure of
film production and exhibition remained ineffectual. This was also the case for film
distribution until the late 1950s when distributors became increasingly important.
84
There were no state-funded or -controlled film studios in Turkey, nor welldeveloped or technologically sound studios of private companies that would be
comparable to Western studios. Unlike Hollywood’s name, which emerged from a
constellation of film companies and studios, the Turkish film industry was named after a
street where only the offices of several film production companies were located. The
increase in the number of films and film production companies did not translate into an
increase in the number of available studios or postproduction laboratories. Throughout
Yeşilçam’s rise in the 1950s, the films were mostly shot en plein air in Istanbul or at one
of several lavish ex-Ottoman aristocratic mansions and middle-class houses, which were
rented to the filmmakers and used repeatedly as sets in several films. In 1951, Yıldız
magazine reported that Istanbul was turning into Hollywood thanks to filmmakers who
were shooting outdoor scenes and drawing the attention of crowds as they worked.
“Throughout this summer,” the report continued, “we came across such scenes in places
such as “the beaches, Sirkeci station, the slopes of Mühürdar, the Babıali incline, the
shores of the Bosporus, the Princess Islands and the Dolmabahçe pier” (“Hollywood’a
Dönen…”, 9). The films that took place in locations other than Istanbul were shot
generally in nearby towns and villages to reduce the transportation and lodging costs. The
only existing film studios at the time were those used for the dubbing of foreign films.
Later some of these studios turned into low quality post-production studios. The director
Şadan Kamil said that the film laboratory of Marmara Film Studio in the 1940s had a
number of handmade wooden tubs which were five feet deep, but only a foot wide. The
rolls of negative film were washed in these tubs. They knew that the Western studios
used machines for this process, but such machines were beyond their means (Kamil 2000,
19).
It was not just the equipment that was extremely expensive for the filmmakers but
also raw film stock, which was throughout the history of Turkish film always imported.
For instance, in the early 1950s, Faruk Kenç mentioned that it was very difficult to get
raw film because of import regulations imposed by the Democratic Party government
(1993, 27). The DP government also attempted to indirectly control filmmaking by
distributing raw film through its Media and Publishing (Basın Yayın) institution. This is
85
again indicative of the relation of the Turkish state to cinema: let it develop on its own
but control it at the same time. For the film producer Hürrem Erman, Turkish
governments always saw cinema merely in terms of entertainment and did not see its
industrial potential. He points out that there were many people employed by the film
industry who were making a living out of films, and films could have been important
export commodities (1973, 26). The state was not interested in opening film schools, film
libraries, or cinematheques. The only existing places that might have served such
functions were the screening theaters established by the RPP at the People’s Houses,
which were closed under the DP government. This situation continued until the mid
1960s, when the first cinematheque and film archive were established. The first film
school opened in the mid 1970s.
Filmmakers also learned how to make films, and the tricks of trade, by practice.
In the years following the Second World War, directors who claimed that they had visited
Hollywood or other European film industries started directing films (Havaeri 2002),
actors were gathered literally from the street, and films were made with any available
equipment. Director Faruk Kenç claimed that he used the traveling shot for the first time
in Turkey in his 1940 film, Yılmaz Ali (Perseverant Ali), but because they used an old,
heavy camera, they had great difficulty to move it on the rails that they built (Kenç 1993,
27). Another director, Seyfi Havaeri, talked about how, while shooting his second film,
Damga, they filled the hole on the camera’s film cartridge with gum, or how he tried to
imitate a crane shot by asking his cameraman with a camera on his shoulder to shoot a
scene from on top of a moving truck (2002). Such experiments and practical innovations
might have been experienced by Western filmmakers in the early years of cinema when it
was a new invention. But in Turkey, filmmakers tried to understand and analyze the
cinematic narration of Western films while adding local, domestic elements. İlhan
Arakon and Kriton İliadis, both of whom were respected directors of photography,
examined lobby cards and stills of Western films to learn how they did lighting and miseen-scène (Arakon 2004).
Similarly Hürrem Erman, an active producer from the late 1940s on, first
mentioned the prejudice against films that did not involve the director Muhsin Ertuğrul
86
and his actors at the City Theater. Such films had no chance in the market. He relates
how his independent group made his first film by renting a repaired wooden camera with
one lens (Erman 1973, 23). Seyfi Havaeri, the director of this film, Damga, mentioned
that a major film company of the period, İpek Film, which worked with Ertuğrul, would
not lend its equipment to them (2002). They found a Greek photographer, Coni
Kurtdeşoğlu, who helped them rent a camera. In return for his help, Kurtdeşoğlu who did
not have any experience in filmmaking did the camera work for this film. Then, they
decided on a story about the life of a young girl in Istanbul after the loss of her Greek
mother and Ottoman Turkish father. While Erman credited the story to Fikret Arıt,
Onaran claimed that the story belonged to a Greek writer whose name is not known (in
Özgüç 1998, 52). Erman offered the role of the young girl to Ms. Mensure after seeing
and liking her variety show at a bar. They promptly changed her name to the more
glamorous Sezer Sezin. In searching for a lead actor, Erman said that after not liking a
couple of eager guys, he finally met a man by the name of Memduh, to whom they
decided to give the surname Ün, meaning fame. However, more significantly, Un was
supposedly the surname of the Hollywood actor known as Turhan Bey, known in Turkey
as “the” Turkish actor in Hollywood even though he was half-Turkish and did not have
any ties with Turkey. For another role, Erman recruited his Armenian dentist, Arşavir
Alyanak, who was interested in the film business and who later became a director. After
the most of the film was shot under the direction of Havaeri, a couple of remaining
scenes were shot by another director, Lütfi Akad, who was also new to the filmmaking
business. After the completion of shooting, Erman and his companions realized that they
did not have a studio for post-production. They hired a carpenter in Adapazarı, a small
town close to Istanbul, where Erman owned some film theaters. The carpenter made four
or five tubs, all of which leaked the chemicals used to wash the negatives. Their
misadventures continued when they printed the film and discovered that most of it was
out of focus. Erman hired the renowned editor-director Orhan Atadeniz to edit the film.
The last touch was rewriting the dialogues and dubbing the film in the studio. Although a
copy of this film is not available today, it is clear from this long story that the film must
have been of such low quality that one would expect even spectators of the time to have a
87
difficult time with it. Nonetheless, the film was extremely successful. Erman said that
when he showed the film to his friends, he received a lot of criticism from them, yet the
doormen and janitors of his studio responded to the film with genuine tears.
As becomes clear from the above story, filmmaking in those years was not as
standardized or predictable a process as it was in the West. Instead it was spontaneous
and arbitrary in terms of the constitution of a cinematic narrative and discourse. As an
integral part of its transitional character, it involved various ways of mirroring and
reinventing Western experiences of early cinema. In addition, even though some
filmmakers went to the West for film education, upon their return they did not quite
practice what they learned in the West. Instead they fit into the general frame of domestic
commercial cinema. This was partly due to the unavailability of Western-style studios
and necessary technical equipment, which forced filmmakers to create their own practical
solutions and inventions. But it was also due to other conditions of filmmaking in a nonWestern, underdeveloped country that had to develop its own ways of responding to and
transforming the technology and language of cinema. While they were aware of Western
cinemas, this awareness was not directly translated into the reproduction of a similar
cinema. Instead they tried to practice filmmaking by “Turkifying” it, by mirroring,
mimicking and by transforming as they translated.
3.3.3. Film Exhibition
During the late 1940s and early 1950s the problems of filmmakers were not just
limited to the conditions of filmmaking but also extended to the exhibition of their films.
In the second chapter, I noted that the conditions of film viewing were poor not only in
Anatolian cities, but even in many of the film theaters in Istanbul. Director Faruk Kenç
talked about the limited availability of film theaters. For instance, the Taksim Cinema,
which used to show a lot of Turkish films, was booked in advance for foreign films. They
could only allot one to two weeks for Turkish films, which might be extended to three or
four weeks if the film made enough profit (1993, 27). In other words, because the rise of
popular cinema took place in a couple of years, not only the infrastructure of filmmaking,
88
but also the infrastructure of film exhibition was not quite ready. Although the number of
film theaters during these years is not exactly known, there are a number of estimates
which give a sense of what was available. Oğuz Özdeş, very optimistic about the rise of
Turkish cinema, was concerned about the number of film theaters in 1951. According to
him, there were about 300 around the country, while in Istanbul there were only ten firstrun theaters, more than half of which were controlled by İpek and Lale film companies,
who were mainly importers and therefore unwilling to show domestic productions (1951,
24). Özön noted that the number of film theaters, around thirty in 1923, had risen to 130
in 1939 and 200 in 1949 (1995a, 49). In the years following the 1948 tax cut, there was a
steady increase in the number of theaters, which peaked in the late 1960s alongside a
peak in film production– almost 3000 film theaters showed around 300 films made in a
year.
As I will elaborate in the next chapter, the clear patterning of distribution and
exhibition in Turkey emerged from the mid- to late-1950s with the start of the golden age
of Yeşilçam cinema. Before that, to show their films, domestic production companies had
to rely on their relationship with the owners of first-run theaters in Istanbul, which were
partly controlled by major film importing companies. However, in other theaters they had
to create their own network of distribution either by renting films to theater owners or by
fourwalling these theaters for periods of a couple weeks to a couple months depending on
the number of films held by the production company and its financial power. For
fourwalling, Tuncan Okan noted that they paid a guaranteed amount of money to theater
owners and they also shared the profit gathered from the film. In many cases, theater
owners got a share which fluctuated between 35 to 45 percent of the net profit after taxes
gathered from the ticket revenues (1958, 37). Similarly, Erman noted that for his first
film, Damga, they rented Taksim Film Theater, a first-run theater at the time, for one
week. But thanks to the success of the film in its first week, the film was shown there for
two more weeks, and he received a remarkable share from the profit. Then they printed a
few more copies of the film for distribution to Anatolian cities. Although there was a
system of sharing profits through a percentage given to Istanbul theater owners at the
time, Erman noted that with this film they gave percentage shares to some Anatolian
89
theater owners for the first time. Because there was not a distribution system, they mainly
sold the film’s rights to theater owners for a fixed price (Erman 1973, 23). In short, much
like the conditions of production, the exhibition of films was not yet based on a clear
system. Both production and exhibition worked spontaneously and independently.
3.3.4. Film Consumption and Criticism
With migration and the spread of film theaters to small towns in Anatolia, both
the patterns of spectatorship and film criticism were transformed. While these spectators
consisted mostly of members of the lower- to middle-classes in peripheral locations (both
urban and rural), their relation to Western cinemas was also limited to and conditioned by
dubbing. Their taste was deemed “primitive” by director Şadan Kamil: “People used to
go to see a film as if they were going to coffee houses or night clubs. They listened to
music and watched famous singers and dancers.” People favored these films because,
according to Kamil, they enjoyed looking at a star player, listening to a couple of songs,
or crying at a few sad scenes. He marveled at how these spectators never tired of
watching the same subjects time and time again (2000, 22). Such comments became
standard fare among filmmakers and critics throughout the history of Turkish cinema. An
evaluation of spectators as primitive, naïve and underdeveloped is a view shared by both
elite and intellectuals. As Vasudevan notes, “the middle-class are bearers of a rationalist
discourse and the attributes of responsible citizenship and…the popular cinema…is the
domain of first a premodern, and then a decultured, lumpenized mass audience” (2000,
135). Likewise in Turkey, the discourse of modernization articulated by the elite and
intellectuals was aligned with class distinctions coupled with sociopolitical positions. An
urban, educated, westernized, and mostly Kemalist bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie
carried an ideology of modernity based on novelty and continuous change. They
continued to consume Western cinema and some examples of “realistic” Turkish cinema.
On the other hand, as Vasudevan noted with reference to Ashish Nandy, commercial or
popular cinema “attracted spectators to a narrative which ritually neutralizes the
discomfiting features of social change, those atomizing modern thought-patterns and
90
practices which have to be adopted for reasons of survival” (2000, 135). This may be
why an alternative route of Turkification was adopted by both Yeşilçam and arabesk
music.
Along with the popularity of Egyptian films and the rise of domestic film
production, various film magazines changed their coverage. Earlier popular film
magazines covered Western cinema by using Western popular film magazines and
materials supplied by the distributors of Western films. Hollywood’s international
dominance made Hollywood films and news predominate in the pages of these
magazines, thereby reducing the space allocated to European films. During the years of
the popularity of Egyptian cinema, Egyptian films and stars were also covered in these
magazines. Starting from the late 1950s, there were two types of film magazines: one
followed the earlier tradition of covering popular films and stars with sensational and
gossipy material while the other considered cinema as a form of art, publishing serious
articles about the possibility of making realist films. However, before this partition, film
magazines of the late 1940s and early 1950s displayed an optimism about the rise of
Turkish cinema which went hand-in-hand with heavy criticism of its existing films. In
1949, one film critic, Sami M. Onat, wrote: “Belly dancing music, bar amusement, the
costume film trend, the caprice of melodrama, the desire for bland surprise and some
other differences in outlook turn film into nonsense” (in Onat 1990, 52). Onat said that
even though directors were also not happy about this situation, they kept filming as
required by producers.
Such vehement criticism was not universal. In 1954, before its coverage had
shifted from Hollywood to domestic cinema, Yıldız (Star) magazine announced a victory
for domestic films in its editorial section. “Until five or six years ago, nobody believed in
the progress of filmmaking in Turkey” (“Yerli Filmlerin…” 1954, 3). The report, which
noted that 300 of 350 imported films were American, asked why, despite the dominance
and quality of American films, local spectators nonetheless liked domestic films full of
technical incompetence. The answer was simple: people saw themselves in these films.
Unlike the stories and morals of the American films that do not fit in Turkey and rely on
characters like television artists, bankers, and gangsters, domestic films reflected peoples’
91
own life-styles, issues, and music. Through Turkish films, spectators could dream about
being artists like those on the screen, whereas those in Hollywood were far beyond their
grasp. According to the magazine, the first victim of this rise of Turkish cinema was
Egyptian film; the second blow was felt by the French and British films which were
fading out of the market; and the third blow was yet to be gradually felt by American
films. While companies that used to import began to produce, film magazines shifted
their attention from foreign to local products.
As republican ideology imagined a universal and scientific model of
modernization, no space was left for ambiguities or ambivalences. Yet even as they
aimed to reform(ulate) the Turkish public, they retained a paternalistic view of it as
backward and underdeveloped. For instance, as noted in the previous chapter, the Turkish
public was seen as not ready to see All Quiet in the Western Front, but Hollywood
melodramas or comedies presented no problem. Reşat Kasaba noted that both the
modernizing elite in Turkey and scholars of Turkish modernization, such as Bernard
Lewis and Daniel Lerner, imagined Turkey as eliminating its traditional elements. Yet
such discourses of modernization, when faced with the realities of Turkey, demanded
new categories allowing for the contradictions both of modernization and of those groups
in society which were in-between – neither modern nor traditional. Daniel Lerner, in his
1958 book, The Passing of Traditional Society, describes the city as a modernizing
landscape which contains various figures, including: migrants living in miserable
conditions who never penetrate into the urban environment; those who find a satisfying
life through industrial discipline; and still others who “are infused with new dreams and
glory – imagining themselves at the head of an Islamic brotherhood, or of a proletarian
union” (in Kasaba 1997, 23). Yet, according to Kasaba, such uncertainties or ambiguities
did not prevent them from claiming that “Turks are the happiest people in the Middle
East,” for it was, above all else, modernizing.
In this process of modernization, religious groups, Kurds, and non-Muslim
minorities conflicted with the promise of a singular national identity and culture. On the
way toward creating the happiest people in the Middle East, religious brotherhoods and
Islamist intellectuals were liquidated along with other political forces which seemed to
92
impede the modernizing elite. At the same time, non-Muslim minorities were not
excluded from the liquidation process. While many non-Muslims escaped, were deported
or subjected to population exchange, a considerable part of the remaining non-Muslim
population found themselves paying special wealth taxes or having their businesses
attacked during the riots of 1955. As the production companies and magazines that made
up Yeşilçam cinema settled into Beyoğlu, they entered the previously cosmopolitan
spaces which non-Muslim minorities were slowly leaving. Ironically, both Yeşilçam and
arabesk, as popular and alternative “Turkifications” (or “Turkifications-from-below) in
the cultural field, resonated with the republican nationalist ethos in its aggression toward
non-Muslim and non-Turkish minorities. Yeşilçam not only made various movies in
support of Kemalist ideology, but it also reproduced the aggressive nationalist ideology
in various ways. At the same time, it countered the projects of the Kemalist state by
introducing elements of tradition and religion side-by-side with modernity. Nevertheless,
Yeşilçam’s existence is marked with an ambiguity and transitionality, which did not fit to
the models of modernization as prescribed by the modernizing elite and scholars.
Yeşilçam’s Turkification of Western and Eastern films furthered this ambiguity.
In some cases, such Turkifications did not quite fit to the scheme of Turkishness. At
times they reproduced Western models and at other times they brought to the fore
elements of tradition, religion and tropes of Eastern cinemas. But ultimately, they were
Turkifications, bearing the traits of both a transformation or translation and an aggression
or exclusion, much like the couch grass that coexists and also aggressively grows.
Although numerous adaptations were made, as Giovanni Scognamillo points out, only
230 of 3100 films made before 1973 were adaptations from Turkish literature. This
limited number was due to strict censorship, copyright payments, and the intellectual
investment that such adaptations required (1973b, 62). The breakneck pace at which
scriptwriters were forced to work after the eruption of popular film industry led them to
adapt various foreign films. Scognamillo notes that in 1965 one writer claimed that the
tempo of making 150 films with a limited number of production companies and
filmmakers made plagiarism from foreign films a pragmatic necessity (1973b, 67).
93
Yet on a more fundamental level, cinema as a Western technological product
came with its own technological and ideological history which demanded a response
from non-Western filmmakers and spectators. Throughout their history almost all of the
third world cinemas relied upon Western equipment to make and watch films. Thus they
had to and they have to respond to this dominance in different ways and at different
levels, always by vernacularizing, domesticating, adapting, reinventing, and at the same
time imitating, mirroring, and plagiarizing.
3.4. Turkification and the Melodramatic Modality
The “auslands journal” (foreign lands) section of the website of the German
television channel ZDF (www.zdf.de) had a news story dated March 4, 2004, titled:
“Alles getürkt,” meaning all or everything was “getürkt,” by “the book pirates of the
Bosporus.” It is a story about street vendors selling pirated copies of bestseller books
such as Harry Potter series and Orhan Pamuk’s novels. The piracy was not limited to
books, but also involved CDs, VCDs, and DVDs of copyrighted software and movies.
Although in the last couple of years the laws concerning copyrighted materials have been
tightened in an attempt to catch up with EU laws, the piracy of copyrighted materials still
exists in Turkey. The story also indicated that some of the vendors saw themselves as
“Ottoman Robin Hoods” with an “anti-imperialistic” sensibility. However, they are not
“Ottoman” anymore, but “Turkish” with nationalist fervor enmeshed with religious and
ethnic identities. In German getürkt is a commonly used word which literally means
“Turkified.” But in contemporary German, getürkt is actually a derogatory term that
means faked or falsified, or as used in this story, corrupted or pirated. According to
Duden Das grosse Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, it means fingieren (to simulate or
to invent something) or fälschen (to falsify or to fake) and it is often felt as discriminatory
(oft als diskriminierend empfunden).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “to Turkify” or “to Turkicize”
means “to render Turkish” and “Turkish” means “of pertaining or belonging to the Turks
and Turkey.” The verb “to turkish” means “to transform, especially for the worse; to
94
pervert, to turn into something different” and it has been used since the early 16th
century. While the words turken, turquen, turkin, turkess, torcasse, torkes, turkiss or
turkess have an uncertain etymology, if not from the word torquer (to twist), they
originated from the word “Turk” and suffix “-en” by “referring to the action of the Turks
in transforming Christian churches into mosques, or from the Koran being regarded as a
transformation or perversion of the Bible.” Words such as turken or turkess mean, “to
transform or alter for the worse; to wrest, twist, distort, pervert” or “to alter the form or
appearance of; to change, modify, refashion (not necessarily for the worse).”
If not from religious sources about a conversion from Christian into Muslim, the
contemporary usage of the word may have originated from a famous eighteenth century
chess-playing machine by the name of “the Turk” that was created by a Hungarian Baron,
Wolfgang von Kempelen. This chess machine was “a mechanical man, fashioned from
wood, powered by clockwork, dressed in a stylish Turkish costume—and capable of
playing chess” (Standage 2002). Originally created for the entertainment of the AustroHungarian Empress Maria Theresa, this machine challenged famous figures such as
Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Though a long-standing curiosity for many, the Turk, named after the costume of the
wooden figure, functioned through trickery; it faked, falsified or simulated a real machine
with the capability of playing chess, yet it was still an invention, a curious and an exotic
one.
The contemporary German usage of the word emerged from the contact with the
Turkish population in Germany, who had arrived there as guest workers and stayed for
good, creating a large diasporic population. Thanks to them, things are Turkified
(getürkt) either by being transformed in a Turkish way or manner or by being made
unruly or unlawful. In other words, Turks create ways of getting along with rules and
laws by ruining the validity or legality of civil life and the civic virtues of the Western
tradition of democracy and civility. That is why things are transformed, altered, changed,
modified, refashioned, twisted, simulated, invented, falsified, faked, distorted, wrested,
corrupted, perverted, and pirated. Turks in Germany or elsewhere are getürkt, alles
getürkt! Turkification does not stop there; films and filmmaking are also getürkt. There is
95
no more categorical clarity and unity but ambivalence and multiplicity. “The rhizome
itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to
concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes
the best and the worst: potato and couch grass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couch
grass is crabgrass” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 7). Couch grass is not potato; it is
crabgrass – when rats swarm over each other, alles getürkt.
In the second chapter of this study, I introduced the notion of hayal in relation to
an understanding of cinema in Turkey. Hayal underscores a transition from “shadow”
plays and traditional performing arts to cinema which introduced aspects of “image,”
“imagination,” and “dream.” Through this trope, I tried to place the locale of hayal (the
first films shown on a shadow-play screen) through a look at the history of a nation-state
and its national culture. The drama of nation building brings about invention,
purification, aggression, unification and thus exclusion. In this respect, hayal involves
various levels of relation to the West, including protocols such as imitation, adaptation,
translation, and transformation; i.e., “Turkification.” This chapter deals with
Turkification, which is not a simple and clear path of relating to the West, but which is
instead a relation with various aspects and definitions of the West. In the case of
Yeşilçam, this involves views of Western cinema ranging from Hollywood to art cinema
and auteur films. Yet there was not a single and unitary West that is dreamed of nor was
there a single Western cinema. With these issues at hand, Yeşilçam’s Turkification marks
various practices, ranging from facile to complex, of translating, transforming or
rendering Western cinemas.
While hayal and Turkification help us understanding what Yeşilçam is and how it
works, below I will try to introduce the “melodramatic modality” of Yeşilçam in order to
underline how such protocols have been rendered into film and how one may read
Yeşilçam films in relation to an overview of melodramatic modality that underlines
popular cinemas in different countries and climates. This analysis will not solely be based
on a conception of melodrama as a genre, specifically as a genre of women’s films, but
rather as a “phantom” genre, as a modality that has a historical presence in theater and
literature, as well as in early cinema; that presents a sphere for the coexistence of the
96
modern and the traditional; that involves mechanisms of coexistence with and in other
genres; that brings about a dialectic of pathos and action and a Manichean conflict of
good and evil through a predictable storyline; and that resolves with the morality of the
common man after a series of spectacular and dramatic confrontations.
3.4.1. Grades of Turkification in Yeşilçam
Turkish filmmaking could be described as getürkt at its various stages, from
production to consumption. The making of the Turkish Tarzan films provides a clear
example of such Turkification. Although no copyright laws or concerns were applied
within Turkish cinema, it nonetheless demanded its own intellectual rights if it got a
chance to sell films outside. But exporting films was rare at best. The first Turkish Tarzan
film, Tarzan İstanbul’da (Tarzan in Istanbul, 1952), was shot by Orhan Atadeniz and was
exported to different countries including Spain, Portugal, France and several Arab
countries. Kunt Tulgar, whose father Sabahattin Tulgar produced and did the camera
work of the first film, made a second Tarzan film, Tarzan Korkusuz Adam (1973). Just as
the 1952 script was credited to Kunt Tulgar, who was only four years old at the time, he
credited his film to his son, Kaan Tulgar, who was just a year old. According to Kunt
Tulgar, the first film was an adaptation of Richard Thorpe’s Tarzan’s New York
Adventure (1942) though the film actually utilized earlier Tarzan films like the W. S. van
Dyke classic, Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932). Tulgar also mentioned that, except for a
couple of scenes featuring an elephant, the first film was shot in Turkey by borrowing (or
stealing) scenes from documentaries and other Tarzan films (2002). Orhan Atadeniz, who
directed and edited the film, was renowned for his editing job. For this film, he cropped
frames from different films and carried them in his pocket during the shooting so that he
would be able to give instructions to the players about how to enter the frame and where
to look and move based on the footage on hand from other films. Atadeniz was known
for making films flow in a film industry which had serious difficulties in mirroring the
language of mainstream Western cinemas of the time. He did not just repeat continuity
editing; he did so while also domesticating films by adding elements of local culture.
97
Tarzan was no longer a Western Tarzan but a homegrown Turkish one: Tarzan was
getürkt.
Turkification is a translation of the West. However, this translation does not
simply take place between two languages, but also through other elements of cultural
multiplicities. It is not reducible to a transfer of one set to another, each clearly coded and
therefore decodable. Here the West and the East are not totalities that are identifiable
with a firm set of elements; instead they may be thought of as planes on which various
particularities float. Nonetheless, most discussions on Turkification in relation to Turkish
cinema have instead presupposed properness and originality through the introduction of a
supposed universality (of both language and culture) in relation to different
particularities. It is in this vein that one may view Giovanni Scognamillo’s distinction
between “true” adaptations (domestications) and “merely” adaptations or plagiarized
films (“Turkifications”), or between adapted social-realist films and adapted popular
films. This indeed fits into the previously explained Kemalist framework (into the
“Turkification-from-above”) with a mise-en-scène of a central westernized power
enlightening the traditional peripheral forces. Selim İleri’s “true” adaptation of the
Graham Greene novel This Gun for Hire, which was made into a film by Lütfi Akad by
the name of Yaralı Kurt (Wounded Wolf, 1972), was accepted as a “true” adaptation by
Scognamillo and canonized by other historians of Turkish cinema. In contrast, Damdaki
Kemancı (Fiddler on the Roof, 1972) as adapted by director Hulki Saner was a case of, as
Scognamillo called it, “Turkishification” (Türkçeleştirme, putting into the Turkish
language) similar to the “clear-cut” adaptations of Cinderella, Three Musketeers, Snow
White, Don Quixote, and Carmen. Turkification was actually a method of Turkish theater
inherited by the Turkish cinema. But it was not simply a recipe as Scognamillo suggests:
“a foreign source, preferably a foreign film is chosen; the surroundings, the characters
and if necessary the time of the story is altered; i.e., Turkishified” (Scognamillo 1973b,
69-71). If not a recipe, then what does Turkification entail?
98
3.4.2. Turkification and Melodrama
According to Scognamillo, such foreign sources were not completely translated
into Turkish (which indeed is not possible), but were put into a functional mold of
melodrama: rich girl, poor boy, the intrigue of an evil character, and two men in love
with the same woman. Turkification worked by transforming into the melodramatic
modality. Safa Önal (2002), one of the busiest scriptwriters of Turkish cinema, stated that
there were some fundamental texts that many Turkish films, in one or other way, relied
upon, such as Stella Dallas (d. King Vidor, 1937). Another busy scriptwriter, Bülent
Oran, said that Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is another such story, incessantly reproduced
by popular Turkish cinema (2002).
The director, Ertem Eğilmez, said that in one such case they first tried to make an
adaptation of Pygmalion, but they failed. In the meantime, they decided to have a look at
Mahmut Yesari’s novel Sürtük. Similar to Pygmalion, this novel was about a man who
decides to culturally educate a prostitute. Once he succeeds, the woman cheats on him
and eventually the man ends up alone. They also read Garson Kanin’s Dünkü Çocuk
(Born Yesterday) in which a journalist culturally educates a woman. Eventually, they
decide to follow these examples and eschew a happy ending (Eğilmez 1974, 18-19).
According to Agah Özgüç’s film dictionary, Eğilmez’s Sürtük (1965) is a combination of
Pygmalion and Charles Vidor’s 1955 film Love me or Leave me (1998, 277). In addition
to his 1967 sequel Sürtüğün Kızı (which according to Özgüç is a remake of King Vidor’s
1937 film Stella Dallas), Eğilmez also remade Sürtük in 1970 with different actors.
However, the “original” adaptation of Pygmalion in Turkish cinema, Sürtük (1942), was
made by the Czechoslovakian director Adolf Körner. Cemil Cahit of Yıldız magazine
noted at the time that this film might not be shown in theaters because of its similarity to
Hollywood’s Pygmalion (d. Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, 1938) which was then
playing at Turkish theaters (in Gürata 2001, 27). In the same year, Körner also made
another film, Kerem ile Aslı, based on a traditional love story and acted by two famous
singers of the time: Müzeyyen Senar and Malatyalı Fahri.
99
Although these films from the Second World War years are lost, the nuances they
involved point to aspects of a process of Turkification which includes a combination of
traditional forms, folk stories and performing arts, and rendering them with modern and
Western references. In short, there were various grades of Turkification, achieved
through successive alterations of the same themes. As Oran pointed out, the Turkification
of spy or crime stories often involved the addition of both a motivational “love story” and
a number of scenes with songs (2002). Yet among these different levels of Turkification,
there was only one (similar to the Turkification-from-above) that was appreciated by film
critics and historians: “true” domestications. Integral to their melodramatic character,
Turkified stories such as Pygmalion, Xavier de Montépin’s La Porteuse de Pain (The
Bread Peddler), and Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959) were not “true”
domestications involving the critical element of realism (Scognamillo 1973b, 70-71). To
be a “true” domestication, realism, again a Western form, had to be imported and
adapted.
The link between realism and melodrama is worth noting here. Peter Brooks’
study on the novels of Balzac and Henry James, The Melodramatic Imagination,
delineates melodrama as “a specifically modern mode, which evolves out of the loss of
pre-Enlightenment values and symbolic forms, in response to the psychic consequences
of the bourgeois social order, in which the social must be expressed as the personal”
(Gledhill 1987, 29). In a post-sacred modern society, melodrama fills a gap created by
secularization, individualization and westernization efforts such as those demarcated by
the positivist reforms of the Turkish Republic, which attempted to produce an
enlightenment-from-above. Much like the link between romance stories and the European
realist novel, while nineteenth century Ottoman novels took the style of Western novels,
they also utilized traditional love stories from both idealized folk tales and more down to
earth meddah (story-teller) stories and imitations (taklit). According to Berna Moran, folk
tales such as Kerem ile Aslı, Tahir ile Zühre, and Emrah ile Selvi, were composed of four
parts: “1. the start of a love between young woman and man, 2. the compulsory falling
apart of the lovers, 3. the struggle of lovers to get together, and 4. an ending with
marriage or the death of both” (1995, 24). The highest virtues in these stories are the utter
100
fidelity of lovers to each other, moralism, and that love ultimately prevails as a force over
everything. In early Turkish novels, writers like Ahmet Mithat and Şemsettin Sami aimed
to transform these stories into more realistic texts in line with the Western-style novels
that they were trying to write by adding analyses and information on human nature and
psychology (Moran 1995, 30). These novels introduced two types of women: one an
angel, victimized by love, and the other a femme fatale, victimizing for love. Moran
relates this to westernization and modernization by seeing the victimized woman as not
just victimized by the other characters in the novel, but also by the traditions and customs
that westernization efforts tried to eliminate. Moran also suggests that such characters
were not taken from Western novels but from traditional stories since Ottoman morality
and ethics frowned on extra-marital relationships and womanizers (1995, 35). Though
such novels might be read as opposing the patriarchal system, in them the romantic
elements of folk tales were restored at the end through the restoration of a heterosexual
relationship between the two characters with a Hollywood-style happy ending or with the
death of the lovers.
As noted in the previous chapter, these traditional stories had already been
utilized by shadow plays and theaters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
especially in Tuluat theater in which Western and Ottoman theaters were enmeshed. In
line with the histories of Western performing arts and literature which inherited
melodrama from earlier popular traditions, the late Ottoman rise of melodrama and
realism involved a combination of popular traditions and literature coupled with the
westernization of the arts. While Tuluat players or storytellers relied upon a generic
storyline and characters, they also had an improvisational aspect which the performers
modified during their performance. The generic aspects of these performances, later
adopted by Turkish films, may be considered in relation to the post-Enlightenment realist
tradition of capturing, representing, and changing the world in two ways: in relation to
the contrast between reform and restoration, or the positivist projects of westernization
and modernization of the republican establishment and the melodramatic reaction to
them; and through a view of melodrama as a modality inscribed in different genres of
popular cinema in Turkey.
101
3.4.3. Melodrama and Modernity
As Peter Brooks suggests, the relationship between melodrama and modernity is
tied to melodrama’s relation to the traditional or what preceded the modern, i.e.,
“melodrama’s search for something lost, inadmissible, repressed” (Gledhill 1987, 32).
The melodramatic imagination has a lot to do with this other side of modernity, which on
the one hand is continuously lost and repressed by projects, while on the other belongs to
the realm of masses rather than that of high art. However, this should not lead one to
conclude that the classical realist text is normative while the melodramatic is the
excessive element that disturbs the consistency of this text. This would be missing an
alternative view of melodrama which is seen as “a basic element of popular cinema”
(Williams 1998, 44). Instead, Brooks’s argument must be located as a response to the
Enlightenment’s projects, its modernism that was countered in the post-Enlightenment
era through a romantic reaction that aimed to restore the elements of truth and morality
that preceded the Enlightenment. Yet this is not about a binarism between progress and
regress, realism and melodrama. Instead, following Brooks, this is about the infusion of
the melodramatic into the realist novel and the persistence of the melodramatic side-byside with other modern forms, such as the coexistence of liberty and the libertine in an
Enlightenment framework. On a different level, such early melodramas of the late
eighteenth century also coincided with the rising bourgeois consciousness in a struggle
against feudal and aristocratic classes. By taking these characteristics as traits of prerevolutionary melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser noted that Restoration melodramas replaced
tragic endings with happy ones, and that “they reconciled the suffering individual to his
social position, by affirming an ‘open’ society…the victory of the ‘good’ citizen over
‘evil’ aristocrats, lecherous clergyman and even…the lumpen-proletariat, was re-enacted
in sentimental spectacles full of tears and high moral tones” (1987, 46). Elsaesser points
out that though coupled with conformism and submission, these melodramas still
conveyed political sympathies and indicated social evils. This contested existence and
experience of melodrama, including filmic melodrama, is ambivalent: “melodrama would
102
appear to function either subversively or as escapism – categories which are always
relative to the given historical and social context” (Elsaesser 1987, 47).
Although Brooks seems to contrast realist novels with melodrama by seeing both
as opposing parts of modernity, he actually traces a history which itself is marked by such
tensions. Like modernity, which carried contrasts integral to its existence, melodrama is
itself marked by such contrasts. Ben Singer argued that in film studies the links between
cinema and modernity have been constructed by what he called “the modernity thesis” of
some film scholars such as David Bordwell, Miriam Hansen, and Tom Gunning. There
are three components of this thesis: the similarity between film and urban experience; the
interaction between the novelties brought by modernity; and the changes modernity has
caused in human perception. Criticizing the reductive character of Bordwell’s modernity
thesis, Singer also underscores the importance of the similarity between early filmgoers
and urban modernity by noting elements such as strong impressions, visceral stimulation,
speed, spatiotemporal fragmentation and juxtaposition, abruptness, and mobility (2001).
Though Singer does not elaborate much on the shortcomings of a method of similarities,
and criticizes the inability of formalist attempts to present a complete picture, he relates
melodrama to six basic aspects of modernity: “modernization, rationality, discontinuity,
mobility, individualism, and stimulation” (2001, 35).
As part of this examination, Singer discusses Baudelaire’s famous article “The
Painter in Modern Life,” in which Baudelaire talked about modernity as “ephemeral,
fugitive, and contingent,” thereby setting it against the other half of art, which he deems
“eternal and unchangeable.” Singer, who discusses “The Painter in Modern Life” instead
of “The Painter of Modern Life,” only takes the ephemeral, contingent, and fugitive
aspect of modernity by turning it into a fuzzy novelty, without having a look at the other
side of modernity. As Stanley Cavell points out, Baudelaire talks about modernist
painting, in particular that of the realists such as Courbet and Manet, who were asked to
make “these natural and historical and phenomenological transformations” that involved
new “attirements, physiques, posture, gaits and nudity” (1979, 42). But Cavell asks: “why
was he (and it is the poet Baudelaire in question) willing to forgo serious art in favor of
modest draftsmanship?” Baudelaire’s “despair of happiness,” “disgust with officially
103
made-up substitutes” of paintings, and his estrangement from the present and the past
lead him to the wish for photography and motion pictures: “the wish for that specific
simultaneity of presence and absence which only the cinema will satisfy” (1979, 42). As
Cavell points out, Baudelaire was “the prophet of the modern,” “perverse and
superficial,” and he chose dandies, fashion, cosmetics, crowds, women and courtesans,
all of which became parts of the stories of cinema. For Cavell, cinema, taken as a
medium through which someone makes sense, is also about discovering ways of making
sense. Once filmmakers started to speak this language, there was no longer anything
unknown. Cinema came with the persistence of what Cavell, with reference to Panofsky,
called “‘fixed iconography’ – the well-remembered types of the Vamp and the Straight
Girl…the Family Man and the Villain” (1979, 33). Aside from not sharing Panofsky’s
presupposition about the public, who would grow accustomed to and then leave behind
such devices, Cavell noted that these types were integral to cinema’s way of creating
individuals who are not individuals but individualities: “For what makes someone a type
is not his similarity with other members of that type but his striking separateness from
other people” (1979, 33). These individualities inflect mood, release fantasy, and they
exist through repeated incarnations.
Cavell’s view of cinema, as a photographic medium whose subject is reality, is
also related to a crosscurrent which puts forward the capacity of the medium to magically
reproduce the world. For him, we connect with the world “through viewing it, or having
views of it” and viewing a movie makes this “automatic, takes the responsibility for it out
of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes
into fantasy, but because they provide relief from private fantasy and its responsibilities”
(1979, 102). For Cavell, movies, as successions of automatic world projections, avoided
the consciousness and seriousness of modernism. But this is more complicated in
Cavell’s postscript to his book, The World Viewed, where he suggests that “movies from
the beginning have existed in two states, one modern, one traditional, sometimes running
parallel to and at varying distances from one another, sometimes crossing, sometimes
interweaving” (1979, 219). Cavell does not deny the possibility of the absence of a
relationship between cinema and modernism, yet he sees movies as myth, and in this, as
104
inherently anarchic, thus not reducible to the consciousness and rationality of modernist
projects. “Their unappeasable appetite for stories of love is for stories in which
love…must find its own community, apart from…society at large” (Cavell 1979, 214).
Thus the myth of movies is about a human gathering which does not belong to society
(gesellschaft), but to some “origins and comprehension which lies behind the grasp of
human history and arbitration.” For Cavell, the experience of movies is what the
spectator consents to in front of a movie; it is in that myth of democracy, that becomes
livable in the land of romance – not in the land of secular politics or of American
literature.
It is this aspect of movies that belongs to the melodramatic modality of popular
cinemas. It is what is left from gemeinschaft – which runs parallel to gesellschaft.
Yeşilçam relies on a coexistence of the traditional and the modern, on a carnivalesque
ground where different members of the filmgoing community share a communal sense of
transgression. As family entertainment, spectatorship in the 1960s and the early 1970s
involved partaking of pathos, laughter, and noise. It is what modernism (i.e., the
republican reform projects) could not altogether eradicate or repress, like the drama of the
primal scene. As Brooks notes, “melodrama refuses repression,” a repression also broken
by its own narrative, in such “moments where repressed content returns as recognition, of
the deepest relations of life, as in the celebrated voix du sang (‘You! My father!’), and of
moral identities (‘So you are the author of all my wrongs!’)” (1994, 19). Brooks views
melodrama as invested in the spectacular and sensational but with a silent revelation of
good and evil. This fight between villain and hero, between types as individualities,
constitutes the dramatic narration of melodrama which is “a mise-en-scène whose system
of figuration is caught between restoration and reform” (Browne 1994, 168). Modernity,
as with its culture industries and class-based ideological positions, functions through
those projects which distinguish between high and low culture, reform and restoration,
and progress and regress. As noted above, linear models of modernization, such as those
of Lewis and Lerner, see modernity as a model that may be achieved through continuous
development and progress and through the complete elimination of the traditional.
However, much like the dramatic narration of melodrama, Yeşilçam is also caught
105
between restoration and reform, progress and regress – in a constant state of transition.
Turkification, as translation and transformation (for better or worse), emerges from
transition that cannot be fixed in a rational path of linear progression, and thus that is
excluded from the republican reform projects. In other words, Yeşilçam’s Turkification
was not prescribed by the republican elite; it was not a Turkification-from-above.
3.4.4. Melodramatic Modality
The second aspect of melodrama, as modality, might be thought a founding
element of popular cinema, in this case, Yeşilçam. Historically, melodrama originated in
two different renderings of opera: “In France the idea that music might be interpolated
between passages of speech to indicate what characters were feeling and representing
pantomimically” (Wickham 1992, 184). Jean Jacques Rousseau borrowed this sense of
melodrama to describe his monologue Pygmalion (1771). A second rendering of the term
emerged in Germany: Jean Brandes and Georg Benda “applied the term to their Ariadne
auf Naxos (1775), where speech was backed by music to heighten the emotional quality
of the scene” (Wickham 1992, 184). Both of these early renderings then evolved into
various theatrical practices in Europe. There, a newly rising entertainment practice
composed of new places for entertainment such as taverns or pleasure gardens come
together with various performances including songs, dances, and other spectacles. Glynne
Wickham noted that morality (virtue of the common man and the happy ending that
rewards the good against the evil), the spirit of revolution (Rousseau’s noble savage and
the lower-class fantasy of upward mobility or revolt), romantic novels (an inherently
good hero tortured in the dungeons of Gothic castles by their evil owners, serving for the
visual enrichment of the spectacle), and circuses (spectacles of epic size imitating those
of the ancient Roman amphitheaters as well as with other fairground attractions) came
into play in this general picture of melodrama. Gilbert de Pixérécourt merged such
elements of melodrama with scenic marvels of circuses, a large orchestra, stereotyped
situations, characterizations of circus tableaux, intrigues, and sensationalism which was
later adapted by Anglophone writers both in Britain and the United States. His work also
106
included one more contribution made to melodrama which came with the fantasy of
pioneers advancing to the Western frontier coupled with a gold rush that gave melodrama
a moral framework: “the spectacular reversals of fortune which acquisition, or loss, of
this precious metal could itself effect, coupled with the part that women could play in
precipitating such reversals” (Wickham 1992, 189).
Melodrama, then, came about as a part of popular entertainment practices of the
modern era. Maintaining this sentimental and spectacular aspect of entertainment, it
entered into the world of cinema. However, it is not totally stripped of its earlier
characteristics. Instead it carries traces of not only a transformation from tradition to
modernity, but also pre-cinematic entertainment forms that involve theaters, fairground
attractions, and carnivals. Moreover, film melodrama is not just limited to a specific
genre of women’s or family melodramas. Instead it was more like a parasitical term that
coexisted with a variety of other genres by supplying them with pathos, action, laughter,
and a moralistic story. Taken in this line, melodrama is not a “pure” or “proper” genre
that is fixable at a specific time and place. Following Russell Merritt’s article,
“Melodrama: Postmortem for a Phantom Genre,” Rick Altman likens melodrama to a
phantom genre and notes: “melodrama is a slippery and evolving category” (Altman
1999, 71). In the early years of American cinema, melodrama developed in association
with a variety of genres which intermingled pathos, romance, domesticity, action,
adventure, and thrills. In this respect, as the basic elements of melodrama, “Richard
Koszarski emphasizes the villain-hero-heroine triangle, true-to-type characters, and
visually powerful dramatic confrontations” (in Altman 1999, 72). Such a characterization
of melodrama is not very different from the relationship noted above between melodrama
in theater and in literature that carried elements of popular entertainment and modernity.
Melodrama, then, can be seen as a “cultural form inherited from the nineteenth-century
stage, in tension with and transformed by realism and the more realist techniques of
cinema” (Williams 1998, 50). This is also relevant for Yeşilçam, which not only inherited
a similar literary and theatrical tradition, but also was transformed by the modernist
reform programs by eventually stitching those together in its modality.
107
Early film melodrama, in the period of silent cinema and early sound film in the
United States, was not limited to a specific genre but was a term coexisting with other
genres: Western melodrama, crime melodrama, sex melodrama, mystery melodrama, and
comedy melodrama. What came with later film melodrama – family melodrama,
woman’s film or weepies – was built upon this intricate net of contradictions and
ambivalences in melodrama. Melodrama, as a modality, and as Yeşilçam, was a mode of
storytelling which promised sensation, excitement, and continuous motivation in the fight
between good and evil presented with a spectacular mise-en-scène and with
sentimentality and morality which realigns the melodramatic with a “realistic” message.
“It is this basic sense of melodrama as a modality of narrative with a high quotient of
pathos and action to which we need to attend if we are to confront the most fundamental
appeal of movies” (Williams 1998, 51). As noted above with reference to Cavell, it is this
“appeal of movies” that does not belong to the world of a post-Enlightenment secular
society, but of a community that found itself in modernity, a myth of an egalitarian
community that is livable in the land of romance. It is this sense of Yeşilçam that has
been nostalgically reiterated in contemporary Turkey. But what is this sense of
melodrama or of Yeşilçam? What is the melodramatic modality of Yeşilçam?
Discussions on melodramatic modality (or on melodrama as a phantom genre),
which grows with and persists in other genres, are based on a re-vision of the history of
early cinema. In her article “Melodrama Revised,” Linda Williams traces various studies
concerning American cinema in the first half of the twentieth century by first referring to
Tom Gunning’s rendering of the term “attraction,” borrowed from Sergei Eisenstein.
Gunning’s reading of early film spectatorship considers a combination of narrativity with
spectacles and emotions, differentiating it from the linear narrative described in The
Classical Hollywood Cinema of David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger.
As Williams points out, Staiger’s recent studies introduce a coexistence of narrativity and
spectacle that present sites for the emotional response of all of its spectators regardless of
their class backgrounds. In this manner, Staiger distances herself from the formalist
rendering of a linear and continuous narrative, enmeshed in a presupposition of the fields
of excess or subversion, which are read as flaws of or deviations from the linear narrative
108
of classical realism. According to Williams, a third argument questioning the dominance
of the classical comes from Rick Altman who argues that melodrama involves
“ephemeral spectacle, showmanship and moments of artistic motivation,” all of which
leading to an admiration of the show, beyond the classic text’s “cause-effect linear
progress toward narrative resolution” (1998, 57).
Williams traces melodramatic modality in various films ranging from D. W.
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919) to social issue films,
(Salt of the Earth, d. Herbert Biberman, 1954), action films (First Blood, d. Ted
Kotcheff, 1982) and blockbusters (Schindler’s List, d. Steven Spielberg, 1993). Williams
equates the melodramatic character of Schindler’s List with false consciousness that
relieved Americans and Germans from their guilt by identifying with the moral good of
the ordinary people personified by Schindler. By articulating Peter Brooks’ argument
about melodrama which underlined the retrieval of innocence and good in a post-sacred
world where such moral and traditional binds were lost, Williams claimed: “However,
what we think and what we feel at the ‘movies’ are often two very different things. We
go to the movies not to think but to be moved” (1998, 61). Williams’ reading of the
melodramatic modality in relation to false consciousness may lead one to dismiss film as
“movie” and cinema as “entertainment” by retreating to a more familiar contradiction that
has been embedded in film criticism and filmgoing for a long time. But beyond that
contradiction, as noted above, the myth of democracy and freedom lies at the heart of the
melodramatic modality – a romance of utopian social existence where justice and
equality prevail.
After articulating a need to revise or reconsider melodrama, Linda Williams offers
five basic melodramatic features that may be traced in films from different genres and
times. She reaches the first feature of melodramatic modality through a reading of D. W.
Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), a film about the mythic world of melodrama that
begins and ends in a space of innocence. Following Brooks, she argues that the film
creates its own idyllic mise-en-scène of nostalgia and conservatism. “Nostalgia for a lost
innocence associated with the maternal suffuses this film. Pathos arises, most
fundamentally, from the audience’s awareness of this loss” (Williams 1998, 65). The
109
second feature of melodrama is its focus on virtuous victim-heroes through a story,
according to Elsaesser, told from the point of view of the victim-heroes. Third,
“melodrama appears modern by borrowing from realism, but realism serves the
melodramatic passion and action” (Williams 1998, 67). Here, with reference to Christine
Gledhill, Williams notes that melodrama is tied to the past, unlike realism which searches
for a renewed truth and stylistic innovation. Fourth, “melodrama involves a dialectic of
pathos and action – a give and take of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time’” (Williams
1998, 69). Finally, in line with Brooks’ argument, “melodrama presents characters who
embody primary psychic roles organized in Manichaean conflicts between good and evil”
(Williams 1998, 77). Then, Williams ties melodrama to a specific articulation of
American democracy. The myth of a democracy, based on equality and freedom, is based
on middle-class morality which envisages a Manichean conflict in which good always
wins. Thus the polarities articulated in the film’s narrative serve a double purpose. While
such a moral polarization helps the narrative construction of action or pathos, the
resolution is aligned through a happy ending which promotes conventional morality and
an insistence on inherent innocence and goodness. As indicated above, such values and
morality underpin the secular, bourgeois characteristics of melodrama. But does such a
modern capitalist frame have a particular national reference that is limitable to the
American case, or does melodramatic modality have a comparable relevance in different
national contexts?
3.4.5. Is There a Nationality of Melodramatic Modality?
The melodramatic modality might be viewed as related to various national
identities and traditions inscribed in the forms of nationalization and modernization. The
convergence of the nation-state and modernization involved not only the development of
national culture and identity, but also the effects of modernization itself: mass education,
urbanization and migration, mass communication and culture, industrialization,
bureaucracy and policing, modern professions, nuclear family, and individualism and
consumerism in capitalist societies, as well as the amplification of non-aristocratic class
110
distinctions. Following Ernest Gellner, nationalism is not related to an inferable
consciousness and rationality but to an invention of them, a projection of a nationality
onto a community regardless of its heterogeneity and differences (1983). For Benedict
Anderson this invention involves the self-definition of nations as imagined political
communities which are limited and sovereign (1991). While an imaginary communion is
supposed to be shared by all members of a nation despite their inequality and differences,
such ties construct imaginary fraternity and equality for all. Nations are invented but real,
imagined but practiced, and pure yet rife with conflict. Nation-building involved the
cultural constituents of modernity with a secular state apparatus, legal system, language,
and education, which led to the creation of a high and proper and thus a canonical culture
of the nation as distinct from the culture of past. Yet the imaginary bind of nations
emerges through that which is lost in the process, a sense of community and ethnic
communion outside the rationalist and materialist world of modern societies. This
mythical origin is what is supposed to bind the nation together. Linda Williams’
argument about the democratic character of melodrama in the American context
resonates with a myth of “representational” democracy articulated in a unitary
nationality. Melodrama, if taken as coincident with democracy, not only conveys the
claims of innocence and purity attached to a national identity (which Williams associates
with Americanness), but also inadvertently makes these claims for nationalism itself.
Contrary to Williams’ nationalization of melodrama, melodrama can instead be
understood as part and parcel of the process of purification, pitting us against them and
good against evil that makes up the drama of nation-building, through which its violence
and crime became coded as good and thereby erased.
Thus, instead of reading melodrama as a distinctively American modality in the
footsteps of Linda Williams, and by reading it as a rhizomatic modality that shares the
same garden with other modern and national cultures, and that persists in this garden of
high and proper cultured plants and flowers, it may be possible to view melodrama’s
“coup” as persisting and spreading everywhere, not just in the gardens of Americanness.
If one may talk about a pragmatics of story telling, the melodramatic modality is right at
the heart of such a practice. Melodrama came with modernity; it belongs to a greater
111
picture of the modern era, and it is coupled with its own contradictions and transitions.
The break with the past and tradition that is proposed by modernist projects created
various discontinuities and seizures – yet it was unable to remove them completely in
terms of culture and arts. In this respect, melodramatic modality indicates the failures of
modernist projects of high and proper culture. At the same time, although it is initially
tied to a bourgeois revolt against the aristocratic palace gardens which Bacon praised, it
later was also deemed as not useful to bourgeois gardens, or to public gardens and parks
of modernist projects. Melodrama and couch grass do not, in the non-Western world,
belong in the world of modern projects because nobody grows it because it is crabgrass.
It exists by not belonging. It grows spontaneously and persists on its own. It is because of
this presence through exclusion that melodrama is particularly vital in geographies other
than those of the Western cinemas such as Japanese and Mexican cinemas (Elsaesser
1987), Chinese cinema (Browne 1994), Egyptian cinema (Shafik 1998) or Bollywood
(Vasudevan 2000).
As noted, cinema was left out of the republican national reform program and its
modernization and westernization projects in the field of arts. While this project brought
about its own patterns of Turkification-from-above, or the translation and application of
Western sociopolitical patterns into a national context, it was also set as the prime
example of a high and proper culture. As I have argued, there were a number of
proponents of this project among the filmmakers and film critics. Moreover, though the
republican reform programs might be taken as not completely successful in the field of
music or other arts, these projects were nonetheless successful in their creation of
multiple types of cultural life. The republican project was not directly concerned with the
coexistence of a variety of cultural and artistic practices side by side, but with denoting a
single, true and proper path of modernization and westernization. Therefore the
melodramatic modality of Yeşilçam cinema with its aspects of hayal and Turkification
became eloquent in its relation to the republican cultural project: it offered not only an
ambivalent and alternative “Turkification” with all of its political and national disputes, it
also belonged to that imaginary world of nationality that the republican establishment
attempted to create through imposition from above. Integral to its melodramatic modality
112
and its national and democratic myth, Yeşilçam cinema also presented a hayal (dream,
imagination, mirror, specter, and shadow) of Turkification which is simultaneously
traditional and modern, Eastern and Western. As a result, Yeşilçam’s melodramatic
modality must be viewed with reference to not just its Turkification and hayal, but also in
a general context of modernity and nationality, both of which resonate with the
melodramatic modality of Hollywood or other national cinemas which involve a morality
and ethics of good and evil, myths of democracy, rationality and romanticism, a nostalgia
for lost innocence, a dialectic of pathos and action, spectacular and sensational
attractions, types or individualities, dramatic conflicts and spectacular reversals of
fortune, intrigues, and triangles of hero, heroine, and villain.
How, then, did films of the later decades of Yeşilçam take up these issues and
move forward in a way in tune with both republican ideologies and popular tastes? As
will become clear in the following chapter, the complexities of balancing conceptual
frameworks with economic and technological exigencies created a language and aesthetic
inherent to Yeşilçam films and divergent from the desire of so many filmmakers and
critics to emulate examples often seen as “better.”
113
CHAPTER 4
YEŞİLÇAM I: INDUSTRY AND DUBBING
4.1. Yeşilçam’s Hayal
The rise of Yeşilçam cinema to a dominant position within the Turkish national
market during the 1960s and 1970s has generally been read as having a commercial and
popular cinematic appeal with an opiate effect on the masses. However, when
reexamined it also appears to contain a resistive potential, both against the West as
represented by Hollywood, and by the republican establishment intent on reproducing
itself and the country in the guise of the West. In this regard, the key issues of the
interdisciplinary character of film studies identified by Gledhill and Williams in the
introduction of the anthology Reinventing Film Studies are particularly relevant in terms
of what they identify as “the massness of cinema,” film as both a “sensory” and a
“significatory” medium, and the conception of cinema as constituting an “alternative
public sphere.” Through these tropes, this chapter will consider cinema’s mediation
between rationality and romanticism, meaning and feeling, attraction, spectacle, and
entertainment at the same time as business and education. Thus it becomes possible to
reconsider Yeşilçam cinema in terms of its ambivalent response to westernization and
modernization, siding with it and against it simultaneously. Gledhill and Williams
propose a new perception of “the significance of the ‘image’ and ‘imaginary’ as sites of
cultural construction,” (2001, 2) thus requiring a rethinking of cinema at the heart of the
social imaginary, relocated in the complexity of cultural forms, practices, and effects.
This chapter will look at how Yeşilçam presented a path of Turkification entangled with
114
the hayal and the melodramatic modality of a popular cinema in its translation and
transformation of modernity and that which constitutes ‘the West’.
In order to recognize the elements of this cultural construction, it becomes
imperative to maintain the relationship between tradition and modernization as mediated
by hayal. As noted in the previous chapters, hayal is image, imaginary, dream, mirror,
specter, shadow or wayang. Hayal thereby also denotes popular cinema in Turkey in its
complexity and ambiguity. The use of the word hayal, derived from Arabic, is telling in
relation to successive republican projects of purification of the Turkish language. Under
the guise of this purification, many new words were created in order to replace their
Arabic or Persian counterparts which had been in common use until the republican
reforms. As a result of the reforms, a large set of words came to replace the various
connotations of hayal. For instance, the use of görüntü or imge and imgelem, for image
and imagination, is not an innocent process of Turkification. Instead it indicates through a
practice of Turkification-from-above how the republican projects turned their faces to the
West for inspiration, replacing earlier identities related to the East – the Ottoman Empire
and Islam – with notions derived from the West as if they had never existed in earlier
Turkish culture – as if the word hayal itself had been but a dream. On the other hand, the
uses of düş for dream and gölge for shadow from old, Central Asian Turkish bring to
mind the other end of the republican project, based on the replacement of an originary
folk identity stemming from Anatolia and/or Central Asia outside the world of Ottoman
Islamic identity. The play of the remaining two meanings of hayal, ayna as mirror and
hayalet as specter, are two words for which the republican language reforms failed to
prevail in modern usage. Instead ayna is a Persian word, while hayalet is an Arabic word.
In the field of language, the republican intellectuals deemed Persian and Arabic as
Eastern. Yet words such as these kept haunting the projects as reflections in a mirror
which does not tell lies.
Considered together, the use of all of these words in contemporary Turkish is
intricately embedded in a politics of language which lays out the complexity and
coexistence of many things side by side in republican Turkey. In the relationship between
language and power, purified Turkish words belong to the world of Kemalism, while
115
Arabic and Persian words which were commonly used in the Ottoman language may
belong at times to an anti-Kemalist, often Islamist political stance. My use of hayal is not
related to any of these positions per se. Instead I use it here to lay out the intricacies and
complexities of signification and sensation in a republican context where various choices
in the field of culture are taken to mean more than what they are, by bringing to light
various concerns about the relation between being politically correct and using language.
In this study, hayal may be taken to denote all this multitude of meanings, without
making a claim to any of those political stances, but acknowledging them. Much like
Yeşilçam cinema, which found itself in the middle of such debates at its apogee, an
analysis of the term, hayal, underlines a similar interplay of hegemonic claims to which
cinema was exposed, as well as the ambivalence of the responses and practices of
filmmakers within such a context. Intermingled with this multitude of ambivalent identity
claims, the commercial and industrial requirements of Yeşilçam cinema aimed to
translate various inputs into its profitable tactics. In this respect, Kemalism or Islamism
and morality or sex necessarily entered into the frame of Yeşilçam’s filmmaking. This
filmmaking thereby produced images of a rhizomatic existence and a social imaginary
marked by an often-repressed ambiguity of identities.
The effects of Yeşilçam cannot be comprehended in isolation from the perennial
contradictions and uprooted systems produced by Turkish politics, in which intense
nationalism has often discriminated against those deemed as other within the country, in
which radical republican reforms have coexisted with conservative and Islamic powers,
and in which three military interventions – in 1960, 1971, and 1980 – have interrupted
and mediated the production of national discourses both by government and at the
grassroots. Erik Jan Zürcher called this period the Second Turkish Republic – between
the 1960 military intervention which ended the First Turkish Republic (established in
1923) and ending with the 1980 military intervention (1994, 253). The Second Republic
introduced a new, more liberal Constitution in 1961 that remained in effect until 1982. In
terms of film production, Yeşilçam’s best years took place between the military
interventions of 1960 and 1980. In this period, the number of feature films made was in
excess of 3500, over half of the films made in the history of Turkish cinema. While at the
116
beginning and end of this period, the number of films made was around 100 per year, this
number peaked with around 300 films at the time of the 1971 military intervention.
During these years, the film industry worked smoothly, with a defined network of
production, distribution, and exhibition. Despite the political upheavals and ambivalence
that characterized these decades, Yeşilçam was able to thrive as a popular, mass medium
because of the ability of cinema to produce a dual presentation of sense and meaning and
because of its creation of an alternative public sphere of hayal against and within the real
public sphere of politics.
In this chapter, I will try to deal with this complexity on two levels. Following a
periodization of Yeşilçam’s golden age, I will start with Yeşilçam’s system of
production, distribution and consumption. Then I will examine the practice of dubbing or
post-synchronization as a Turkified tactic of Yeşilçam’s filmmaking practice. In this
respect, I will first talk about how the process of filmmaking started at one table and
ended on another: that is, how the decision-making process and its dynamics determined
the conditions of preproduction, and how the postproduction of film marked by dubbing
produced the knot that holds together Yeşilçam with Turkification and hayal.
4.2. The Periodization of Yeşilçam’s Golden Age
Had Turkey’s everyday life not been interrupted by the 1960 coup, it might have
been possible to conceive of Yeşilçam as beginning immediately after World War II and
developing gradually in concert with Turkey’s multiparty democracy. However, both the
violence of the 1960 intervention itself – resulting in the execution of the political leaders
of the Democratic Party – and the constitution instituted by the same military regime the
following year radically changed the possibilities available for Yeşilçam and for Turkey
as a whole. The military represented statist Kemalism, while, throughout the 1950s, the
DP represented a more populist path towards modernization and westernization which
was more open to the preservation of the conservative, Islamic identity of the masses.
While the military claimed to be outside of party politics, the coup was a clear rejection
of the incorporation of such populism into the programs of top-down reform.
117
Nonetheless, despite its fervent nationalism and moderate Islamism, it was also the DP
that promised a millionaire in every neighborhood and the creation of Turkey as a small
America under the patronage of the US during the cold war. While the 1960 military
intervention attempted to “restore order” by putting an end to Democratic Party rule, it
also slowed down the capitalist wave of economic liberalization. This is closely related to
a dynamic between central and peripheral political forces which were continuously at
play in Yeşilçam’s filmic narratives: the Democratic Party, which to some extent
represented peripheral traditionalist and conservative forces, started to threaten the
reformist Kemalist center. However, this should not be seen as a clash between
westernization and anti-westernization, or modernization and anti-modernization. Instead
both political forces shared the dream of westernization and modernization and but what
was at stake was the control over the locus of power, the center, and the ways of realizing
their dreams. The irony of the military intervention was that while the Kemalist center
yearned for a bureaucratic and technocratic government, the Western examples which led
them always reminded them of the necessity of the creation of a democratic political
world which eventually brought the peripheral forces closer to the dominance of center
by the politicians. It was also during the 1960s that migration and socioeconomic
modernization of the peripheral forces became more visible in the center or in urban
areas. During the 1960s, Turkish political life was also faced with novel challenges with
unions and other civil societal organizations demanding socioeconomic equality and with
socialist parties represented in parliament. All of these found their way into filmic
narratives by producing novel themes in the genre of social realism. Such films often
took up issues of migration, yet also constructed a melodramatic fantasy of vertical class
movement. Although Yeşilçam has generally been considered a cinema of escape, such
films show that it was not at all irresponsive to the socioeconomic and political
conditions of the country, nor did it disregard the hegemonic power relations of the state,
filmmakers or its audience. Even though it was limited, the political liberalization of the
1960s played an important role in the growth of Yeşilçam.
Even though the year of the coup, 1971, coincided with Yeşilçam’s peak years, it
also cut through Turkey’s political and social life yet again. Generally regarded as a more
118
right wing intervention than its predecessor, the 1971 intervention was basically a
military memorandum asking for the resignation of the government. It was followed by
elections rather than by military governance, but did not stop there and ultimately led to
the execution of three leftist guerillas and a violent and bloody hunt for other leftist
factions in the country. These aftereffects had a powerful resonance in the world of
cultural production. This is reflected by shifts in Yeşilçam’s production pattern, with an
initial rise in low-budget production that ultimately led towards a decline in both the
quantity and purported quality of the films. Much as the increasing politicization of the
masses in the late 1960s came to an end in 1971, another such politicization and era of
violent interactions among left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist political groups in the late
1970s came to an end with the 1980 military intervention. This coup led to a halt in
political life and greatly diminished the number of films made in the country under the
governance of a three-year junta. While the 1961 constitution was only slightly modified
following the 1971 military intervention, the military junta decided to create a new
constitution in 1982, thus starting the period of the Third Republic (Zürcher 1994). This
constitution reduced political rights and freedoms, aiming to limit separatist movements,
especially those of Kurds, leftists, and Islamic radicals. After jailing many and executing
some of the political activists of the late 1970s, the junta placed a ban on the political
parties and leaders of the late 1970s which remained in effect until 1987. In 1983,
elections were held to choose Turkey’s Prime Minister and new ruling party, while the
office of the Presidency was secured by the leader of the junta. This complex era framing
Yeşilçam’s peak and decline cannot be separated from the workings of the industry itself.
The period of the Second Republic saw, on the one hand, internal migration and
an increased visibility of peripheral forces in urban centers, and on the other, the
emigration of guest workers first to Germany after their invitation in 1961, and later to
other European countries. Immigration was a result of slow economic and industrial
growth which was protective and subsidiary and insufficient to compensate for large
population increase. Both population and industrial growth in Turkey were very high
during this period. By 1960, the 1923 population of Turkey had more than doubled,
reaching 28 million; by 1980, it reached 45 million. A new way of life and
119
Americanization came to be a reality of Turkish culture in the 1950s, particularly in
urban centers among the upper middle-class. Starting in the 1950s, the U.S. government,
often in collaboration with NATO, established a number of military bases in Turkey to
monitor the Soviet Union. For example, the first Coca-Cola plant in Turkey opened in
Istanbul in 1964. Television broadcasting started in 1968 in Ankara, and then in 1971 in
Istanbul. However, Americanization was also countered by anti-American sentiment
especially voiced by leftist groups and organizations. But with the rise of television,
especially after the start of state television’s national broadcasting in 1974, not only did
the world of filmmaking change but also Americanization found a new niche, through
U.S. television series and films.
All of these developments had enormous effects on cinema. With increasing
urbanization and modernization of the Second Republic, cinema became one of the main
avenues of entertainment for families. As an entertainment industry, film’s dominance
persisted during the 1960s and 1970s, only waning as a result of the competition from
television in the late 1970s. According to Özön, while seven tickets per person were
bought annually in 1970, this number fell to under one per person by 1985. He also notes
that while the total number of tickets sold in 1970 was almost 250 million and the total
number of televisions in the same year was 30 thousand, by 1984 total ticket sales
decreased to 56 million and the total number of television sets increased to 7 million.
Starting in 1982, more foreign than domestic films were seen in theaters (1995, 50). In
1973 and 1974, it started to be widely reported that theater owners, unhappy with ticket
revenues, were starting to search for other options (“Seyircisizlik…” 1974, 63). The most
immediate solutions involved turning some centrally located theaters into small shopping
malls or closing them down entirely. While this was the solution fostered by theater
owners, it was of little use to filmmakers who wanted to continue producing films. The
decline of family spectatorship led filmmakers to augment the doses of action and sex in
their films in order to attract male spectators in urban centers. This led to the rise of a
previously nonexistent genre of sex films with a specific visual makeup and pattern of
spectatorship. This option was increasingly exploited in the second half of the 1970s.
While many analysts of Yeşilçam have considered the sex film industry as aberrant from
120
Yeşilçam’s earlier patterns, these sex films maintained many of the elements of Yeşilçam
in terms of both filmmaking and filmic texts. Moreover, as I will elaborate later, though
the practice of film distribution changed drastically with the introduction of videotapes in
the 1980s, Yeşilçam persisted. Although in a different medium and form, television series
in the 1990s and today continue to reproduce such basic elements of Yeşilçam’s
melodramatic modality.
The transformations and changes in filmmaking in the mid-1970s have led some
to situate the golden years of Yeşilçam between 1960 and 1974 (Abisel 1994), while
others have suggested different periodizations based on auteur directors and the changes
in the language of filmmaking. Thus Nijat Özön suggests that the period of filmmakers
was between 1950 and 1970, while the period between 1970 and 1987 was the period of
‘young’ or ‘new’ cinema (1995a). Like Özön, Giovanni Scognamillo talks about a period
of “inflationary” filmmaking, because the number of films made was excessive, but
locates this period separately, between 1960 and 1986. A further periodization is offered
by Alim Şerif Onaran (1994 and 1995). Onaran followed Özön’s periodization by
considering the following periods: an early period between 1896 and 1938, the year of
the death of Mustafa Kemal; the period of transition between 1938 and 1952; and the
period of filmmakers between 1952 and 1963. In addition, Onaran dated the period of
new Turkish cinema between 1963 and 1980, while he later added a further contemporary
Turkish cinema period between 1980 and 1994. While Onaran’s periodizations are
mostly inspired by political markers, it is interesting that he does not put forward 1960 as
a turning point. Instead he offers 1963 as the date of the preparation of a law concerning
cinema in particular, as well as changes in the films of particular directors. The literature
on Turkish cinema in the English language repeats the periods set by Özön. Writers such
as Ayşe Franko (1987), the Turkish film critic Atilla Dorsay (1989), and Yusuf Kaplan
follow Özön’s periodization, using its staple elements: the eras of theater-makers,
transition, and filmmakers (1996). In a recent piece by Nezih Erdoğan and Deniz Göktürk
(2001), Özön’s periodization is again reproduced as these writers situate Yeşilçam’s
specific mode of production between mid-1960s and mid-1970s, though they do not
delve into the characteristics of this mode.
121
Rather than using formal divisions stemming from film production itself, I
suggest that a sound history of Yeşilçam needs to address the period of the Second
Republic as a key to understand both sociopolitical and cinematic transformations in
Turkey. Undoubtedly, as a form of popular filmmaking, Yeşilçam had its best years in
commercial and artistic terms during the 1960s and 1970s. While the specific dates that
different writers suggest may differ, all of the film historians cited above participate in
nostalgically remembering a golden age of a naïve and innocent filmic world of
melodramatic modality. They seem to forget that this world actually belonged to two
decades of intense sociopolitical change. Yeşilçam films, which continue to be consumed
by spectators through various television channels (some of which show little but these
films), now stand for a bygone era. Framed by nostalgia, this era is marked by the
innocence of not belonging to the global and modern world of capitalism that has altered
Turkey with increasing rapidity since the 1980s. One website about Yeşilçam starts with
these words: “We miss (open air) summer film theaters, wooden chairs, sunflower seeds,
sodas, a different film everyday… Long live the romanticism of Cinema Paradiso”
(http://www.geocities.com/eski45/sinema.html). It is interesting to note that in this casual
quote, memory of a local phenomenon occurs through a foreign film based on a similar
sense of nostalgia. Similarly, Abisel notes that the 1960s and the early 1970s were the
“happy years of Turkish cinema” (1994, 98). Such an image and imagination of
happiness, romanticism, innocence and purity disregards the very impure social and
political history that frames it. These were years of the often-violent socioeconomic
transformation of Turkey, marked by military interventions and political oscillations and
violence. Turkish modernization had accelerated during this period through numerous
factors: the expansion of mass education, mass communication, and culture; import
substitution based industrialization; urbanization, migration and immigration; the
advance of the nuclear family and individualism; and consumerism within an
increasingly capitalist economic system slowly replacing the state-centered planned
economy. All of this resulted in the amplification of class distinctions. While the era of
the First Republic might be viewed in terms of sociopolitical modernization, the era of
the Second Republic brought about more of a socioeconomic modernization entangled
122
with capitalism. However, both processes of modernization and westernization were far
from complete. Instead, a third process started after the 1980 military intervention with a
new constitution in 1982, which gave way to a more authoritarian power structure
coupled with de-politicization, privatization of the economy, and the integration of
Turkey into the global capitalist system, especially during the 1990s. All of these
produced various consequences in mass culture and entertainment, as well as a nostalgia
for the “happy,” “pure,” and “innocent” years of popular filmmaking in the 1960s and
1970s. Perhaps rather than looking through such rose-colored glasses, it might be useful
for the moment to look at Yeşilçam’s system of production, exhibition, and consumption
and how this produced an industry of popular or commercial cinema in Turkey.
4.3. The Popular Film Industry
4.3.1. Toward a Working System of Production
The system of production was determined by an intricate process that, in director
Kunt Tulgar’s words, started at the table and ended on the table (2002). The table where
it all started was the table in a business office where a producer and a distributor met to
decide upon what films to make for the upcoming season. Other participants of this
imaginary round table meeting were the director, the scriptwriter, and the stars. Though
these people who gathered around a table may have changed in specific instances,
Tulgar’s claim accurately reflects the preproduction stage of any film. At the same time,
the role of distributors in determining the films varied based on the power of the film
production companies. Some major filmmaking companies had a greater say during the
preproduction stage, while some minors relied mainly upon the money that distributors
would bring them. In the case of minors, distributors had a say in selecting actors and the
genre of the film, depending on their expectations concerning the region in which they
distributed films. In other cases, star actors, directors, and scriptwriters had a say during
the preproduction stage.
123
According to Tulgar, the process of filming was conducted quickly, culminating
at the second table, that of postproduction, where a film was edited and dubbed. In many
cases, the flaws arising from poor sets, poor film quality, and lightening-speed filming
were partially eliminated during the postproduction stage. This was not an occasional or
temporary phenomenon: Hürrem Erman noted that despite the increase in the number of
films, the technology of filmmaking remained constant during the 1950s and 1960s. For
instance, he noted that equipment such as editing tables or an almost half-century old
Debrie Matipo printer that he bought second hand in the late 1940s were still used in the
early 1970s. He also noted that there were no dissolves or fades in color films but just
cuts from one scene to another because of the absence of proper equipment (1973, 25).
Hürrem Erman also mentioned that even though the costs of filmmaking almost doubled
with the advent of color films, revenues did not increase accordingly (1973, 30). The
transition to color films came around 1970. Abisel noted that while only 56 of 229 films
made in 1969 were color, 138 of 226 films in 1971 and 178 of 208 films made in 1973
were color. As a result of the expenses associated with the increasing presence of color
film, the quality of different copies of the same film was also remarkably different thanks
to the varying conditions of postproduction studios. The quality of film development
varied due to a variety of factors; including the equipment and staff, as well as the
urgency and speed of development. In light of these factors, Tulgar’s assertion of the
importance of the postproduction stage makes sense. Yet even as they tried to eliminate
the failures of the filming process, the postproduction stage was at the same time marked
with its own incompetence.
4.3.2. Bonds, Loan Sharks, and Taxes
Nevertheless, the system of production, exhibition and distribution was not that
facile and easy to grasp during the high years of Yeşilçam cinema. There are three
important factors that influenced the process of filmmaking: the financing of filmmaking
with bonds and checks, the role of distributors, and fourwalling of theaters. These three
factors, in addition to various particularities of film texts and language, made filmmaking
124
during the 1960s and 1970s into a full-fledged popular film industry. Because of the
differing accounts of the period, it is difficult to ascertain exactly when these practices
became standard. Hürrem Erman mentions that the “bond system” started to be used
frequently after the mid-1950s, when the number of films produced rose (1973, 28). But
producer Nusret İkbal of Be-Ya Film contends that he was the “first” one to use bonds to
finance his films in 1960 (in Türkali 1974, 47). Unlike state bonds, what Yeşilçam
filmmakers meant by bonds was more like postdated checks or legally valid certificates
of debts to be paid at a specific due date. Türkali also mentioned that the start of the use
of bonds by film producers did not coincide with the dominance of regional distributors,
which was strongly felt during the second half of 1960s. In the early years of the use of
bonds, regional distributors started to give such bonds or other forms of financial credits
to film production companies in order to be able to gain advantages over other
distributors working in the same region.
As a result of this system, in the first half of the 1960s there was still quite a lot of
competition between distributors. Film production companies, which received such bonds
from the distributors, started to pay actors and other filmmakers with these bonds,
eventually leading the workers of the film industry to get the bonds cashed by illegal
bankers, or loan sharks, at a reduced or discounted rate. Both film production companies
and filmmakers wanted to create artificial financial guarantees in order to reduce risk.
While film production companies wanted to make sure that filmmakers, including star
actors and directors, would be available for their films, filmmakers wanted to guarantee
themselves a job and a certain amount of payment in advance. Yet this system soon led to
a false economy in which nobody worked for cash, only for promises of future payment.
Türkali asserts that the system was at the same time corrupted by raw film importers who
supplied the market with cheaper raw films to increase their revenues, and also by
“usurers” who wanted to cash more bonds and lend more money (1974, 48). As the
system of bonds became a widespread practice in the mid-1960s, these “loan sharks” and
“regional distributors” became the most important actors in the industry. In 1967, the
magazine Sinema Postası reported that four main “loan sharks” of the film industry
(Adnan Karadayı, Ferdinand Manukyan, Metin Alper and Necdet Barlık) claimed that if
125
they had not cashed bonds, Turkish cinema would have only produced 25 films a year –
one tenth of its annual production at the time. The article also noted that loan sharks often
ignored the legal limit on the amount of interest that could be charged while cashing
bonds. However, these four bankers also threatened filmmakers because one fifth of the
bonds that they cashed were later protested by the banks (“Sinemanın Para…” 1967, 10).
A later issue of the same magazine announced an urgent need for a law concerning the
film industry, since many of the production companies ran the risk of going bankrupt
because of the protested bonds. Moreover, while they should normally have been paying
regular salaries and benefits to their workers, almost none of the companies did so.
Instead, most paid all of their workers, including the actors and directors, with bonds
(“Sinema Kanunu…” 1967, 9). The minor workers of the film industry – technicians,
stunts, and stage workers – were not happy about the work conditions because most of
the companies did not insure them, work hours were excessive and lacked holidays when
they were filming; and there was no job security since they were basically irregular
workers. The head of Turkey’s Film Workers Union, Nazif Taştepe, mentioned in 1974
that while he was the head of the Union for four years, they had been able to get
insurance for only 35 of their 1500 members, and the premiums for these were paid by
the companies only during filming (Taştepe 1974, 17). The workers of the film industry
had to accept not only the lack of insurance and job security of production companies, but
payment in the form of bonds which could only be cashed by loan sharks who would
charge exorbitant fees for the service. According to Hürrem Erman this widespread use of
the “bond system” drastically reduced the amount of capital that production companies
invested in films. Because they started relying upon the advance cash and bonds coming
from the distributors, the capital of production companies was greatly reduced and
eventually they ended up having to pay for only a quarter of the costs of a film. This
made them much tied to the distributors and very vulnerable to fluctuating market
conditions. The absence of big investors in the film industry and the reluctance of
national banks to give credit to producers made filmmakers dependant on bonds (Erman
1973, 32).
126
The tax system, which allowed for a five-year grace period, encouraged producers
who made many films tried to recoup their tax payments by making even more films.
Taxes on films were based on the projection of five-year amortization. Sixty percent of
the total amount was charged in the first year, twenty percent in the second, ten percent in
the third and five percent each in the fourth and fifth years (Erman 1973, 28). Erman
mentions that for a film to be successful in financial terms, it needed to pay for its costs
in the first year of exhibition. After 1973, very few films even ran after their first year.
When Erman talked about the first year, he referred to the calendar year, while the film
season was assumed to start in early Fall and ended in late Spring. So, films that appeared
at the beginning of the season had a greater chance of bringing more revenues. In
addition, though it is difficult to verify many claims concerning film exportation,
producers such as Hürrem Erman mentioned that they also sold films to distributors in
Greece, Italy, Germany, Cyprus, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. However, such
sales were not an expected part of the projected costs and revenues of a film. Instead,
such export sales came as a nice surprise for film producers to make some extra revenue
from their films. Nevertheless, more films made by film producers meant more taxes to
be paid. This was then coupled with increasing costs due to the advent of color, the
chronic devaluation of the Turkish lira, the increasing cost of hiring star actors, and the
dominance of regional distributors who brought cash from ticket revenues into the market
after the films’ distribution.
4.3.3. Regional Distributors and Fourwalling
In such a network of production, distribution, and exhibition, distributors were
particularly influential in the decision-making processes of small production companies
between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. In small production companies, it was an
excessively dynamic market where lots of new entrepreneurs invested in films in the
hope of making money. The chart below indicates the dynamism of this market. What
was constant to some degree was the persistence of some major companies. From the 75
film companies which made films in 1962, only 19 were active ten years later. The others
127
either left the market or in some cases continued under different names. According to
Agah Özgüç’s Dictionary of Turkish Film Producers, which covers the history of Turkish
cinema until 1995, only 17 companies made more than 49 films (1996, 7). This list of 17
companies was topped by Erler Film owned by Türker İnanoğlu, which made 169 films
starting in 1960. The second company on the list, Er Film owned by Türker İnanoğlu’s
brother Berker, totaled 150 films after 1961. Three other companies made over 100 films:
Kemal Film, Saner Film, and Erman Film, while the remaining 12 companies made
between 49 and 98 films. While this was also the case for major companies which also
attempted the fourwalling of film theaters in Istanbul, the chart below illustrates the state
of smaller production companies in the business. In 1962, while only 5 production
companies made 5 or more films with a total of 30 films, the remaining 70 companies
were responsible for 101 of 131 films. A similar pattern is also visible in 1972, when only
17 of 124 production companies made 5 or more films, totaling 120 films out of 300. The
remaining 107 companies made the remaining 180 films. By looking at these numbers
and also by looking at the list of major companies supplied by Özgüç, it becomes clear
that the major film production companies which stayed in business for more than two or
three decades produced around 25 to 30 percent of the films each year. While the
percentage of companies that produced more than 5 films was 22 percent in 1962 and 40
in 1972, 17 major companies listed by Özgüç produced 1471 films, which is
approximately 25 percent of the 5899 films made before 1996. In other words, especially
during the two most productive decades of Turkish cinema, the major film companies
only controlled a quarter of film production, which left numerous minor companies to
produce the majority of films and therefore to become more and more dependent upon
the money (cash or bonds) coming from distributors.
128
1962
Number of
Films
1
2
3
4
5
7
8
Number of
Production
Companies
50
11
7
2
3
1
1
Total
131
75
1972
Number of
Films
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
10
22
Total
300
Number of
Production
Companies
66
17
13
10
6
6
2
1
1
1
124
Table 4.1. Number of Films and Production Companies in 1962 and 1972 (Based on
Agah Özgüç 1997 and 1998)
As the regional distributors eliminated competition of other distributors in their
areas, they started to represent their own regions. Though they maintained an economic
monopoly over what films were distributed in their region, they also channeled the
demands of the spectators in their region through the information they gathered from the
theater owners. According to a sarcastic article written by Çetin Özkırım in 1959, during
the preproduction stage of a film, a production company had to make an offer to a
popular player first and later had to appear to leak this information to the press to
advertise the project. Later they had to talk with the regional distributors of Adana and
İzmir to determine the story of the film and where to insert standard scenes of belly
dancing, a funeral, and songs. This process was crucial for the filmmakers to secure
money in advance from distributors who also provided producers with information about
the popularity of actors (1959, 3). This economic structuring of the distribution and
exhibition system often also determined the contents of films that were shown in different
regions. Within this system, Turkey was divided into five large regional centers from
which films were distributed to other towns in the region. These five regions were
129
Samsun, Adana, İzmir, Ankara and Istanbul. This division resonated with another one,
that of the geographical division of Turkey by the republican regime.
As I noted in the introduction, this governmental division aimed not only to
organize the central power of the state, but also served as a fictive cultural reordering of
Turkey through the association of a characteristic folk culture to each region. There were
seven regions in this scheme: the two Western regions, Marmara and Aegean, were the
most developed parts of Turkey with Istanbul and İzmir as their respective centers. While
the Mediterranean region lay along the southern coast of Turkey, the Black Sea region
lay along the northern coast. The mountainous and arid lands of Eastern Turkey were
called the Eastern Anatolian and Southeastern Anatolian regions, the latter of which is
mostly populated by Kurds. These divisions did not consider any of the considerable
cultural, ethnic and lingual diversity of Turkey. Instead, Turkey was imagined as a
unified entity and any sort of opposition was taken as a threat to the unity and integrity of
the state. Unlike Ankara, which was made into the political heart of a Republic, Istanbul
continued to serve as its socioeconomic center. In terms of filmmaking, Istanbul and the
Marmara region where it was located not only generated a considerable amount of
revenues for a film, but also the distribution of films in this area mostly stayed under the
control of film production companies without leaving much space for the operation of
distributors. This was not the case in other regions, which came under the partial control
of regional film distributors. According to Nilgün Abisel who made a study of the system
of distribution in the 1960s and 1970s, in the beginning of the 1970s, there were 6 regions
in addition to the Istanbul and Marmara regions (1994, 100). The chart below gives a
sense of the regions, number of theaters, and the annual number of spectators:
130
Region
Adana (21 towns)
İzmir (12 towns)
Ankara (6 towns)
Samsun (16 towns)
Zonguldak (2 towns)
Marmara (9 towns)
Istanbul
Number of
Theaters
463
646
216
238
82
343
436
Number of
Spectators
37,335,472
51,427,031
29,474,552
20,420,363
13,149,007
27,288,164
67,402,721
Total
2,424
246,497,310
Table 4.2. Number of Theaters and Spectators in the Regions (Source: Abisel 1994, 100)
Though these numbers were estimates and the exact year was not supplied by
Abisel, they give an idea about the popularity of films and the workings of the regional
system. The population of Turkey at the time was 36 or 37 million, which meant that at
least 8 tickets were sold per person in a year. Domestic films were very popular; regional
distributors were basically businessmen who relayed the demands of spectators according
to their own evaluation of such demands. Because they brought money, in the form of
cash or bonds, to the market, they influenced some of the production companies. Abisel
noted that the distributors would normally come to Istanbul during spring and make deals
with various producers. Thus they had a role in determining how many, what genres, and
with which star actors the films would be made during the upcoming season. It was also
during the spring months that film producers decided upon their films for the next season.
Therefore, the distributors’ relaying of spectatorial demands, derived from theater
owners, had a role in determining the following season’s films. However, Hürrem Erman
said that this worked only if the production company was in dire need of the money that
would come from the distributor (1973, 34). The involvement of distributors in this
process was important to producers who aimed to determine what would sell best in the
next season. Hürrem Erman’s formula for success depended on determining the trends of
the film season and introducing a couple of novelties for the season. In this respect, if a
film gained remarkable success during one season, other producers tried to exploit this
131
success by making films in the same genre, with the same or similar star actors, and so
on. For example, Erman said that he made “lighter” films for the 1973-1974 season,
“comedies or sentimental comedies” (1973, 34), while other producers made adventure
films or followed some other genre trend. He also noted that star players and directors
also determined the content to a great extent. If a star was known for his or her excellence
in, say, comedies or melodramas, s/he played similar roles repeatedly, which led to
typecasting. Then, while Erman or other producers evaluated the stories brought to them
by their contracted directors or scriptwriters, they also looked at foreign films to
determine how they could benefit from them. In short, all of these factors came into play
in determining what stories to choose, what films to exploit, and what star actors to deal
with.
Apart from the distributors’ role in determining the following season’s films, what
came with the regional distribution system was both a proliferation of genres based on
varying regional identities and differences in various cuts of the same films depending on
the identity of regions. Hürrem Erman explained that while the Adana and Ankara
regions preferred action-oriented films, for instance, efe films were liked more in the
İzmir region where efes were the local bandit heroes (1973, 33-34). Religious films
brought more revenues from the Samsun, Ankara and Adana regions. However, such
regional appeals were not constant in each and every case. Instead, other elements were at
play in these regions, including the rural and urban levels of modernization, the interest
of spectators based on their education levels, and the interplay of nationalistic, ethnic, and
religious fervor. While the Aegean and Mediterranean regions were known to be not
particularly fond of religious films, in the rural areas of the region, religious films were
quite popular. For instance, while showing a religious documentary which was mainly
edited footage from different films, in a theater in Söke, a small Aegean town, in 1961,
the theater owner moved out all the chairs and put rugs on the floor to mimic the interior
of a mosque. During the ten-minute intermission, they offered non-alcoholic and
religiously proper rosewater (gül suyu) to the spectators to let them enjoy the blissful
atmosphere of the mosque-like theater (“Haberler” 1961, 29). In another case, Musa
Özder, a traveling cinema projectionist with a 16 mm projection machine, traveled to
132
remote villages in southern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains and later talked about the rural
spectators’ preference for religious films. Because there was no electricity in those
villages, he had two donkeys for his travels: he loaded one with an electric generator and
rode the other with the projection machine in his hand. He worked mainly during summer
season and projected the film either on school walls if available or on a screen that he
attached between two trees, though the screen flew away at times due to the wind. The
spectators sat on rugs they brought from home or on the ground. According to Özder,
they liked religious, historical and village films in rural parts of the Mediterranean region.
Though he showed religious films reluctantly, villagers demanded more. One village
imam even claimed that “cinema was immoral and the work of the devil.” But with the
religious films he showed from time to time, he made sure that, apart from villagers, he
made the imam happy, too. In such films even some of the villagers stood up during the
call to prayer (1974, 50-53). In other words, it was not just the identities of regions which
came into play in determining the popularity of films. Yet the input of distributors
generally came into play in relaying such demands for films with religious, actionoriented or pathos-based content. According to Abisel, even during the script writing
process, specific scenes that would relay the demands of the region were placed in films
based on formulas and the advance amounts paid by the distributors. Abisel also noted
that distributors were in an advantageous position in this system because they had a
chance to decide on supporting other production companies if the films of the company
that they made deal with were not successful (1994, 101). Thus in this system, minor
production companies found themselves in a vicious circle: because they initially relied
upon the money coming from distributors, minor producers had to accept the demands of
those distributors in determining the following season’s films. But if those films that were
made in tandem with the distributors were not successful at the box office, distributors
had a chance to work with other producers the following season.
The minor companies’ dependence upon regional distributors was fostered by
major production companies’ fourwalling of theaters in Istanbul. Before the start of
fourwalling, almost all first run theaters in major cities showed foreign films. In 1958,
almost 90 percent of imported films were from Hollywood. But due to a series of
133
devaluations of the Turkish lira, American companies threatened not to send any films
until the Turkish importers started paying their debts (“Filmcilik…” 1958, 32). While
initially this created an economic crisis among the major film importers, it also created an
advantageous situation for domestic filmmakers who could produce films at a lower cost
than imported Hollywood A-movies. Although Turkish films did not quite come to
dominate first run Beyoğlu theaters, they did dominate second run theaters throughout the
rest of the city. Starting after this year, second-run theater owners started to demand and
even plead with Turkish filmmakers for domestic films (“Sinema, Meydanı…” 1958, 30).
This development opened the floodgates for Yeşilçam films, which soon overtook first
run theaters by contracting with major Yeşilçam production companies. Fourwalling is
generally known in Turkish cinema as the “foot system” (ayak sistemi). Such theaters
were referred to as the “feet” of the production companies. Major production companies
in particular came together to the fourwalling of centrally located theaters in Istanbul.
During the high years of Yeşilçam, in Istanbul, there were three “feet” networks that
guaranteed exhibition for around 110-120 films. For this, a few production companies
created an alliance which led to agreements with theater owners in Istanbul to show only
the films of those majors in their theaters. The production companies paid theater owners
an advance fee for fourwalling, thereby blocking them from showing the films of other
production companies. However, during these years the annual number of films made
lingered between 200 and 300, leaving 150 to 200 films outside the practice of
fourwalling (Erman 1973, 28). This meant that first run film theaters in Istanbul were
taken up by majors. However, for the fourwalling of Anatolian theaters, Erman said that
either they directly sold the films to theater owners or they paid 25 percent of ticket
revenues to theater owners whose theaters they used. As distributors became more
powerful, production companies decided to leave this job to the distributors instead of
dealing with theaters in various Anatolian towns. The major film companies did not
expect their films to be successful in all of the regions. Instead, because they thought that
different regions had varying film preferences; in one season, they produced films in a
variety of genres so that while one of their films was successful in one or two regions, the
others had a chance to do well in other regions.
134
4.3.4. Majors and Minors: Quality Films and Quickies
In this system, then, the major production companies had a chance to control first
run theaters at least in Istanbul and in the Marmara region while the distributors of each
region had a chance to be involved in the decision-making process of smaller production
companies. In addition, smaller production companies tried to find ways to compete with
majors by investing in quickies more like B-movies of Hollywood studios or independent
exploitation films of smaller Hollywood production companies. The practice of
producing quickies such as action-adventure films, fantastic or science-fiction films,
westerns, adaptations of Hollywood serials or comic books, and eventually sex-comedies
during the late 1960s and 1970s closely resembled the history of Italian cinema which
experienced a similar situation during those years. Indeed there was an active exchange
between the popular film industries of both countries. Various Italian companies came to
Turkey to make films and at times to make co-productions, while Turkish filmmakers
sent many films to Italy for postproduction. Pierre Sorlin noted that in Italy, as in Turkey,
there was a distinction between two types of film: “quality films” and “quickies.” In Italy,
while quality films were booked to national distributors at high prices and therefore
expected to bring a high return from first-run theaters, quickies were booked to regional
distributors who sold them to peripheral and rural theaters (Sorlin 1996, 120). Sorlin also
explained that the quality and sophistication of films became more important for Italian
intellectuals who formed cinema societies and cine-forums that led to a distinction
between “elite” or “high” and “mass,” “popular” or “low” forms. In other words, this was
a distinction that arose out of the work of majors and minors, or between Yeşilçam’s
mainstream and its low-budget filmmakers. With reference to Christopher Wagstaff,
Sorlin noted that spectators living in suburban, peripheral and rural areas “confronted
with loosely constructed stories full of thrills and excitement, let their attention fluctuate,
carefully following the fights or chases but began to chat as soon as there was a pause in
the action” (1996, 121). However, this aspect of film spectatorship, which Sorlin related
135
only to quickies, was in fact a characteristic of the consumption of the majority of
Yeşilçam films, both quality films and quickies.
This was exactly what was going on in Turkey, too. Spectators of second-run,
suburban or peripheral and rural theaters went to such open-air summer theaters with
wooden chairs, brought their food and bought their drinks from tea gardens in the
theaters, chatted during the film, enjoying the film as much as entertainment as a cultural
experience. During the 1960s and in the early 1970s, in many of these theaters, filmgoing
was a family experience as much as it was the experience of young male spectators.
Therefore, apart from a differentiation between major and minor film production
companies and therefore between first-run and second-run theaters, there seemed to be
another binary or pair of currents that ran together in Yeşilçam cinema in relation to the
exhibition and consumption of films. While most filmgoing was generally a family
experience, there were also action-adventure and fantastic quickies directed mostly
toward young male spectators who, after the mid-1970s, became the main consumers of
cinema with the rise in popularity of sex films. With increasing political polarization and
violence, worsening of economic conditions, and increasing unemployment rates
especially among rural migrants to the cities on the one hand, filmmakers were faced
with increasing costs of filmmaking made worse by currency devaluations that affected
technological equipment and raw film imports of the industry on the other. The broadcast
of national state television allowed the family audience of movies to stay home, replacing
the cinema with the living room. While many film theaters closed their doors, others
replaced their family fare with a diet of sex comedies made on the fly by low-budget film
companies. While there was a rise in the production of these films, however, such low
budget, poor quality films had always been part of the film scene. Quickies of various
genres had always coexisted with films perceived as higher quality, and young,
undereducated, lower-class males had long since been their primary spectators.
136
4.3.5. Exploitation Cinema as a Survival Tactic
The economic conditions of filmmaking in Turkey had already brought about
incompetence in the technical quality of films of Yeşilçam, which seemed to be a lower
quality cinema in comparison to its Western counterparts, making the “quickies” of
minor film production companies the lowest of a lower cinematic practice. As may be
seen in the above chart, in 1972, one film production company, which was not even a
major player in Yeşilçam, Osmanlı Film, produced 22 films. Mehmet Karahafız, who
founded the company in 1970, was initially a theater owner in İzmir. As with some other
producers and director-producers, he chose a faster and cheaper way of making films
with the cheapest available equipment and without star players or renowned directors and
scriptwriters. Perhaps influenced by their education in Italy, figures such as Mehmet
Karahafız and Kunt Tulgar produced and directed films in a manner reminiscent of
Italian cinema practice. One of the twenty-two films produced by Karahafız was
Bombala Oski Bombala (Bomb Oski, Bomb!), directed by Çetin İnanç who directed
almost two hundred films in a period of little over than two decades. İnanç, who said that
he used to complete his films in ten to fifteen days, stated that he completed his costumed
super hero flick Bombala Oski Bombala in just two days, one day for shooting and
another day for editing. He also noted that they often shot three or four films at the same
time, by going from the set of one film to another one on the same day (1999, 346). So
quickies were basically a survival tactic of minor film companies which offered
attraction, fantastic spectacle, and thrill for their spectators. Following the changes in the
film industry around the mid-1970s, many of these companies and filmmakers became
involved in the making of sex films as another phase of low-budget, exploitation cinema.
It is in this context that such films must be viewed and understood in comparison to
American or Italian exploitation cinemas. Directors such as Çetin İnanç or Kunt Tulgar
were well aware of what was going on in other popular film industries and what they did
was again a “Turkification” of the popular films of foreign cinemas. İnanç mentioned that
they looked at the examples of Dutch, German, and Italian erotic movies and Turkified
those films in the same manner as the other genres of Yeşilçam (1999, 348). Another fast
137
director of the era, Yılmaz Atadeniz, who made various adaptations of Hollywood serials,
comic books, and westerns, said that while he was reading the Italian photo-novel,
Killing (first published in 1965 in Italy by Ponzoni) in a Turkish paper, he decided to
shoot his first Kilink movies simultaneously rather than successively in order to use the
same sets and costumes, Kilink İstanbul’da (Killing in Istanbul, 1967) and Kilink Uçan
Adama Karşı (Killing Against the Flying Man, 1967). “It was interesting. There was
eroticism, adventure; there was mask and thus mystery. I told to myself that it suited my
style, and I immediately decided to make it into a film” (Atadeniz 1999, 328). Then,
Atadeniz asked a friend about making the photo-novel into a movie. İrfan Atasoy, who
liked the idea, not only gave bonds to finance the movie in return for the distribution of
the film in the Adana region, but also became the lead actor of one film, as the flying man
who was a rip-off of Superman. While they had to shoot totally original scenes for an
adaptation of the Killing photo-novels, in adaptations of Tarzan or Superman movies they
used footage directly from original films or various documentaries.
As Yeşilçam started to experience a crisis in the mid-1970s with increasing costs,
the decreasing number of spectators that led to the closing down of film theaters, and
with the rise of television as a mainstream form of entertainment for upper and middleclasses, Yeşilçam’s majors continued to respond to these developments with conventional
melodramas and comedies as well as with new stars, and the low-budget filmmakers of
Yeşilçam’s quickies tried to exploit other possibilities. Such tactics of exploitation
created a period which no longer belonged to the nostalgia of a pure and innocent
filmmaking, but were crude and obscene, and often considered “pathological.” In the first
issue of an Islamist film magazine of 1977, Fatih A. Şen commented on sex films under
the title, “A Pathological Anatomy of an Epidemic.” For him, Turkish cinema was
captured by “an epidemic that highlighted a load of diseases, a load of economic crises
which ranged from the disinterest in the state to the insufficiency of thought, morality,
and aesthetics” (11). Although they belonged to an unapproved realm of filmmaking,
female nudity had been a part of Yeşilçam’s filmmaking long before the wave of sex
films. However, as in the United States, sex films’ overt sexual content and their
pornographic elements came at a time when television created considerable competition,
138
and alongside major demographic changes resulting from migration. A lower-class,
peripheral existence with shanty-town settlements around urban centers became more and
more a factor, so the inhabitants of these shantytowns became increasingly visible as they
traveled into city centers every day in search of jobs. Such lower-class male viewers of
earlier action-adventure films with a limited erotic content and female nudity became the
main customers of these new sex films, while middle- and upper-classes started to own
television sets in the 1970s and videocassette recorders in the 1980s.
4.3.6. Sexploitation Films
In such an environment, the Turkification of an Italian film, Oksal Pekmezoğlu’s
Beş Tavuk Bir Horoz (Five Chickens and One Rooster, 1974), the first film of the wave
of sex-comedies fit right into the mold of low-budget, exploitation cinema. In the Italian
original, Homo Eroticus (a.k.a. Man of the Year, d. Marco Vicario, 1971), Sicilian
Michele (Lando Buzzacca) is of “simple peasant stock, lower-class, a Southerner, yet he
is being seduced, desired, and bedded by many wealthy Northern women” because he is
“extremely virile, is in possession of an enormous penis and has been nicknamed after his
three testicles” (Gavin). In the Turkish version, the Sicilian servant is turned into a
villager who migrates to Istanbul following a doctor’s discovery of his extraordinary
sexual power. As summarized by Agah Özgüç, in the film, the villager Kazım (Sermet
Serdengeçti) becomes famous in Istanbul and then, five high society women who are
sexually unsatisfied with their rich husbands have intercourse with Kazım before his
compulsory marriage with a girl whom he sexually assaults (1974, 70). As the first film
in a wave of sex films, Beş Tavuk Bir Horoz was not just a simple sex-comedy. Like the
majority of sex films, it resonated with mainstream Yeşilçam films. Such films generally
belonged to the melodramatic modality of Yeşilçam because of their recurring stories of
love between a lower-class and an upper-class character that ceaselessly offered a
resolution through a heterosexual relationship either by marriage, i.e., a Hollywood
ending, or by death, i.e., a Russian ending. At the same time, sex films, because they
139
were aimed at male spectators, transformed such themes of heterosexual romance into
cruder and more obscene forms.
Generally, historians of Turkish cinema have only produced derogatory readings
of Yeşilçam’s sex-film wave, between 1974 and 1980. Deemed as the dark years of
Yeşilçam, these filmmakers were thought to be diseased by bad filmmaking. Sex films
were often perceived as an “epidemic.” Yet these developments were far from sudden.
The decrease in the number of family spectators, the increase in the number of male
spectators of cinema, and the worsening of socioeconomic and political conditions of the
country at first resulted in an increasing number of domestic low-budget action-adventure
films which at times included nudity. More importantly, it led to the import of an
increasing number of foreign, mainly European, sex films in the early 1970s. Thus lowbudget filmmakers competed with the foreign sex films by producing domestic Turkified
examples. As Linda Williams pointed out with reference to Stephen Heath, seeing
pornography in an opposition between liberation and repression brings about what Heath
calls the dilemma of the “sexual fix,” disguising the relations of power embedded in
sexuality (1989, 14-15). Thus, instead of taking sides in relation to this dilemma, a look
at the constructions of sexuality and its relation to the practice of pornography seems
more critical. In this respect, the sex films of the 1970s in Yeşilçam were tied to the
conditions of the country. It was not merely coincidental that the military intervention put
an end to both political extremism and to sex films that were seen as a form of sexual
extremism that ran against the morality of the people as understood by the army. Again,
as Linda Williams noted with reference to Walter Kendrick, “pornography is simply
whatever representations a particular dominant class or group does not want in the hands
of another, less dominant class or group” (1989, 12). In the case of Turkish sex films,
such representations can be understood through sexual images. In this vein, the dominant
classes’ assumption that the lower-classes would not be “responsible” enough with
politics or with such dangerous practices of mass media such as pornography played a
role in the Kemalist army’s intervention with its elitist view as the guarantor of the
Turkish establishment. In other words, much as the military intervention took on the
responsibility of protecting the people from themselves by “readjusting” politics, they
140
also suppressed sex films, which they saw as a threat to the moral and religious makeup
of Turkey.
Contrary to popular labels attached to the late Yeşilçam period, sex films did not
become the norm of filmmaking, though many were made. Yeşilçam’s mainstream
melodramas and comedies continued to be made during the second half of the 1970s. Yet
sex films affected other films by raising the possibility of representing nudity. In the
unnaturally apolitical world of the post-1980 military intervention era, this perhaps lead
various male directors to speak for women and their sexuality in a series of “art” films
generally referred as “women’s film.” These were not melodramas, but instead were
attempts to come to grips with the idea of the possibility of female sexuality. Thus one of
the ironies of Turkish sex films, directed towards a male audience, was their later effect
in addressing female sexuality through the film medium. What came with sex films in the
1970s was then a transformation in the realm of low-budget filmmaking which shifted the
genres produced by minor film production companies from action, adventure, and fantasy
towards soft-core sex-comedies. As Çetin İnanç mentions, there was no difference
between sex films and religious films for the filmmakers – instead of sex films, they
could have made religious films if those were what brought the most money (1999, 348).
Taken in this vein, sex films, i.e., “sexploitation films,” belong to the second grade of
Yeşilçam industry, a broader range of low-budget, exploitation filmmakers.
In the 1970s, there were two waves of sex films which were distinct from each
other. The first wave came in 1974 with the influence of other European cinemas,
especially Italian sex films. While the earlier action-adventure films of the late-1960s and
the early-1970s had involved nudity as a part of the “thrill” of action directed for male
spectators, sex-comedies integrated nudity into their storylines. Scognamillo and
Demirhan claimed that nudity in the earlier films was a kind of “fishing” which
demonstrated that films involving nudity brought more money (2002, 144). Made without
any of Yeşilçam’s star actors and directors, the wave of sex films was initially produced
by low-budget filmmakers who had previously worked as directors of action-adventure
quickies. Their actors included low-rank Yeşilçam actors and extras, as well as
newcomers from theater and women eager to enter the film world in any guise. At the
141
start of the sex-comedy wave, only about 5 percent of the 189 films made in 1974
integrated nudity into the subject matter. However, the success of films such as Ah Deme
Oh De (Don’t Say Ah, Say Oh, d. Nazmi Özer, 1974) or Beş Tavuk Bir Horoz
encouraged other low-budget filmmakers to exploit their popularity. In 1975, more than
half of the 225 films made were sex films. Though this early wave, involving nudity and
obscene jokes as well as comical “bed scenes,” lost its attractiveness in the following
years, it still made way for an increasing percentage of sex films during the late 1970s.
The films of the late 1970s lost their comic element and became increasingly
obscene, though never actually explicit enough to qualify as hard core. During this
second wave, especially in 1979, sex films gained a new impetus with the increase in the
number of 16mm films. In 1979, two thirds of the 193 films made were sex films and
almost all of those were shot on 16mm, which helped the film industry to reduce the
costs. All of these 16 mm sex films, as well as many of the films of the first wave, were
shorter than regular feature films in order to allow projectionists at film theaters to insert
hardcore footage that had been shot separately or taken from foreign films, a practice
referred to as “montage.”
Even though Turkey experienced two conservative Nationalist Front coalition
governments during these years, increasing political rivalry and the ensuing violent
exchanges between different political groups not only allowed sex films to escape the
attention of censor boards, but also allowed a limited production of political films, from
both the left and the Islamist-right. The 1980 military intervention and the following three
years of military rule put an end to the making of sex films, as well as political films. Yet
the production of sex films had a continuing effect on the film industry. While an
increasing number of theaters closed during the late 1970s and 1980s, those that remained
began to show either imported mainstream Hollywood movies or Turkish and foreign sex
films, often two or three films for the price of one. Thus the sex film industry created a
continuing forum for the local film industry when political limitations, as well as the shift
in spectatorship due to television, had severely curtailed its viability.
Although one may see the period of sex films as a period when the popular film
industry experienced severe crisis both in terms of form and content, a different reading
142
of Beş Tavuk Bir Horoz is also possible. Rather than emphasizing its sexual content, one
could instead take up issues such as its Turkification of an Italian film; its presentation of
a lower-class dream of vertical class movement; and its use of Yeşilçam’s melodramatic
modality. Like the Sudanese Mustafa Said who went to Britain for education and had
relationships with British women in an attempt to “liberate Africa with his penis” in
Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, or like Fabián of Buenos Aires
who travels to the Falkland Islands to impregnate British women and let future kids of
Argentine blood dominate the island in José Luis Marquès’ F--kland, both Sicilian
servant Michele of Homo Eroticus and villager Kazım of Beş Tavuk Bir Horoz represent
masculine violence directed toward the female members of oppressing groups. Both films
reveal the latent threat of the return of the other as more powerful than those with actual
power. Despite its ill-conceived strategy of resistance, besides reproducing patriarchy,
Kazım’s masculine terror is also about politicization. In this respect, sex films resonated
with the comedy films of the 1970s, especially those with actor Kemal Sunal, which
introduced a frequent use of obscene and slang language tied to the texts of resistance
against dominant classes. While comedy persisted through the 1980s, the production of
sex films came to a halt with the military intervention. Nonetheless, they not only
continued to show in cheap theaters, the advent of the VCR in the 1980s made them a
common part of the video market and allowed for their informal export for the enjoyment
of immigrant workers who often brought them to Europe after their annual visit home.
4.4. Melodramatic Modality, Turkification and Hayal: Knotted in Dubbing
Sex films carried Yeşilçam’s tropes with its melodramatic modality,
Turkification, and hayal. In these films, as in their predecessors, what Yeşilçam’s
filmmakers had been doing was to investigate different tactics of Turkification while
maintaining a consistent pattern of melodramatic modality. Despite variations and
changes, this process involved various levels of translation and transformation. The
exploitation of Italian photo-novels or Hollywood melodramas, even Soviet socialist
realist films had been a constant theme of filmmaking in Turkey. In all of these
143
Turkifications, a permanent postproduction element that knotted various threads of
Yeşilçam was dubbing. In the previous chapters, I talked about dubbing only in terms of
the dubbing of foreign films, which involved a translation but also a rewriting of the
stories of Western films. Dubbing was very important even in the replacement of the
opening credits of foreign films. For example, the opening credits of Raj Kapoor’s
Awaara (1951) named only the lead roles (Nargis and Raj Kapoor) and the director (Raj
Kapoor) while giving full credits to those who “Turkishified” (meaning “put into the
Turkish language,” a variant on the more ethnically inflected Turkification) the film: i.e.,
a full list of dubbing artists, dubbing director, translator, voice synchronizer, and the
dubbing studio.
4.4.1. Earlier Practices of Turkification and Dubbing
As noted in previous chapters, the Turkification of foreign films involved not only
the dubbing of Western films, but also Egyptian or Indian films which were particularly
popular in the 1940s and 1950s. This process of Turkification involved (mis)translations,
the Turkification of characters, and muting of ideological aspects of films by giving them
a “Turkish” voice, similar to the practice of Turkification-from-above. In the 1940s, HaKa Film imported socialist realist Soviet films and then dubbed or “Turkified” those
films. But they did not stop there – they “domesticated” these films by adding locally
made scenes in an attempt to “fit” them to the realities of Turkey. This process of
ideological purification was, in the words of the owner of the company, Şadan Kamil, a
form of “domestication” (yerlileştirme): shooting some new scenes, montaging them into
the Soviet films, and dubbing them (2000, 16). Such scenes mostly involved songs and
dances performed by famous Turkish singers and dancers, but there were also some
scenes which helped or altered the flow of the story. Faruk Kenç, a director who started
directing in late 1930s, referred to scenes acted by famous comedians and added to such
films as “Turkification” (1993, 25). The last element of such “Turkified” films was
dubbing, guided by a new script composed of the translation, transformation and
alteration of the original Soviet text. To provide narrative “coherence,” the Turkish
144
dubbing artist who dubbed the hero of Soviet film also dubbed the domestic-made scenes
with the Turkish actor who acted in place of the Soviet character. Thus if there was
another Turkish artist acting in the scene, s/he was voiced by a dubbing artist, other than
himself or herself. Ha-Ka film did not stop there, and later “domesticated” German,
American and French films, before eventually starting to make “Turkish” films.
In popular Turkish cinema, sound was recorded live during the filming of most
Turkish films before the Second World War and in many films since the mid-1990s. The
five decades in between are marked by dubbing or post-synchronization, which in many
cases was done by professional dubbing artists who started out their careers dubbing
foreign films. In an anecdote that appeared in Artist film magazine in 1960 (v.18, p.30), a
journalist asked Adalet Cimcöz, who, with her brother Ferdi Tayfur, voiced many
Yeşilçam stars, about her views on a theater to be opened by the stars of the era.
Cimcöz’s reply to the question was caustic: “Excuse me, but who will dub that theater?”
Had this theater come to fruition, it would have reversed the normal pattern of movement
from the world of theater to that of film, revealing the artifice of the latter. While the
theater never became a reality, Cimcöz’s point is obvious: prompters were not enough for
Yeşilçam stars, they needed dubbing artists or they had to dub themselves. Her reply
seems to imply that the people on screen were visual actors, but would not be capable of
carrying their own voices on a stage. In terms of post-synchronization, there were two
paths that Yeşilçam film tended to follow: either actors were dubbed by professional
dubbing artists or some actors chose to dub their own parts. In both of these situations, it
was dubbing which allowed the process of filming to be fast and inexpensive. Thanks to
dubbing, actors did not need to do a lot of rehearsals. Instead, they repeated their lines for
the camera immediately after a prompter read them during filming. This also allowed
filmmakers to take only one shot of many scenes by decreasing the chance of mistakes
related to sound and therefore by decreasing the cost of raw film.
145
4.4.2. Turks Voicing Their Own Films!
In early sound films in Turkey, the number of films made was low, and film
sound was recorded live on the set. Because many early film actors were theater actors
and some also worked on the dubbing of foreign films, the transition from silent to sound
films in Turkey did not create problems as it did in Hollywood where some film stars got
voice training after the advent of sound films. Though the transition to sound film worked
smoothly for Turkish cinema, one of the preconditions for the rise of Yeşilçam was not
this transition, but a transition from live sound recording to post-synchronization. For this
reason, any history of Yeşilçam cinema and its mode of production is inherently tied to
Faruk Kenç’s Dertli Pınar (Troubled Spring, 1943), which was the first fully dubbed
film. Because İpek Film did not let Faruk Kenç use their studios for making this film, he
decided to shoot the film without sound and then dub it at producer Necip Erses’s sound
studio where foreign films were dubbed at the time (in Sekmeç 2001, 6). Leon Sason
(1961, 32) claimed that this was partly the result of the difficulty of finding raw film and
other equipment during the war years because of their cost and import restrictions. Kenç
claimed that both the success and the greatly reduced costs of his film led others to follow
his lead. But Kenç also added that he did not like post-synchronization (1993, 27). Like it
or not, dubbing became a standard stage of filmmaking which contributed to Yeşilçam in
terms of both Turkification and hayal.
In the second chapter of this study, I argued that “Turkification,” in the case of
(mis)translations of foreign films and the process of their dubbing, involved mechanisms
of othering, including the West and the others of Turkish national culture. However, the
dubbing of Yeşilçam films by Turkish dubbing artists brings about an ironic antiillusionism in the films. Due to the existing practice of dubbing foreign films, it may be
argued that the dubbing of Turkish films did not demand a change in the auditory habits
of filmgoers. A common cliché about the voice artists in these films is that they all
belonged to a tradition of the City Theater of Istanbul. Directed for many years by
Muhsin Ertuğrul, the actors of the City Theater helped to disseminate a speaking based
on the Istanbul accent. In this vein, dubbing of Turkish films supplemented the earlier
146
practices of Turkification articulated in the dubbing of foreign films which involved a
nationalistic rendering of foreign films. The earlier dubbing artists all helped the
republican project of the purification of language through their speech and also enhanced
the dominance and mainstreaming of the Istanbul accent. Thanks to a theater tradition
which not only involved but was led by non-Muslim actors during the late Ottoman and
early republican era, early Turkish films include the accents of non-Muslim minorities or
imitations of them. However, the interest in maintaining an appropriate adherence to
republican linguistic mores meant that villagers were usually represented with
preternaturally proper, Istanbul Turkish, equivalent perhaps, to a Midlands farmer
portrayed as speaking Oxford English. Such dubbing created a linguistic identity for the
masses to adopt in keeping with the formulation of an increasingly uniform national
identity across Turkey.
According to Erman Şener, during the golden age of Yeşilçam cinema, voice
artists were generally paid based on their work for three-hour sessions (1968,37). Şener,
who gave a description of the process of dubbing, noted that a film was cut into 150 to
300 parts to ease the recording work based on sessions that took place in the dubbing
studio. Before recording a part, dubbing artists watched that specific part a couple of
times to ensure lip synchronization, and then rehearsed their parts. When the dubbing
directors signaled the start of the process by uttering the number of the part, the sound
engineer started the process of recording. Dubbing actors used the same microphone from
a set distance without any concerns about the depth of sound of the characters in the film.
Using this method, all of these parts were dubbed and the dialogues of a movie were
recorded on a negative film. The last part of the process involved taking the film to an
editing table to synchronize the sound copy of the film with the silent image copy. If
there was a separate recording of sound effects and film music, it was also edited together
with the two other copies. As suggested by this description of the process of dubbing by
Erman Şener, such a sterile sonic environment created a rather cold and senseless voicing
of many films, which lacked the noise of everyday life. While the technique and
infrastructure of sound stayed similar during the period of Yeşilçam cinema, this practice
147
of dubbing by voice artists was not universal and there were some film actors who voiced
themselves in the 1950s and 1960s.
4.4.3. His Master’s Voice, His Slave’s Body
While dubbing became a central part of Yeşilçam in its financial advantages, it
remained an obstacle to cinematic illusionism or realism by creating breaks and
discontinuities in the diegetic realm of the film. The use of sound in Yeşilçam is
comparable to the use of sound in musicals and hardcore sex films in American cinema,
both of which raised different issues than the early sound films’ experiments with sound.
In contrast to Eisenstein’s or later avant-garde uses of sound, Hollywood sound
experimented with increased dialogue and increasingly realistic effects. In most narrative
or feature films, sound – in the form of dialogue, music or sound effects – was used to
foster a realistic illusion of the diegetic world. According to Linda Williams, while music
helps to establish the mood and the rhythm of bodies and to fill in the gaps of editing,
sound effects add to the spatial dimension of diegesis, and “synchronous speech ties the
body to the voice” (1989, 122). For Williams, this illusion of realism in mainstream
American cinema was not replicated by the use of sound in two genres of film: musicals
and sex films. Instead, in hardcore sex films, lipsynch often failed and the use of postsynchronized close-up sound “disembodied” the female voice. But like musicals with
post-synchronized musical scores recorded in sound studios, the clear and close-up
sounds in sex films offered an effect of closeness and intimacy. Instead of increasing the
realist effect, Williams argued that they produced more of a “surreal” effect, by breaking
up a film’s “continuity” or “realistic illusion.” Such gaps and discontinuities are among
the reasons why Yeşilçam is generally deemed as bad or low quality.
Nezih Erdoğan notes that “the discrepancy between the visual and the aural”
involves a variety of situations (2002, 239). These include: the invisible presence of the
prompter; the voicing of actors by professional dubbing artists; in the case of an actor
voicing himself/herself, the matching of an image recorded earlier with a voice recorded
later; problems of lipsynch; the distortion of the first syllable of words in some films
148
because of the technologies of recording; and the use of music. In addition, songs
performed by actors complicated dubbing further because an actor who was voiced by a
dubbing artist during his/her dialogues would be voiced by a different singer. So an actor
might become doubly dubbed! Sadi Konuralp noted that the use of music in films was
widely based on a practice of using musical scores from vinyl records, “upholstery
music” as it was called by the industry (2004, 63). In the period between the 1950s and
1980s, the majority of films used such records even though they might have an original
score or songs performed by Turkish musicians. To this end, the industry employed
various composers or musicians, who were well aware of Western and other musical
traditions and who often had a good collection of records from which to upholster film
music. Certainly the use of these musical selections, had a broad range: from original
Western movie soundtracks to traditional and modern Turkish musical genres, as well as
various Western musical genres, including but not limited to classical music, jazz, blues,
rock, and pop. Stitching these together, Erdoğan noted, “The soundtrack of Yeşilçam
appears extremely impoverished” (2002, 239). Following his arguments on the practice
of Yeşilçam’s dubbing, and after asking whether all Yeşilçam actors speak in the same
voice, Erdoğan argued:
...they do not speak at all. Their bodies are given over not to homogenous
thinking subjects but to Logos expressing itself through voices that were
only slackly attached to bodies. Hence Yeşilçam is like the shadow-play
master whose voice remains the same by way of the differences it
produces. It might well be suggested that the voice in Yeşilçam is the
voice of Yeşilçam; the utterances are instances of Logos which dictates its
moral universe and orchestrates the unfolding narrative (2002, 243).
In other words, Erdoğan claimed that the post-synchronization practice of Yeşilçam
muted bodies while disembodying voices. Following this argument, Erdoğan notes that
Yeşilçam’s film scripts describe action without articulating dialogues into the flow of
everyday life by making actors “be-spoken.” For him, then, the bodies of actors become
vehicles for the mediation and the disembodied voices belong to a theocentric space, that
of Logos, but an Islamic one which penetrates all bodies. This, according to Erdoğan,
149
blurs the line between a Cartesian body-soul duality and also between diegetic and
nondiegetic worlds which diffuse the “Divine Presence” throughout the soundtrack.
Erdoğan concludes his article by noting that though Yeşilçam appears to separate two
domains “by giving body to the service of Logos and by denying the characters the
‘look’, and therefore the sight of the body, this body-soul duality is resolved by the
condition of the existence of body for the mediation of voice and thus truth” (2002, 249).
This may be argued in relation to the Kemalist projects of secularization and to
mainstream dubbing marked by an Istanbul accent that became the standard accent of
Turkish through radio and television. While on a “theocentric” level the body is muted
and the voice is disembodied, Erdoğan’s analogy of Yeşilçam in relation to a Karagöz
master whose voice is the only voice throughout a play does not work on a fundamental
level. Instead this “dream” of having a single voice that would be be-spoken for all is also
shared by the Kemalist reformers.
4.4.4. Cinematic Sound and the Illusion of Voice
Still on an imaginary level, the muting of bodies in the name of a voice speaking
the truth has also been the dream of projects of modernization. Looking back on his
melodramas, comedies, and sex films of the 1960s and 70s, Yeşilçam director Aram
Gülyüz currently directs television series which have prolonged Yeşilçam’s practice of
post-synchronization. He relates a story of a guest from France around the early 1970s
whom he took to a couple of films at different theaters. After watching the films, his
guest ironically pondered the dubbing: “Just think how interesting it would be if all of our
stars also had the same voice” (2004). Gülyüz had an epiphany: in Yeşilçam films, a
small number of dubbing artists were voicing many of the stars. However, the bodies
were not simply muted, instead they had gestures, star texts, and they were types or
individualities. One of the most acclaimed realist directors of Turkish cinema, Lütfi Akad
noted that in choosing actors he did not care much about their acting but “their facial and
bodily makeup, their ‘type’ as the French call it” (2004, 59) In many Yeşilçam films from
1950s and 1960s, there were blatant looks of the bodies that addressed the spectators. In
150
particular, happy endings were often indicated not simply by the coming together of the
happy couple but by the attention they paid to the viewer – through a look or a wave not
seen by the rest of the characters, i.e., by deliberately addressing the nondiegetic world.
Alternatively, as the happy couple walks off, an auxiliary character either gestures the
closure of a stage curtain or waves goodbye to the spectators by signaling their return to
the nondiegetic world. As Peter Brooks argues, we can understand “melodrama’s
constant recourse to acting out, to the body as the most important signifier of meanings,”
as “the genre’s frequent recourse to moments of pantomime.” Though not given a chance
to voice themselves, noble savages communicated with the Europeans in gestures – they
offered “a set of visual messages, pure signs that cannot lie, the undissimulated speech of
the body” (Brooks 1994, 19). However, the play of gestures in Yeşilçam did not come
necessarily at a point when verbal language became inadequate. Instead, as noted above,
dialogues were mostly descriptive or even at times instructive, perhaps similar to early
sound films. As scriptwriter Bülent Oran said, “Turkish spectators watch films with their
ears” (in Türk 2004, 219). However, Oran also said that Turkish spectators were also
very aware of the types of stars: “A jeune cannot be an evil man, and jeune dammes
cannot intentionally be prostitutes. Only fate can lead them to such flaws” (in Türk 2004,
217). Moreover, Oran also claimed that such habitual identifications of types of actors,
such as comic, evil or femme fatale, were related to types in Karagöz plays. “For
example, when Necdet Tosun appeared on the screen, the film theater was ready to laugh
before he did anything” (2004, 225). Even if you turned such comic types into evil
characters, Oran claimed that the spectators laughed at the most dramatic parts of the
films. In this respect, as argued in the previous chapter, Yeşilçam’s melodramatic
modality belonged to a give and take of dualities, at times spoken by the dubbed voice of
truth and at other times the autonomous gestures of a savage, i.e., both modern and
traditional or both civilized and primitive. In this respect, seeing Yeşilçam in terms of
diegesis or continuity, or of a religious morality, becomes difficult because of its
nondiegetic elements that recur continuously, its discontinuities and coups, and its
attempt to come to grips with a Western bourgeois morality that is enmeshed with an
151
Eastern traditionality. Viewing dubbing only in terms of muted bodies and disembodied
voices implies gestured bodies given to savagery or pantomime.
In considering the sound of Yeşilçam, and voice as such, one also must consider
what voice is – what do the voice of the dubbing artist, the actor, and the singer add up to
in a single film? For example, the most legendary, acclaimed, and stereotypical female
star of Turkish film, known as the “sultan” of Turkish cinema, Türkan Şoray, was
initially dubbed by several dubbing artists, but eventually was dubbed almost exclusively
by Adalet Cimcöz. In her later films of the 1970s, she chose to dub her own lines.
However, in all of these films, her songs were dubbed by singer Belkız Özener. Thus
Türkan Şoray spoke and sung with different voices in her different films, yet the absence
of realism in this multiplicity of voices never threatened her singular star image. While
communication through speaking, through the word, is one aspect of voice, the truth of
voice is not just limited to the word or to “articulate signs.” Though Erdoğan interprets
voice as in the service of religious morality and truth, Yeşilçam’s voice, which was
constantly recorded and played in “mono,” is more complicated in its give and take, its
realism and spectacularity, or its “ah” and “oh,” its pain and pleasure. Should we then
assume that Yeşilçam’s use of post-synchronization is integrated in a monotheistic
tradition bringing about a mediation of voice and truth by ousting the body? Or should
we ask whether cinematic sound (music, sound effects, and the voice of actors or dubbing
artists) belonged to a realm of the spectacular and the savage? How should we place
Yeşilçam’s sex films such as Ah Deme Oh De or Oooh Oh (1978, d. Aram Gülyüz) into
this frame of Logos?
4.4.5. Close-up on Noise
Linda Williams argues that hardcore sex films involve various close-ups of both
sound and image. However, she also notes that a close-up shot of a body part or an act is
different from a close-up sound of pleasure. In other words, following Alan Williams, she
argues that a close-up sound in the manner of a close-up shot is not possible; the
soundtrack and the imagetrack are not commensurable. Still, though it may not be useful
152
in increasing realist effect, the post-synchronized sounds of pleasure in hardcore films,
similar to close-up shots, offer the “spectacular.” But still this spectacularity in “the aural
‘ejaculation’ of pleasure” does not match with the truth of the close-up shot of visual
ejaculation. In this respect, she argues that aural voyeurism is subject to failure because
the foregrounding of the sound of pleasure is very different from the image of pleasure.
Following Mary Ann Doane, she notes, “sound cannot be ‘framed’ as the image can, for
sound is all over the theater, it ‘envelops the spectator’.” While it may be possible to
show male pleasure on the imagetrack, the sounds of pleasure (especially of women) are
often not “articulate signs,” but they come from “deep inside,” by being attributed to
“primitive pleasures” (Williams 1989, 124-125). Taken thus, Yeşilçam’s sound in sex
films, asking women to moan not in pain (“ah”) but in pleasure (“oh”), was not just
dubbed to increase the realist effect like American hardcore sex films or musicals. Rather
a film was completely dubbed to knot it together during postproduction. A give and take
of pleasure and pain was supposed to culminate in Oooh Oh, the sound of total pleasure:
entertainment. As for entertainment, what was offered was a package: not only a realistic
and rational narrative and its placement into a coherent and continuous cinematic
language, but also a complete entertainment program that involved attractions,
spectacularity, pleasure in pathos or action, and tears in pain and laughter.
In this respect, when talking about Yeşilçam, this state of being neither one nor
the other, but both at the same time must be underscored. Perhaps it would, then, be wiser
to comprehend Yeşilçam in relation to Turkification, as translation and mistranslation, a
transformation and a perversion or vulgarization. Though this may not be articulated in
terms of a politics of emancipation, at the same time it is not simply reducible to a cinema
of escapism or intoxication. Beyond this problem of savagery or vulgarity, an integral
question that is attached to Yeşilçam and its Turkification is hayal. While the
Turkification of a Western technology involved various avenues of quick but not perfect
solutions as well as mirroring and plagiarism, the dream of filmmakers was to create
films equal in quality with Western ones even as their technological and cultural makeup
prevented this from ever becoming a possibility, let alone a reality. While they
participated in dubbing practices at the time, looking back, almost all Turkish filmmakers
153
were critical of dubbing for it was nonillusionistic and nonrealistic. Nobody considers
that it was perhaps reasonable, even natural, within a particular spatiotemporal
configuration of film production and consumption. Instead of reading Yeşilçam as a
mythic narrative of gradual accomplishment of realism and considering dubbing as one of
the prime obstacles before such realism, Yeşilçam’s dubbing might be viewed not as
what seems “real” but a solution that seems “natural” to the conditions of its production.
Bülent Oran claimed that Turkish spectators watch movies with their ears. He relates the
story of the man who shined his shoes, who used to take his family to a tea place right by
an open air theater first to listen to the film and then to decide whether or not they should
buy tickets to watch it. If what they heard was shiny or thrilling (cafcaflı) enough, they
bought tickets to watch the film (2004, 219). Should we then claim that Yeşilçam’s
consumers were more of an “audience” than they were spectators? Had this been true,
there would have been no incentive to go into the film theater to “see” the film, which
was there and which stayed there. Inside such theaters, there was a carnivalesque
environment filled with spectators from all ages talking with family and friends during
the film, bringing food and eating or sharing with others. Sodas and tea were sold and
served, and children ran around and made noise as others cursed them. Parallel to this
world of family carnival, film theaters showing sex films offered another, darker
environment of carnivalesque masculinity marked by masturbation, and at times by
homosexuality and pedophilia. It was an underground carnival which fostered darker
pleasures. How important was the illusion or realism of a diegetic world both in terms of
soundtrack and imagetrack for such spectatorship within the distraction of open-air
summer theaters that constituted half of the theaters in Turkey during the golden age of
Yeşilçam cinema?
In the previous chapter, I talked about an alternative rendering of cinema as an
interweaving of the real and the magical, traditional and modern, appearance and
apparition – not real but natural. Popular films do not offer reality to their viewers, but
only visual and sonic images of it which allow them to naturalize myths without making
them more civilized. Demanding reality from popular cinema and then criticizing it for its
lack of reality is inherently against the nature of popular film. Viewed and heard as
154
mythic and anarchic, popular films belong more to a carnivalesque world. Viewed as
apparitions in appearances or heard as moans or noises among discrete voices, film’s
naturalness may be understood in relation to our presence in nature that is tied to the
unnatural and that involves not only a civilized, canonical beauty but also an ugly,
savage, or irrational beauty. The voice of Yeşilçam is inescapably coupled with its noise.
This noise is neither mono nor stereo or polyphonic, but cacophonic – a rhizome that is
both couch grass and potato. It is in this cacophony that one may find what Yeşilçam
Turkified with post-synchronized sound: not only voices, musical scores, and sound
effects, but also the noise of the theater, of the projection machine, and of its spectators.
The nostalgia for the golden age of a popular cinema is not just because of its sounds and
images, but because of an image and imagination of its pre-capitalist, carnivalesque
laughter and cry, which is lost in the process of modernization and westernization, just
like Karagöz or other traditional forms of entertainment.
155
CHAPTER 5
YEŞILÇAM II: GENRES AND FILMS DURING THE HIGH YEŞİLÇAM
Her dakika calib-i hayret menazır arzeder
Bir temaşa hane-i ibretnümadır perdemiz
Karagöz oyununa giriş
Every minute provides scenes of captivating astonishment
A spectacle house of cautionary tales is our screen
(Prologue to Karagöz plays)
5.1. Karagöz and Punch
In March, 2005, the Little Angel Theater in Islington, London put on a new
puppet play, The Grass is Always Greener. In the play, which starts out in a twodimensional Karagöz format and then transforms into three-dimensional Punch style,
Karagöz is inspired to go to London when he sees Punch on television (Awde 2005). The
artistic director of the theater, Steve Tiplady, explains how Punch, Karagöz’s cousin,
“takes him up in the London Eye and offers him the world, if he becomes a 3D glove
puppet” (in Wright 2005). But in this Faustian storyline, as Punch, i.e., Mephistopheles,
brings Karagöz into the “real world,” Karagöz realizes that the real world which is put
before him and which he dreamed of, is not as he had imagined. According to Tiplady,
“like Turkey itself, which is half-European and half-Asian, the show is a mix of ethereal
Eastern shadow puppets and knockabout Western Punch and Judy” (in Wright 2005). In
Turkey, Karagöz is generally viewed as a traditional, two-dimensional and basically
vocal art, and as not belonging to the world of perspectival representation. It has been
slowly fading out for the past fifty years. But in this fade out, is there a fade in of
156
Karagöz into other arts? Or should it stay as a traditional art that must stay in its premodern position? What should one make of Karagöz? Should it be revived? Does it
belong in museums? Nowadays, not only do such questions persist in relation to Karagöz,
but they also have relevance in terms of Yeşilçam cinema, which by and large faded out
of the contemporary world of filmmaking in Turkey while persisting in the form of
television series, which even employ some of the old Yeşilçam filmmakers. What The
Grass is Always Greener “did” to Karagöz can also be seen as a metaphor for Yeşilçam
cinema, which always dreamed of being in the real or more realistic world of London or
Hollywood just to realize what it is composed of. But once it incorporated forms of the
West, there was no return. Instead a new existence has emerged which is neither quite
knockabout Western nor ethereally Eastern, but in-between.
Because some Turkish cinema writers saw that cinema, as a modern medium, is
the output of a variety of Western technological inventions allowing for a mechanical
representation of the three-dimensional reality of the world, Karagöz was thought to have
no place in such a world of “representation.” It is in this vein that Karagöz, as a premodern mode of representation and entertainment, has often been disregarded by
historians of Turkish cinema such as Nijat Özön. On the other hand, filmmakers such as
Halit Refiğ considered Karagöz, if not visually viable anymore, as one of the sources of
Turkish cinema. Yet he did not see its form as useable on the path toward the creation of
a totally “national” cinema, which was supposed to produce homegrown perspectives and
narratives. Both writers took cinema essentially as a “serious” art which would serve as a
mechanism for enculturation. Set in this context, the Karagöz quote with which Refiğ
opened his 1971 book Ulusal Sinema Kavgası (The Struggle for National Cinema) shows
what Karagöz and later Yeşilçam was, or how it was consumed: above all, both forms
provided its spectators with “scenes of captivating astonishment.” While they presented
cautionary tales to their spectators, they had to do so within a house of spectacles that
involved both viewing and wandering in a world of dreams and escapade. Yeşilçam
presented its spectators with astonishment, spectacle, and cautionary tales; tears, laughter,
and thrills. Karagöz is also a part of the tradition of oral storytelling: “Our legends, folk
tales, and religious stories are filmed in Yeşilçam” (Özön 1996, 6). In presenting these,
157
Yeşilçam not only utilized the storylines of traditional sources but also, when faced with
technological or visual shortcomings, it solved them with the help of verbal
communication, as did traditional theatrical forms. Thus while its sources and methods
shared a specific relationship to both filmic and local traditions, as a popular film
industry or as a mass entertainment industry by and large producing commercial films,
Yeşilçam did not have a project or agenda akin to that of the Republic. Instead it repeated
several well-known formulas to increase profits. In this, it produced a number of genres
and cycles of films in the same genre. In doing so, the majority of Yeşilçam’s filmmakers
did not look for a “true” or good way of making films; instead they searched for the most
profitable formula for filmmaking.
In the previous chapter, I tried to show how Yeşilçam was organized as a film
industry and how it knotted its films with the help of dubbing. While cinema, in its
reproduction and representation of the world, is taken to be a “realist” medium, Yeşilçam
is generally criticized for not being realist enough – hence its proximity to
nonrepresentational and nonillusionistic Karagöz. Beyond criticizing its visual
discontinuities and failures, such critics often also consider the narratives of Yeşilçam as
generally incoherent and discontinuous. Though during the golden age of Yeşilçam such
gaps were generally eliminated in the mainstream films of major production companies,
low-budget films of the minors were still marked by such discontinuities, which remain
even in contemporary Turkish films and television series. However, in Yeşilçam,
whenever the visual language became insufficient for conveying the story, filmmakers
relied on dubbing or overdubbed narrative to eliminate these shortages. Similar to
Karagöz or other traditional forms of theater that relied on very limited sets and stages,
they solved the problems of visual language with verbal language. Such solutions also
brought about narrative formulations and genre-based practices which were based on the
repetition of successful formulas.
158
5.2. Genrification and the Recycling of Genres
Discussions on genre generally look at different stages of the production and
consumption of films: film industries may refer to genres before and during the stage of
production as “genre films;” spectators may be aware of genres; and critics may see
genres as having significance in terms of economic, sociopolitical and cultural
conjunctures. Genre criticism and studies in relation to popular cinema also have
relevance in terms of film criticism and film studies. While the former may evaluate films
in relation to earlier examples of the same genre, the latter may look at the development
of and transformations in different genres. In this respect, genres are generally thought of
as “film genres,” whose borders and places are continuously negotiated and shifted in
different spatiotemporal contexts. In the third chapter of this study, I argued that
Yeşilçam’s filmmaking practice is basically a melodramatic one by claiming that
melodrama is not just limited to a genre, but a general frame of the mode of filmmaking
in a specific context of popular national cinema. Yeşilçam presented a cinema combining
narrativity with spectacles or attractions. As much as it tried to make sense, it was also a
cinema of the senses and emotions. Though one may find its origins in a combination of
music with drama, and place family or maternal melodramas or weepies at the center of
the discussions on melodrama, melodrama was not just related to “pathos, romance, and
domesticity.” Rather, in line with Steve Neale’s study on the understanding and
conception of melodrama until the Second World War, melodrama also involved “action,
adventure, and thrills; not ‘feminine’ genres and the woman’s films but war films,
adventure films, horror films, and thrillers, genres traditionally thought of as, if anything,
‘male’” (in Altman 1999, 72). However, this earlier conception of melodrama was
transformed first in the 1940s and 1950s with the increased production of family or
maternal melodramas and later in the 1980s through the interpretation of feminist film
students, who put these films at the core of melodrama as a genre. For Rick Altman, this
earlier conception of melodrama has been undermined by recent film scholarship. Thus it
becomes clear that rather than following determined types, conceptions of genres
themselves are subject to considerable redefinition.
159
Indeed, Altman asks a very useful question about genres: “Are genres stable?”
(1999, 49) In answering this question, Altman noted that ‘generic’ terms moved from
adjectives to nouns. “Before the western became a separate genre…there were such
things as western chase films, western scenics, western melodramas, western romances,
western adventure films, and even western comedies, western dramas, and western epics”
(1999, 52). Thus according to Altman, each of these already existing genres qualified the
West as the frontier through its settings, plots, characters, and props. For him, before
turning into a noun, three changes had to occur for genres such as the musical and the
western. First was the studios’ practice of standardization and automatization of generic
elements based on and repeating earlier successful practices and thus getting rid of
adjectives, or “abandoning the add-on approach.” The second change was based on the
“genrification” of shared attributes in terms of a genre’s melodramatic plot and characters
such as “villain, endangered woman, and law-abiding young man” in the case of westerns
or “the use of music as both catalyst and expression of heterosexual romance” in the case
of musicals. Finally, the public’s awareness of generic structures and its change of
viewing based on the generic concept and identifications (“character types and relations,
plot outcome, production style, and the like”) was also necessary (1999, 53). Here
Altman indeed talks about three changes that take place at different temporal stages of
cinema: the first has to do with a pre-filmic or pre-textual stage when the genre, or the
content, of a film is defined by participants involved in the production of a film; the
second concerns the textual character of a film and how it is read in a genre; and the last
relates to the reception or consumption of a film, i.e., how it is viewed and understood by
the “readers” of the text.
In the previous chapter, I noted that the producer Hürrem Erman had an
awareness of genres and generic choices that determined the films made in the following
season based on socioeconomic clues that were consolidated from the political processes
of the country, tips from regional distributors, reading of the market, and the surmised
plans of other production companies. Scriptwriter Bülent Oran said that every year
producers had a period of indecisiveness before the end of the film season, when they
started to plan for the following season. They had to find answers for several questions:
160
“What films were they going to make that year? What was the public bored with? What
was the public demanding?” (1973, 22) According to Oran, the first stage of planning
was based on the hints of distributors who, depending on their regions, asked for films
with particular stars, in particular genres such as action-adventure, or with particular
ingredients such as fight scenes, nudity or lots of tears. The second stage of planning was
the producer’s reading of the socioeconomic and political conjuncture: “Is the public
experiencing hardship? Are they comfortable? Based on these factors, comedies or
dramas are considered” (Oran 1973, 22). In both examples, filmmakers responded to
genres in relation to the processes of a film’s production, distribution, and consumption,
and shifting conditions that demanded quick and creative solutions. In a similar
discussion, instead of focusing on producing films in particular genres, Altman argues
that studios or film production companies sought “to initiate film cycles” that would
easily create a brand name for the studio: “Stressing studio-specific resources (contract
actors, proprietary characters, recognizable styles), these cycles always also include
common features that can be imitated by other studios (subject matter, character types,
plot patterns)” (1999, 60). This obviously required novelties to be introduced into genres,
which initially became adjectives that qualified already existing genres such as “musical
melodramas, musical comedies or musical romances” and later culminated in the
industry-wide (i.e., not limited to a profit-making novelty of one studio) genre of the
musical, as a noun. For Altman, in this process of “genrification,” once the noun genre,
e.g., musical or western, becomes a “generic” practice of the industry, it becomes less
profitable to repeat the formula and thus new cycles or adjectives started to be sought by
the filmmakers (1999, 62).
Altman’s model of genre-cycle involves a constant process of “exchange” and
“altercation,” “genrification” and “recycling,” or “mapping” and “remapping.” “Just as
our knowledge of the changing borders of France underlies any current use of the term
‘France’, so categories like poetry, drama, and comedy coexist with the musical” (Altman
1999, 69). Instead of presupposing an originary or specific map that would serve as a
point of reference for each discussion of France, it would be more commensurable to see
borders as shifting, as subject to redefinition or remapping. Instead of looking for music
161
and drama in each melodrama or instead of seeing family or maternal melodrama in each
discussion of the melodramatic, it would be more meaningful to study melodrama as a
constantly shifting frame that is subject to transformation and altercations in different
spatiotemporal filmic practices. Following Russell Merritt, Altman notes that melodrama
is “a slippery and evolving category” (1999, 71). While such a view of melodrama brings
us to a categorization which is applicable to all genres, and therefore subject to various
transformations and shifts, it may also serve as our clue to understanding genres as
belonging to a multiplicity of locations instead of a specific and definable locus. It is
worth noting that Altman related genre to nation in terms of the location of genre. He
argues that while for some, the nation stood for “a single coherent concept referring to a
single coherent referent…the very notion of nation appears to depend on constant conflict
among multiple competing but related notions” (1999, 86). By taking genres as systems
and processes that are interconnected with each other, Altman’s likening of genres to
nation as complex and interconnected communities also brings forward a presupposition
of an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson) and “a bourgeois public sphere”
(Jürgen Habermas) (1999, 196). He then points out that “all genre formation…begins
with a process of cycle-making creolization, combining gypsy adjectives with
established, land-owning generic substantives” (1999, 199). Altman’s view of
genre/nation also presents a center-periphery conflict that continually shifts the borders
and involves attempts to capture the center. Instead of arguing for a center that holds, that
is pure and originary, Altman’s argument involves a dialectical operation that leads to
continual transformations, as well as recyclings and regenrifications. As I will argue
below, Altman’s association of genre/nation with concepts such as creolization, gypsy
adjectives, or recycling easily fits a general framework of “readings” of third world or
postcolonial cinemas which moved from an understanding of national cinemas based on
origins, essences and purity to ambivalences, hybrids, and subversions. While I will try to
touch on aspects of postcolonial theory in relation to cinema, particularly Yeşilçam, I will
also attempt to relate this to the notions of Turkification, hayal, and melodramatic
modality that I have tried to explain in previous chapters. In this respect, I will argue that
Yeşilçam cinema may be thought of as a site of demand and desire that presented
162
complex and contradictory claims of identity that oscillate between the East and the
West. I will then try to place such protocols of identity formation and identification in
relation to Yeşilçam films that exemplify different film genres.
5.3. Yeşilçam’s Özenti
In defining what he refers to as “cosmopolitan cinema,” the Islamist Yeşilçam
director Yücel Çakmaklı makes reference to the stories told by Hollywood and Western
cinema in general (2002) as those which are not “our” stories or which do not carry the
necessary cement of a Turkish-Islamic identity. When I asked him whether he meant a
specific genre of films, he answered negatively: “Every kind, adventure or comedy; every
kind, action, historical action or comedy. But Turkish cinema took these, and initially
tried to adapt them, but later started to imitate – even in the 1960s and 1970s, it started
serial production by copying both scripts and films” (2002). In this respect, much like
Nijat Özön and Halit Refiğ, Çakmaklı also yearns for a “national” cinema that would
define itself against Western cinema, which he called “cosmopolitan” and therefore not
proper to the traditions and mores of Turks. He even went on to claim that not only
Muhsin Ertuğrul’s films about the republican War for Independence, but also later social
realist films were merely “imitations” of Italian Neorealist films. Likewise, he claimed
that the films of Satjayit Ray or Youssef Chahine arose out of an özenti, a demand and
desire to imitate. Beyond his criticism of leftists, the westernized elite, or intellectuals in
the name of nurturing a Turkish-Islamic identity, Çakmaklı’s choice of words fits into the
general framework of nation/genre in Turkey. His criticisms are not very different from
the criticisms of others: though coming from different ends of the political spectrum,
filmmakers generally claim that Yeşilçam, of which they were a part and with which they
wanted to part, is a cinema characterized by özenti.
The word özenti, which refers to a desire to imitate somebody, is a fabricated
word from the root, “öz” which means self or essence. Özenti is the noun form of the verb
özenmek which does not have a direct counterpart in English and which, according to the
Redhouse Turkish-English dictionary, means 1. to take pains (to do something), 2. to
163
want to imitate (someone), and 3. to try to (do something one knows little about). In other
words, it involves work, imitation, and novelty. According to İsmet Zeki Eyuboğlu’s
Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language, the “en-mek” suffix denotes a “self”
that moves toward itself, and in özenmek, “öz (self) is self-reflexive. It thus makes itself
closer to another self, it enters into a relationship with another self. Özenmek is, for a self,
to try to do something done by another self by moving towards itself.” The double
meaning of the word öz brings to mind two things that determine the Turkish nation: its
relation to the West, and its cinema’s relation to the West. When one takes öz as
“essence” and “pure or genuine,” it refers to all claims of national identity which
presuppose a Turkishness which must be essential, pure, and original -- even though such
presuppositions differ according to different communities supposed to be one under the
imagined unitary rubric of a nation. On another scale, however, öz also refers to self.
When it is used in the form of özenmek, it describes a relationship of desire between self
and other (selves). Whenever one-self desires to be an-other self, özenmek involves a
movement that starts at the self, goes to another self, then returns to itself. However, in
this movement, in this process of “trying to do something one knows little about,” what is
lost is the “essential, pure and original” self. In other words, when Çakmaklı deemed
mainstream Yeşilçam to be a cosmopolitan cinema and therefore a cinema of “özenti,” he
indeed referred to a cinema that has lost its “essence, purity, and originality.” At the same
time, he articulated a claim about and a return to an “essence” which is to be found in
Turkish-Islamic culture that is excluded by the republican regime in the name of a
cultural synthesis based on folk and Western cultures. More importantly, though
Çakmaklı seems to be critical of the republican project for its desire to be like the West,
his films and his presupposition about “öz” are not devoid of Yeşilçam or westernization.
In contrast, his desire to “return to our öz” is based on an “öz” that is no longer pure and
essential, but ‘purified’ and ‘essentialized.’
164
5.3.1. Nationalism, Colonization, and the Third World
In short, intellectual and political positions that relate to Yeşilçam cinema may
involve aspects of leftist, Kemalist or Islamist ideologies. But regardless of their position,
they are directed toward a supposedly original synthesis that would create a true Turkish
essence. However, these intellectual positions about a national culture and its arts,
specifically its cinema, miss a crucial point concerning cultural colonization. Frantz
Fanon stated that the native artists’ production of visual arts is based on national works
that are “a stereotyped reproduction of details.” For him,
These artists, who have nevertheless thoroughly studied modern techniques
and who have taken part in the main trends of contemporary painting and
architecture, turn their back on foreign culture, deny it and set out to look for
a true national culture, setting great store on what they consider to be the
constant principles of national art. But these people forget that the forms of
thought and what it feeds on, together with modern techniques of
information, language and dress have dialectically reorganized the people’s
intelligences and that the constant principles which acted as safeguards
during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely radical
changes…Before independence, the native painter was insensible to the
national scene. He set a high value on non-figurative art, or more often was
specialized in still-lifes. After independence his anxiety to rejoin his people
will confine him to the most detailed representation of reality. This is
representative art which has no internal rhythms, an art which is serene and
immobile, evocative not of life but of death. Enlightened circles are in
ecstasies when confronted with this ‘inner truth’ which is so well expressed;
but we have the right to ask if this truth is in fact a reality, and if it is not
already outworn and denied, called in question by the epoch through which
the people are treading out their path towards history (Fanon 1967, 181).
In an assumed historical link to an empire and an imperial culture, many of the Turkish
intellectuals of the republican era found themselves in a problematic relation to the West.
While Turkey was not colonized per se, but invaded and then engaged in a successful
War of Independence, formations of a Turkish national culture carried almost all
elements of a colonized culture in its relation to the West and those who demanded the
creation of such an essential national identity led to a cultural self-colonization. However,
165
the national culture and its strength in forming a Turkish national identity created first a
myth of reaching for the standards of the West through modernization and westernization
and then supported it with a secondary claim of being true to a national culture with an
imaginary return to its essential and pure state. It was not coincidental that, when I talked
with Metin Erksan for a possible interview in 2002, he refused to talk with me because I
talked about Turkey as a third world country. For him, Turkey’s place is not next to
“those” Third World countries but next to the Western countries, as their equal. Yet
Turkey as a Third World country easily suits a definition such as the following:
The fundamental definition of the ‘Third World’ has more to do with
protracted structural domination than with crude economic categories (‘the
poor’), developmental categories (the ‘non-industrialized’), racial categories
(‘the non-White’), cultural categories (‘the backward’), or geographical
categories (‘the East’, ‘the South’) (Shohat and Stam 1994, 25)
Such structural domination holds the essence of özenti: a nation never able to be because
it is structured as always becoming through an external system of essential identity and
linear progress. However, when referred to as a “Third World” country, Erksan and other
intellectuals of a Kemalist-nationalist perception only think about the poor, the nonindustrialized or the backward, something that the Turks should not be. As indicated by
probably the most renowned saying of Mustafa Kemal, recited daily as a pledge by
schoolchildren, a Turk must first declare his/her national identity, then his/her
righteousness, and then his/her work ethic and meticulousness: “I am a Turk. I am just. I
am diligent.” It is because of such a nationalist sentiment that many intellectuals –
leftists, Kemalists, and Islamists alike – have found themselves in a state of blindness that
carries the inerasable marks of a nationalist and an imperialist past. It is because of this
that Turkish politicians did not find themselves in a position to attend the 1955 Bandung
Conference which led to the Nonaligned Movement in 1961 and culminated in the
conception of “third world” terminology. Instead, Turkey conceived of itself within a
frame of nationalist discourses in the Third World that assumed “an unquestioned
national identity. But most contemporary nation-states are ‘mixed’ formations” (Shohat
and Stam 1994, 26). Neither earlier Third Worldist initiatives or perspectives, nor a
166
contemporary postcolonial theoretical stance was proper for the national culture projects
of Turkey that dreamed of being equal to the West.
As a Yeşilçam director producing popular films generally referred to as “business
films” (made just for profit), Erksan, like Refiğ, yearned for a proper national cinema
which would be modern but at the same time utilize elements of Turkish culture such as
Sufism. Following Fanon, in yearning for a representative art, native artists
stereotypically reproduced details in the name of reality. Such details looked lifeless and
undecipherable not just to the foreign spectators but also to the domestic masses.
Moreover, when he heard that I was going to do a study on his film Şeytan (Satan), which
is a “Turkification” and even an “Islamization” of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973),
he said that because this movie had no respectable place in his oeuvre, he was not going
to talk about it. Assuming that it was not me who caused his anger during our very short
telephone conversation, one might understand his attitude through the contrast between
his remake as a “business film” and his intellectual positioning as a Kemalist, nationalist
director within in the frame of a national cultural project that is supposed to be stable and
true, bereft of impurities, bastardization, and errors. Despite such similar concerns, Refiğ
and Erksan later part ways in terms of their interests. While Refiğ started to talk more
about reviving Islamic Ottoman culture, Erksan defended the Kemalist cultural project of
westernization through Turkish folk culture. Though the two sides have such separate
positions, their relation to the West and its cinema is still noteworthy. In his book on the
possibility of making a film about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey and
eponymous father of the Turks, Erksan claimed that a film about the life of Atatürk
cannot be done in Turkey because it would concretize the concept of Atatürk and thus
limit people’s freedom in imagining Atatürk. Instead of a Turkish filmmaker, Erksan
made a controversial suggestion: “a big and real American filmmaker such as Martin
Scorsese, Steven Spielberg or George Lucas” must make this film (1989, 76). But one
such big and believable American director had to come up with the idea, without
incentive or requests from Turks. This was not only because they had the best creativity
and technology available to filmmakers, but also because Hollywood had the best
capacity to create “myths and legends” that would avail themselves to one’s freedom to
167
“image” and “imagine” Atatürk and his ideology. The power of Kemalist ideology comes
from its “image” of Atatürk as the savior of Turks and founder of the Turkish nationstate. In representing the father of Turks, that film would have to give the “inner truth”
which would be best represented by his ideals and ascriptions, by harnessing cinema’s
realistic power into a power to create “myths and legends.” Taken in this vein, the inner
truth of Atatürk is also related to a claim about the genuine state of a self that is bereft of
fallacies. Instead of viewing national culture in terms of a process of continual change
and transformation, such a film and such models offered by “serious” filmmakers coming
from different ends of the political spectrum offer stable and pure states of originality and
essentiality without considering the possibility of a split inhibited by the very
presupposition of a national culture.
5.3.2. Colonial Selves, Postcolonial Others
However, the concept of özenti directly contradicts any such supposition of
unitary and originary selfhood. Integral to the meaning of “özenti” is a movement that
starts from the self, goes to the other, and then assumes a return to self. But what this
movement marks fundamentally is the impossibility of a self to which one can return or
that would stay intact once such a movement were to occur. In his article, “Remembering
Fanon,” Homi Bhabha quotes Fanon who said that he, himself, “had to meet the white
man’s eyes” and see his “cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, and racial
defects.” According to Bhabha, Fanon thus understood himself as far from his own
presence marked by amputation, excision, and hemorrhage (1994, 115). Fanon’s colonial
subject is placed into vision and representation; while being “over-determined from
without,” Fanon sees this process as taking place in the colonial condition through image
and fantasy. The ideas of civility and progress, the move from nature to culture, and the
myth of man and society, according to Bhabha, are all undermined by the delirium and
perversions of the colonial condition. In other words, post-Enlightenment Man’s “dark
reflection, the shadow of colonized man,” disturbs and divides its being (Bhabha 1994,
116). For Bhabha, this “idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other, but the
168
‘Otherness’ of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity,” is
transferred by Fanon onto the historic condition of colonial man.
What emerges from the figurative language I have used to make such an
argument are three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of
identification in the analytic of desire. First: to exist is to be called into being in
relation to an Otherness, its look or locus. It is a demand that reaches outward
to an external object…It is always in relation to the place of the Other that
colonial desire is articulated: that is, in part, the fantasmatic space of
‘possession’ that no one subject can singly occupy which permits the dream of
the inversion of roles. Second: the very place of identification, caught in the
tension of demand and desire, is a space of splitting. The fantasy of the native
is precisely to occupy the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s
avenging anger…It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonized Other, but the
disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial
otherness…Finally…the question of identification is never the affirmation of a
pre-given identity never a self-fulfilling prophecy – it is always the production
of an ‘image’ of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that
image. The demand of identification – that is, to be for an Other – entails the
representation of the subject in the differentiating order of Otherness.
Identification…is always the return of an image of identity which bears the
mark of splitting in that ‘Other’ place from which it comes (Bhabha 1994,
117).
Having listed these three conditions, Bhabha quotes Fanon who narrated the moment of
being seen by a white French kid: “Look a Negro…Mama, see the Negro! I’m
frightened.” Orhan Koçak wrote about two republican intellectuals, the republican
reformist Nurullah Ataç and the traditionalist Cemil Meriç, who wrote on Shakespeare’s
The Tempest. Koçak saw these authors as blind to Caliban’s identity. For Koçak, instead
of seeing this play/character in terms of a clash between two cultures, both saw it/him as
parts of the same culture within a post-Enlightenment framework of universality and
civility (228). After reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, Meriç admitted that he would
not be able to write a study like Said’s, yet still claimed that he had looked into almost all
of the sources used by Said. According to Koçak, Meriç then resorted to a form of
Occidentalism by totally disregarding the real West as he made it into a single, unified
entity, and with which he had a relationship of demand and desire: “If we burn all the
Korans, if we demolish all mosques, we are still Ottomans in the eyes of the Europeans;
169
Ottoman, in other words, Islamic: a dark, dangerous and enemy mass” (in Koçak 1995,
241). Meriç’s search for identity led him to dig into Eastern sources, including those of
Buddhism. However, he favored sources in the French language. Though in his relation
to the West, Meriç found himself in a relation of love and hate: of desire. He never
imagined himself in the position of Caliban, the inferior slave whose island was
conquered by a superior master, Prospero. Though he saw an inherent darkness, danger
and enmity in his identity, he tried to identify with what was enlightened and canny,
instead of using his darkness, his shadow, toward a political subversion. Moreover, he
learned the language of the master and tried to communicate with it, without attaching it
to a colonial violence. It was not just a coincidence but an irony of history that Ernest
Renan served as a source for the claims of national identity fostered by Ziya Gökalp or
others who had a say in the production of a national cultural program in Turkey. Renan’s
nationalism had to be stripped of its inherent racism in a search for a nationality based on
a spiritual principle that links the past with the present.
Much like China which could not quite place itself in the Second World or the
Third World, and which experienced a process of self-colonization triggered by its own
governments, the Turkish intellectual climate stayed away from Fanon, Said or other
postcolonial theorists until the 1990s. As I noted in the second chapter of this study with
reference to Rey Chow, though both countries never experienced colonial rule per se,
both countries were in effect colonized and both peoples suffered exploitation thanks to
their own governments’ programs and projects of modernization. Thus, postcolonial
thought’s stress on “deterritorialization, the constructed nature of nationalism and
national borders, and the obsolescence of anticolonialist discourse” are significant in
understanding this situation of colonization (Shohat and Stam 1994, 38). For Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam, in line with its poststructuralist approach, postcolonial theory involves
a going beyond the earlier understanding of Third World and Third Cinema, which
involved earlier nation-building attempts and proximity with nationalist ideals of linear
progression. Instead, “postcolonial theory, in so far as it addresses complex, multilayered
identities, has proliferated in terms having to do with cultural mixing: religious
(syncretism); biological (hybridity); human-genetic (mestizaje); and linguistic
170
(creolization)” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 41). This shift from essentialism, nationalist
originary models and racial purity, to hybridity and ambivalence may bring about a useful
path of analysis in understanding popular Turkish cinema. In this respect, while I used the
word “Turkification” to explain such complex and contradicting processes of
internalization, domestication, and nationalization, similar words may be observed in
other cases such as the “Algerianization” of French culture and the introduction of
transnational identities marked by diasporic and hybrid existences throughout Europe.
5.3.3. Yeşilçam and Özenti
In the world of cinema, including that of filmmakers who yearned for a national,
art or political cinema, such a relationship with the West did not come about. In terms of
filmmakers, an ongoing relationship with Hollywood involved a dream of the inversion
of roles, to be in the place of the other, of Hollywood, to possess a fantasmic space which
cannot be literally occupied – hence it is a dream. Such filmmakers are like Karagöz who
sees Punch on television and decides to go to London. There, Punch offers him the
“world,” to be like him, in a three-dimensional world of puppets. For this, Karagöz had to
identify with Punch and accept his three-dimensional world by leaving his twodimensional world behind. Nezih Erdoğan, who has written on the problem of
identification in relation the construction of a national cinema in Yeşilçam, argues that
both the defenders of westernization and its critics in Turkey placed the West both as the
other and at the center of those arguments (1997, 180). While Yeşilçam saw its norms as
set by Hollywood, the proponents of a political or art cinema saw something like French
New Wave or Italian Neorealism at its center stage. In any case, the other had to be
mirrored, the image of the other that is desired was outside and özenti involved a dream
of being in the place of the other, possessing its space, and being the master. In this
dialectical inversion of roles, however, the place of identification is marked by a tension
of demand and desire. The dynamics of özenti – as a word that claims an öz, an essence
and origin, in itself, but marked by a ceaseless move from outside itself and a demand to
capture the place of other before returning to itself – are critical for understanding
171
Yeşilçam. While Yeşilçam was deemed özenti by its critics who yearned for a “true”
national cinema, Yeşilçam produced ambivalent responses not simply to such demands
but also in relation to the West. Yeşilçam’s özenti on the one hand involved a movement
from self to other and then a return to self. On the other hand, the dynamics of this
movement at the same time involved an impossibility of returning to an originary self
already lost in the process of modernization and westernization. Looking at Yeşilçam
melodramas from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Erdoğan argues that “melodrama as a
popular genre which plays on desire” provided us “with valuable insight into the
ambivalent nature of national identity” (1998, 264). This is indeed so, but is not just
limited to Yeşilçam melodramas. Rather, it also extends to Yeşilçam’s melodramatic
modality and its genrification. Turkification and genrification are both processes of the
construction of nations or genres. The dynamics of such processes are not reducible to
clear-cut categorical identities.
Instead, Yeşilçam’s özenti produced ambivalent and contradictory responses to
both West and East, and to both reform projects and anti-reformist tendencies. In this
özenti, one may find two distinct but related flaws of Yeşilçam: while one has to do with
its relation to Western cinema, the other concerns its relation to the westernized elite and
the reforms that elite executed in Turkey. As noted in the previous chapter, Yeşilçam is
also divided in itself in terms of films produced by majors and minors. Put together, these
complex inputs created multiple and ambivalent realms of response and criticism. In this
vein, one may claim that there is a single direction from a colonizing West to a colonized
and traditional East. But to this one may add the division within a colonized country
where the westernized elite represents the West and where they become auto-colonizers
with reform programs exerted over the masses, who become the doubly colonized. The
elite’s özenti is generally mediated through high culture: e.g., classical music, opera,
ballet, painting and sculpture. To institute such high arts in the context of Turkey, the
early republican government founded institutes and institutions and tried to disseminate
them to the public.
In contrast, such westernizing reform programs were not
administered in the process of the growth and popularization of popular cinema. While
the elite chose Western films over the Turkish ones, their choice was more of Hollywood,
172
as a popular cinema, than art or auteur films of European cinemas. By echoing Fanon’s
arguments, such a relation to the West eventually brought about the issue of the
alienation of the elite and westernized intellectuals from the masses in their own country
by creating a more westernized taste than that of the masses. This presupposed a demand
and desire to reach the level of the West, to be equals, on a path of özenti that claimed to
possess the place of other without giving up its own self. As Bhabha quoted from Fanon,
this has to do with the colonizer’s invitation of a shared identity based on education and
status: “You are a doctor, a writer, a student, you are different, you are one of us” (1994,
117). Sold on such a claim to difference, they repeatedly enacted their differences
through the hierarchy constructed through self-colonization
This relationship with the West, generally mediated by high culture, became more
complicated in terms of cinema. While the masses were subjected to the projects and
programs of westernization and modernization, they were also aware of Western
cinemas, mainly of the same Hollywood which the elites sought to emulate. The masses
were marked not only by the dream of possessing the colonizer’s place, but also by the
dream of stepping into the place of the self-colonizers who locally stood in their stead.
They are not only presented with a double “image” of identity, but also are asked to
incorporate them. As doubly colonized and Eastern, they were traditional, rural, and
multi-ethnic and they were asked to negate their identity, their selves which were multiethnic and multi-cultural, as they were subjected to a program of nationalization,
westernization, and modernization. In terms of cinema, Hollywood was consumed by
them through a certain mode of “Turkification” thanks to dubbing and at times re-editing.
The popularization of Egyptian and Yeşilçam cinema which developed thereafter, with
the rise in the number of film theaters and with migration to urban centers, created
ambivalent identities and identifications, both in terms of the films of major and minor
production companies and of their response to the West and westernizing reforms. In this
respect, taken as a cinema of özenti, Yeşilçam’s self is not just it-self but a spontaneous
and ambivalent movement from it-self to its others (i.e., dream-selves) before its return to
it-self, which is distorted and transformed (i.e. “Turkified”) in the process. But it is the
distance between selves and others that underlines the “movement” of özenti which
173
involves a working, an effort to create something novel in its imitation. But should one
find in this process an antagonistic relation between the West and the East, the colonizer
and the colonized, and the master and the slave? Should one presuppose a return to the
self? Or is it possible to see Yeşilçam’s özenti in relation to couch grass, to a rhizomatic
tactic of survival and aggressive growth?
A possible reading of özenti may introduce an argument about self and others, and
“the Other” based on a particular reading of Lacan. In presenting “the place of the native
[i.e. the colonized] as that of the image and the silent object,” Rey Chow noted that “a
kind of lack in a pejorative” sense is at work (1993, 48). According to Bhabha or Chow,
Fanon attempted to fill this with an antagonism by claiming natives’ subjectivity through
an anticolonial envy and violence. In an attempt to go beyond an imagination of the
native that is subjected to a Manichean ethics, to a melodramatic antagonism between
good and evil, that limits the native into a field of the impure (i.e., getürkt), by following
what she called “the Lacanian language,” Chow offered “the Other” (Autre), “that is
before ‘separation’, before the emergence of the objet petit a, the name for those
subjectivized, privatized, and missing parts of the whole” (1993, 49). While a relation
between the Subject and “object a,” the object of desire, would lead one to a direct
positioning of the two, according to Bhabha or Chow, the introduction of the Other as the
locus of speech and truth (i.e., the law of the father), puts representation into ambivalence
by disclosing a lack.
In the language of psychoanalysis, the Law of the Father or the paternal
metaphor, again, cannot be taken at its word. It is a process of substitution and
exchange that inscribes a normative, normalizing place for the subject; but that
metaphoric access to identity is exactly the place of prohibition and repression,
precisely a conflict of authority. Identification, as it is spoken in the desire of
the Other, is always a question of interpretation for it is the elusive assignation
of myself with a one-self, the elision of person and place (1994, 119).
Instead of locating an antagonistic relationship between the West and the East, the ruler
and the ruled, and the white and the black both in terms of colonization and selfcolonization, what Bhabha underlined is the ambivalence integral in the identification,
174
the distance between the self and the Other: “the strategic return of that difference that
informs and deforms the image of identity, in the margin of Otherness that displays
identification.” While this is a path of understanding the identity and identification of
colonized subjects and their not so simple objectification that involves the Other, the
application of this postcolonial stance to film brings us to a totally different frame of
reference. Following a similar line of argumentation and echoing Bhabha, Nezih Erdoğan
noted that the big Other of Yeşilçam is Hollywood, that which sets the rules, yet is
outside the reach of Yeşilçam.
The Big Other plays on difference and the disavowal of difference, mimicry,
departing from the denial of difference, will crash at the barrier of difference
anyway. Hollywood is what Yeşilçam can never be…Difference signifies lack
in this context. So, in order to make this lack ‘good’, Yeşilçam, hopelessly
produces excess…There is a paradox here; excess is not only a consolation for
the lack, but it also justifies mimicry retrospectively (Erdoğan 2001, 127).
Though this seems to be a fair means of viewing Yeşilçam, it also brings about the
problem of an Oedipal drama set at the center stage of an analysis not only of the
discourse of the colonized but also that of Yeşilçam. Before that, an initial problem in
relation to this view of cinema is underlined by the very idea of “excess” which is only
possible through a presupposition of a language of cinema based on classical Hollywood
cinema’s “realism.” Only after presupposing the continuity of classical Hollywood’s film
language, can one speak about the breaks and gaps (i.e., the excesses) that disturb such
continuity. However, as I have tried to argue with reference to the traditional performing
arts, Yeşilçam’s filmic language and narratives are full of such discontinuities and
nurtured by such breaks. In other words, its nonillusionism was its defining character; it
did not face the problem of reality or a realistic illusion but it was fed by the
naturalization of such nonrealism.
But there are still other questions in relation to “the Other:” Do films claim an
identity or is it the analyst, the Subject, who presupposes such analytic realms and places
cinema accordingly in the Oedipal drama? What if, as Deleuze and Guattari argued,
“cinema is able to capture the movement of madness, precisely because it is not
175
analytical and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence?” (2003, 274) In this
respect, seeing Yeşilçam in terms of a “delirium” might present us with different avenues
of reading the Oedipal drama. Instead of assuming that this Oedipal guilt becomes
attached to a child, what if it turns out that the father is guilty? Instead of the story of
Oedipus, what if we look at the story of Abraham? Marked by an analytical urge and an
“infinite regression” in terms of the child’s relation to the father [a father’s relation to a
child, who then becomes another father], the beginning of this delirium is based on a
father’s Oedipalization of a son. For Deleuze and Guattari, “every delirium is first of all
the investment of a field that is social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist,
pedagogical, and religious: the delirious person applies a delirium to his family and his
son that overreaches them on all sides” (2003, 274). While psychoanalysis places the real
actions and passions of the mother and father into the “fantasies” of the child, and places
that child into a scheme of infinite regression, it also does so in relation to a family,
which is before everything else a social field.
If the familial investment is only a dependence or an application of the
unconscious investments of the social field – and if this is just as true of the
child as of the adult; if it is true that the child, through the mommy-territoriality
and the daddy-law, already aims for the schizzes and the encoded or axiomated
flows of the social field – then we must transport the essential difference to the
heart of this domain. Delirium is the general matrix of every unconscious social
investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious interplay of
disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments. But we have seen
in this context that there were two major types of social investment, segregative
and nomadic, just as there were two poles of delirium: first, a paranoiac
fascisizing (fascisant) type or pole that invests the formation of central
sovereignty; overinvests it by making it the final eternal cause for all the other
social forms of history; counterinvests the enclaves or the periphery; and
disinvests every free ‘figure’ of desire – yes, I am your kind, and I belong to
the superior race and class. And second, a schizorevolutionary type or pole that
follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to
move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the
periphery, proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the other pole: I am
not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I am a beast, a black.
Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn’t
effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that
escape is revolutionary – withdrawal, freaks – provided one sweeps away the
176
social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the
shuffle…Doubtless there are astonishing oscillations of the unconscious, from
one pole of delirium to the other…[from revolution to fascism] (Deleuze and
Guattari 2003, 276-277)
Yeşilçam’s özenti does not presuppose an öz, an origin or essence; it does not try to
establish a unity; and it does not try to take the advice of the “good people,” supporting
republican ideology or of the proponents of a true national cinema, both of whom work
for reforms. Instead its pragmatics dictates a growth and an aggressive expansion. Thus
Yeşilçam may be seen as exploring a global field of coexistence, of the West and the
East, of the colonizer and the colonized, of the paranoiac and the neurotic. However, this
coexistence, seen in delirium, in “the general matrix of every unconscious social
investment,” might involve the “astonishing oscillations of the unconscious” from one
pole to another. Özenti is about desire – a desire to be like the superior race and class, like
the colonizer, the West. But it is also about the impossibility of this, a return to self and
thus an escape from desire: “I am not your kind,” I am inferior, I am the colonized, black,
Eastern, and getürkt. But Yeşilçam is neither revolutionary nor fascist. Instead özenti is
the condition of its existence, and thus the coexistence of two kinds – “Yes, I am your
kind” and “No, I am not your kind.” As suggested before, Yeşilçam is rhizomatic, it
operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map,
even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic
channel…It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or
collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off
and starting up again (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 20).
Seen in this “regard,” özenti is not a movement that returns to its-self, but one that
continues to move in its movement between self and other: it does not and cannot return
to its-self or to any original self, nor can it find a refuge at its other – but it continuously
moves from its-self and its-other, between another self and another other, and so on. “A
rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing,
intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree
177
imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,
‘and…and…and’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 25).
5.3.4. In Passim
In this study, I have tried to argue that Yeşilçam might be considered in relation to
a variety of concepts: Turkification, hayal, melodramatic modality, and özenti. Through
all of these concepts, apart from the cross-current of the West and the East, another flow
of arguments is based on the ways with which we can understand Yeşilçam not as a
singular entity but as a cultural entertainment machine that brought about “a mechanism
of double articulation” in which unlikely combinations occurred through perpetual
construction and collapsing or mapping and remapping. I have also noted that such a
persistence and aggression is not free of power relations. Instead it creates its own
hierarchical structures in its give and take of emotion and spectacle, modernity and
traditionality, secularity and religiosity; and introduction of ethnicity, class and gender
relations. With the help of “Turkification,” I argued that Yeşilçam is not just limited to an
inferior and anti-realistic language of filmmaking, but also an active (mis)translation and
transformation of the West affected by presenting a popular cultural synthesis of the West
and the East, partly as an alternative and partly as supporting the cultural synthesis
projects of the state. In this respect, like the early adaptation of melodramas and the
infringement of serious or high drama, or cinema’s location in between real and magical,
Turkification was a process of coexistence between the West and the East. Alternatively,
through the notion of hayal, I tried to deal with cinema’s varying degrees of relation to
traditional forms of entertainment, such as shadow plays (hayals) and theater-in-theround. In this regard, I also noted that Tuluat theater and other popular theatrical forms of
late Ottoman and early republican Istanbul involved forms of Turkification in their
adaptations and remakes of Western plays. I also noted that hayal has a variety of
implications in terms of cinema or the moving image itself in the sense of the magical
reproduction of reality. Like the two-dimensional shadow play Karagöz which is both
image and specter, Yeşilçam brought about a world of dream and imagination, mirroring
178
the reality of a three-dimensional world. As the last aspect of hayal, I introduced
Yeşilçam’s relation to Western cinemas, its dream of being like Hollywood, having a
worldwide dominance and thus its mirroring of the Western cinemas which brought itself
back to the frame of Turkification. In this chapter, I introduced Yeşilçam’s özenti
(imitation or pretension) as a perpetual movement from self to the other with the
impossibility of a return to itself and with the movement in the distance between self and
other. I also noted that apart from the word’s existence in relation to the republican
reforms in the field of language, özenmek, the verbal form of özenti, not only refers to
taking pains to do something but also trying to do something novel even while based on
imitations. Lastly, I referred to genrification and the recycling of genres and the
melodramatic modality as the underlining element of such a perpetual process of
mapping and remapping. In relation to this last point, I want to reiterate briefly genre and
its relation to melodramatic modality.
“Genre is first and foremost a boundary phenomenon,” noted Christine Gledhill in
her attempt to “rethink genre” (2000, 221). While early critics and students of film tried
to “map” genres, to define the territories and boundaries of genres, the contemporary
understanding of genres reflects the hybrid, cyclical or amorphous existence of genres,
the processes genrification and recycling, mapping and remapping. In such a conjuncture
of remapping, a re-evaluation of melodrama based on its earlier understanding that
included both female- and male-oriented genres, combining action, pathos, and laughter,
has come to the fore. In this regard, Gledhill argues that “melodrama is not nor ever was
a singular genre” (2000, 227). For her, melodrama is “an early cultural machine for mass
production of popular genres” and it is a “modality, understood as a culturally
conditioned mode of perception and aesthetic articulation.” In this respect, melodrama
not only involves “a mix of folk and new urban entertainment forms,” but also “middleclass fiction and theater of sentimental drama and comedy.” Melodrama aimes at a broad
public appeal and thus involves elements from various sources, including but not limited
to “news events, popular paintings or songs, romantic poetry…high dramas or circus
acts” (2000, 227). Thus in terms of its nineteenth century history, melodrama is related to
a process of modernization and democratization rooted in the middle-class. Coupled with
179
this historical and institutional view of melodrama, Gledhill also argues that “aesthetic,
cultural, and ideological features coalesce into a modality” (2000, 228):
The notion of modality, like register in socio-linguistics, defines a specific
mode of aesthetic articulation adaptable across a range of genres, across
decades, and across national cultures. It provides the genre system with a
mechanism of ‘double articulation’, capable of generating specific and
distinctively different generic formulae in particular historical conjunctures,
while also providing a medium of interchange and overlap between
genres…Because of its wider socio-cultural embrace, the melodramatic mode
not only generates a wide diversity of genres but also draws other modes into
its processes of articulation. Thus melodrama thrives on comic counterpoint,
can site its fateful encounters in romance, and keeps pace with the most recent
of modes, realism, which first worked in cooperation with melodrama and then
disowned it (Gledhill 2000, 229).
In line with this understanding of melodramatic modality, I think that melodrama may be
viewed with the following ensemble of characteristics, the majority of which can be
found in Yeşilçam cinema: it is a slippery and evolving category, a phantom genre; it is
sensational and spectacular; it is sensory and significatory; it may flow toward revolution
or fascism; it is ambivalent and parasitical; though it grows aggressively it coexists with
other genres as well; in its replacement of a religious frame in a post-sacred world, it
involves a nostalgia for a pure and innocent past; it brings about an endless fight between
good and evil which is enmeshed with a middle-class morality; it serves well with an
imaginary community of virtuous common men (i.e., noble savages) that constitute a
nation; in this, it is stereotypical; it presents a myth of democracy that is livable in the
land of romance and fantasy though it is marked by the return of the repressed by
demanding a recognition; it demands emotional response through its spectacles and
attractions as well as with its dramatic narrative shifts; it does not build its characters in
their contradicting and complex selves; instead it gives contradictions through a
differentiation of stereotypical characters which are generally referred as types or
individualities; this aspect of individuality serves well with stars whose presence on the
screen is conditioned as singular individualities; it involves a hero-heroine-villain
triangle; it works with dramatic and spectacular confrontations; in this, it is about
180
intrigues, plays, and massive obstacles; in its working, there is a dialectic of pathos and
action, a give and take of tension and relief; and lastly it resolves through a lifting of
intrigues or obstacles. With all this in mind, how do these notions of Turkification, hayal,
özenti, and genrification play out in a sampling of Yeşilçam films? The following
sections offer an in-depth analysis of Yeşilçam films which run to a wide spectrum of
types, from star-based business films to low-budget quickies in the 1960s and the 1970s.
Through these examples, I hope to exemplify the concepts that I see as constituting a
thread of Yeşilçam’s identity, as well as to provide concrete examples through which
both devotees of Turkish film and those who have never seen its examples may consider
Yeşilçam films with a fresh eye.
5.4. Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır (Life is Sometimes Sweet, 1962)
Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır was a major production undertaken by Birsel Film,
including several stars and some color scenes. In his Dictionary of Turkish Films, Agah
Özgüç summarized Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır (Life is Sometimes Sweet, d. Nejat Saydam) in
two words: “salon comedy” (1997). Yet at the time, the film was a big production,
opening in sixteen theaters simultaneously, fourteen of which were mainly first-run
theaters in Istanbul, while two were in Çanakkale and Bursa. According to the
advertisement for the film that appeared in Yıldız (Star, 1962, v.11) magazine: “Zeki
Müren says that Life is Sometimes Sweet. Life will not withhold the sweetest hours of
itself from those who will see this film. Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır is the most beautiful film of
not only this year, but of many years. In this film embellished with in-color revue scenes,
the most beloved artists of our white screen, among them Belgin Doruk, are together.”
Indeed, the film included many key players. As indicated by this ad, the director of the
film Nejat Saydam was not placed in the limelight. He was known as the “bureaucrat
director” who was employed to make business films in a systematic way and without
personal glory. However, he was very successful in this position and directed over a
hundred and twenty films throughout his career as “bureaucrat director.” Before this film,
he also worked on the highly successful Küçük Hanımefendi (Little Lady, 1961) which
181
then turned into a series of films starring Ayhan Işık, a famous leading man, and Belgin
Doruk as the little lady of a rich mansion. Acting in various films at the time, Belgin
Doruk was one of the three finalists for a popular actor competition in a 1951 issue of
Yıldız (Star) film magazine along with Ayhan Işık, who was generally known as the
“king” of Yeşilçam. Acting together for many films to come, Doruk and Işık were the
first star players of Yeşilçam. Thus her participation in this film marks it as a first-run
project of a major studio with two stars, one from the world of music and the other from
the world of cinema.
Only making one film per year during the 1950s, the other star of the film, Zeki
Müren, was first and foremost an acclaimed singer of classical Turkish music. While
considered “Turkish classical music,” this musical style is actually a republican period
rendering of the Ottoman Palace music tradition that combined elements of Arab and
Persian musical traditions. In this respect, one could easily note a comparison between
this film and Egyptian films, which often were full-fledged melo-dramas (musicaldramas) with famous singers. This scheme of singer films included singers of folk,
arabesk and pop during different eras of Yeşilçam cinema. However, the basic storyline
of a singer coming from lower-class or rural background and his/her rise in Istanbul
coinciding with a love affair is a common storyline. Thus while Müren’s presence in the
film is hardly unusual, during his career as an actor, Zeki Müren did not play in many
films. “In truth I am not at all ambitious in cinema. I play in one film per year when I am
not on tour and because I cannot refuse the insistence of my fans in Anatolia” (Müren
1963, 13). Thus in his films, Müren’s primary interest was to present the experience of an
Istanbul music halls to his spectators in Anatolia. For this reason, in the opening credits
of the film, there are two different lists of songs performed in the film, one listing the
songs composed by others, and the other those composed by Müren. The film was also
careful to credit Rauf Tözüm who compiled the background music.
The opening credits of the film include a short statement explaining the limitation
of the use of color to only some scenes as due to the high costs of processing color film,
which was not possible in Turkey at the time. Before this film, there were only four color
films in Turkish cinema: an unfinished, partly-color, animation film of 1951 (Evvel
182
Zaman İçinde, Once Upon in Time, d. Turgut Demirağ) and three color films (Halıcı Kız,
Carpetweaving Girl, d. Muhsin Ertuğrul, 1953, and Salgın, Epidemic, d. Ali İpar, 1954,
and Ahretten Gelen Adam, The Man Who Comes from the Hereafter, Turgut Demirağ,
1954). The first color experiment after this small group of color films in the early 1950s,
Life is Sometimes Sweet started a series of experiments with color film, which would
gradually become more common in the second part of the 1960s.
As a major production with cinema stars and a star singer, Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır
promised a “sweet film” for the enjoyment of its spectators. Though the film seems to be
a light romantic comedy (hence the name “salon comedy”) which takes place at a lavish
bourgeois mansion with cardboard characters typical to the melodramatic modality, it
also introduces a complete program of entertainment, involving a give and take of
sensuality and spectacularity, attractions and astonishment. The film opens with Zeki
Müren, who plays a character by the same name, hitchhiking with a suitcase and his dog.
A truck picks him up and on the back of the truck he meets another hitchhiker, Müsellim
(Kadir Savun) also on his way to Istanbul. The film thus starts with the standard tropes of
migration from Anatolia to Istanbul (i.e., periphery to center), and a promise of vertical
class movement (i.e., from lower- to upper-class) to be completed in Istanbul. Müsellim
tells Zeki that he is the spitting image of his relative, Rasim (Zeki Müren), whom he
plans to meet in Istanbul. The fellow travelers part ways at the Eminönü Port, a standard
Yeşilçam location which proclaims arrival in Istanbul. We follow Müsellim to the lavish
bourgeois mansion where Rasim, again played by Zeki Müren, works as a servant. Rasim
is a comic character in the film, in contrast to Zeki, a respectable lower-class guy who
finds work in a factory. Rasim is also in love with a woman, Yeşim (Belgin Doruk)
whom he keeps seeing in the window of the neighboring mansion. The film evolves
around these two mansions, which were constructed at a studio of the time, indicating an
unusually high expenditure for Yeşilçam films which normally rented houses as sets. The
characters in the film living in the two mansions can be listed based on their class
backgrounds as follows:
183
UpperClass
(Urban)
LowerClass
(Rural)
Mansion 1
Father
Grownup childish son (mad,
comic effect)
Mümtaz’s Mansion
Yeşim
Mümtaz (Yeşim’s uncle)
Semih (Yeşim’s fiancé)
Maid
Rasim (comic Zeki Müren)
Şaban (cook with a regional
accent)
Müsellim (assistant cook)
Servant
Maid Ayşe (Rasim’s comic
counterpart)
Feleşen (Yeşim’s black nanny)
Zeki Müren (Yeşim’s friend)
Table 5.1. Characters in Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır
As mentioned in the second chapter, such stock-characters in a mansion were
common in Tuluat theater, a combination of traditional puppet plays with Western
performing arts. Because there are two mansions in this film, one gloomy and pathosridden in the beginning and the other the locus of comic-effect, in this film the stocktypes of Tuluat have been divided between them. Apart from the basic elements of a love
story and many comic performances, Tuluat theater also involved songs performed by
singers, hence Zeki Müren’s songs in the film also fall within this tradition. In this regard,
Rasim (Zeki’s comic reflection) was much like the İbiş character in Tuluat who is also a
buffoonish simpleton servant perennially in love with the maid Fatma. In the film,
though Rasim harbors platonic love for Yeşim, his real counterpart is the maid of other
mansion, Ayşe. The son of the mansion, equivalent to Sirar in Tuluat, is replaced by Zeki
Müren who ultimately falls in love with his daughter Yeşim. However, it turns out that he
is actually the son of Mümtaz who parted with his wife, Zeki’s mother, long ago. While
the girl character of Tuluat emerges as Yeşim in the film, Tiran (Tyrant) is replaced by
Semih, Yeşim’s villainous fiancé. Like the usual love affair of Tuluat between Sirar and
the girl, the film revolves around the possibility of a heterosexual love relationship
between Zeki and Yeşim. Because Zeki ends up being the real son of Mümtaz, his
position as the son of the mansion, Sirar, is restored at the end of the film. Lastly, as in
Tuluat, there are other stock-types of a mansion such as the cook, gardener, and nanny.
184
Typical to the melodramatic modality, while the emotional cues of the film are
based primarily on the love affair between Zeki and Yeşim, at the start of the film, they
are also enhanced by Yeşim’s confinement to a wheelchair due to a traffic accident. Her
evil fiancé Semih (Sadri Alışık), does not want her to get healed since he wants to marry
her only for her uncle’s money, and also cheats on her! Though Yeşim may recover, she
needs emotional support to do her walking exercises. This “trick” of being sick (e.g.,
crippled, blind, deaf, or with heart failure or tuberculosis) is used in many Yeşilçam films
and the reasons for getting sick are incredibly weak and at times funny, like going blind
because of falling off of a chair. The “hired gun” scriptwriter of Yeşilçam, Bülent Oran,
mentioned that such tricks were “like heroin. At times, we were in the mood to pump up
the dose. I do not remember its name now, but there was even one film in which we made
both protagonists blind.” Oran also said that he even invented a couple of diseases which
inexplicably put the protagonist on his deathbed, only to be healed through some sort of
divine intervention. “I used to find various ways of committing suicide for
protagonists…If it was an emotional film, I made them take pills, if it was a thriller, I
made them to go to a cliff and jump off” (in Türk 2004, 216). The power of love usually
serves as the element of divine intervention for the magical healing of protagonists, as is
the case in Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır. While the sentimental aspects of a film ending in pathos
are carried through such sicknesses and other obstacles placed before the couple, the
film’s spectacular aspects are carried by the revue scenes which I discuss below.
In terms of class difference, Yeşilçam films generally promised vertical class
movement to the lower-class lead character because of his/her inherent goodness and
purity. Such a movement is triggered by a variety of events, including marriage with an
upper-class character, winning the lottery, and inheriting money from a distant relative,
or, as in the case of this film, being the son of a father from whom the mother separated
when he was a baby. Rather than being the fault of the parents, however, the loving
couple was usually separated by obstacles created by villains or evil as such. This
restored the virtues of middle-class morality on which the goodness of the protagonist
must be predicated. Indeed, the most clichéd repartees of Yeşilçam present clear
185
examples of such class and tradition-based morality. Consider, for example, the following
lines frequently associated with Yeşilçam films and easily recognizable to its aficionados:
Lovers to each other: “When we get married, we will have a house with pink
shutters” (with the connotations of a white-picket fence);
Protagonist sacrificing himself/herself for the other protagonist: “No, stop! S/he
is not guilty. I am the criminal you are looking for;”
Before the protagonists are separated by forces outside their control: “I will
wait for you for all eternity;”
Poor protagonist to rich one: “I may be poor but I am honorable,” “We are
from two different worlds,” “I am a poor boy and you are the daughter of a
rich businessman,” or “You are as hostile as you are beautiful;”
When a protagonist has a fatal illness and does not want the other protagonist
to know: “I do not love you, I toyed with you, didn’t you understand;”
Rich father to son or daughter: “If you marry with that boy/girl, I will disown
you;”
Poor father to son or daughter: “Money cannot buy happiness, do not forget it;”
Protagonist recognizing his/her long lost lover: “My God, this picture, this
picture…” or “This voice, this voice…No, it cannot be;”
When a protagonist goes blind: “Oh my God, I cannot see, I cannot see, I am
blind,” and later in the film, “Thank God, I can see, I can see;”
To a fallen woman: “You have cast a dark shadow over our happy home;”
A fallen woman assuring herself: “I did everything to pay for my
child’s/mother’s/father’s operation;”
A fallen mother assuring his son/daughter: “I will put you through school, even
if I have to carry stones on my back;”
Poor protagonist to evil rich character: “Do you think you can buy me with
money?”;
Female protagonist to the villain: “You can have my body, but you can never
have my soul;”
Poor protagonists assuring themselves: “People like us live for their honor,” or
“People like us die for their honor, but you cannot understand this;”
Worker to his/her boss: “No, you cannot fire me. But I resign;”
Kid who does not know that he is talking with his/her real father: “Mommy, I
liked this uncle very much. Can I call him, daddy?”;
Father to the child about the mother who did not die but is separated from the
family: “Your mother was an angel, my darling” or “Your mother passed
away in childbirth;”
Father to a child when he does not know the child is his son/daughter: “I had a
son/daughter around your age;”
Mother to son: “Son, do not leave your father’s blood on the ground”
(announcing a blood feud, meaning that the kid must kill his father’s
murderers);
186
Turkish hero against a Western or Byzantine evil lord: “O Justinius, this is
what they call the Ottoman slap” (referring to a slap on the ear and neck
that is supposed to kill at a single blow);
Turkish hero sacrificing himself: “You run away, I will take care of them,”
Turkish hero coming to the rescue: “I have arrived, buddy”
Though in this list I wrote down which character said each phrase to whom, in the
emails that include these phrases, this information is not given. Instead, anyone who is
familiar with Yeşilçam films not only recognizes the characters, but becomes aware of
the storyline and genre of the film solely from these one-liners. For example, while the
last three films are about historical dramas coupled with the lead Turkish heroes’ love
affair with a Byzantine or non-Turkish woman (not necessarily for happy ending, but at
times metonymic means of capturing foreign lands), the one preceding them points to a
village drama where a blood feud is an important part of feudal honor codes. Thus these
phrases exemplify how cliché-based or stereotype-based Yeşilçam films are, in that they
fit perfectly into the frame of Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality based on a middle-class
morality that stands for a poor but honorable way of living and loving. Moreover, as Oran
said, actors who became good or evil types did not have a chance to change their types;
i.e., good types are always good, and an actress known for playing femme fatales or an
actor known for playing the evil womanizer must play such roles again and again.
“Indeed, we write characters according to the actors” (in Türk 2004, 217). Much like the
types in Tuluat and other traditional forms of performing arts, many of the actors who
became “individualities,” had to fit their types. So when one saw Zeki Müren and Belgin
Doruk at the beginning of the film, it was clear from the start that they were the
protagonists. However, the appearance of Sadri Alışık as a villain here is surprising since
this was one of his first films and he later became a leading, usually comic actor – leading
actors are by definition cast as morally good.
Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır presents the story of a lower-class, rural character, Zeki, and
his initially impossible love affair with an upper-class character, Yeşim. A second love
affair, between Rasim (Zeki’s other self) and the maid of Mümtaz’s mansion, runs
parallel to the first. When both love affairs come to completion through the removal of
obstacles before them, morally proper marriages conclude the film. Zeki starts as a
187
worker at Mümtaz’s factory, where Mümtaz sees him singing one day. Mümtaz invites
him to his place to sing. There, Zeki meets Yeşim, who plays piano as Zeki sings. Then,
Mümtaz’s friend Rıfat (Nubar Terziyan), who owns a night club/music hall (gazino), asks
Zeki to sing professionally. Zeki not only sings there, but also changes the style of the
music hall, by introducing novel revue programs. Such a novelty has its counterpart in the
filmic medium as all of these revue scenes are shot in color. As Zeki helps Yeşim by
providing emotional support in her struggle against her injury and Yeşim’s fiancé Semih
is taken out of the picture after it becomes clear that he is not in love with Yeşim, Zeki
appears to be a perfect fit for Yeşim. Right after Yeşim’s friend tells her that she saw
Semih with someone else, seen in a close-up shot, Yeşim looks at the camera and winks,
thereby assuring spectators that Semih has been eliminated as an obstacle before Zeki and
Yeşim’s marriage. The last obstacle is eliminated not only by Zeki’s own rise as a singer,
but also the revelation of his upper-class roots through his real father, Mümtaz. While the
storyline generally seems to function through realistic illusion, the problem of Zeki and
Yeşim marrying though they are cousins is never addressed. Indeed, while this would be
unremarkable in rural, lower-class Turkey, it would be unusual in an urban setting among
upper-classes. Yet perhaps its impropriety among the westernized upper-classes was not
considered significant enough for the film to address.
As melo-drama, that combined music with drama, the songs that interrupted the
drama and were sung by Müren throughout the film are a combination of his own
compositions and some other songs. Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır, which is also the title of the
film, is Müren’s song. He sings this song during the opening credits, when he hitchhikes
and as he carries a suitcase and his dog. Like the opening of the film signaled by a
suitcase and a lonely Müren with his song, the end of the film is also marked by two
suitcases as Zeki and Yeşim go to airport for their honeymoon abroad. While one of these
suitcases is marked with stickers spelling out “Bon Voyage,” the second suitcase comes
to replace it with the phrase, “The End.” Thus the suitcase, which was a prop in the
opening sequence, becomes a carrier of direct communication with the audience at the
end, wishing both the characters and the viewers a bon voyage as they leave the theater.
This signaling of “The End” from within the film eliminates any sort of illusionism by
188
directly addressing the spectators with a prop that belongs to diegetic and the nondiegetic
worlds at the same time.
Much as this ambivalent end stitches the filmic and the real world together and
thereby points to the “sweetness” of life through the film’s title and theme song, the last
two in-color revue shows of Zeki Müren not only bring about a variety of issues in
relation to musical performance and its cultural politics, but also some issues concerning
the double personality of Zeki Müren himself. Müren’s interpretation of Ottoman palace
music fits into a scheme of republican popular cultural interpretations of traditional
palace music with new inputs coming from the West and the East. As noted in the
previous chapters in relation to Egyptian films, before Müren’s rise to prominence, a
variety of singers changed this music and partly modernized it. Beyond the use of some
Western musical instruments in some Ottoman palace music, such earlier changes
signaled the foregrounding of only the song part as attached to the singer’s performance.
Beforehand the totality of the musical form which ran longer with both instrumental and
sung parts was based not only on a specific maqam to trigger a particular mood, but also
the varying improvisations of the performers of musical instruments, including the singer.
So before the foregrounding of the song part in a longer performance, that part did not
have a primacy over other parts of the musical performance. Thus Zeki Müren became
famous solely as a singer thanks to a route opened by others. As the first solo singer
divorced from this more-instrumental tradition, he also changed the face of musical
performance. While republican cultural reformers had envisioned the westernization of
Turkish music by making it polyphonic in line with Western classical music, Müren’s
performance with Yeşim at the piano is only Western in its combination of
instrumentation, with the piano representing the West and the voice representing the East.
In contrast, one of Müren’s in-color revue scenes, which he himself prepared as a part of
his rise to prominence in the film, updates a classical song by a nineteenth century
religious and palace musician, Dede Efendi, who felt the stresses of westernization during
his own time. Zeki Müren calls this revue show, during which he performs a Dede Efendi
song, the “Şehzade Revüsü” (Prince Revue). As he performs the song in the show, Müren,
playing the son of an Ottoman sultan, wanders around his harem while a black servant in
189
the background fans him with a big-feathered fan. Complete with thin moustache and
earring, Müren reminds viewers of a Rudolf Valentino in a perfect Orientalist
fantasyland. His revue show not only brings about elements of an imagining and
mirroring of a fantasy in the style of Hollywood with its music and the scenery (thus
Yeşilçam’s özenti mixed with its Turkification), it also points to an Ottoman imperial
past. Another reminder of this past in the film is Yeşim’s black nanny, a common
character in Yeşilçam films of the 1950s and 1960s, a remnant of the slowly fading
Ottoman aristocratic mansion life in Istanbul involving not only rural Turkish servants or
cooks, but also former black slaves. The placement of the women lying as odalisques
within the harem also serves a reminder of their role as slaves and concubines within the
palace. However, the interesting thing about the revue show is its translation of the
Ottoman past through the eyes of Hollywood which again invites a consideration of the
complicated nature of Turkification, demanding not only a revival of a strong country
marked by an imperial past but also the recognition of that same country as subject to
westernization and the colonization of its own visual imagery. Much like Yeşilçam itself,
Zeki Müren also noted that he knew his limits; he was limited by the borders of Turkey
for he sang his songs only in Turkish but not in a major European language (Müren
1992).
In this respect, Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır is intricately related to a Hollywood film
tradition which brings about various issues in relation to Hollywood and which has been
a repeated theme of writing about Hollywood. Writing about Singin’ in the Rain (d.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) with reference to Rick Altman and Peter Wollen,
Steven Cohan first talks about the binaries in the film: masculinity/femininity,
innovation/obsolescence, naturalness/engineering, body/voice, and image/sound. While
Don (Gene Kelly) and Lina (Jean Hagen) star as the singing and dancing happy couple in
Singin’ in the Rain, the coming of sound and the ensuing innovations, makes Lina, whose
shrill voice does not fit her ideal image on the screen, obsolete. This allows Kathy
(Debbie Reynolds) to team up with Don, who comes to “embody the perfect synchrony
of body and voice, dancing and singing, which marks the achievement of the talkie, just
as the talkie’s technological matching of sound and image mirrors the couple’s off-screen
190
harmonious blending of masculinity and femininity” (Cohan 2000, 57). Cohan then tries
to introduce a “third term” to “deconstruct” this sound/image dichotomy. For him,
Singin’ in the Rain tries to “wed” the rift between sound and image through introducing
dance, i.e., performance. However, the film’s self-reflexive highlighting of the instability
of dubbing and its attempt to “wed” this rift “in the married print and the married couple”
puts forward dance as a “third term” to stabilize the rift, but opening up itself to
deconstruction (Cohan 2000, 61). Though I would not rely on such a reading of
“deconstruction” based on a “third term,” in Cohan’s argument, the issue of “dance” and
its relation to “coupling” offers an interesting relation to Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır. While
Yeşim is introduced as a “crippled” woman, later she comes back to life with the musical
and thus spiritual help of Zeki. When Mümtaz gives a dinner to celebrate the end of
Yeşim’s illness, Yeşim wants to have her first dance with Zeki but Semih does not let
them, claiming that Zeki had actually not helped at all. So dance represents not only the
overcoming of castration but also the novel possibilities of coupling for Yeşim.
At another instance, Müren’s Şehzade Revüsü, which combined dance and music
on a stage, brings about problems related to Orientalism, Hollywood, and the cultural
politics of Turkish music, his last revue show plays with a number of other things as well,
including “coupling,” “doubling,” and “dubbing.” Because he and Yeşim have only
twenty minutes left to catch the plane to go abroad for their honeymoon, Müren has no
time for the encore for which his fans outside clamor. So he asks Rasim, who becomes
Zeki’s assistant at the music hall, to go on stage for him to let the spectators applaud him
a little before he leaves the stage. However, the owner Rıfat plays a record of Zeki Müren
performing Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır, forcing Rasim not only to mime singing while a record
plays, but also to dance with the song, “to perform the song as if he is Zeki Müren.”
However, during his performance, Rasim fails – he can neither manage to lipsynch nor
perform a dance. Instead all of his gestures and mimics present an unruly combination of
failure in his mimicry of Zeki Müren. But he who is on stage at the end of the film is the
“real” Zeki Müren, while Zeki Müren in the film left for his honeymoon. While Gene
Kelly’s uncanny combination of a lower-class character with middle-class morality in his
star persona was perceived to present problems of virility in a male dancer, Zeki Müren’s
191
singing, dancing, and attire brought about a wealth of meanings that go beyond a contrast
of virility and a male dancer. There are indeed three Zeki Mürens according to the film:
two in the filmic world, and one in the real world. However, this becomes really
complicated when one starts to think about the “real” Zeki Müren who belongs to the
nonfilmic or extratextual world.
Not simply a nationally renowned singer, Zeki Müren also created an aura around
his celebrity persona which led to a publicly-known but never uttered collective
communal secret: he was a cross-dresser and by implication a homosexual in a country of
intense homophobia. As “the Sun of Art” or as “the Pasha” (“Army General”) of Turkish
music, he linked earlier musical performance practices with the later ones, including a
taste for arabesk late in his career. Though the state’s radio and later television
broadcasts had strict rules about the music and attire of their singers, Müren was not
subject to such rules – when he went to a ball at the Presidential Palace in the 1970s, his
eleven-inch high platform heels became a sensational topic for the press for a long time.
Yet his diction in Turkish was always exemplary. He also westernized the practice of
musical performance at music halls or clubs by introducing uniform clothing for the
instrumentalists, and by introducing a thrust stage to wander among the audience. Having
an education in fashion design, he designed his own costumes which openly offered
various patterns of cross-dressing, with mini skirts, earrings and heavy make-up. Apart
from being a singer and an actor in cinema, he also tried his chance in theater by acting in
the Robert Anderson play, Tea and Sympathy which revolves around a “suspected”
homosexual college student. While there is an aura surrounding Müren, thanks to his
popularity, his sexual life did not lead to much homophobic violence directed toward
him. Instead it was a publicly known “secret” that has still never been uttered in public.
Even after his heart failure during a televised award ceremony on state TV and ensuing
death in 1996, none of the messages by the leaders and artists of Turkey or none of the
obituaries referred to his homosexuality. Instead, only a few obituaries talked about his
“bitter” private life without giving further details. Even a book about his life story that
appeared at the time of his death chooses not to mention this “well-kept” secret (Gür
1996).
192
When one views Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır in relation to the “real” Zeki Müren, the
film brings about an interesting flow between the real and the filmic which ultimately
mimics the real world. In a bizarre sequence in the film, after Ayşe talks with Rasim in
front of the mansion, she leaves to go to Mümtaz’s mansion where she works. On the
way, she comes across Müsellim who has candied apple in his hand. Without much talk
and looking back and smiling, Ayşe takes off as Müsellim arrives at the entrance of the
mansion where the mad son of the mansion owner comes out and demands the apple.
Mainly serving for a comic effect, the childish grownup son makes various childish
demands of Rasim and other workers at the mansion, all of whom have to take care of
him. Seeing the apple candy in the hands of Müsellim, the son wants and takes it. As he
starts to literally “lick” the candy, Rasim and Müsellim standing on either side of the son
also demand their share of the candy. So all three start to lick the candied apple with great
gusto, as the son stops at times to both lustfully and angrily look at Rasim and Müsellim.
Such a brief pause invites a reading full of homosexual elements is indeed made possible
through the carnivalesque or comic entertainment that the film presents. In this respect,
the laughter is located around the comic persona of Sadettin Erbil who acts as the
grownup son who is actually still a child.
However, the locus of laughter may also be related to a locus of transgression and
in this respect, this sequence comfortably fits into Zeki Müren’s extratextual existence,
always standing on the border of the secrecy of his private life and the publicity of his
transgressions, between being a good and bad apple. The double persona of Zeki Müren
in the film, as Zeki Müren and Rasim, and the interplay of this divided self run parallel to
his real life existence which is marked by a double personality: one as the straight and
popular but at the same time sensational singer, the other as the gay, private Zeki Müren.
Taken in this line, the film’s play with Zeki Müren and his double who becomes a Zeki
Müren impersonator at the end is not only a reminder of the “real” Zeki Müren, but also
his transgression of several borders. One may see the “real” Zeki Müren as Zeki Müren in
the film and thus argue that the film conveys a realist text; at least, as an entertainment
program that brings the experience of a real Zeki Müren concert to the spectators. But
this “real” Zeki Müren becomes a part of two heterosexual love stories in the filmic
193
world, that of Zeki and Rasim. At the same time, his double in the filmic world, the
buffoonish and always happy Rasim who counters Zeki’s initially gloomy and then
“sometimes” happy personality, which cannot find a parallel in Müren’s real life, is
marked by a loneliness inherent in the impossibility of living his life openly. In that
respect, while both Zeki and Rasim find contentment in their proper, heterosexual unions
at the end of the film, and thereby find the sweet side of life, such happiness does not
have a counterpart for Zeki Müren in the non-filmic world.
Beyond all these interplays of identities, couples and doubles, dubbing
complicates the matter further. As noted in previous chapters, Yeşilçam was an industry
of dubbing, in that soundtrack and imagetrack were not recorded simultaneously. Instead,
films were dubbed either by professional dubbing artists or by the actors themselves
during the postproduction stage, thereby creating a problem of realistic illusion. In this
respect, here I already argued that though Yeşilçam’s practice of dubbing brought about
problems of realism, the consumption of Yeşilçam films created a naturalization of
dubbing, without attaching dubbing to an issue of reality. While Zeki and Rasim are not
seen in a single frame until the very late moments of the film, spectators are continually
reminded of their similarity by other characters who mistake one for the other as if they
were twins. Although both of them are acted by Zeki Müren, only one of them is named
as Zeki Müren in the film, with a deliberate play that revolves around the issue of the
name itself. In the film, while Rasim is only referred to by his first name and we never
learn his last name, we know that Zeki’s last name is Müren. In Yeşilçam films, such a
play with names is common and there are various films in which the stars played with
their actual first names and first and last names, or even with names that are corrupted
versions of their actual names, such as when Hülya Koçyiğit becomes Hülya Çokyiğit. In
this respect, apart from the adoption by different names that sound fancier than real
names to foster a star image, one may even introduce the issue of naming in relation to
the republican reform programs. There were no last names during the Ottoman Empire;
instead it was customary to add the father’s name as well as titles related to one’s
profession or heritage while referring to people. This was changed under the republican
194
regime through a 1934 law that made Western-style last names obligatory. Thus Rasim,
without a last name, is Zeki’s rural, backward, uncivilized and comic alter ego.
Much as rural Rasim is insufficient compared to worldly and talented Zeki, his
failure in performing Zeki Müren in the final revue scene of the film is magnified both in
terms of performance and lipsynch. This play on failure is itself amplified as Yeşilçam’s
dubbing practice itself is often considered a failure in realistic illusion. So intricately part
of the Turkification practice of Yeşilçam, the films’ failure is doubled at the end of the
film by bringing the problem of a “real” Zeki Müren playing the character of Rasim and
failing in that role as he tried to become Zeki Müren. Indeed Rasim’s situation is highly
reminiscent of Yeşilçam, which is about a dream of being a worldwide famous film
industry known as “Yeşilçam” and thus being marked by özenti. Yet in first a move to the
West and then a return to an altered self, a dream of worldwide dominance is what is
produced. But for Yeşilçam, this did not produce a perception of what is to be Yeşilçam
as such. Rather the attempts to be the “real” Yeşilçam are based on a mimicking of an
“ideal image” of Yeşilçam (i.e., of an artifice), hence Yeşilçam’s özenti. So Yeşilçam not
only dubbed its own reality, but also doubled its own image. Such a Yeşilçam “reality” of
dubbing and doubling is also coupled with the self-reflexivity of the film. Indeed selfreflexivity may be viewed as doubling and thus özenti.
Making this image even more complex, at the end of the film Rasim and Zeki are
seen twice in the same frame, a split-screen image of two Zeki Mürens, one as Zeki
Müren and the other as Rasim. However, in their conversation, probably because of the
technology of filmmaking or the quality of special effects, Rasim’s voice alters and it
seems to be dubbed by someone else; i.e., it is doubly dubbed. In addition, in the split
screen image, when Rasim or Zeki moves, parts of their arms vanish twice because the
actor fell out of the split-frame as he moved. If one reads these two instances as moments
of failure in the film’s realistic illusion, one may argue that an already failed illusion due
to dubbing and the doubling of Zeki Müren is doubly failed. But such a double failure is
what makes up Yeşilçam when compared to Western cinematic practices, especially
Hollywood. However, if seen in relation to Turkification, such a failure is not necessarily
a failure of realistic illusion but the very mode of Yeşilçam cinema. In other words, set in
195
a frame of traditional performing arts that are marked by nonillusionism and direct
address of the spectators as in the cases of Karagöz (hayal) or theater-in-the-round, Hayat
Bazen Tatlıdır is not about the creation of a realistic illusion in the style of Hollywood,
but instead an ambivalent combination of such Western elements with already existing
Eastern practices.
In this respect, much like the Karagöz’s acquaintance with Punch, Yeşilçam is
also acquainted with Hollywood, which it continuously adapts, reproduces or remakes in
its filmic practice. Integral to the working of özenti is the impossibility of the return to an
original self, after an attempt to go and see the place of the other: This is what Karagöz
did when he accepted the Faustian bargain of Punch and this is what Yeşilçam did as
well. Seeing and experiencing the illusionistic world of a three-dimensional reality in
Western cinema, Yeşilçam not only dreamed of making films like those of Hollywood, it
also figured out the impossibility of succeeding. However, once that encounter with the
other happened, a presupposition about an original self became impossible. By using a
Western medium, i.e., cinema, and by dreaming of being like the Western examples of
this medium, Yeşilçam had to create tactics of translation and transformation of that
medium to make it legible in Turkish. In this respect, when it tried to follow the
conventions of, say, Hollywood cinema, it was not able to do so word-for-word, both
because of theatrical conditioning and because, at least on a purely technical level, it was
impossible. Instead Yeşilçam produced various translations, which cannot be limited to
pure imitation, but which instead belong to an ambivalent world of dreaming and
mirroring, and thus doubling and transforming. Much has Yeşilçam had a hayal (dream),
it was itself a hayal (Karagöz shadow play or mirror-image), and thus presented a world
of hayal (dream/imagination/fantasy). Such a world of fantasy produced various
transformations and ambivalences, with things like an apple candy pointing to the bad,
yet good, apples of society.
196
5.5. Kara Sevda (Unrequited Love, 1968)
While Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır combined elements of Tuluat, Western cinemas and
some usual Yeşilçam archetypes, it also belongs to a category of “singer films” that
revolve around an already famous singer who carries his/her star persona into the filmic
world rather than around a film star who acts as a singer in the film. But in either case,
singing and songs were an integral part of Yeşilçam films, which presented a complete
program of entertainment, not only pathos and action, emotions and spectacles, but also
music, particularly popular songs of the time from different musical styles. Most of these
“singer films” start at different locations, as rural dramas or peripheral urban comedies,
and eventually introduce a story about the rise of a singer and a love affair coupled with
it. They are generally based on social class difference, and end with the union of lovers.
Such a basic storyline is reproduced by other films involving Ottoman court (i.e., Turkish
art) music singers other than Zeki Müren, Turkish folk music singers, arabesk singers, or
even pop music singers; or film stars who become singers. Indeed, many Yeşilçam stars
performed as singers on stage, at bars, music halls or other venues. The film Kara Sevda
(Unrequited Love, d. Seyfi Havaeri) raises similar issues as Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır, while
also emphasizing themes of modernization and westernization.
The 1968 version of Kara Sevda is actually a remake, or rather a combination of
two earlier films of Seyfi Havaeri, one by the same name (Kara Sevda, 1955) and the
other Gönülden Yaralılar (Wounded Through the Heart, 1949). In 1977, it was remade
again in color and under another name, Çeşme (Fountain, d. Temel Gürsu), but this time
with the arabesk music singer Ferdi Tayfur as the male lead and Necla Nazır as the
female lead. According to Havaeri, a producer who had thought him dead saw him by
chance on the street in 1968 and offered to remake the 1955 version of his film with two
stars – Nuri Sesigüzel, a folk music singer, and Hülya Koçyiğit, a female film star (2002).
Although the original Kara Sevda was not predominantly a singer film, but instead a
village drama with a sad ending, the 1968 version involved a series of songs by
Sesigüzel. Based on the success of the 1968 version of the film, Havaeri made another
quickie for the Uyanık Film Company in the same year, titled Kara Yazım (My Dark
197
Fate), again with Nuri Sesigüzel. Much like its sequel, the story of Kara Sevda is based
on an ill-fated love affair between the characters Hasan (Nuri Sesigüzel), the son of the
farm’s caretaker, and Selma (Hülya Koçyiğit), the daughter of the farm’s landlord
Rıdvan. According to the Dictionary of Turkish Films, while the first Kara Sevda and
Çeşme were summarized as the story of unrequited love between a farm lord’s daughter
and the son of the farm’s caretaker, the 1968 version is defined as “a modern Leila and
Majnun story.” The story of Kara Sevda includes many of the elements of Leila and
Majnun: the two grow up together, but later are separated because of Leila’s father. At
the end, Majnun returns to Leila’s grave in order to die there and reunite with her in the
afterlife. The similarities stop there. In the film, there are no markers of the madness
which, in the folktale, mark his movement from physical to spiritual love that carries
elements of religious spiritualism through which the lover and the beloved become one.
Nonetheless, this definition of the film as “a modern Leila and Majnun” story makes
sense in terms of a melodramatic thread that is woven by a modern, post-sacred world
where it is no longer possible to search for a true love that passes through madness and
spirituality. Rather, perhaps such a search becomes possible through a more materialistic
plot that passes through being a famous singer, selling records, and making money while
still idealizing your first lover and dying for her. Indeed, being desperately in love, and
literally or metaphorically killing yourself for that love is generally referred as arabesk
love in contemporary Turkey, love that in line with a folk culture which has been
translated into arabesk through the peripheral culture of urban centers.
Kara Sevda’s opening credits are accompanied by a folk song, sung by Nuri
Sesigüzel, the lyrics of which are about the singer’s unrequited or desperate love for
Selma. As children, Hasan and Selma spend their days together, studying for classes and
playing. After Selma’s birthday party, Selma and Hasan plant a pine tree together. They
call it “their” tree, making it symbolize their love and togetherness. In the scene
immediately after they plant the tree, they reappear as teenage lovers talking under its
fully-grown branches. However, the class difference between the two protagonists,
insisted on by Selma’s father, is the main obstacle before their possible union through
marriage. While Hasan’s father listens to his son singing, he senses that Hasan is in love
198
with Selma and remembers his own teenage years when he also fell in love with the
daughter of a landlord, but then married his equal, Hasan’s mother. The sadness of
Hasan’s father is reignited in his seeing the impossibility of a love affair between Hasan
and Selma. The landlord, who defines himself as a businessman above all and thus wants
to modernize his farm, plans to marry his daughter to an agricultural engineer. Selma’s
mother is aware of her daughter’s love, but is helpless because in a traditional family it is
the father who makes decisions. As in many other melodramas, the patriarchal regime
and the traditional patterning of family relations are continually reproduced in Yeşilçam
films. Here, such traditions function to set obstacles before the lovers who belong to
different classes. Regardless of the modernization and westernization level of the rich
fathers in such films, tradition is the law within their families. After a number of
incidents, Hasan is asked to leave the farm, while Selma is forced to marry the
agricultural engineer. At the end of the film, Selma, unhappy because of the compulsory
arranged marriage and imagining Hasan seduced by the immoral girls of Istanbul, slowly
dies of her unrequited love. Coincidentally, Hasan decides to return to the farm and sees
his lover on her deathbed. He takes her to the base of their tall tree before he too commits
suicide. In the next scene, their souls rise to the skies from their graves, located under the
tree. In this scene, two figures with white clothes rise to the skies with the tree in the
background – in reality, the actors are climbing the stairs of a soccer stadium with the
background image of the tree superimposed on the footage.
Beyond the threading of a love story with obstacles and a theme of class
difference integral to the melodramatic modality of Yeşilçam, the film opens up two lines
of discussion: one related to the discourse of Kemalist modernization and the other to
cultural politics as reflected through music. The film points to the value of education as a
tool for vertical class movement. Leyla is a high-school graduate, but her father Rıdvan
did not let Hasan continue his education after primary school. Instead, during his military
service, he learned how to drive and operate a tractor. As Havaeri points out, Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk set an example for Turkish peasants by forming a series of state farms and
operating farm machinery (2002). Thus by mimicking Mustafa Kemal’s famous ride on a
tractor at the Atatürk Forest/Agriculture Farm in Ankara, Havaeri claimed to introduce
199
such machinery into his film in order to include state modernization programs. However,
here the villain rides the tractor. This discrepancy can be understood by considering the
village film genre which often emphasizes the backwardness of village life and its
traditionalism coded by the continuation of feudal honor codes. Some village films are
directly allied with Kemalist reform projects in their portrayal of the village population as
under the influence of traditional forces and thus to be modernized through the agents and
institutions of the state located in the village. This other type of village film was more
involved with social realism and therefore aimed at a transformation of the condition of
life in rural areas through a reformative (Kemalist) and at times a revolutionary (leftist)
intervention. Though at times he allies himself with republican reformism, Havaeri’s look
at village life also involves an implicit criticism of the republican cultural project.
While Rıdvan finds Hasan unsuitable for his daughter because of his lack of
education, which he himself curtailed, he enforces the project of modernization through
the projected improvement of his farm. Thus he invites the agricultural engineer Necdet
(Önder Somer) to modernize the farm and increase revenues. Rıdvan asks Hasan to treat
Necdet with the utmost respect, again signaling class differences. However, while the
upper-classes refer to each other as polite and civilized, the lower-classes always refer to
the upper-class as snobs, brats, crackpots, etc. In this mimicking of the discourse of
joining world civilization promoted by the republican regime, Yeşilçam films also
introduced counter elements to such projections of civility in relation to education, by
siding with the vulgar underclass. The prospect of Necdet’s marriage is particularly
appealing for his mother, who is attracted by the inheritance that her son will receive
from Rıdvan. This gives way to a subtextual promise of a love affair between Rıdvan and
Necdet’s mother. The arrival of Necdet and his promises about the modernization of the
farm by changing the land, by adding fruit trees and a vineyard, clearly fits with the
republican reform programs. Regardless of their stance toward the republican
modernization project, almost all village films introduce forces of the center represented
through teachers, soldiers, doctors, bureaucrats, and, in the case of Kara Sevda, the
agricultural engineer. Much like the state’s project of social engineering, modernization
also necessitates land reform, as well as the modernization of agricultural techniques and
200
technology. In this manner, the film’s presentation of the urban engineer coming to
reform the countryside fits well into a dichotomy of center and periphery: a modern,
urban, and westernized center against a traditional, rural, and Eastern periphery.
However, although Havaeri claimed that he included agents of modernization (the
agricultural engineer and the tractor) in an attempt to disseminate the reform projects,
those who are willing to realize this project are also those who are not very willing to
listen to the demands of the rural community and who force them to modernize. Although
Necdet ends up marrying Selma, he ends up respecting her love of Hasan. But Rıdvan, as
the enforcer of modernization in his land, is also the villain of the film, which makes the
film’s discourse about modernization very problematic. Rıdvan is at the same time the
landlord, the owner of the farm and the enforcer of rules and the purveyor of
modernization, he is also a member of the upper-class.
In addition to raising the issue of class through the administration and ownership
of farms, Rıdvan also forbids his daughter from listening to the folk songs sung by her
lover, Hasan. In the early parts of the film, Hasan sings folk songs expressing his love for
Selma as they meet on different parts of the farm. Much like Müren in Hayat Bazen
Tatlıdır, whenever Sesigüzel sings, he loses awareness of the outside world by
concentrating solely in his performance. Selma listens to her beloved in the background,
staring at him and smiling. Then they show their love to each other, cheek-to-cheek,
without kissing.
This use of music to combine presence and absence becomes a central theme in
relation to modernization and technology. The following sequence begins by expressing
Rıdvan’s frustration about not being able to develop his farm since he has a daughter
rather than a son. Then Rıdvan, hearing the voice of Hasan who was supposed to go to
town to pick up Selma’s fiancé Necdet, gets angry because he thinks that Hasan is still on
the farm. However, when Rıdvan yells “Hasan, Hasan!” nobody replies, so he asks Selma
where Hasan’s voice is coming from. Selma replies by pointing to a tape-recorder: “It is
from here, daddy, from here.” In a move parallel to the early republican regime’s
promotion of Western music over supposedly lower-class folk music, or its projects about
the modernization of traditional forms of monophonic folk music with polyphonic
201
Western music, Rıdvan tells his daughter, “You will not listen to this music any more.
You will listen to tangos, waltzes!” But Selma claims that such folk songs remind her of
her belonging to these lands, and put her soul at peace. Obviously, Selma’s discourse is
not simply about her personal love, but also about the impossibility of making the
Turkish public get used to Western music as a part of the republican cultural reform
program. Although such asides in the film seem contradictory, both the republican reform
programs and the traditionalist opposition to them were partly successful and created a
hybrid or ambivalent culture in Turkey which does not completely belong to either
vision.
The transmitter of such Western music at that time was the state radio, which also
broadcast programs such as “The Village Hour” which aimed to enlighten the rural
masses with agricultural information programs that discussed methods of modern
farming. Such attempts of forceful modernization become doubly inscribed as Hasan,
after his expulsion from the village, goes to Istanbul to find a job. There, Hasan is
discovered by a talent scout who heard him while singing desperate songs of love at his
hotel. As when Müren sings in the factory, here too all the people in the hotel listen to the
singer’s unselfconscious performance. Thus the lower-classes do not seek fame and
fortune, but it comes to them out of good luck: as long as they keep their integrity, they
are always discovered by someone else. Hasan proves his integrity as he remains faithful
to Selma even as he becomes famous on the stage and is surrounded by women. He then
wins the state radio’s competition recruiting singers. Soon, the recently married Selma
turns on “The Village Hour” on the radio in the hopes of becoming more educated and
helping with the modernization of the farm. Instead, she hears Hasan singing songs of
desperate love. By going to the city and finding fame and fortune, Hasan not only won
the war against class, but also found himself a place on state radio, despite its attempt to
be the voice of modernization throughout the land. Selma thus ends up face to face with
the threat of her “past” lover, and also of traditionalism as aired by the very agent of
modernization, state radio.
To further complicate the issues of modernization and westernization in the film,
the attire of Rıdvan or the main villain is also telling: Western-style clothing (hat, polo
202
pants, binoculars, and a horse-whip in his hand symbolic of his role as landlord) that is
markedly different from rural Turkish dress codes and instead reminiscent of the attire of
the early republican elite. In avidly Kemalist village literature or films, the landlords, or
the owners of vast lands, are allied with the traditional, feudal forces of the rural world,
as is the imam (the religious leader) and, at times, the bandits. In most village films, the
landlord uses the imam to advertise and promote his traditionalism, while he uses the
bandits to do his dirty work as I will introduce later in relation to Öğretmen Kemal
(Teacher Kemal, d. Remzi Jöntürk, 1981). In this respect, the promulgation of modernity
through the landlord seems to function as a criticism of the republican modernization
project, at least in relation to its attempt to westernize Turkish music, and therefore to
broadcast not only waltzes and tangos, but also to broadcast Turkified versions of them.
The association of the film with a folk music singer, replaced by an arabesk singer in the
late 1970s version of Kara Sevda, and the impressive success of the film at the boxoffice, especially in the Anatolian towns where the allure of folk music was felt more
than in Istanbul in the 1960s, reflects the partial distaste of the public directed at
republican cultural projects, at least as expressed through music as a popular form. Thus
when the melodramatic modality of the film attempts to incorporate Kemalist
modernization, elements of traditionalism come to the fore at the expense of the very
ideology the film attempts to promote.
At the end of the film, seeing no hope in his marriage with Selma and respecting
her love for Hasan, Necdet proclaims that Selma is no longer his wife, but his sister.
However, because she is married and thus no longer “pure,” Selma has no exit from the
vicious circle, and so she gets sick and passes away. Had she lived, the moralistic
underpinnings of Yeşilçam would not have allowed for her remarriage. Talking about
Turkifying scripts from Hollywood films, Bülent Oran stated that it was more difficult for
him to Turkify than to write original scripts because they had to maintain the foreign
film’s formula for success despite radically modifying them to suit local morals and
traditions. For instance, some Western films that he adapted included married women
cheating on their husbands. For him, when Turkish spectators watched such foreign
films, they thought that such things were possible because ultimately, the foreign film
203
represented foreign women. So they did not see a problem when both the husband and the
wife were foreign. But in “stealing” such a film’s successful storyline, if scriptwriters
placed a Turkish woman in the same situation, the Turkified version was fated to be a
box-office disaster: “In our film, if the woman is Turkish, her husband is an honorable
Anatolian man. When we adapt such a film, and allow the man to be cheated on, he is
perceived as a pimp and she is understood as a prostitute” (in Türk 2004, 204). In such a
moralistic world of Yeşilçam melodrama, there was not any exit for Selma except for
death, and the subsequent hope for reunion with Hasan in the afterlife. Hasan returns,
finds Selma dead, and commits suicide. Then, they are buried under their pine tree before
their souls, dressed for a wedding, rise to the skies. At the end of the film, the spectators
see the image of a couple leaving flowers on the graves of Necdet and Hasan in the hope
of getting married themselves. An over-narration presents an epilogue to the film,
signaling the nostalgia of a sacred love in a modern world that rendered such a love story
no longer entirely plausible even though staged in the present. “From that time on, all
lovers who could not be together visited the graves of the lovers to eliminate the
obstacles before them.”
Kara Sevda’s resistance to republican reforms is evidenced by its placement of
such traits in the realm of evil, its fostering of sacred over secular values, its localism and
ties to a rural identity, and its anti-westernization coupled with an inescapable response to
and acceptance of some elements of modernization. All of these bring about a
contestation of the modernization and westernization promoted by the republican
government. While the film’s peripheralism is restored at the end with Hasan’s return,
with his death and burial in the village, modernization and westernization still remain
possible on the farm which Rıdvan and Necdet would modernize together. At this point,
the intervention of a Leila and Majnun theme and its religiosity become more meaningful
in terms of the lyrics of Nuri Sesigüzel’s folk songs, which retain elements of divine love,
madness and desperation because of love, hence the association with Majnun in relation
to folly or being blinded by love. Before Hasan had left the farm, Selma’s mother had
asked Rıdvan to respect the lovers. Rıdvan’s reply signals the Leila and Majnun theme
very well: “In what kind of an age are we living, wife? The age of Kerem and Aslı or
204
Leila and Majnun was long ago…The son of a farm’s caretaker cannot be my daughter’s
groom.” Thus the film suggests that tradition is both passé and yet also continuing,
repeating yet again the conflict of the modernization project. Hasan hears this
conversation and leaves, thereby maintaining his honor and integrity.
In the meantime, throughout the film Hasan’s father stands in for the
powerlessness of the lower-classes as he witnesses the injustice done to his son. As he
watches in the background, silent and almost in tears, the pathos of the film increases.
The most effective moment of this pathos takes place as he watches the marriage
ceremony of Selma and Necdet, dreaming of his son Hasan in the place of Necdet. As the
song Hasan sings over the radio explains, “They ripped a raw fruit from the branch; they
separated me from my lover.” Beset by the connotations of this song, Selma also listens
to this song on the radio in the bridal chamber after Necdet turns on the radio. To this
ensemble of tears, Hasan’s father, wandering around the farm house, also hears the radio:
“Hasan, this is my son’s voice.” Indeed, what is heard on the radio is Hasan voice when
he sings, but unlike in Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır, where Zeki Müren speaks his own lines, this
singing voice is different from the speaking voice dubbed for his son. While Nuri
Sesigüzel sings with his own voice, Hasan’s speech was dubbed by a voice artist, thus
dividing Hasan into two. Coupled with this is the voice of over-narration at the end of the
film which creates a further voice. To this ensemble of powerful voices, one may also
add the voice of the radio itself as representing the voice of the state, as the father of all
Turks.
It is, after all, not Hasan’s presence that makes the project of modernization
unraveled, but his voice as carried despite his absence. Eventually even Necdet
understands that Selma never loved him and he gives up, ultimately accusing Rıdvan. In
the end, it is the father – associated with the state both through his costume and in his
projects – who is the locus of blame and, who, like the republican regime tried to change
people against their will. In this respect, Hasan represents the vast majority of the people
who were subjected to the cultural projects of the state. Even his last name, Kara,
meaning black or dark, denotes his fate – the fate of the masses, according to the
traditionalist discourse of the film, is dark. However, beyond presenting a sheer
205
dichotomy of modernity against tradition, such an encounter with the forces of modernity
creates a site of contestation where elements of modernization and traditionalism are
actively worked out and thus the border between the two continues to alter and transform.
It is like Karagöz who went to the world of Punch, and then, returning home, found that
what he left behind is no longer there. Therefore he had to adapt himself to his new
environment which is no more one of two-dimensional shadows, but of incompatible
two-dimensional shadow plays and the three-dimensional world of Punch.
5.6. Bir Teselli Ver (Give Some Consolation, 1971)
While Kara Sevda focused on the transition from rural to urban by focusing on
those left behind, the majority of films that have taken up this theme of modernization do
so by following the main character within an urban environment. Lütfi Akad’s Bir Teselli
Ver is one example of such a film. Though he is not known outside Turkey, Lütfi Akad is
generally considered the first “auteur” director of Yeşilçam. Nijat Özön (1962), Giovanni
Scognamillo (1973c), and Alim Şerif Onaran (1990) place him at the start of a new kind
of filmmaking based on cinema directing without any influence coming from theater or
other arts. According to Özgüç’s Dictionary of Turkish Film Directors, he is “the first
great director of Turkish cinema” (1995, 10). Unlike the popular directors of various
quickie, “business films” such as Muharrem Gürses or Seyfi Havaeri, Lütfi Akad
generally worked with major companies. While learning the tricks of the trade on his own
in the 1950s, he gained acclaim for several social issue films in addition to his later
“business films.” During the fierce debates among filmmakers at the turn of the 1970s, he
aligned with Halit Refiğ and Metin Erksan, known as “national” filmmakers. This was a
period when an influential group of leftist film critics demanded a cinema that would be
responsive to European movements such as Neorealism and New Wave. Not quite
identifying with the Third World, such a discourse produced a Turkish Cinematheque
based on and in collaboration with its French predecessor. It produced a different grade
of the imagination of Western cinema through a practice of Turkification that passed
through art and at times political cinema. More importantly, this strand of criticism
206
deemed Yeşilçam completely backward and almost nonexistent. Within an atmosphere of
such heavy criticism, two main responses came to the fore within intellectual circles. On
the one hand, an Islamic response was offered first by Yücel Çakmaklı and later by other
directors such as Mesut Uçakan. While Çakmaklı also deemed Yeşilçam “cosmopolitan”
and thus an impure language of filmmaking, he offered a return to an origin defined by a
Turkish-Islamic identity carried by elements of Ottoman culture. Çakmaklı referred to
this as “national” cinema and used an Arabic word, “milli” which means national and is
still used in contemporary Turkish. On the other hand, Halit Refiğ and those who aligned
with him offered an alternative reading of their leftist critics by applying an Orientalist
Marxian argument, that of the Asiatic mode of production, to Turkey and thus concluding
that a Marxist revolution was not possible in Turkey for it was not a class-based capitalist
society in the sense of Western societies. Instead Turkey, based on an Asiatic mode of
production, must be viewed in its specificity and a new “national” and partly leftist
discourse had to be established based on the essential characteristics of the Turkish
society. To this end, they argued for a “national” cinema under the name, “ulusal”
cinema, using a word that means nation, and is a “purified” and “created” Turkish version
of the Arabic word milli. While partly aligning himself with the proponents of “ulusal”
cinema, Akad produced various types of films, and managed to remain in his words
“between light and dark” in relation to the ongoing debate about national cinema. (2004).
In 1971, Lütfi Akad directed five films. He wrote scripts for the first two, Anneler
ve Kızları (Mothers and Their Daughters) and Bir Teselli Ver (Give Some Consolation),
while the other three were by two of the Yeşilçam script writers known as “serial killers”
for their speed in writing. While Safa Önal wrote both Rüya Gibi (Like a Dream) and
Mahşere Kadar (Until the Day of Judgment), Vahşi Çiçek (Wild Flower) was written by
both Önal and Erdoğan Tünaş. For Akad, the last three films were basically “ordinary”
business films, with “ordinary” scripts and “ordinary” direction. Three of these five films
were singer films, Anneler ve Kızları with Neşe Karaböcek, Bir Teselli Ver with Orhan
Gencebay, and Rüya Gibi with Zeki Müren. Moreover, Akad noted that the story of Rüya
Gibi and Mahşere Kadar were almost the same as his 1968 film, Kader Böyle İstedi
(Thus Spoke the Fate). In his words, “he made the same film three times” (2004, 521).
207
According to Akad, script writers Tünaş, Önal and Bülent Oran “always had a couple of
synopses to present you, they wrote fast, and they never wrote something outside the
lines, something bad. Because they wrote a lot, they may at times give you masterpieces
that fit the rules of mathematics and statistics” (2004, 522). His scripts for Anneler ve
Kızları and Bir Teselli Ver were likewise based on some basic dramatic contradictions
that attempted to motivate the spectators with a give and take between these
contradictions.
According to Akad, producer Hürrem Erman asked him to watch and make a film
based on Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) which was itself a remake of John M.
Stahl’s 1934 film, Imitation of Life, based on a Fannie Hurst novel. Akad liked the film
and understood that the producer was looking for a story based on the dramatic conflicts
between two girls and between them and their mothers (2004, 513-514). However, Akad
replaced the racially based central conflict of the American film with a domestic one,
between the center (Istanbul) and periphery (somewhere in Anatolia). With the help of a
Dictionary of Proverbs and Idioms, he turns the black mother in the original film into an
Anatolian mother, Fatma Bacı (Yıldız Kenter), who is a realistic, farsighted, sound, and
wise character. He uses this character as a link with the traditional sagaciousness of the
ancestors of Turks. The white mother, an actress in the original film, becomes a singer in
the Turkish version because in Turkey, the rags-to-riches promise of the performing arts
is based on singing rather than on acting (2004, 515). This wise Anatolian women
character was later used by Halit Refiğ to make a film by the same name, Fatma Bacı
(1972), describing the courageous survival story of an Anatolian woman who escapes
from a blood feud and migrates to Istanbul.
As examples of a “national” cinema, these films more or less attempted to stay
away from the influence of Western cinemas. Yet the origin of Fatma Bacı lay in the
black mother character of Sirk’s Imitation of Life. Like Cemil Meriç and Nurullah Ataç
writing on The Tempest but blind to Caliban’s blackness, Akad, Refiğ, Erksan, and other
proponents of national cinema all stay away from the dangerous issues of colonial and
imperial regimes and class. For Akad, while slavery was a strong theme in the history of
the United States, this was not the case for Turkey: “The thing which separates the people
208
of a society which has never been enslaved and in which it was possible to rise from
shepherd to grand vizier is not so much class but money” (2004, 514). In other words, he
saw Turkey not so much as a class based society but believed that the Ottoman and later
Turkish system gave a chance to vertical movement across the socio-economic strata.
Similarly, on the other end of the political spectrum, Islamist proponents of “national”
(milli) cinema also claimed that there are no classes in Turkey and instead the problem is
based on a cultural difference between the Christian West and the Islamic East, and
between the secular, westernized portions of Turkish population and the traditional,
religious ones. As I will argue below, both Akad’s Bir Teselli Ver and Çakmaklı’s Oğlum
Osman (Yücel Çakmaklı, 1973) are based on this assumption and thus, despite their overt
opposition to existing cinematic forms and the republican project, they actually collude
with both. While the former film links to the earlier singer films in a specific way and
thus responds to socioeconomic and cultural changes in Turkey, the latter resonates with
the above examples of “national” (ulusal) cinema, by attempting to recuperate forms of
traditional storytelling with Islamist sentiment.
Following his “Turkified” film, the most important “Akad film” of the same year
was Bir Teselli Ver (Give Some Consolation, 1971), featuring the arabesk music singer
Orhan Gencebay. According to Akad, as in the other film, he began the project at the
behest of film producer, Kadir Kesenen, who asked him to do a film with the rising
arabesk singer Orhan Gencebay. To go beyond the star image of Gencebay and his reallife identity, Akad noted that he placed the conflict of the story in a poor neighborhood in
Istanbul (2004, 517). This film marks Akad’s entry into the theme of migration, featured
in his later, more acclaimed films. Akad sees Bir Teselli Ver, which takes place in a
peripheral shanty-town of Istanbul, as a film about “the music of migration” (i.e.,
arabesk) which not only broke with the traditional folk songs of Istanbul, but also
introduced various foreign melodies and instruments (2004, 519). While of a generation
that allowed him to feel some closeness to the music of Müren, the fifty-five year old
Akad felt himself foreign to the music of both Gencebay and Karaböcek. Nonetheless, in
both Anneler ve Kızları and Bir Teselli Ver, Akad tried to produce insights on youth
culture through scenes involving bars and parties.
209
The theme of fallen women, common in Yeşilçam films, is portrayed through a
woman who starts to sing at bars and night clubs, trying to maintain her respectability in
a “dark” world of alcohol and sex. As in the case of Kara Sevda, where Selma worries
about the temptations facing Hasan, in the case of male singers, Yeşilçam often depicted
a modern world full of immoral women or femme fatales who surround the male lead
once he steps into the dark world of bars and night clubs. While such “dark” spaces
generally represent evil within the melodramatic modality, the class contradiction in
Yeşilçam films is widely portrayed in the party or musical entertainment scenes that take
place at the houses of rich people, from traditional aristocratic mansions to vast
farmhouses of feudal lords, and to modern apartment houses of the nouveau riche.
Imaginatively interpreting the entertainment practices of Istanbul, such spaces of
entertainment, and the performance of youth in those spaces, became a common trope of
Yeşilçam to portray class conflicts. Most of the time, the lower-class, rural character is
put down and ridiculed by the games of rich youth, who have no consideration for the
honor and composure of the lower-class characters. Such a scene then becomes a
metaphor for the encounter between rich and poor, the central and the peripheral, and
thus may also be thought of in relation to a greater theme of migration which led to an
encounter of the central and the peripheral, the westernized and the Eastern, in the big
cities of Turkey. This encounter took place at the borders of these cities which
experienced shanty towns popping out in one night in the outskirts of the big cities, a
phenomenon which began in the 1950s but did not enter public urban consciousness until
the 1960s.
Taken in this context, neither Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır nor Kara Sevda took into
account the urban spaces of migration. In contrast, Bir Teselli Ver is about urban
visibility of squatter settlements and shantytowns as it started to redefine the borders of
cities, and thus the culture of cities from 1960s on. In this respect, Akad’s closeness to
old Istanbul folk songs, like Zeki Müren’s performances of Turkish classical music based
on Ottoman palace music, and his foreignness to the arabesk music of Orhan Gencebay,
is itself typical of the period. Nonetheless, regardless of their sheer strangeness or
familiarity, arabesk music and other novel musical forms of a changing urban culture in
210
Turkey found their reflection not only in the films of “serious” or “auteur” filmmakers
such as Lütfi Akad, but also in the films of other filmmakers considered more popular
and low-budget.
Bir Teselli Ver’s opening credits involve a series of musical instruments that are
used in arabesk music: bağlama (a traditional Turkish folk instrument, like a longnecked, small lute), ud (a lute-like Middle Eastern instrument used in Arab, Persian and
Turkish musics), violin (though a Western instrument, also commonly used in Middle
Eastern music), guitar (a Western instrument), and tambourine and other percussion
instruments. The camera pans from the instruments to Orhan Gencebay, whose work
through written notation signals that he is a professional musician rather than a folk
singer, since the practice of using musical notation is taken from the West and it was not
a strong part of folk, palace or religious music until the late Ottoman era. Orhan gets up
and goes to Kadir’s (Kadir Savun) blacksmith shop, where Kadir greets him by calling
him “aşık,” which literally means a lover like Majnun, but also refers to traditional folk
or religious troubadours. Thus he produces the folk sound of a traditional occupation
which is carried into the world of urban modernity of a squatter settlement. As they chat,
Kadir tells him a folk tale about the shepherd and the daughter of the sultan, lovers who
were not equals. As an arabesk singer and a laborer, Orhan combines traditional folk and
modern culture, offering a synthesis of the two. In this respect, he is an urban version of
Nuri Sesigüzel in Kara Sevda, conveying elements of desperation and religious love
attained through asceticism. The next cut in the film introduces us to Orhan as a worker
in a blue collar uniform, asked to repair the car of the factory-owner’s daughter Nermin
(Tülin Örsek). After fixing Nermin’s car, Nermin takes Orhan home where his uncle
angrily stares at his dirty uniform and questions Nermin about what happened. Before
leaving, Orhan forgets his music in Nermin’s car. After Orhan comes back from work, he
goes to the blacksmith and starts listening to the sound of the hammer on the anvil.
Nermin, at home, plays the notes of Orhan’s song on the piano, but neither her gambler
uncle (father’s brother) nor her businessman father nor her fiancé is interested in music.
They only talk about business and money. Then her other uncle (mother’s brother)
211
arrives, he understands Nermin and fills the gap left by the absence of her mother. Thus
the stage is set for a battle between good and evil.
Nermin records Orhan’s song before giving his notes back, but because of her, he
already has missed an appointment with the record company. Nonetheless, he sings his
song for Nermin as he drives her home in the car that he fixed earlier. Nermin, starting to
fall in love with Orhan, sees her home as a prison or hell, whereas she feels free with
Orhan. When they drive back to Nermin’s house, her friends surround the car and take
Orhan inside against his will. Wearing a dirty uniform, he finds himself at a party of rich,
young people who dance to rock music. They ask Nermin to introduce this “strange”
friend: “He is Orhan. He is a musician.” Then one of the guests stops the music and asks
Orhan to perform. As Nermin takes Orhan to a piano, Orhan’s reply is stern enough: “I
know nothing of this instrument.” Nermin offers to accompany Orhan on the piano as he
sings. But Orhan does not want to perform for these degenerate rich kids. Before Orhan
starts, Nermin’s fiancé and bad uncle arrive on the scene and make unfriendly gestures.
Even before Orhan starts to sing, with the very first notes of the piano, the degenerate
kids are bored and start playing rock on the record player again. Orhan bumps into a
young kid and the bad uncle as he jolts from the party and returns to his neighborhood.
He feels at home when he starts drinking rakı (a strong, anise-flavored liquor similar to
the Greek ouzo) with Kadir and other people in the neighborhood, and tells them how the
rich brats tried to humiliate him at the boss’s house. The shantytown Orhan lives in is a
neighborhood where many elements of village folk culture have been carried into an
urban environment. Dress codes and the props used in these scenes presents a realistic
portrayal of life at the periphery of Istanbul, and indeed these scenes were shot on
location in a squatter settlement in Istanbul.
Orhan starts to play his songs with the proper instrument, bağlama, for his equals,
for people in the neighborhood. Back at Nermin’s house, her good uncle advises her to go
and apologize to Orhan. As she and Orhan talk, it is obvious that they belong to two
different worlds; each determined by its own “herd.” Orhan, whose village upbringing is
signaled by his childhood occupation as a shepherd, sees Nermin’s friends, but not
Nermin, as a “bad” herd. When Orhan takes Nermin to his neighborhood, everybody
212
welcomes her. When Orhan first leaves her among the women, one of them reads her
fortune in a coffee-cup, a common pastime. Then, Nermin is invited to the men’s part, to
the rakı drinking men’s world with another woman accompanying her. As Orhan the aşık
starts to sing his song, the crowd gathers around him and listens to his songs, which
bridge gendered space, much like the vocal bridges constructed in Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır
and Kara Sevda. But while in the previous films, the music of Müren and Sesigüzel were
also mediated through state radio, arabesk music was excluded from the world of state
radio until the 1990s, limiting him and other arabesk artists from distributing their music
through films and records. In the meantime, back at home, Nermin feels that she no
longer belongs to the business-oriented world of bad uncle, fiancé and father.
At work, Nermin’s fiancé is not nearly as pleased as Zeki Müren’s boss in Hayat
Bazen Tatlıdır when he overhears Orhan singing. He orders Orhan to stop singing at the
factory. As the tension mounts within the family, they first fire Orhan and then Nermin’s
father threatens the dwellers of the squatter settlement.7 After being fired, Orhan starts to
work at Kadir’s blacksmith shop, again resorting to traditionalism as he sings a song to
the rhythm of the hammer and anvil. Nermin asks him for forgiveness and decides to
move to the neighborhood, saying that she missed the warmness of the good people there.
While Nermin’s bad relatives worry about her, her good uncle is happy for her. When
some of the elders from Orhan’s neighborhood come to ask for her hand in marriage, they
kick them out. Nermin’s father sends his lawyer to retrieve his daughter, who is not yet
eighteen. After her return, he plans a wedding with her fiancé, but he is not fast enough
and her birthday frees her from his power. So Orhan and his friends take the ceremony by
siege, taking the bride with them. Before they leave, Kadir throws a horseshoe at the bad
uncle. A woman from the neighborhood first says to the rich people that “this is the way
to straighten things out politely” and then she invites not only Nermin’s family, but also
the spectators for the “real” marriage ceremony that was to take place the same evening.
7
Indeed, many such shanty towns in Istanbul and other big cities generally referred as gecekondu (meaning
dwellings built in one night) are often subject to demolition. Built without permission on state-owned, and
at times on privately-owned, lands, they were later integrated into city plans through general exemption
laws issued by governments. As a result, instead of a planned urban settlement and growth, urban areas
developed in an initially illegal manner later legitimized by the populist policies of various Turkish
governments.
213
At the colorful marriage ceremony, including gypsy music, Orhan and Nermin first kiss
the hands of their elders to show respect. Then, with the gypsy band starting to play an
ironically “sad” Orhan Gencebay tune asking to get back his love, they slowly walk away
to their happy marriage. Considered in relation to other singer films, Akad’s work
attempts to portray real life, while maintaining the same relationships between characters
and classes as other Yeşilçam films. In other words, it still repeats Yeşilçam in terms of
plot, character, and the use of music, despite claims of a higher, auteur film status.
5.7. Oğlum Osman (My Son Osman, 1973)
While Yücel Çakmaklı also portrays himself as moving away from the tropes of
Yeşilçam, in many of his films he nonetheless repeats them. In his Kızım Ayşe (1974), the
Fatma Bacı character of the Akad and Refiğ films (as acted by Yıldız Kenter) takes on a
different name but reemerges as a wise and religious Anatolian woman who tries to
protect her daughter. The Koranic quotation with which the film begins signals the
importance of both formal and spiritual education. For Çakmaklı, cinema is first a form
of entertainment, then an art, and lastly a medium of education. When, in a 2002
interview, I asked him about this issue of “reading” (i.e., education) in relation to his
films, Çakmaklı said that there are two sides of reading/reciting8 (2002). While Kızım
Ayşe and many of his other films involve formal education through schools and getting a
diploma to perform a respectable job, for him, the other side of education is a traditional,
verbal one, which one can only get through traditional, Islamic channels. According to
Çakmaklı, instead of placing a dramatic contradiction between rich and poor – and thus
instead of dealing with class issues – he tried to present a contradiction between two
styles of living: one western(ized), the other Turkish and Islamic. However, in
Çakmaklı’s films, much like other Yeşilçam films, the western(ized) characters are
almost always upper-class and urban while the Turkish-Islamic ones are lower-class and
rural. Thus his claim to dismantle the “cosmopolitan” or “westernized” cinema and place
8
To attain religious knowledge, reciting, as in the practice of reciting Koran, is as important as reading. In
addition, Çakmaklı also talks about a tradition of Islamic knowledge, especially in folk culture, which is
transmitted through oral narration.
214
a “proper” national cinema in place of Yeşilçam is not only contradicted with the content
of his films, but such contradiction also fits into Yeşilçam. In line with Yeşilçam,
Çakmaklı’s films rely on a vocal tradition that gives primacy to the spoken word over the
image. As discussed earlier, this filmic tradition relies on the tradition of traveling
storytellers who went from village to village in Anatolia and told stories or tales with
moralistic messages. In this respect, his films fit into a mode of consumption of cinema
favoring religious films. Indeed, Çakmaklı’s first successful film was a documentary
about the annual pilgrimage to Mecca which was mainly composed of footage taken from
various fiction films and documentaries. Çakmaklı worked within a tradition of
storytellers who backed up their tales with some visual images, but for whom
communication was primarily verbal. In an attempt to align himself with the “essence” of
Turkish-Islamic culture in rural and peripheral Anatolia, Çakmaklı reiterates such stories,
especially those told by his grandfather, who was a village imam.
Issues of modernization and westernization; the rendering of the West based on
Turkification; an attempt to get away from mimicking the West and Western cinemas; the
fostering of a Turkish-Islamic identity with a claim of a return to an essential or original
state; and the creation of a “true” and “proper” nationality based on a tradition related to
the Ottoman era are all aspects of both perspectives of “national” cinema, whether ulusal
or milli. The two perspectives differ primarily in terms of the latter’s increased emphasis
on religiosity. However, in such an attempt to create a true and national cinema, both
perspectives not only used a Western technology, but also relied upon its conventions of
storytelling by attempting realistic editing. Yet this relation to realism produced various
failures of illusion. Whenever Karagöz attempted to enter the three-dimensional world of
Punch, he felt that he did not belong there. But the two-dimensional world in which he
once belonged no longer existed. Although Çakmaklı or other Islamist filmmakers tried
to stay far from these problems as they tried to present a perspective which they claimed
to derive from the roots and origins of an essential Turkish-Islamic identity, that identity
no longer existed. In this vein, while resonating with Akad and Refiğ’s films, Kızım Ayşe
can also be seen as a sequel to Çakmaklı’s Oğlum Osman, made in 1973, one year before
215
Kızım Ayşe. While the later film is about the relationship between a mother and a
daughter, the other is about the relationship between a father and a son.
Based on a story by Raif Cilasun and a script by Bülent Oran, Oğlum Osman
opens with a postman delivering a telegraph from Osman (Aytaç Arman) to his father
(Nuri Altınok). Accompanied by a religious hymn about a father’s prayer to have a son,
the father learns that Osman is coming back from Germany after getting a diploma in the
field of industrial engineering. Although they live in a fairly modern apartment, the
family does not seem typically westernized since both the mother Seniha (Şükriye Atav)
and the nanny wear a headscarf, signaling their conservative, religious attitudes. As the
mother and the nanny prepare Osman’s room, they do not forget to hang a Koran above
the headboard of his bed and to put his prayer rug, skullcap and rosary in his bedroom.
The following day, Seniha’s visits her neighbor and her daughter, both of whom are also
covered. Her neighbor’s daughter Fatma (Fatma Belgen) has been waiting five years to
marry Osman. Happy to hear of his return, she goes to her room, takes off her headscarf
and starts looking at a photo of Osman that he sent from Germany which she keeps with
their childhood photos. Then, as a flashback shows their childhood, she narrates their
story of love, accompanied by classical Turkish music and sung by a chorus. But it is not
the actress but professional dubbing artists who voice this monologue. Then we see a
flashback in which Osman, en route to Germany, hands a flower to Fatma, who is again
covered since she is in a public space. At first, he keeps his promise to write frequently,
but as she received fewer and fewer letters from Osman, she worries about losing him “in
the world of blonde girls,” i.e., Germany. She explains that her only help during the past
years was her belief of God. As she says these words, the mimesis of the film is disturbed
as we hear the motor of his arriving plane long before we witness its landing.
Showing his respect for his father by kissing his hand, Osman is welcomed at
their modern apartment flat while Fatma watches his arrival from another flat of the same
apartment. Osman’s father is ready to make Osman the head of his factory since he would
improve it with the science and technology of Europe. But his mother says that first he
needs to get married. Osman’s reply is clear: “In Europe, there is no hurry to get
married.” But his father presents the voice of the reason: “While it is good to use the
216
science and technology of Europe, we must not lose our lifestyle.” As both the father and
the mother say grace over the meal, Osman is mute. The voiceover of the father’s internal
monologue signals the building tension between the parents and the son. Thus the
primary conflict emerges yet again as that between tradition and modernization. The
issue of modernization had been a primary concern throughout society since the
nineteenth century. While some modernization theorists, particularly those who
influenced republican ideology, emphasized the relationship between cultural and
technological modernization, conservative and Islamic modernizers believed that
technological innovation could be adapted without changing cultural traditions. Like
other Islamic intellectuals, Çakmaklı imagined Europe solely in relation to its Christian
heritage and thus perceived it as culturally threatening. While Çakmaklı signals a
common concern of the Islamic political parties that have emerged in Turkey since the
1960s, he does so not in relation to a lower-class family, as was generally the assumption
about traditional people in the past (including in his own earlier films), but in relation to
one that is religious and upper-class. Moreover, here Çakmaklı identifies the shift in
Osman’s values with his education in Germany, where he loses his culture such that his
return to his “own” country creates an identity clash between him and his family. Much
like Karagöz who goes to England and who experiences Punch’s three-dimensional
world, Osman’s return is also marked with the problem of return. The usual Islamist
criticism of republican reform programs is based on criticizing the republican reforms as
“imitation” or “özenti.” The Islamist alternative is generally based on the return to an
“öz” (essence/origin) which is defined by a reiteration of a Turkish-Islamic identity that
supposedly preceded modernization and westernization projects. However, such an öz is
nowhere to be found because it has already changed thanks to its voyage to the West.
After a visit to the factory with his father, and before taking it over as planned,
Osman goes out with his father’s secretary. He drinks, smokes, gambles, and returns
home drunk and singing a song in German. As Osman continues this decadent life, Fatma
waits for him, watching his comings and goings. When they talk, Fatma tells Osman that
Eastern civilization is better than that of Europe. Fatma remembers their past
conversations, and tells him: “It is no good talking about these things because you belong
217
to a totally different world.” So the usual melodramatic gap opens between the two
characters, but is no longer based on a class difference as in Yeşilçam films or in the
other films of Çakmaklı, but on a cultural difference. Instead of a Marxist view of the
development of capitalism based on infrastructure, Çakmaklı’s view seem to fit to a more
Weberian argument that explains the rise of capitalism in relation to Protestant ethics.
Based on such a reading, it seems easier, at least on a rhetorical level, to refuse the West
or Europe as having a different culture marked particularly by Christianity. Here, of
course, in contrast to Weber’s interpretation, this culture marks not hard work, but loose
morals. When a girlfriend of Osman phones him, his father finally learns that Osman no
longer is using his traditional, Islamic name, but a new more modern and secular one,
Kaya (meaning rock). His father says, “Now, your name is Kaya, huh? Just a piece of
stone. I named you Osman to be as brave as Osman Ghazi [meaning “veteran” of a war in
the name of Islam], and as religious as the Caliph Osman.” This line clearly sums up
Çakmaklı’s argument in relation to a “national” cinema based on a Turkish-Islamic
identity: to follow the Prophet Mohammad after the Caliph Osman, and to found a
Turkish Empire like Osman Ghazi, the founder of the Ottoman Empire after whom it was
named. By taking the name of Kaya, Osman wants to reject the meanings inherent in his
name. In a flashback, Osman’s father remembers how he named him with the help of the
leader of a religious brotherhood; then how he taught him to love his flag and his
homeland, and to pray and recite the Koran. His project was clear: Osman was to be loyal
to his religion (Islam), the traditions and mores of the society (Turkish), and aware of the
progress of the century (Western science and technology). Much like the republican
project of creating a modern, secular Turkey, Osman’s father’s “project” was to nurture
an Osman who synthesized nation, Islam, and technology. However, in the process of
gaining the latter, he lost the former two. While Osman’s father sent him to Europe to
learn science and technology, he lost his soul – like Karagöz, he made a Faustian deal
with Punch!
According to the film and general Islamist arguments, Osman lost his spirituality
in an attempt to be a scientific realist, i.e., a materialist like those of Western capitalist
societies. This is a central problem of Turkish Islamism which, throughout the 1970s,
218
claimed that Europe was simply a materialist, capitalist culture and a Christian whole –
essentializing, Occidentalist view. The Islamist criticism of the West is generally based
on a claim that Europe lost its spirituality because of capitalist materialism and that they
are now searching for greater spirituality or for religious presence. However, Islamic
intellectuals were no different from their secular counterparts in that they could only
perceive Turkey in relation to the West, ignoring other paths and cultures. Instead of
seeing the stresses of a discursive power inherent in the West’s imagining of the East and
its presentation of a model modernization for the East, they also saw the West as a whole,
leaving no space for the possibility for differences within the West. The West is thus seen
as only “usable” in terms of its technology while Turkey already had the necessary
remaining characteristics, a religious and national sentiment, to reach a synthesis.
However, the movement from self to other and back to self taken as such is no longer a
dialectical process. There is no possibility of fixing or freezing the West and the East as
is and moving from one to the other; instead they are produced and reproduced through a
continuous movement and trading of positions. In such a movement of özenti, what
matters most is not fixable positions but the striking proximity and distance of the two
continuously altering entities, the West and the East.
So Osman’s father ends up with a son named Kaya, a snob and a brat, instead of
an Osman of whom he would be proud. After saying that he returned solely for his
family, Osman threatens to return to Germany where he has a job ready for him. After his
father disowns Osman he goes back to Germany. In Germany, with his German girlfriend
and her father, Osman happens to watch a documentary on the history of religions on a
German television channel for Turkish workers in Germany. Ironically enough, the
documentary is about the creation of life by Allah, thanks to the very democratic address
of German TV in addressing religiously conservative German workers. With footage
stolen from Hollywood films including Cecil B. DeMille’s religious epics and William
Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959), the ten-minute documentary sequence is coupled with images
of its three spectators including Osman. The footage itself is a mish-mash of laterally
compressed widescreen images accompanied by an overnarration about Allah, Noah,
Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad. The footage used for Muhammad is taken from
219
an Egyptian film about the dawn of Islam and Çakmaklı’s 1969 documentary about the
Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Kabe Yollarında (On the Way to the Kaaba). The
documentary part is a combination of black-and-white and color footage with an overnarration in Turkish. Having no problem understanding the Turkish documentary,
Osman’s German girlfriend Helga’s father questions Osman about the history of religions
and Islam, as if he does not even know the part before Islam. Although Çakmaklı
presents the father as a “materialist,” Helga rejects Osman’s offer to meet on Sunday
since she and her family will be going to church. As he imagines her there, Osman
imagines a woman who is covered yet praying to a Latin cross. When he sees the nightly
end of the West German TV broadcast, signaled by its anthem, he daydreams about his
childhood and the Turkish flag. Then, he remembers his father’s words about “the project
of Osman.” He thus replaces the republican State project that renamed Mustafa Kemal as
“Atatürk” with an Islamist project to be realized under the paternity of the Islamic and
Ottoman name, Osman.
Back at his home in Germany, Osman drinks and thinks about his life back in
Turkey: his father, his mother, and Fatma. The film cuts to Fatma, who has forsaken
marriage, and then to Osman’s father, still mourning his son. Falling asleep, Osman
dreams that he is running away from “rocks” (Kaya) falling from a cliff. After a rock
smashes him, the Caliph Osman approaches him and says that he is his namesake, the
Caliph Osman. Then, Osman Ghazi, the founder of Ottoman Empire, approaches him,
and says: “You have my blood in your veins. Your name is my name. You are a Turk,
you are a Muslim. Return to yourself.” Then, both Osmans, the Caliph and the Ghazi,
remove the rock (Kaya) on Osman before extending their arms to raise him. Coming back
from his death as Kaya (or should I say Lazarus), and returning to his self as Osman,
Osman wakes up from his dream. Thus the dream (hayal) of being a European is
misguided, and Osman returns to Turkey, signaled by the tower of the border control
flying a Turkish flag, to the accompaniment of Ottoman music. After crossing the border,
his first stop is the Selimiye Mosque, the largest Ottoman mosque by the architect Sinan.
Then, he goes to Bursa to visit Osman Ghazi’s tomb. The over-narration tells us that
Osman’s voyage from Edirne to Bursa has meaning. The film again reverts to a
220
documentary format showing us the sixteen busts of the leaders of the “Turkish” empires,
including Attila the Hun, Kutluğ of the Uigurs, Chengiz Khan of the Chengiz Empire,
Seljuk of the Seljuks and others. Ironically, however, all of these sixteen leaders were
linked with modern Turkish identity through Kemalist republican historiography, against
which Çakmaklı and other Islamists were purportedly trying to present an alternative
project. This to some extent shows how strong and successful the Kemalist national
cultural project was.
What is not ironic is the repetition of Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality itself,
based on such contradictions and ambivalences. Despite their deeming Yeşilçam a lowly
cinema, Kemalists, Islamists and leftists all shared a discourse of engineering cinema
based on varying nationalist projects. What Yeşilçam produced instead was a practice of
filmmaking which, regardless of the project, was marked by the easygoing contradiction
of good and evil without relying upon a pre-defined project, but an özenti that was altered
and transformed in the process of filmmaking. Despite their understanding of özenti as
imitation, such critics of Yeşilçam were themselves embedded in Yeşilçam. Though they
aimed to tell, or make cinema tell, things other than what they criticized Yeşilçam for
telling, they ended up within the same mode of narration. They wanted to revise the ideas
of the masses and yet repeated what they already were hearing. If one thinks of Yeşilçam
as a cinema of dubbing, in a film like Oğlum Osman, what was told to the masses was
doubly dubbed: not only by the dubbing artists voicing the actors, but also by the overnarration of the documentary parts of the film enmeshed by the fiction. The film is
neither a feature film, nor a documentary; it is neither a secular republican nationalist
film, nor a traditional, Islamist film; but instead a combination, a film that fits perfectly
into Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality marked by a give and take of reality and fantasy,
spectacularity and sentimentality.
After visiting the sixteen leaders, Osman goes to the annual ceremonies at Söğüt
celebrating the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. Having visited the former capitals of
the Ottoman Empire, he arrives in Istanbul, where he first visits the fortress used in
conquering the Byzantine Empire, then the palace of the Ottoman sultans. There, the
museum staff tells him about the holy relics brought from Mecca and housed in the
221
palace. Finally, the tour guide shows him the Koran and sword of the Caliph Osman, and
talks about how he loved to recite. This narration is accompanied by religious hymns. He
then visits the major mosques of Istanbul. At the Eyüp Sultan Mosque, considered the
most holy mosque in Istanbul, as he listens to the Friday prayer and a sermon about the
Hajj, Fatma sees him. Without paying a visit to his family, Osman decides to go on the
Hajj to Mecca. The film then reverts to documentary format again, using footage from
Çakmaklı’s earlier work. Returning to the story, a guide tells Osman the details and
meaning of Hajj rituals. Such scenes combining a fiction and a documentary format are
done by crosscutting the original footage with images of the film’s characters. While
Osman’s informants are supposed to be talking, there is no concern with lipsynch; at
times, they are not even moving their lips. Instead it is the over-narration that stitches the
footage together. Those parts of the film taken from an Egyptian film are not dubbed at
all, retaining Egyptian Arabic. As the Egyptian movie is summarized, parts are reedited
and dubbed while others are not. With all this cutting, the film continuously shifts from
black-and-white to color footage.
After this twenty-minute combination of documentary, fiction and fantasy,
Osman’s father wakes up from a dream and wakes up his wife to tell her that Osman is
coming back. But Osman is still in Mecca, redeeming himself, asking for the forgiveness
of Allah. Only then does he return to Istanbul and his father’s home. His father and
mother each embrace the prodigal son before he asks their forgiveness. Then, he asks
Fatma for forgiveness and his father visits hers to arrange their marriage. Thus after a
voyage through Çakmaklı’s documentary, Egyptian films, and Hollywood films, Oğlum
Osman restores its melodramatic ending, in which a traditionally proper marriage is
arranged between Osman and Fatma before they walk away toward to setting sun. In
keeping with Çakmaklı’s aim to present a complete program of entertainment, art, and
education, Oğlum Osman dismantles any sort of coherence and continuity in terms of
illusionistic or realist film language by combining various imagetracks (documentary,
feature, color, black-and-white), and soundtracks (dubbing Turkish in Turkish; dubbing
Arabic in Turkish; overnarration in Turkish; Germans not only understanding but talking
222
in Turkish; lipsynch; no lipsynch; various music; and sound effects that do not run
parallel with the imagetrack).
5.8. Şeytan (Satan, 1974)
Although such mishaps of realism are readily apparent in many Yeşilçam films,
they are perhaps nowhere more disturbing than in works whose effect depends on the
realism of special effects. These become particularly obvious when the films in question
attempt to repeat complex effects in cheaply made remakes. While Yeşilçam produced
various remakes of Western films in various genres, horror films were not a major
element of this practice of Turkification. In this respect, Metin Erksan’s 1974 remake of
The Exorcist not only shows the difficulties of remaking horror or science-fiction films
especially in terms of special effects, but it also points to the dynamics of Turkifying not
only Western films but also religious themes. In a book on “fantastic” Turkish films,
Scognamillo and Demirhan note that there were a variety of trends in Yeşilçam that dealt
with the supernatural and unearthly aspects of cinema. According to them, there were
four main types of films using fantasy: fairy-tale, super hero science-fiction, historical
fantasy, and western films (1999). These superhero science-fiction and western films
(which might be called “kebab” westerns, similar to spaghetti westerns) produced a
practice of “Turkification” which did not quite reflect the daily realities of the society.
Alongside these mainstream trends of surreal or fantastic cinema, Scognamillo and
Demirhan only consider two horror films. One is Drakula İstanbul’da (Dracula in
Istanbul, d. Mehmet Muhtar, 1953) and the other is Şeytan (Satan, d. Metin Erksan,
1974). They actually exclude a handful of other horror film remakes including remakes of
Psycho (d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and The Shining (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1980). The low
number of horror films in Yeşilçam reflects several factors: Yeşilçam was first and
foremost an entertainment industry which addressed a family audience; as script writer
Bülent Oran said, Yeşilçam spectators did not identify with the characters in horror films
(2002). Horror literature in Turkish language is very limited and there are only some
fantastic fairy-tales and stories: In part this results from the absence in Islam of a notion
223
of the direct presence of evil (Satan) on the earth. Yet beyond such limitations, the few
horror films of Yeşilçam present prime examples of direct remakes of Hollywood films,
thereby emphasizing in part what Yeşilçam is not and cannot be. The dynamics of
Turkification are even more clearly woven into the texts of horror films which attempt to
domesticate themes often nonexistent in Turkish culture.
As noted earlier, Metin Erksan disowned Şeytan. Even immediately after he made
the film in 1974, Erksan argued that it was not a direct remake of William Friedkin film
The Exorcist (1973) but an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel: “I read the novel
and saw the movie in England. I cannot say that I have used the film to a great extent. I
was completely loyal to the novel, as much as I could be. I filmed it according to my own
perspective.” (in Scognamillo 1998, 258). In this respect, Şeytan is indeed neither a
remake nor an adaptation, but both – it is more of a hybrid text. Şeytan not only translates
a full set of Christian codes into Turkish ones, but it also presents a mixture of filmic
language and styles. It also employed an ensemble of novelties both in terms of its filmic
narrative and language. The idea of making a film like Şeytan came from producerdirector Hulki Saner, known for his various melodramas starring a little girl named
Ayşecik (“little Ayşe”) and comedies with Sadri Alışık, such as the Turist Ömer series.
The Exorcist was not shown in Turkey until 1981 and, according to the lobby card of the
Turkish version, Şeytan was made to exploit the success of The Exorcist: “The
blockbuster film based on the best-selling novel which has been playing to sell-out
crowds in America and Europe and makes its viewers faint.” Nonetheless, according to
Scognamillo and Demirhan, as big-budget production of a Yeşilçam major, Şeytan did
not do very well at the box office.(1999, 80). Şeytan not only tries to Turkify the special
effects of The Exorcist, thus only employing those that were imitable without dealing
with complex ones such as the spider walk of Regan (Linda Blair), but also translates the
codes of the original novel and film from Christian to Islamic ones. In doing so, Şeytan
ignores various details inherent to Turkifying the original novel or film, starting with the
absence of a practice of exorcism in Islam.
Şeytan, like The Exorcist, opens with an archeological excavation in a Middle
Eastern desert where an archeologist who ultimately turns out to be “the exorcist” finds
224
signs of Satan. A cut to an Istanbul mansion follows, introducing Ayten (Meral Taygun)
and her twelve year-old daughter Gül (Canan Perver), as well as other characters in the
mansion: the cook, the maid, and the governess. While this mansion setting is reminiscent
of a typical Tuluat mansion, and while the mother character Ayten, her daughter Gül and
their servants seem to fit this tradition, the film provides no background with which to
introduce such a melodramatic text. Ayten is portrayed as an upper-class, “single,
divorced” mother, which is not a common theme in Yeşilçam. The film then introduces
Tuğrul (Cihan Ünal) who has a book on Satan. At the mansion, a couple of strange things
take place as early markers of the coming of Satan. Among these, the most interesting is
the appearance of Tuğrul’s book: “Satan: Under the Light of Modern Perspectives on
Mental Diseases, the Case of Demon Possession and the Rite of Exorcism in Universal
Religions.” Such a long title for a book, which is shown for a little while allowing it to be
digested, not only explains the film to those who are not aware of what exorcism is, but
also points to the complex interests of Tuğrul Bilge, a doctor, a psychologist, writer, and
religious scientist (din alimi). The detour to the Yeşilçam’s tropes and its use of names is
well served with the character Tuğrul Bilge, whose last name means “sage,” because he
not only placed his mother in an asylum before her death, but also failed in curing her
despite his scientific research. Again within Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality, his
mother not only worked but also at times begged to give her son a good education. Again,
the importance of education in relation to a discourse of modernization is underscored
through Tuğrul, who sees his late mother in his dreams.
As Gül’s “sickness” becomes very obvious and she starts to curse not with fourletter words as in The Exorcist but by saying, “May God torment you, God damn you,”
while possessed by Satan. Ironically, Satan, talking through Gül, asks for help from God
to curse human beings! After a series of tests, medical doctors advise Ayten to contact a
psychologist because Gül’s schizophrenia and psychological problems are leading to
psychophysical problems. So Ayten tries her chance with a psychologist who hypnotizes
Gül but cannot find a solution to her schizophrenia. The increasing symptoms of Gül’s
possession lead her mother Ayten to ask help from Tuğrul, who then joins the
archeologist for the exorcism. Tuğrul first goes to talk with Gül before starting the
225
exorcism and records this conversation. Interestingly, Tuğrul talks with Gül in Latin, not
in Arabic which is the language of the Koran, and not in Turkish, the language of the
film. Then, when Tuğrul and the archeologist start the rite of exorcism, the archeologist
recites the Koran in Arabic and splashes the water of Zamzam (a sacred spring near the
Kaaba in Mecca) on Gül, instead of holy baptismal water, as in the original. As in The
Exorcist, at the end of Şeytan, Tuğrul transfers the spirit to himself and dies with it.
The dynamics of Turkification are at work in Şeytan in the translation of Christian
codes into Islamic ones such as the use of the Koran instead of the Bible, Zamzam water
instead of holy water, and the use of a pseudo-Islamic terminology during the exorcism.
However, while The Exorcist was based on a true story that took place in Maryland in
1949, Şeytan is based on a cinematic and novelistic rendering and subsequent translation
of a true story. There is no belief in an earthly presence of Satan in Islam that would lead
to possession and then a rite of exorcism that would follow. But beyond being simply
incoherent, these were results of the practice of Turkification, which leads to slippages
and distortions. In this respect, by at times talking in Turkish and at other times in Latin,
Satan may belong to both the West and the East within a film which promises to bring the
West to the East. In such a practice, Erksan, who saw The Exorcist in London, not only
presented the Turkish spectators with what he saw, but also promised to do this as did
The Exorcist. Like Karagöz experiencing the world of Punch in London, Şeytan places
itself into the world of The Exorcist. But such a move is incessantly marked by slips of
the tongue, as for instance that of the dubbing artist who voiced Ayten. When Ayten says
the name Suzan, Gül’s governess, she first says, “Suzan” but the second time, she says
“Suzın” – much like the pronunciation of Susan in English. So she pronounces Suzan’s
name correctly immediately before pronouncing it “Suzın,” like Susan. Perhaps this slip
of the tongue reveals Şeytan’s “Turkification,” although it tries to hide it through various
adaptational tactics.
In Turkifying The Exorcist, Şeytan also introduced a number of novel elements
such as the use of Tuğrul’s book as a prop to introduce the meaning of exorcism to the
Turkish spectators, and Gül’s adoration of a statue of Satan, as if she is performing a
devotional prayer to pre-Islamic idols. Although The Exorcist has a subtext contrasting
226
modernity with the religious rites of pre-modern times, this becomes the primary issue in
Şeytan, which continuously brings about theme of science, secularism or modernity
versus religion. Unlike “Father” Karras in the original film, Tuğrul is an atheist who
claims not to believe in Satan and who drinks alcohol yet goes to a mosque to get
information about exorcism from an imam. Moreover, as a counterpart to The Exorcist’s
Father Merrin, the archeologist in Şeytan, who seems to be a guru of exorcism, is never
introduced to the spectators: we do not know his occupation, his connection with the
imam from whom Tuğrul asks for help, or what he did in his previous encounters with
Satan. Instead, these characters which belong to a world of fantasy come from nowhere
without any explanation and they may carry highly contradictory identities. As Erdoğan
notes, “a Yeşilçam character, with his/her consequential identities, may first play games
with his/her lover, and while s/he was a poor and uneducated and bad mouthed, s/he can
adapt to the upper-classes easily” (1995, 189). In this respect, Tuğrul fits well within
Yeşilçam’s crossing of borders, vertically moving between classes, or having a chance to
be one’s other, desired self in a world of fantasy or dream. This dream world also brings
about its own contradictions. While choosing to be a penniless writer instead of a famous
medical doctor or, in other words, by not staying in the world of the power of science in
order to write about Satan and thereby come to believe in the existence of Satan and thus
god, Tuğrul not only passes from the world of science to that of the religion, but thereby
loses his life. Such a move from atheism to religion is also repeated by Ayten and Gül,
who end up going to a mosque at the end of the film. Thus the religiosity of the female
characters is reinforced while atheism, associated with science and modernity, is
punished by death.
As might be seen from its lobby card, Şeytan attempted to present a film that was
not available to spectators in Turkey, but this was only possible through mirroring the
original. But this is no mirroring, but a Turkification, both of the original novel as Erksan
suggested, and of the film as Saner suggested. Probably knowing that he had to produce a
“different” film in a genre that did not have a lot of relevance to Yeşilçam, Erksan
attempted to use a very different filmic language. At times it is reminiscent of his own
“art” films such as Sevmek Zamanı (A Time to Love, 1965) where he tried to articulate a
227
Sufi theme with the introduction of a love of the image of the lover or the other and with
a filmic language reminiscent of Alain Resnais. Likewise, his 1976 film İntikam Meleği –
Kadın Hamlet (The Angel of Revenge – Woman Hamlet) introduces not only a diverted
adaptation and thus a Turkification of Shakespeare’s text, but it also involves a very
surreal language that seems far outside of Yeşilçam. However, Şeytan is also reminiscent
of his “business films” such as Feride (1971) where he uses typical elements of the
Yeşilçam’s conventional tropes such as party scenes, a singer rising to fame, and a
melodramatic storyline.
Like some Yeşilçam films, especially those of the early 1970s which were the
first to use color, Şeytan uses various zooms that come unexpectedly after cuts. While at
times the film shifts from an establishing shot to a close-up through a fast zoom, at other
times, it does the opposite. However, after a while, the film’s excessive use of zooms
probably exceeds all other Yeşilçam films by creating an effect of total strangeness –
perhaps just adding up to the film’s specificity as a horror film, in a land without horror
films. For example, director Atıf Yılmaz criticized the excessive use of zoom in
Yeşilçam, saying “Indeed zoom is used more in documentary films. But our filmmakers
used it mostly by zooming on actor’s faces for they were not used to this equipment”
(1997, 22). However, the “novel” language of the film is not just limited to the excessive
use of zoom, but it also involves frequent use of alternating high and low angle shots,
shot-reverse-shot sequences coupled with varying angles and distances, back and front
lighting, blocking and movement, pans and tilts. In doing all these, Şeytan’s vocabulary
ranges from Hitchcock-style shots and editing to film noir shots of the police officer and
lighting reminiscent of German expressionism. The low-quality props and special effects
also contribute to this hybrid language of filmmaking, further complicated by dubbing
and the use of music from The Exorcist. The majority of the players were not usual
Yeşilçam stars but instead theater actors who rarely acted in Yeşilçam films, thus
presenting novel characters or types for the spectators. Nonetheless, there are also some
stock-types and usual elements of Yeşilçam, such as the cook of the mansion played by
Ahmet Kostarika who at times seem to present comic relief; a large-size photograph of
the mother on the wall (a commonly used prop in Yeşilçam films); the typical party
228
scene; and the dubbing of some characters done by regular voicing artists who also
dubbed various Yeşilçam stars. However, all such characteristics are also countered by a
series of elements novel in the discourse of Yeşilçam such as the new faces of actors,
alternating ways of organizing shot, edit, and mise-en-scène; novel props (statues and
statuettes of Satan); and an attempt to represent realistically, especially in scenes of
medical tests and operations.
Beyond all such “strangenesses,” Şeytan is presented in a world bounded by the
film itself since Islam has no practice of the “exorcism” of Satan, but perhaps of genies.
This absence of the practice is signaled in the film first by the explanation of what
“exorcism” is, and then by using the word “exorcism” in English. As such, it clearly
presents the dynamics of özenti as it tries to be the other, that of a perfect Hollywood
film. Yet it loses its own position and whenever it attempts to return to its original
position, it faces the reality that there is no place for its own reality. While there is always
an other to be mirrored, to be like, and to be desired, there is no pure or original (self) left
in this process of Turkifying the other. Instead it has to be marked with a ceaseless slip of
tongue like that of Ayten: Yeşilçam has to keep pronouncing “Suzan” as “Suzın.” But
“Suzın” is not “Susan.” It is not the blonde whom Osman, disguised as Kaya in Germany,
is looking for; it is not The Exorcist that the Şeytan is looking for; it is not the world of
Punch that Karagöz is looking for; and it is not Susan that Ayten is looking for: instead it
is “Suzan” which is consecutively pronounced as both Suzan and Suzın. It is this being
in-between, neither one nor the other, but both. And Satan? It is not talking in English,
nor in Arabic, but in Latin and Turkish – in a language that is cannot be uttered anymore
as once was, in a language that itself lost its original voice as it was once spoken, and in a
language that can now be uttered only by suppositions and guesses. So it is not the voice
of truth anymore, instead the voice of a slipping tongue.
5.9. Turist Ömer Uzay Yolu’nda (Tourist Ömer on Star Trek, 1973)
In the contemporary revival of Turkish cinema, parody has become a common
way of incorporating the Yeşilçam tradition while also maintaining a seemingly ironic
229
distance from it. Writing on a contemporary Turkish film, Kahpe Bizans (Harlot
Byzantium, d. Gani Müjde and Tolgay Ziyal, 1999) a parody of Yeşilçam’s historical
adventure films, Selim Eyüboğlu has noted that the aspects of parody in the film rely
upon Bakhtian carnivalesque practices of laughter, by creating a space where fantasy and
popular culture are traded in Turkey’s contemporary big-budget film market. Eyüboğlu
differentiates between a modern parody, where there is a hierarchical relationship
between the original text and its parodization, and, with reference to Linda Hutcheson, a
postmodern parody which is self-reflexive and dislocates this hierarchy, blurring the lines
between what is parody and what is parodied. This latter type of a parody of Yeşilçam
melodrama started in the late 1980s with two films: Biz Doğarken Gülmüşüz (We
Laughed As We Were Born, d. İsmail Güneş, 1987) and the hit film of 1988, Arabesk (d.
Ertem Eğilmez, 1988). Both films are parodies of Yeşilçam melodramas, particularly
those starring arabesk music singers. The former film’s title is a direct reference to Yücel
Çakmaklı’s 1973 film, Ben Doğarken Ölmüşüm (I Was Dead When I Was Born), starring
arabesk singer Orhan Gencebay. While the structure of the title signals arabesk music’s
fatalistic and dark worldview reliant on a world of sacred tradition, the film is actually a
parody of such a film’s stories and songs, and features a popular comic singer and dance
trio of the 1980s (Komedi Dans Üçlüsü). Arabesk, a more famous film, was written by
humor writer Gani Müjde who also wrote and directed Kahpe Bizans.
While both of these films fit into a general practice of the reevaluation and
revision of Yeşilçam films which took place as Yeşilçam started to wane and become
more and more self-reflexive during the 1980s, many critics often forget that modernist
parody was already a staple of Yeşilçam during the 1970s when many genres, particularly
Western and adventure films were Turkified through a process of parody. Turist Ömer
Uzay Yolunda (d. Hulki Saner) was one such film in that it took its inspiration from an
episode of Star Trek, but like other films that parodied Western films, used parody as a
means of considering, encounters between the East and the West. For example, Cilalı İbo
Teksas Fatihi (Shiny İbo, Conqueror of Texas, d. Osman F. Seden, 1971) involves a
famous comic character, Cilalı İbo, who finds himself in the middle of a cowboy world
after having already appeared in various films since the 1950s. Similarly, Çifte Tabancalı
230
Damat (The Groom with Double Guns, d. Osman Nuri Ergün, 1967) is about a bank clerk
who imagines himself as Red Kit. There were also fairy tales that placed the funny,
peasant fairy tale character, Keloğlan (bald boy) – a standard Turkish character – in the
world of other, Western fairy tales which viewers would know of only through Western
films and stories, such as Keloğlan ve Yedi Cüceler (Keloğlan and the Seven Dwarfs, d.
Semih Evin, 1971). Several sex-comedies of this era either directly referred to Western
science-fiction and film characters or altered them in various ways, introducing
superheros or heroes familiar from American action-adventure films and television series.
For example, Çarli’nin Kelekleri (Charlie’s Fools, d. Günay Kosova, 1978) is based on
the television series Charlie’s Angels (Çarli’nin Melekleri) but turns the female angels
(melek) into male fools (kelek). Süper Selami (Super Selami, d. Yılmaz Atadeniz) is about
a market delivery boy who escapes from a plot against him and hides in a cave where an
Indian fakir suddenly comes out of nowhere. The Indian fakir first utters the magic word
“Shazam” and turns into a superhero with the mask of The Phantom and the costume of
Superman (Scognamillo and Demirhan 1999, 55). Then the Indian fakir transfers his
magical force to Selami, who then becomes Süper Selami in his fight against evil.
While these examples evidence a variety of genre-crossings, genrification and
recyclings, in terms of Yeşilçam they belong to a familiar mode of comedy based on a
male comic character who has standard traits with which the viewer can identify – he is
poor, honest, and witty. Such characters are generally paired with a more educated or
reasonable character, reminiscent of the format of shadow plays, where the uneducated
Karagöz plays off of the more urbane Hacivat, as well as theater-in-the-round, where
Kavuklu is coupled with Pişekar. Alternatively, such a character may also appear as a
solo, foolish character like the İbiş of tuluat and Keloğlan of fairy tales. For example, in
Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır, Zeki Müren’s alter-ego Rasim, a comic character, functioned
against his more educated alter ego. The connection between this cinematic tradition and
earlier theatrical traditions is not merely circumstantial or subconscious; it was often
carried by actors who moved from one genre to the other. One such actor was İsmail
Dümbüllü, who had inherited the headdress symbolic of the acting profession, the kavuk
(a form of Ottoman headdress that preceded the Fez, a headdress which was the product
231
of nineteenth century Ottoman dress reform itself outlawed during the republican era)
from one of his masters in theater. While in some of his film appearances, Dümbüllü
simply performed his stage sketches; in other films he used his theater character within
the narrative of the film itself. These were: Dümbüllü Macera Peşinde (Dümbüllü in
Search of Adventure, d. Şadan Kamil, 1948), Dümbüllü Sporcu (Dümbüllü the
Sportsman, d. Seyfi Havaeri, 1952), and Dümbüllü Tarzan (d. Muharrem Gürses, 1954).
Dümbüllü films introduced not only the tropes of theater-in-the-round within cinema, but
also began the practice of making a series of films about various adventures of the same
comic character, much like Hollywood comedies with Laurel and Hardy or the Marx
Brothers. Three such characters who became very popular were Feridun Karakaya’s
Cilalı İbo (Shiny İbo), Sadri Alışık’s Turist Ömer (Tourist Ömer), and Kemal Sunal’s
İnek Şaban (Cow Şaban). Like Dümbüllü, all three of these later actors were originally
theater actors who carried a theatrical character into films. The female counterparts of
such characters appeared mainly in romantic comedies and came to be identified with
particular actresses such as Belgin Doruk’s Küçük Hanımefendi (Little Lady) or Hülya
Koçyiğit’s Kezban who traveled to various European cities for each film in the series.
Thus the Turist Ömer character of Sadri Alışık partook of a traditional theatrical
background which carried elements of popular comedy from theater to cinema. Like
other film series which used the same character in several films, Turist Ömer Uzay
Yolunda is one of the seven films that introduced the Turist Ömer character, played by
Sadri Alışık. All of these films were also directed by the same director, Hulki Saner,
giving them a thematic continuity which goes far beyond parody and into an ongoing
consideration of pressing issues in Turkish society from the mid 1960s, when the series
was first introduced, until the 1970s, when the eponymous hero finally used up his
possible destinations on earth and traveled into outer space. Thus in order to understand
the issues taken up in the final, parodic installation of the series, it becomes necessary to
situate its concerns in the broader experience of its tragic-comic hero.
The first Turist Ömer (d. Hulki Saner, 1964) introduced the rural, poor and foolish
Ömer character as a “tourist” in Istanbul who has recently migrated from rural to urban
Turkey. Thus the series began with a standard comic plot which puts a traditional figure
232
in a modern urban setting, thus reflecting on the modernization processes taking place in
Turkish society. While in such initial versions this theme did not involve aspects of
ethnic difference, later comedies, especially those made in the 1980s, replaced the
Turkish villager in the city with a Kurdish character migrating to Istanbul and
experiencing problems not simply from the conflict between tradition and modernity, but
also from ethnic difference. In the next film in the series, Turist Ömer Dümenciler Kralı
(Turist Ömer, The King of Tricksters, 1965), Ömer is mistaken for a foreign prince,
placing him among the high society of Turkey. The film thus not only deals with class
difference, but also with the relationship between Turks, former Ottoman “masters” of
Arab lands, and legions of oil-rich Arab tourists arriving in Istanbul who were rich, but
whose behavior was seen as “uncivilized” and attire as anti-modern. By featuring a look
at the Arab world as the “East” of Turkey, such a film also mimicked the Western
cinemas’ consumption of the Orient as opulent, pre-modern, and romantic.
In the third film, Turist Ömer Almanya’da (Turist Ömer in Germany, 1966),
Ömer goes abroad to Germany as a low-class, rural Turkish worker and falls in love with
“Helga”. This reflects a particular history of immigrant workers in the Western European
countries who served as the lowest rung of the workforce of the burgeoning European
economies in a post-Second World War context. This theme of the immigrant worker, the
difficulties that they experienced in the diaspora and that they had upon their return to
Turkey, became a common theme in Turkish cinema especially in the 1970s and 1980s,
as more and more families came to include relatives working in Europe. The relationship
between film and this issue was addressed to a large extent by Oğuz Makal in his work
Sinemada Yedinci Adam (A Seventh Man in Cinema), a book of cinematic reflections
inspired by John Berger’s 1975 book A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe with
Jean Mohr’s photographs that documented the one seventh of workers in Northern
Europe who were immigrants from a wide range countries including Turkey, Greece,
Albania, Italy, Portugal, and Iran. 9
9
Immigration from Turkey to West Germany started in 1961 and then this expanded to other European
countries such as Austria, Sweden, Netherlands, and France. Following a strict and degrading process of
health control documented in Berger and Mohr’s book, workers were taken by these countries as temporary
“guest” workers to meet the labor demands of rapid postwar industrialization. Starting out in the most
233
Turist Ömer Almanya’da was one of the first films to address the issue of the
often overlooked personal lives of displaced workers in Germany, but it certainly was not
the last. While this first wave of immigrant workers came mostly from rural areas of
Turkey, a second wave of immigrants went to Europe as political refugees, especially
around the time of 1980 military intervention. Dealing mostly with serious dramas such
as Otobüs (Bus, d. Tunç Okan, 1975), Almanya Acı Vatan (Germany Bitter Land, d. Şerif
Gören, 1979), and Kırk Metrekare Almanya (Forty Square-meters Germany, d. Tevfik
Başer, 1983), Makal argues that such films used realistic language to deal with the
problems of communication and the search for identity (1994, 123). While such films
might be considered social realist dramas in Yeşilçam cinema, some of them like Otobüs
and Kırk Metrekare Almanya also introduced issues concerning the definition of national
cinema. Like many films produced after the 1980 coup, these were shot by filmmakers
living in Europe and produced by European production companies or television channels,
enhancing the technological opportunities to produce realistic films. Yet while these films
address issues that are Turkish, the dislocation of their production raises the question of
what constitutes national cinema, and at what point that film instead comes to represent
more complex transnational identities. The films of second and third generation
immigrant filmmakers such as Fatih Akın, Hussi Kutlucan, and Ayşe Polat, introduce
discussions about transnational cinemas. Coinciding with the demise of Yeşilçam in the
late-1980s and the early 1990s, films like Reise der Hoffnung (Umuda Yolculuk, Journey
of Hope, d. Xavier Koller, 1990) complicated the definition and understanding of
national cinemas to a great extent. As a co-production of Switzerland, Turkey and the
United Kingdom, the film tells the story of a Kurdish family who illegally tries to
immigrate in Switzerland by crossing the Alpine mountains from Italy.
The co-productions and discussions about transnational cinemas especially after
the 1990s brought about a problematization of national cinemas. In this line, Yeşilçam’s
relation to the Western countries and its representation of Turkish characters in such
lands may be seen at three different levels. The first category of such films involves
demanding sectors of industry with the lowest pay, without social security, and living in packed small
workers’ quarters with fellow foreign workers, these temporary workers or gastarbaiteren slowly turned
into permanent workers by receiving their rights and slowly bringing their families from home.
234
comedies and romantic comedies which put a Turkish character into Western lands to
create a comic story such as that of Turist Ömer, as well as various family melodramas
which introduced upper-class characters going to Europe for vacation. The second
category of films includes various genres such as comedies, serious dramas and family
melodramas, also introducing lower-class and mostly rural characters immigrating to
Europe in search of a better life. Finally, there are a number of melodramas such as
Memleketim (My Homeland, Yücel Çakmaklı, 1975) and Bir Türk’e Gönül Verdim (I Fell
for a Turk, Halit Refiğ, 1969) which involve themes of culture clash between the West
and the East underlined by a particular ideological stance represented by the filmmakers
themselves. In this last category of films, while the filmmakers tried to pose their own
theses concerning the relationship between the West and the East, generally by choosing
the values and morality of the East over the “capitalist” West, they introduced
westernization as a problem leading to the loss of “essential” traits of the Turkish
identity.
While Turist Ömer Almanya’da thus partakes of a much broader range of cultural
concerns by portraying him as a worker, the fourth and fifth Turist Ömer films raise
further issues through his travels to Arab and African lands. Turist Ömer Arabistan’da
(Turist Ömer in Arabia, 1969) involves elements of the Ottoman colonial presence in the
Arab lands. It also shares various elements of the Turkish popular cultural consumption
of “primitive” populations with Turist Ömer Yamyamlar Arasında (Turist Ömer among
the Cannibals, 1970). Both films involved elements of Orientalism played out by Turkey,
normally considered Oriental itself, reproduced against other non-Western countries.
After his voyages to such “dark” and “black” fantasylands of princes and cannibals, in his
sixth film of the series, Turist Ömer returned to Europe yet again. This time he found
himself in the middle of an arena surrounded by bulls and matadors in Turist Ömer Boğa
Güreşçisi (Turist Ömer, the Bullfighter, 1971). Having already thus become a seasoned
world traveler, Turist Ömer’s last voyage was neither to the East nor to the West, but to
the beyond, to the future and extraterrestrial world of the Star Trek television series.
In this series of films, Ömer travels to many lands, and thus partakes in the
primary identity of the tourist. His identity as an ill-mannered vagrant and bum parodies
235
the class assumptions of tourism, based on travel among affluent, capitalist, and generally
Western characters. Starting out as a lower-class, rural Turkish character, Turist Ömer
quickly picks up the slang of Istanbul before starting his voyages abroad and on-board,
and maintains this attitude by returning to Turkey at the end of each film and “staying”
there between them. Turist Ömer is not only reminiscent of Karagöz, but also of
Karagöz’s voyage to the world of Punch. In this respect, Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda not
only parodies Star Trek by means of Turkification, but is also about özenti. As noted
above, özenti is not simply related to work marked by novelties which come about in an
adventurous manner. Rather, the movement from self to other and an attempt to return
back is marked by a continual movement between self and other, without the construction
of a fixed identity. Turist Ömer’s visit to Star Trek, to the world of American television
series, transforms Ömer, as well as introducing the complexities of the original series.
Not only is the film the “first” cinematic rendition of the television series, predating its
first official film version, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (d. Robert Wise, 1979) by six
years, it is also based on the pilot episode of the series, which nonetheless ultimately first
aired as episode 6, “The Man Trap,” on September 8, 1966. The Turkish version of the
episode strictly follows the script of the original though there are two aspects that make it
closer to parody than to remake: the introduction of the Turist Ömer character into the
original story and the exceedingly poor quality of sets, make-up, and special effects. The
latter aspect brings to the fore a trashy filmic language that is to a great extent shared by
popular cinemas throughout the non-Western world, and often seen as characteristic of
Yeşilçam. Nonetheless, Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda was a fairly mainstream production,
considerably better quality than various other quickies featuring comic book heroes such
as Batman, Superman, and Killing.
In The Man Trap episode of the original series, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise
land on planet M113 for a medical check of the only two residents of the remote planet,
Robert and Nancy Crater. However, Nancy turns out to be a “salt vampire” who is the
last survivor of a species that lived on the planet. This theme of “salt vampire,” according
to one website, was indeed based on a joke that represented the NBC censors who asked
for revisions on the series as well as “cutting love scenes which featured open mouthed
236
kisses” (http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series). In other
words, open-mouthed kisses which were censored by the NBC were indirectly
represented with a female “salt vampire” who not only bites, but also sucks out the life
force of the Enterprise crew.
Although the Turkish remake does not involve such an ironic intervention, it
involves not only the elements of Yeşilçam, but also a double-edged relation to the West
with an ambiguous parody of the series. As the “first” feature length film version of the
television series, Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda not only predates Hollywood’s use of the
television series, but it also “Turkifies” the extraterrestrial world of the series. This is
obvious from the beginning, as the opening credits start with “upholstered” music from
the original series and other sources accompanying overexposed yellow images of the
Enterprise taken from the original. Similar to the original episode, the Yeşilçam version’s
crew of the Enterprise also land on a planet, Orin 7, where the only living beings are
Professor Crater (Kayhan Yıldızoğlu) and Nancy (Şule Tınaz), to take some scientific
notes from the professor and to check their health. While the original episode involves
the crew landing on a sterile studio set of an unearthly planet, the Turkish Enterprise’s
pioneer crew is teleported to the historical city of Ephesus. True to Yeşilçam’s tradition
of shooting on location, which utilizes Istanbul’s Byzantine churches, Ottoman fortresses,
cisterns and other such historical buildings for historical adventure films, the majority of
science-fiction and fantastic films utilized eccentric geographical locations such as
Cappadocia, the land of fairy chimneys, and the ruins of Greek or Roman cities such as
Ephesus. After the four members of the crew, Mr. Spock (Erol Amaç), Doctor McCoy
(Ferdi Merter), Darnell (Necip Koçak) and Green (Oytun Sanal) wander the main street
of Ephesus, they find the professor and his wife Nancy in their rundown residence in an
Ephesus building interior. We are introduced to the characters of the series, those in the
dubbed version of the television series, kept intact with transliterations, in a Turkish
accent (e.g., “Spak” or “Körk.”). The Enterprise is referred to as Atılgan which means
“enterprising,” “intrepid” or “bold.” As the salt vampire takes on the faces of different
women who touch the lives of the Atılgan crew and tried to lick their salt, the professor
threatens the crew by showing off his “threatening” robot, Hercules, (Sönmez Yıkılmaz)
237
who has a stiff, Tarzanish quality. The professor explains to two crew members that they
have to leave without further questions and supplies them with salt, but in the meantime
Darnell dies. So Mr. Spock contacts the bridge, telling Captain Kirk (Cemil Şahbaz) that
they need to do some more investigations on the planet. Nancy finds the dead body of
Darnell and claims that he died of a strange plant called “Borchia.” In the meantime, the
professor tries to save Nancy by making his time machine work and bringing someone
from the past to accuse him of the murder.
A cut to Istanbul of 1973 introduces Turist Ömer (Sadri Alışık) who is about to be
forced into marriage for impregnating a woman during a one-night stand. Just before
saying “I do,” Turist Ömer prays to God for a miracle and gets it, finding himself in
Ephesus, i.e., Planet Orin 7. As he starts to stare lustfully at the two female guardian
robots of the professor’s house, Hercules arrives and takes him to the professor and
Nancy. In the meantime, Turist Ömer keeps talking and makes fun of whatever he sees
around, as in the earlier films in the series. When taken to the professor’s residence, he
asks “Where am I now?” Professor replies, “You are on the biggest planet of the galaxy.”
“So, is it close to Kasımpaşa (Turist’s neighborhood in Istanbul famous for its slang and
bullies)?” “We are three million light years away from Kasımpaşa.” Then, Nancy comes
and starts to kiss and lick Turist’s hand to suck out his salt. Ömer has a quick explanation
for her behavior: “I looked at a woman a couple of days ago on the street, and she ended
up nine months pregnant. So now you lick my hand. I swear, you may give birth to nine
kids.” The Professor stops the lustful Nancy, telling her that he would be their accused
murderer, just before the mischievous Ömer stops paying attention and starts to play with
the robot Hercules. On the bridge of Atılgan, the ship’s female-voiced computer explains
that Darnell did not die of the plant Borchia, but because all the salt had been sucked out
of his body. When Ömer sees Spock on the planet, he is shocked by his pointed ears,
points at him and asks the professor, “Is this also a machine? But the engineer did a bad
job. Look at these pointed ears, smooth hair, and strange look.” In the meantime,
although enjoying his new surroundings like a kid, Turist begins to understand that he is
thought of as a “monster” and the murderer of Darnell.
238
Taken on board for further interrogation, like a mischievous kid, Ömer sits in the
Captain’s chair and plays with the gadgets around him by pushing buttons and giving
orders like the Captain: “Mr. Spock, send us four well-brewed glasses of tea.” Ömer ’s
culturally specific jokes create alienation effects among the crew who try to understand
this Easterner from the past. Apart from thinking of him as a robot, Mr. Spock even
claims that, if he is human, then his mother and father must have been from different
planets. Getting angry about the subtext of being a bastard, Ömer replies, “Hey, stop. I
may not know myself but I very well know that your mom is from another planet, and
your dad is from the planet of goats.” Then, he introduces himself as Turist Ömer. Such a
repartee between Ömer and Spock constructs a duo similar to that of Karagöz and
Hacivat. Ömer, with his Kasımpaşa slang and childish gestures, invites Spock’s famous
phrase: “Beyond reason.” As a Turkish tourist on board a Western television series, Ömer
also invites an East-West duality, as if he is Karagöz in the three-dimensional world of
Punch. As such, the mischievous Ömer pushes some more buttons and takes Atılgan out
of its orbit just as the presence of an Easterner might in the Western world. Ömer’s
Eastern traits are further supported by the findings of the doctor’s tests on Ömer, who has
“an excessive reaction in his sexual plasmas; a primitive remnant in which the normal
cells are grouped.” But Ömer does not understand this terminology and the doctor simply
tells the captain that Ömer ’s brain capacity is very low and that his heart and internal
organs are not functioning properly. While taking an intelligence test from Spock, Ömer
annoys Spock so much that he wants to quit the test. After annoying more members of
the crew, Ömer asks a couple of questions to Atılgan’s main computer. So Ömer starts
with the standard question: “What does two times two equal?” The feminine computer
replies: “Four.” “Ah, the whore knows the answer. Man, may I ask one more question?”
When Spock lets him, Ömer asks for the results of the weekly lottery, but soon gets bored
of asking questions. The captain, who sees Spock get angry for the first time, figures out
that it is because of Ömer, who then wants to apologize. He extends his hand to Spock
for a handshake. But he takes his hand back, saying “Zzzt!” and making fun of Mr. Spock
just as he did when they first met. Spock tells the captain: “So you see, Captain, this
creature is beyond reason.”
239
On the planet Orin 7, Nancy murders Green and snatches her body. As Green, she
asks for a teleport to the bridge and starts to suck the salt out of various crewmembers.
On board, Ömer keeps playing with toys such as a sound amplifier. The magnified sound
of his rumbling stomach leads to the issue of a red alert on the ship. After eating, Ömer
attempts to smoke an “invisible space cigarette.” Then he questions Spock again by
asking why his ears are pointed and whether it is because his dad pulled them a lot when
he was a kid. He calmly replies, “Everybody has pointed ears on our Planet Vulkan.”
“Then,” he asks, “if in your country people’s ears are that long, what about the ears of the
donkeys?” Spock says, “There are no donkeys on our planet…and our blood is green.”
After Ömer leaves, Spock tells the captain that giving reasonable answers to Ömer’s
questions requires excellence in space mathematics. Spock, unable to understand the
phrase “Zzzt,” decides to ask the main computer which, after hearing the question,
instantly starts to shake and put out smoke before laughing hysterically and going
berserk. In short, Ömer’s presence on board not only leads to many detours from the
original script of The Man Trap, it also introduces Ömer as an Eastern character “beyond
reason,” making fun of the order on board the Western spaceship. Deviating still further
from the series, the film also introduces meat-eating flowers from The Little Shop of
Horrors (Roger Corman, 1960). After leaving the bridge of the ship, Ömer notices Nancy
killing other crewmembers. But Ömer’s attempt to explain the situation to Captain,
Spock, and Doctor is unsuccessful for, as a creature from a strange part of the history of
earth, he has already lost all of his credibility in a future world of reason. In the
meantime, the characters hear Janice’s screams and start to search for the creature on
board. But this time, Nancy becomes Doctor. At this point, the Captain’s log report is
dubbed over the action: “There is a creature among us who can snatch any of our bodies.
We can only find answers from the professor and his wife.” Captain, Spock, Doctor
(Nancy), and Ömer are then teleported to Orin 7, where the professor escapes from them.
This time, he tries to ward off the crew with the help of a giant monster who makes
meaningless gestures and has flames pouring from its mouth. The captain throws stones
at this orange-costumed, gas-masked, long-fingered creature.
240
Though the Turkish filmmakers tried to make this creature as similar as possible
to the one in the original series, they were not successful because of Yeşilçam’s poor
technical capacity for special effects. In this respect, what might be referred to as Turkish
“trash” films, such as the remakes of Tarzan, Superman, Killing, and various other
superhero films, westerns, historical adventures, and action films, share a similar lowquality, quickie aesthetics. Many other Turkified films such as those of family
melodramas, comedies and even some adventure films allow Yeşilçam filmmakers to
adapt these stories into Turkish settings with Turkified characters. But genres that
demand sophistication in mise-en-scène, such as westerns and science-fiction films,
exposed Yeşilçam’s low-budget quality much more. Thus films like Turist Ömer Uzay
Yolunda have become popular in recent years among trash cinema aficionados in the
West. In this film, the low quality costumes are exposed by the “salt vampire” monster
which in trying to mimic the original series, raises issues of verisimilitude.
In this respect, Yeşilçam cinema in general may be seen as a cinema of imitation.
But instead, I have argued above that Yeşilçam, beyond being a cheap imitation, is a
cinema marked by “Turkification” involving a nationalist hayal and özenti enmeshed
with a melodramatic modality. In such a vein, for instance, Spock’s laser gun shot, which
works through scratches on the film negative that create an X marking on the shot
creature, becomes conceivable as a part of Yeşilçam’s film language. Certainly, there are
other alternatives for the spectatorial experience of Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda: the first
one is simply to view such films as “trash,” leading one either to disregard them as films
or to view them with an ironic or sarcastic perspective. Taking inspiration from a
formalist rendering of film language, especially that of Hollywood with its premise of the
creation of an illusion of a three-dimensional world on the screen, one may also talk
about “excess” with reference to Jeffrey Sconce’s (1995) reading of trash cinema based
on Kristin Thompson’s (1999) concept of “cinematic excess.” Sconce’s view deals with
the moments of crisis of spectatorial motivation based upon the classical Hollywood
cinema. When a spectator’s motivation is broken by elements of filmic discourse or
narrative, one may refer to such gaps or breaks as excess. Following Sconce, one may
argue that trash cinema is open to such gaps leading to excess due to their exploitational
241
mentality marked by bad acting, cheap sets, and low quality special effects. Such
moments of excess, where the spectatorial motivation is broken, may lead spectators to
loose their grip on filmic textuality and to bring extra-textual themes and issues into the
textual world of the film. While such a reading of Yeşilçam is possible, this reading
promptly brings up another one: what if a film industry is itself in excess with almost all
of its films? If not taken in relation to a relevant visual history and a general frame of
particular entertainment practices that predated and went hand-in-hand with cinema,
Yeşilçam may be taken as an industry of pure cinematic trash. Thus looking at
Yeşilçam’s particular practices of “Turkification” with all of its cheapness, aggression,
and novelties, as in the case of Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda, seems crucial in
understanding a national popular film industry with all of its intricacies and flaws. It is in
this respect that during its life span, Yeşilçam remained like Karagöz, aware of the world
of Punch and even going abroad to enjoy it, but in the end returning back to its own twodimensional world.
Back in the film, while wandering around the planet, Ömer comes across a
beautiful woman who is the salt vampire. Before Spock comes to help, the creature turns
into Spock’s long dead lover from Vulcan. As Ömer and the captain figure out what is
happening, Spock, under the influence of the salt vampire, tries to protect the woman. In
the meantime, the professor sends Hercules and his fighter robots against Ömer, Spock,
and the captain. Ömer, who is adapting to his new surroundings, figures out that the
professor is controlling the robots with a machine and deactivates the machine to stop the
fighter robots. Then, just before the salt vampire kills the professor, they learn that the
creature is the last surviving member of an extinct species. After a couple more body
transfers and altercations, the doctor is teleported to the planet and manages to kill the
salt vampire. Ömer, who arrives late at the scene of killing, still thinks that the doctor is
the monster and points his laser gun toward him. But Spock explains the situation to him,
saying: “Do not be afraid Mr. Turist, the monster is dead.” Ömer replies: “The monster is
dead but you live. Everybody is afraid of you.” This deliberate extra-textual reference
indeed voices the perception of spectators in Turkey who follow the series and who are
jokingly afraid of Spock’s pointed ears. In other words, Ömer moves across the textual
242
and extra-textual worlds by changing roles: Ömer, as the main character of Turist Ömer
Uzay Yolunda, belongs to the textual world of the film; Ömer, who carries his identity
intact over a series of films and who becomes a part of Star Trek television series,
belongs to an inter-textual world; and Ömer, who voices the spectatorial perception of the
television series, belongs to an extra-textual world. As noted above, such deliberate
addresses directed toward spectators especially toward or at the end of films were a
common Yeşilçam trope that had its roots in the traditional performing arts of Turkey.
Back on the spaceship Atılgan, Ömer, having befriended the crew and solved a
problem with them, starts to prepare for his teleport back to Istanbul. Nonetheless, he still
keeps annoying the crew with his jokes as he asks to take a minibus home. He then
invites the captain and others to his poor house (fakirhane). As he kisses and hugs the
captain and the doctor farewell, he exaggerates kissing Spock. But this time Spock also
has a trick up his sleeve: He extends his hand to Ömer for a handshake and tricks him by
saying “Zzzt.” Ömer finds himself back at the marriage ceremony and cries for help from
Spock. Suddenly, Ömer’s ears become pointed like Spock and he thanks him: “Hey, Mr.
Spock, bro, you are a great guy. You made me an ear-victim like you!” With his new
identity, he discovers new power and, like Spock, touches the shoulders of the bride’s
brothers to immobilize them. Then, he steps on the table and thanks Spock and others
with his trademark gesture of goodbye. Up on the bridge, the captain tells Spock that
Ömer did not forget him. Spock replies, “He was an illogical man.” Doctor tells Spock,
“He made a lot of trouble for you.” Spock replies, “Still, he was a good guy,” before
heading to another adventure on Atılgan, i.e., the U.S.S. Enterprise.
5.10. Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi (Kara Murat, Fatih’s Defender, 1972)
Like science fiction and adventure of films such as Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda,
historical action films bridge the gap between comic books and film, as well as
cinematically rendering both the past and the future in a melodramatic format. There are
three main layers of convergence between history and film in Yeşilçam’s terms: the fight
against the Greeks and other invading forces after the First World War and during the
243
War for Independence which led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the formation
of the Turkish Republic; the fight between the Ottomans and the Byzantine Empire; and
the lives and battles of the Turks of Central Asia against the Chinese and others. To these
three, one may also add a small number of films about the history of Islam which involve
a fight between believers and infidels. Together, these subjects inform the genre of
historical action and adventure. As noted above, the republican cultural project aimed at a
synthesis of the West and the essential traits of a Turkishness defined by excluding
Islamic identity. Such a proposal of synthesis may be found in most republican social
dramas and in historical adventure films about the War for Independence. But in the case
of other historical adventure films, particularly those about the Ottoman period and the
period of early Islam, the grounds for this synthesis shift to some extent. These films
either are not concerned with such an issue of synthesis and cultural projection, or they
relate to the Ottoman period through an anti-Byzantine and thus anti-Christian ethos
composed of a national and a religious identity.
While many of the protagonists of such historical films started out as comic book
or pulp novel heroes such as Karaoğlan, Tarkan, Kara Murat, and Malkoçoğlu, they also
helped the formation of a specific historical representation of the enemies of the Turks
including the Byzantines, Greeks, Crusaders, infidels, Chinese, and even Vikings. The
(“harlot”) Byzantium of Yeşilçam presents a perfect image of the “enemy” that Yeşilçam
tries to overcome and conquer. The formula was: “Byzantines are the enemies of Turks,
Christians are the enemies of Muslims” (Scognamillo and Demirhan 1999, 139). Starting
with İstanbul’un Fethi (The Conquest of Constantinople, Aydın Arakon, 1951), the
Byzantine Empire was depicted as truly byzantine, full of palace intrigues perfect for
adventurous melodrama. According to Scognamillo and Demirhan, this film tried to be
relatively realistic and tried to present the Byzantines objectively, but later films simply
regurgitated all sorts of Byzantine stereotypes: intrigues, illicit relationships, dishonesty,
and torture (1999, 139). Byzantium served simply as an element enriching the mise-enscène of a simple melodramatic plot: a fixed iconography of types; evil; heroes and
heroines overcoming evil forces; tortures by Byzantine lords eliciting pathos; the
conquest of Byzantine lands by killing the enemy; dramatic and spectacular
244
confrontations enriched by elements from sword-and-sandal epics and westerns; last
minute rescues; and romantic relationships with Byzantine princesses who later convert
to Islam. Another element that is commonly used in these films is a Turkish character
captured by the Byzantines as a child who later discovers his true identity, either by
meeting one of his relatives or by a sign noticed by his brother following a dramatic
confrontation between two siblings.
Opening with the image of the Fatih mosque in Istanbul, originally built by
Mehmet the Conqueror (“Fatih”) and with a narration accompanied by a religious tune
about the Prophet Mohammed’s hadith (words believed to have been spoken by the
prophet) about Istanbul which would one day be conquered by Muslims, Kara Murat
Fatih’in Fedaisi is one such film. The film is based on the comic book character Kara
Murat (Black Murat) created by Rahmi Turan. Though there was an earlier version of the
film made in 1966, Fatih’in Fedaisi (Fatih’s Defender, Tunç Başaran), this second
version was popular and triggered a number of sequels, all of which star Cüneyt Arkın as
Kara Murat. The second shot shows a sign on which the hadith about Istanbul is written,
implying that it is in the garden of the Fatih Mosque. The sign, written in both Arabic
and Latin scripts, reads, “How happy the commander who conquers the city of
Constantine and how happy for his soldiers.” As the narrator talks about the conquest
which took place eight hundred years after its prediction, shots of marching Ottoman
soldiers are accompanied by Ottoman military band music (mehter). Soon, we see Fatih
(Bora Ayanoğlu) and his soldiers marching toward Constantinople. As the narrator
continues providing formal historical information, a map of the Ottoman Empire in 1453
shows the territories captured by the Ottomans from their enemies surrounding the
empire. Although the Ottoman Empire had already captured a significant part of the
Balkans and Anatolia, as of 1453 Constantinople had not yet been captured. To indicate
the conquest, an animated arrow on the map moves from Edirne, the capital of the
Ottoman Empire before the conquest, to Istanbul, which starts burning in cartoon orange
flames. As the narrator goes on to tell how the prophecy of the prophet was realized and
how the Ottoman Empire started to dominate the world of the infidels, we see intercuts of
the army band on the Rumeli fortress, Fatih on the back of a horse leading his army, and
245
animated arrows conquering portions of the lands surrounding the expanding empire. But
there is a gimmick to the animated red arrow: in the map, the territories surrounding the
Ottoman Empire are painted with colors other than red. When the red arrow emerges
from the center (Istanbul) of the fluorescent yellow Ottoman Empire, it first turns the
color on the map blood red and then annexes that land to the fluorescent yellow color of
the map of the Ottoman Empire. This cartographic action is accompanied by a narration:
“The entire world bowed its head before the Turkish sword. The Turks, turning the map
of Europe upside down, were rewriting history with golden letters.” The republican
dream of being equals with the Western world can never come close to equaling such
nostalgia of Turkish might and power over fifteenth century Europe. Then, in such films,
Ottoman-Turkish identity is marketed by taking advantage of popular nationalism.
After this long preamble, just before the narrator presents the story of the film, the
animated map focuses on the Princedom of Wallachia before the territory of Vlad the
Impaler (Turgut Özatay), which is not conquered by an animated arrow but through
animated explosions. After the above introduction (continuous narration that goes back
and forth between the present and mid-15th century and the intercuts of shots from the
present, the filmic past, and animated maps), the film quickly moves away from
Ottoman-Byzantine themes and focuses instead on altercations between the Ottomans and
the Prince of Wallachia during the period of Fatih. Vlad the Impaler is introduced as “the
enemy of Turks,” and enemy is enemy, be it Byzantine, Wallachian or Greek! Typical to
Yeşilçam’s historical adventure films, the palace of Vlad’s principality is the apse of the
Church of St. Irene (Aya İrini), an austere church built next to Hagia Sophia during the
iconoclastic movement of the tenth century and used as an imperial armory during much
of the Ottoman era . There, a man, woman, and child are brought to Vlad who asks what
their crime is. His servants reply, “To be Turkish and Muslim.” Vlad tells the Turks, “If
you change your religion and nation, and kiss the idol, I will forgive you.” They refuse to
kiss the cross. Vlad orders, “Impale the man, and take out the woman’s heart.” A man
quickly smashes the heart of the woman in his hands as the little daughter cries aloud. So
in this projection of the mid-15th century, as in other historical adventures of Yeşilçam,
the Ottomans are “Turks” with full awareness of their nationhood. Even in this context
246
there is no mention of the many nations under Ottoman rule. Nationalism, according to
the film’s text, appeared in this mid-15th century setting long before its historical
appearance in the Western world. The film’s claims in relation to Islam are also full of
mixed messages: Christians are openly accused of idolatry, even though according to
Islam Christianity is one of the Abrahamic religions, a “People of the Book,” and
therefore deserving of respect.
At this point the narrator returns to talk about how Vlad refused to pay tribute to
the Ottomans and tortured Turk, statements which have some historical validity. In the
next scene, Vlad is seen in bed with one of his mistresses who makes the mistake of
telling him that she is pregnant (to the accompaniment of some upholstered Hollywood
film music). As Vlad kills her, we are exposed to simultaneous palace intrigue with a
femme fatale, Vlad’s wife, in bed enjoying the attention of a young man before stabbing
him to death with vampiric subtexts. Vlad makes a plan to refuse the Turks their tribute
by ambushing one of the Turkish commanders. Just before the ambush, the Ottoman
raiding forces catch a kid who tells them that he wants to be a raider like them. His older
brother, who is one of the raiders (Cüneyt Arkın) asks the commander to forgive his
brother, who followed them from Istanbul to Wallachia. Right at that moment, Vlad’s
forces ambush the Turks and Vlad tortures them in his palace, accompanied again by a
Hollywood tune that seems to have jumped out from a Sinbad movie. Kara Murat, his
older brother, and the commander are the last three who remain. After Vlad’s men kill the
commander, he asks Kara Murat to cut off his older brothers arms and legs and go back
to Istanbul to tell Fatih what happened in return for his own life. Murat’s older brother, in
this eerie scene, also asks the boy to cut off his arms and legs. Strangely, the little boy has
the might to cut off his arms and legs in four sharp blows of the axe. In this act of
brutality that turns brother against brother, the interesting thing is that both the older
brother in this scene and the grown up Kara Murat in later scenes are played by Cüneyt
Arkın. In other words, the same actor playing two different roles cuts his own arms and
legs – metaphorically castrates himself – before his eventual act of revenge! Cüneyt
Arkın, who started his career as a jeune premier, during this period became the main
action hero of all sorts of Yeşilçam’s “male” genres, e.g., historical, science-fiction,
247
crime, and westerns that demanded action scenes with fights and spectacular duels. Arkın
did all of these scenes without the help of stunt doubles and with his “fighter team,” stunt
players who get beaten by him in one film after another. Though such a doubling of
Arkın, as himself and his brother in the same film, seems far from filmic realism, this is a
very common protocol in Yeşilçam films of almost all genres where the same actor
usually plays the mature father and after some filmic time, the grown up son, or older and
younger siblings as in the case of this film.
After this bloody scene in the film, little Murat is put in a dungeon where he
meets his future “princess,” the little girl who serves the dungeon keeper. In the
meantime, Vlad is with another one of his lovers. As he squashes her breast, he says “I
want more of you Lucia, the Turkish blood that I shed today gave me power…if I also
defeat that Fatih!” She replies, “Do not be suspicious about that, your majesty. Your
victories will be written in the history with golden letters.” Back at the dungeon, the little
girl, Zeynep, continues to give food to Murat and tells him that she is also Turkish and
that her parents were killed by Vlad’s men. As tokens of remembrance, they exchange
their necklaces before Murat is released and sent back to Fatih. Fatih gets angry about
what happened and immediately raids Wallachia. Vlad escapes to Hungary, as the history
books note. Like the scenes at the beginning of the film about the conquest of Istanbul,
these “limited” battle scenes were also shot at the Rumeli Fortress in İstanbul, also the
site where Murat trains as a Janissary soldier.
The narrator signals the passing of time and Murat is shown as an adult raider and
defender of Fatih, still filled with burning vengeance against Vlad. Still filmed within the
relatively small Rumeli Fortress, we see Murat’s new raids on the lands of infidels. After
coming back from Hungary, Vlad reclaims his throne after the death of his brother. So
Fatih decides to send Kara Murat (Cüneyt Arkın) to figure out what Vlad has in mind. A
cut to Wallachia shows a hunting party shot in a “desert!” This desert is the dune of a
small Black Sea town north of Istanbul often used for desert scenes in Yeşilçam.
Nonetheless, like the reappearance of landscape in places supposed to be quite far from
each other, its popping out as Wallachia again does not present any sort of difficulties in
terms of the film’s realism. For the film’s audience, the dramatic effects that follow are
248
understood to be far more important than the location. During the hunting party in the
desert, one of Vlad’s commanders tries to rape Angela (Hale Soygazi), who is the grown
up Zeynep. Mikhail (Erol Taş) tries to save her but he is caught and the commander
orders his soldiers to tie him behind a horse and drag him on the ground until he dies, as
in westerns. Kara Murat arrives in the nick of time and cuts the rope with an arrow. Then
Kara Murat shows his acrobatic tricks on horseback as he fights the rest of the hunting
party. Murat spares Angela’s life and takes off with his new friend, the Serbian Mikhail.
Back at Vlad’s palace, Angela informs Vlad about the situation. He orders that all the
foreigners in town must be arrested. Mikhail and Murat go to a bar to have some food but
Vlad’s head executioner comes to the same place. Everybody at the bar stands before him
except Murat. As he attacks Murat, the soldiers arrive on the scene and arrest Murat who
introduces himself as the Albanian Cafer.
At the palace, Angela checks all the foreigners in order to identify the culprit.
Right before identifying him, she notices his necklace, revealed to the audience through
fast paced zooms crosscutting Angela’s face and Murat’s necklace. As she demurs, Murat
steps forward as the one who killed Vlad’s men. He is sent to the same dungeon as in his
childhood, where he talks with Fatih’s messengers whom he had been ordered to save. As
he awaits his duel with the executioner that is planned for the following day, Angela tries
to save him by making a deal with the head executioner. In the meantime, Vlad’s wife
asks the guards to bring Cafer over to her bedroom. After making love, she again wants
to satisfy her blood lust but the victorious Cafer stops her. Back in the dungeon, the head
executioner taunts him, “Get ready, I will drink your blood tomorrow.” Vlad’s wife, who
hates the foreigner whom she bedded but was unable to murder, asks Vlad’s men to give
Cafer/Murat a bad sword. In the fight, Murat’s sword quickly breaks, but he still manages
to win the duel. Ever honorable, he spares the life of the executioner. At this point, Vlad
understands that he is Murat and tortures him in order to discover his mission. The
following day, the executioner whom he had spared provides him with a mock hanging,
aiding in his escape from the palace. After a show by an oriental dancer, Angela serves
Vlad and his wife as they have dinner and discuss the death of Murat. Murat and Mikhail,
Turks and Serbs in alliance against Vlad, learn about two priests who are messengers of
249
the Hungarian king. They kill the priests, take on their identities as messengers, and go to
Vlad’s palace. Kara Murat, jack-of-all-trades and all languages, talks with Vlad, this time
disguised as a Hungarian. Then, Murat reveals his true identity to Angela, who then goes
to Vlad to seduce him. But Vlad’s wife catches them and asks her servant to kill Angela,
whom Murat saves yet again. The following day, Kara Murat, who returned from the
dead not as a zombie but as real flesh and blood, starts haunting Vlad’s palace by killing
everyone on his path. Murat and Mikhail use their double identities by changing clothes
and keep killing people in the palace. Murat is after the written treaty between Vlad and
the Hungarian king. Angela sees where Vlad hides it and tries to kill Vlad with poisoned
wine. However, Vlad understands and starts torturing Angela. Murat reveals his identity
one more time before Vlad kills Fatih’s messengers. After various fights that were shot
on-location in various fortresses and castles of Istanbul, both Ottoman and Byzantine,
Murat manages to escape from Vlad’s castle with the help of the head executioner who
dies helping them, saying, “I lived like a dog serving evil throughout my life, but now I
am dying like a human!” One more time, Vlad is informed by one of his commanders
that Murat is dead. Vlad again attempts to rape and kill Angela but Murat comes to her
rescue one more time. At this point he starts to call her “Zeynep,” thus restoring her
Turkish (and Muslim) identity. Two final duels break out between Vlad and Murat, and
Vlad’s wife and Angela/Zeynep. In the end, Zeynep kills Vlad’s wife and Murat kills
Vlad by impaling him. The film finally ends with the happy trio of Mikhail, Zeynep and
Murat on horseback while Murat holds the very poor quality replica head of Vlad on a
stick.
This long synopsis of Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi helps us to locate almost all of
the conventions and stereotypes of Yeşilçam and its treatment of history. First of all, one
may talk about a fixed iconography of these films, supported by a fixed set of narrative
elements. As indicated above, many scnes were shot on-location at a limited number of
real locations in Istanbul. Moreover, the multitude of visual codes filled with crosses,
kissing the hands of or bowing before priests, amulets, and the colorful drapery of the
non-Muslim royalty all help to enhance the visual imagery of opulence that is attractive
yet also represents a tantalizing and evil decadence. The “Byzantine” palace that is full of
250
sexual perversions, intrigues, spies, and torture is the site of vices and virtuous victims or
prisoners who reveal their identities late in the film. In terms of narrative, the
melodramatic triangle of the villain (Vlad), hero (Murat), and heroine (Angela/Zeynep) is
there from the beginning. Both the hero and heroine stay virtuous throughout the film.
Although she is always under the threat of rape, Angela remains unsullied as the Zeynep
of Murat. Murat, who befriends the Serbian Mikhail and the Wallachian head executioner
teaches both of them honesty and courage. The evil of villains is exaggerated with all
sorts of dramatic and spectacular tools available to the filmmakers: torture, impaling,
severed body parts, and a vampiric lust for blood. Of course, Vlad the Impaler is often
better remembered as Count Dracula. However, interestingly enough, in this rendition,
Vlad’s wife seems to have more of a lust for blood by victimizing her lovers. Thus the
film also plays on another historic figure, the Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary
who is said to have enjoyed bathing in blood and was a distant relative of Vlad, living
roughly a century after him. The film thus uses a much-mythologized history to pit pure
good against pure evil, a theme at the heart of melodramatic modality. However, unlike
romance films, action-adventure films involve good characters who have a permission to
kill, as they are fighting for revenge of their family or the greater good of their
community.
The understanding of such a greater good is very complicated because Yeşilçam,
especially in its relation to the West, presents a mixed bag of messages. In Kara Murat,
while Wallachians and Hungarians are Christians, they are also blamed for being
“idolatrous,” their idol being the cross. Nonetheless, Serbians can easily be friends with
the Turks without aligning with fellow Christian populations. The Turkish raiders and the
Ottoman conquest of the Balkans are accepted as givens, without any consciousness of
the Ottoman powers under Fatih as imperialist invaders. Under such conditions, the
invaders are the ones who are victimized thanks to Vlad, who is simply refusing to pay
higher taxes to the Ottomans invading his lands and fighting for the autonomy of his own
princedom of Wallachia. Through such reproduction of the formal history of a nationstate and its nationalist elements, the film clearly serves “Turkish” spectators who can,
through the quasi-historical narrative of the film, be proud of their inherent goodness and
251
victorious fights against the evil forces that surround Turkey. In Yeşilçam, such a fight
may take place at any point in history in any location ranging from Central Asia in the
late 10th century to Cyprus of the late 20th century. Although these films thus bolster
republican nationalism by setting good against evil, literally surrounding the nation
during all eras, their use of Islam makes its relationship to the laicism of the Republic far
more complex. Still they help the formation of a communal bind which defines
Turkishness along the lines of nation and religion, as opposed to other nations and
religions. Such a confrontation of identities helps the institution of dramatic and
spectacular encounters during which important narrative turns happen thanks to the
revelation of hidden identities and the hidden internal good of non-Muslims who end up
either converting to Islam or becoming Ottoman-Turkish citizens. Thus the practice of
conversion under the Ottomans becomes subsumed by the declaration of Turkishness
central to national identity, whereby Turkishness is not simply an ethnicity, but an
allegiance. “How happy is he who says he is a Turk,” one of the key mottos of the nation,
relies on a double entendre: like religion, national identity can be taken on through a
heartfelt conversion towards the good. Thus the conversion of Christian characters in the
film also provides a thinly veiled proposition concerning the shared nationalism of the
multiple ethnicities that make up the Turkish nation.
5.11. Canlı Hedef (Live Target, 1973)
While Şeytan, Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda, and Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi
would fit comfortably into a general category of trash cinema, as I have been arguing
throughout this text, this is not only the case for such fantastic films that fantasize Islam,
space voyages or Ottoman history; in order to be trash, they would have to be distinct
from a mainstream, non-trash cinema. On the contrary, all three of these films which are
in a category of nonrealist genres were made by Yeşilçam’s major production companies
with considerable budgets. They are not what one might call quickies, but they still might
easily be viewed as examples of trash cinema. On the contrary, here I am taking the
opposite point of view: these films are not trash unless one considers the possibility that
252
all of Yeşilçam might be trash due to its low production standards when compared with
the standards set by mainstream Western cinema. Trash, then, when compared with
what? My argument rests on the notion that it might be more productive in understanding
Yeşilçam to consider it not in relation to standards set from outside, even if it tried to
compare itself to such standards. Rather, it needs to be evaluated in terms of its own
standards and traditions through which its audiences developed a relationship with its
films. The argument of excess based on an initial definition of a classical Yeşilçam text
would open the path for argument that would suggest that almost all Yeşilçam films are
excessive. Not only is the classical Yeşilçam text itself is marked by excess in relation to
the standards it imagines for itself, it is also excessive in its relation to Western
mainstream cinemas. Much the way that the cinema of Orson Welles served as the ideal
cinema for trash filmmaker Ed Wood, Hollywood may be taken as the dream and ideal
image of Yeşilçam. In the instances of realist dramas, Hollywood may be replaced by the
examples of Italian Neorealism and other social realist films. But Yeşilçam, in relation to
both avenues of Western filmmaking, may be thought of in line with the experience of
Karagöz in the world of Punch. Instead of arguing for a rigid textual structure, narrative
and visual conventions that defined Yeşilçam, here I have tried to underline that
Yeşilçam cinema produced its own ambivalent set of practices that determined its filmic
language through varying responses to the West. But it did so while at all times
responding to Western cinemas and cinema as a medium, a Western medium offering the
possibility of a realistic representation of the world.
While the above three films collided with a non-realistic generic category, crime
or gangster films may have a claim on realism. Internationally known for his social realist
films, Yılmaz Güney, the Kurdish-Turkish filmmaker, first became famous as the “ugly
king” of Turkish cinema in many action films in which he acted before becoming famous
for his later realist dramas and finally receiving a Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film
Festival in 1982, which he shared with Costa Gavras. In line with the increasing
politicization of Turkey in the 1970s, Güney become a world-famous filmmaker who also
had close relations with leftist organizations. But as the “ugly king” of Turkish cinema,
he was initially presented as the antithesis of the handsome “king” of Turkish cinema,
253
Ayhan Işık, who is generally accepted as the first true “star” of Yeşilçam. Ayhan Işık was
“the modest, honest, handsome young man, well-liked by neighbors, and sporting a Clark
Gable moustache” (Özgüven 1989, 35). While Işık was the king of family melodramas,
romance films that were mostly set in the lavish bourgeois houses of Istanbul, Güney
specialized in crime and action set in the other side of Istanbul, its dark streets. While one
was the king for the center and its middle-class cultural makeup, the other was the king of
the periphery, of the “other” side, that of the others of the republican regime. While one
was the favorite king for women, the other was the favorite of men. His machismo
extended to his directorial presence, which can be seen through the name of his debut
film as a director, At Avrat Silah (Horse Woman Gun, 1966). Güney was the tough guy
and “decent” gangster, much like a contemporary of Robin Hood or much like Zorro, one
of his early lead roles – in Nuri Akıncı’s Kara Şahin, (Black Hawk, 1964), a “Turkified”
remake of Zorro. Güney is inherently good; he never wants to be a part of crime; he is
always forced into the underworld of society by the forces of evil, either when a family
member is killed by villains or there is some other evil plot set against his characters.
Güney acted in over a hundred films, the majority of which are action films
ranging from the “kebab” westerns of Yeşilçam to gangster films and realist dramas. As a
fiction writer, he also published short stories and a novel and later in his film career,
started to write and direct his own films. He directed over 20 films, in large part between
1967 and 1971, making 8 films in 1971 alone. After he was jailed twice, once for helping
a leftist organization and the other for killing a prosecutor, he escaped from prison in
1981 and immigrated to France. The majority of Güney’s films were popular movies
which made him a Yeşilçam star, while his later films, the realist dramas, were
appreciated by national and international film critics. Güney made both action films and
realist dramas in his later career and these films in different genres share elements of
Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality. The Manichean conflicts of a melodramatic
modality, the plots against Güney’s characters, and the characteristics of his screen
persona all continue into Güney’s more realist films.
One film that includes many of the characteristics of these films is Canlı Hedef
(Live Target; a.k.a., Kızım İçin – For My Daughter). That year, Güney acted in a total of
254
thirteen films, four of which he directed himself. The plot summaries from the Dictionary
of Turkish Films (Özgüç 1998) for these thirteen films reveal the melodramatic
framework of good against evil on which his films generally rely: a tough guy taking
revenge against his enemies who raped his daughter; a tough guy taking revenge against
the smugglers who killed his older brother; the romance between an ex-safe cracker and
the daughter of a soccer coach; the story of two gangs and of the love between an exmurderer and the sister of a gambler; the story of a jail breaker and a girl who runs away
from a compulsory marriage with a landowner; a tough guy whose father is an imam
regrets his life; a young boy’s fight against drug smugglers who kidnap his girlfriend; the
story of a guard and the three daughters of a rich man; the revenge story of a safe cracker
on the lamb; the love story of a Turkish boy and a Greek girl in a fishing village; the
“hopeless” story of a carriage-driver with five kids; the adventure of the fight between
two bandits and seven small town trouble makers; and the sad story of lovers who fall
apart because of a blood feud. The only movie which received critical acclaim among
these was Umut (Hope, d. Yılmaz Güney, 1970), the sad and hopeless story of a carriagedriver who is obsessed by finding a treasure. Umut is generally accepted as one of the
best ten Turkish films, one of the best examples of realist drama in Yeşilçam and
reminiscent of Italian Neorealist classics. While Umut reflects elements of Neorealist
style with its on-location shooting, postsynchronized sound, open and simple mise-enscène, camera movement, and nonprofessional actors, such stylistic elements were almost
all valid for other Yeşilçam films, ranging from family melodramas to historical
adventures and superhero flicks. What makes Umut or Neorealist films different from
other Güney films of the same year was its filmic narrative: it re-presents social life
through the medium of cinema in a particular way and it also replaces the star image of
Güney as a tough guy with a character who is a poor and helpless carriage-driver. While
Canlı Hedef, about a tough guy taking revenge against his enemies who raped his
daughter, is similar to the Neorealist style of Umut, its relation to the realities of social
life is mediated through melodramatic clichés.
Yet both films are conditioned by their relation to the West and their image of
Hollywood or Italian Neorealist cinema. There were two Yılmaz Güney’s as a public
255
persona: one was the tough guy, the “ugly king” of Yeşilçam, and the other was the
“cult” leftist figure who helped leftist guerillas, made his Kurdish identity known, was
accused of killing a prosecutor, and escaped from prison after the 1980 military
intervention. His films, regardless of their content, were banned by the military regime, a
ban that continued throughout the 1980s, suggesting how intricately the two personas
blended together. Up until 1974, he made social realist films and popular quickies
simultaneously. After that time, he directed only three films and wrote two more which
were directed by his assistant directors. In these five films, he consciously tried to make a
break with Yeşilçam’s conventions. For instance, in Güney’s Arkadaş (Friend, 1974), he
did not present “a usual chain of intrigues” and a story full of various events. Instead, he
said, “drama is already a part of daily life. I did not try to create a strained dramatic
narrative/editing. I just wanted to portray” the daily life (in Dorsay 2000, 93). Moreover,
in the same film Güney tried to dismantle his own star image as the “adventurous,
fighting and swaggering tough guy,” (Güney 1974b, 4) by going against the “molded
Yeşilçam types of good and evil” (Güney 1974a, 3). However, Güney’s success in doing
so was relative. One Islamist writer even claimed in 1977, “If one does not consider some
pornographic scenes in Arkadaş, the film’s moral conception might easily belong to an
example of Milli [National] Cinema” (Sütüven 1977, 8). As I noted in the introduction to
this study, Yılmaz Güney’s practice of filmmaking was conditioned by Yeşilçam’s
practice and as such, he continued to employ Yeşilçam tactics even while he, before his
unfortunate death from cancer in 1984, was shooting his last film Duvar (The Wall,
1983) in France.
While the narrational ends of Yeşilçam filmmakers might vary over a wide
political spectrum, whether of the left, the right, or indifference to politics, these
filmmakers shared a filmic language and a practice of domestic filmmaking that has a
particular relation to the West, conditioned by hayal and özenti, both of which lead to
various levels of textual responses. In this respect, Canlı Hedef, which might be taken as
a “standard” Güney quickie, reproduces various elements of crime and Western genres.
The film opens with fast-paced cutting of close-up shots of guns, people shooting and
enjoying killing others, and money coupled with Rare Bird’s song, Sympathy which was
256
“upholstered” in many Yeşilçam films ranging from romantic scenes to action scenes like
these. The cuts conclude with a mafia meeting, and the camera zooms to the boss Bilal
(Bilal İnci) who reads a newspaper story about the famous tough guy Asım Mavzer’s (lit.
“virtuous/upright Mauser rifle,” Yılmaz Güney) return to the country. Asım, who is also
known as the “black executioner,” killed three brothers of Bilal before leaving the
country. But he left behind Elif, his daughter, whose mother, Kadriye, has recently passed
away. Bilal’s men, led by Jilet (Razorblade, Tarık Şimşek), immediately start cutting
people’s faces with his razorblades, as well as torturing and killing to learn the
whereabouts of Asım. Their first victim is one of Kadriye’s good friends. In addition to
Bilal, Belalı Çino (lit. trouble maker Çino, Erdoğan Vatansever) is also after Asım for
revenge. Learning about his arrival, Asım’s friends Aspirin Osman (Danyal Topatan) and
Korsan Kemal (lit. Pirate Kemal, Yıldırım Gencer) also start to look for him. The names
and nicknames in this film are carefully chosen and constitute the film’s “stylish”
construction of bullies and tough guys. On the one hand, this nomenclature follows
Yeşilçam’s convention of using actors’ first names as the character’s name (e.g. Bilal İnci
as Bilal) and on the other, it employs an “epic” feel that goes well with the film’s
elements borrowed from westerns (e.g. Çino (“Chino”), chic clothing and the duel scene).
This feeling is enhanced by the pleasant sound of the names adopted by many actors in
Yeşilçam, including Yılmaz Güney, whose real last name was Pütün. Adding to the
western feel of the film, the duo of Aspirin and Korsan serve as the sidekicks of the
cowboy Asım, much as in Italian comic books, where the character Zagor, “the spirit
with the hatchet,” is coupled with Tonka, the bold and smart Mohawk, and the comic
Mexican Cico (Chico); or Mark, the Commander of the Ontario Wolves, is coupled with
the pirate, adventurer Mister Bluff and the wise fighter and comic Sad Owl. This
underscores the parallel between popular cultures and cinemas in Turkey and Italy:
westerns, sex-comedies, comic books, and photo-novels were all produced in Italy and
for the most part Yeşilçam either was inspired by or directly Turkified various formulas
that succeeded in Italian popular culture.
This pair of Asım’s friends, one a tough guy and the other a comic, drunkard
musician, find him outside a school. Before they arrive, Asım talks with a teacher who
257
has grown up as an orphan and who is taking care of Asım’s daughter Elif, also an
apparent orphan. Asım is aware that there are many people who are after him for revenge,
so he signs his will and leaves everything to his daughter. At that moment, he reveals that
he was born in 1932 in Siverek, a small town in Southeastern Turkey where the majority
of population is Kurdish. Yılmaz Güney himself was born in 1931 (though, according to
Özgüç (1995), it was recorded as 1937 on his birth certificate) as Yılmaz Pütün in Adana.
So both Yılmaz Güney and Asım Mavzer were born around the same time; and both are
Kurdish, though this was not openly stated since it was not possible to openly reveal a
Kurdish identity in Yeşilçam at the time. Reality and film also merge in the dedication of
the film, which has two names: Live Target and For My Daughter. Like the identity of
Güney’s character, this was also not coincidental since the film carries many
autobiographical themes. Horses, women, and guns crossed through both his films and
his personal life. He shot films and guns. He shot guns at mirrors in hotels and then did
the same in his films. In one of his films, he used real bullets while shooting at a glass
positioned on his ex-wife’s head. At the time of this film, Yılmaz Güney’s real life
daughter, also named Elif, was seven years old. She was the daughter of one of Güney’s
ex-girlfriends while Güney was, at that time, married to another woman, Fatoş Güney. In
a newspaper interview, Elif Güney Pütün said that she lived with her mother, Can, in
Istanbul until she was four years old. Then, she says, “I went to a boarding nursery
school. I lived with a nurse in Ankara up until I was eight. I lived in Adana with my aunt
until I was eleven, then two years with my mom. When I was thirteen, I went to Moda to
stay with Fatoş Güney” (Pütün 1999). Then, Elif went to France with Yılmaz and Fatoş
and still lives there. So this film was made while Güney and Elif were living apart and
Yılmaz expresses his love for her by naming the little girl in the film after his daughter.
Concerning his father’s use of the name Elif in his films, the “real” Elif says, “My dad
sent messages to me by naming little girls in his films Elif. I knew he was trying to reach
me.” (1999). Beyond the contrasts between quality films and quickies, and between
social realist films and popular cinema, Canlı Hedef crisscrosses between Güney’s own
life and his film characters and in this respect, its relation with reality as opposed to
realism becomes increasingly ambiguous.
258
After getting rid of three of Bilal’s men, Yılmaz (Yılmaz Türkoğlu), Osman
(Osman Han), and Necati (Necati Er) and after signing his will, Asım gives his will to
Elif’s teacher. Asım, who provides minimal information about himself, takes the teacher
to the beach for a walk. But Çino, who follows Asım, comes and tells her that Asım is
known as the “Black Executioner” for killing many people and he also tells her that Elif
is his daughter. Both Asım and Çino, wearing chic suits, decide to have a duel, the
classiest of fights. After Çino leaves, Asım tells his story: “I am thirty-eight years old…I
spent twenty years of my life fighting. I was shot, stabbed; spent the best days of my life
in hospitals and prison…Then, I started to be afraid of everything for I had a daughter…I
need to live this life for her…So Asım Mavzer became very compassionate… I left the
country…But then one day my wife passed away.” While that caused Asım’s return, and
while he hangs out with his daughter and her teacher, he does not tell them he is her
father. But Bilal’s men see them before they leave for Kadriye’s friends’ house. In a
scene set at home and made quite bizarre considering Yılmaz Güney’s own life story, Elif
takes a baby doll out of her teacher’s hands and gives it to Kadriye’s friend, who starts
patting the baby doll as if she is really yearning for a baby. Then, Elif says to Asım:
“What happened uncle Asım, you look so sad?” Asım replies, “I need to go for a voyage
and I may not return.” Elif tells him, “Please do not leave me…I liked you a lot. I am an
orphan…I wished you had been my dad.” As everyone starts crying, Asım says to Elif, “I
am leaving, Elif, could you call me ‘Dad’ one last time?” Elif replies, “Dad, my daddy.”
In this scene, it seems that the melo-dramatic effect is pursued deep down to all its
options without paying much attention to a realistic presentation of the scene. Yet, on a
totally non-diegetic terrain, the film is as “real” as possible. Especially when Elif takes
the baby doll from the hands of her teacher, who has been taking care of her for a long
time, and then transfers it to Kadriye’s friend, a move from the “real” Elif’s nurse to
another woman.
The next morning, at the beach, a grave is dug and the rules for the duel are
agreed upon. Their pistols loaded with only one bullet each, the two turn their backs to
each other, walk thirty steps, and suddenly turn and fire their guns. Çino misses Asım,
who did not fire at all. Çino begs Asım to kill him, for he does not want to live defeated.
259
Asım tells, “Ok, you have obliged me. My dear Çino, let’s imagine that you are a bottle, a
wine bottle, and now, you are in the hands of Aspirin. And since you could not cope with
the tortures of Aspirin anymore, you evaporated.” At that moment, Aspirin throws the
wine bottle in his hand into the air. Asım shoots the bottle in air and says, “And Çino, for
me, you are dead now.” Defeated and humiliated, Çino walks away. Then, the trio of
Asım, Aspirin, and Korsan walk toward Elif’s teacher, accompanied by the “upholstered”
song, “El Condor Paso,” an Andean song made famous by Simon and Garfunkel. Then,
Aspirin and Korsan stop in front of Asım and Elif’s teacher, Aspirin makes a joke and
when the teacher hugs Asım, the duo take off, as in Rare Bird’s song, which serves as the
theme music that the film begins again. Such non-diegetic use of music is augmented by
Aspirin Osman’s songs, which are played with a cümbüş, a banjo-like musical
instrument. But cümbüş also means carousal or revel which points to the continuous
drinking and singing parties of the duo, at times with Asım. Yet as the three carouse,
Asım is not happy, and soon leaves. One of Bilal’s men is after him, but is soon killed by
Çino, and Asım lives, avenged yet again.
Bilal, learning about Elif, sends his men to kidnap her. Asım arrives at the school
in the nick of time and a gun fight breaks out between Asım and Bilal’s men, who kidnap
both Asım and Elif. Bilal, who wants to avenge his three brothers, realizes his evil plot as
a tied up Asım, along with the spectators, watches shadows falling on a white curtain. In
this shadow play, little Elif and a man are behind the curtain. Elif cries for help but Asım,
tied up by Bilal’s men, can only watch what is happening, much like the spectators.
Behind the curtain, the man holds Elif up in his arms and starts raping her, as Bilal tries
to open the closed eyelids of Asım to show him the fate of his daughter. As the shadow of
Elif cries, the “Black Executioner” also starts to cry. Then, Bilal lets Asım to go behind
the curtain. There, Asım asks his daughter to forgive him: “Up until today, I stayed away
from you to protect you from evil…But I could not do that because of your longing. They
made you pay for my evil past.” Then, Bilal’s men take both to a railway bridge and hang
them over the edge, as Asım begs them to spare Elif’s life. After Bilal’s men leave, a
train passes and cuts the ropes; both Elif and Asım fall in a river with their hands tied.
Elif drowns right before Aspirin and Korsan arrive. So, Elif who already lost her
260
innocence and decency, dies in the name of the narrative resolution of the melodramatic
plot. Purity is one of the most constant melodramatic mores of Yeşilçam: if a woman
cannot stay pure, she eventually pays for it with her life. Alternatively, if a man saves a
woman from a rundown life, the woman has to be cleansed, usually by taking a bath and
leaving the sinful life behind her. But in this film, Elif has no chance to redeem herself,
for she is just a kid who is not yet aware of the evils of the world. So her death allows for
a narrative resolution and a spectatorial catharsis because she will not grow up as a
“defiled” girl.
The trio of Asım, Aspirin, and Korsan start hunting for Bilal. They attack Bilal’s
girlfriend’s house in yet another bizarre scene. Melek, a servant, is left at home before
Bilal’s men escape. Asım finds a snake in the room, which he grabs. He then forces
Melek onto the couch by stepping on her with one foot, and rapes her with the snake in
revenge for his daughter’s rape. Aspirin and Korsan witness this phallic act, as the
woman reveals that Jilet and Bilal’s girlfriend are hiding at home. The second act of the
revenge is staged on the same railway bridge where Asım ties up Bilal’s girlfriend and
starts waiting for a train to kill her. Right at the last moment, Asım shoots the rope and
saves the girl as she says where Bilal is hiding. Then, before they leave, Asım tells
Aspirin to kill her. So Asım, foiled in his attempt to live decently, accompanied by
Aspirin and Korsan, walks toward Bilal’s hideout, a rundown old factory depot. They all
have guns in their hands and on the way Çino, also with a gun in his hand, joins them in
their fight against evil.
As they walk toward the depot, the film gets more and more “uncanny” thanks to
the “upholstered” soundtrack music from Costa Gavras’s Z (1969), composed by Mikis
Theodorakis. A French-Algerian co-production, Z is about how the junta in Greece
oppressed the left. Gavras’s movie won the Golden Globe and Academy Award for the
Best Foreign Language Film in 1970, as well as a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Strangely enough, when Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören’s Yol (The Way, 1982) won the
Golden Palm at Cannes Film Festival, they tied with Costa Gavras’s Missing (1982) and
thus shared the price with Gavras. Yol, which was made in the aftermath of 1980 military
intervention and banned in Turkey for many years, is about five prisoners given
261
permission to visit their home for a week. The film also involves confrontations with
soldiers and a banner reading “Kurdistan” which one of the prisoners comes across on his
way to Southeastern Turkey. Gavras’s film Missing, with which Yol shared the award,
tells the story of a conservative American father, who in the search for his missing son,
figures out that Latin American juntas are related to the United States government’s
involvement in Latin American politics. In later years, a leftist music group, Grup
Yorum, also combined this Theoderakis composition with a Nazım Hikmet poem,
Farewell.10 Thus while various other Yeşilçam films used the same theme music, Canlı
Hedef’s use of the Mikis Theodorakis’s theme from Z does not seem coincidental.
Indeed, the action parallels the leftist themes of real life. After his friends scatter around
the depot to surround the place, Asım, wearing black pants, a dark blue shirt, a red scarf
tied around his neck, and a black hat with a red stripe around its cone, walks toward the
depot on his own, as if he is going to overthrow all evil. Around the time of this film,
Güney himself was helping leftist guerillas who initiated an armed fight against the
Turkish government in an attempt to trigger a revolutionary movement. As desired in real
life, in their fight against evil, Bilal, Asım and his “comrades” are successful, although
Aspirin dies during the armed struggle.
Canlı Hedef thus introduced interesting relationships with “reality” through
autobiographical elements of Güney’s life including familial and political attachments.
Also visible are the uncanny coincidences that linked the film with Güney’s other films
and his life, oscillating between familial guilt and social responsibility, as well as with the
Gavras connection to a leftist political activism. 11 Yet at the same time, this film is a
10
Nazım Hikmet Ran’s poem is as follows: “Farewell dear friends, farewell! / I bear you in my heart / in
the heart of my heart, / My revolt within my head. / Farewell dear friends, farewell! / Do not line the quay /
waving handkerchiefs. / That is quite unnecessary. / To see myself reflected / in your eyes / is enough. / O
friends, / fellow-workers, / comrades-in-arms! / Here is my farewell / without a single word. / Night will
not bolt the door behind me, / the years will embroider cobwebs / over the windows / of my house, / while I
yell / the Prison Song / like a cry of war. / We'll meet again / dear friends, / we'll meet again. / We shall
smile again under the sun, / fight once more together, / O friends, / fellow-workers, / comrades-in-arms, /
Farewell!” (http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/nazim/farewell.html)
11
Even I experienced such uncanny events when I started writing on this film for this study: I started to
watch Canlı Hedef for the tenth or fifteenth time on November 1, 2005. That day, I stopped the VCR for a
break and started zapping television channels and ended up seeing the film on Kanal 7 (Channel 7) which is
a “light” Islamist channel known for its support for the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP).
262
typical example of Yeşilçam cinema. As I will elaborate below with reference to
Demiryol (Railway, Yavuz Özkan, 1979), the theme of fighting against evil as a
melodramatic element of Yeşilçam was contagious and could also be found in the
political films of the Yeşilçam era. Such a series of “uncanny” coincidences that
combines the filmic with the real in an “unnatural” way is not only a result of Güney’s
own practice of filmmaking, but also an element of Yeşilçam.
What made Güney an exceptional filmmaker and star of Yeşilçam was his address
to not only the male audience but also the female audiences, channeled through a
toughness that went against the grain, the use of all sorts of evil tactics to take revenge in
a Charles Bronsonian vein. Güney was a crowd pleaser not because of his connection
with masculine genres such as action and adventure movies, but because of his presence
in these genres as someone who rebels against the system and who uses all sorts of
means, good or bad, in this fight. As one “legal” brothel (genelev) worker who responded
to a question about Yılmaz Güney’s release from prison said, “His best film is Baba
(Father, 1971). In that film, he bathes (kırklamak) his daughter and saves her from
prostitution. We all wait for someone to bathe us” (in Çeviker 1974, 41).12 In other
words, Güney’s own combination of the filmic and the real reflected on his spectators’s
desires. However melodramatic, Yeşilçam touched upon the lives of at least some of its
spectators who identified with the lives portrayed in the films. It was not just the stories
told on the screen, but also those moments of experiencing movies, which moved its
spectators. Cinema, as suggested above, often moves us more than it makes us think.
It is those stories which go unnoticed in cinema which have the potential to move
us the most. Throughout Canlı Hedef, as a part of his comical act, Aspirin Osman keeps
talking about telling a story that we never get to listen to. He tells Korsan, “May I tell you
a story, bro?” Korsan replies, “Is it obscene?” “Yes.” “Then, don’t!” This dialogue is
repeated several times throughout the film, which itself tells a story. But this
development of a never told “obscene” story comes to a conclusion while Aspirin is
Certainly, much like what happened to Yol (the Kurdistan banner was removed even from the illegal video
copies of the film that were found in the black market in Turkey during the 1980s) or many other Güney
films, the Kanal 7 version of Canlı Hedef was also stripped of portions of the rape scene and the “snaky”
torture scene.
12
I would like to thank İlker Mutlu who made me aware of this interview.
263
dying in the arms of Korsan, who, hoping to attach Aspirin to life a little more, asks him
to tell his obscene story before he passes away. Yeşilçam is very much in the mold of
such stories that are never told because they are always repeated to the point of
extinguishing themselves. Yet those who are like Aspirin, the storytellers, are the ones
who keep reiterating the connection of Yeşilçam to the shadow plays, to hayal. In Canlı
Hedef, it is all about the veiled connection to reality, like that of the rape scene which
takes place “behind” the curtain, not in front of it. It is that reality which is projected
from behind the screen that conditioned Yeşilçam. Yet it is that reality of dream which
was a nightmare, a phantom experience for Asım who closed his eyes in order not to see
that particular shadow play. Such was the other side of Yeşilçam’s hayal, which not only
dislocates the reality of the film, but also blurs the line between the filmic and the real
through the nightmares of Güney himself, who did not feel responsible enough to his
daughter, the “real” Elif, and thus “sent messages” to her through his films.
5.12. Demiryol (Railway, 1979)
Also called Fırtına İnsanları (People of the Storm), Demiryol is a political thriller
which might be thought of as an example of “third cinema,” outside both mainstream
filmmaking and the auteur films of international art cinema circles. In the Turkish film
world, discussions about Brazilian and Argentine cinemas mainly found a place in the
early 1970s through French cinema circles. Aydın Sayman, writing in 1973, noted that
some of Yılmaz Güney’s films involved two things hand-in-hand: a mainstream,
conventional filmic language which mimics Western cinemas, and some novel and
original elements (20). In this respect, Sayman compares Güney with Glauber Rocha,
who talked about finding a new cinematic language beyond traditional and colonialist
film languages. While this introduced a struggle in the system in spite of oppression and
censorship, Sayman noted that Güney’s films did not involve any illegal struggle like that
of Fernando Solanas. In this respect, it may be argued that Demiryol was in the mold of
Cinema Nuovo only in that it employed various elements of Yeşilçam’s filmic language
to address its leftist message more clearly to the people. Yet this was complicated by
264
dynamism supplied through fast-paced cutting and lot of movement thanks to the use of
hand-held camera. However, discussions on “Third Cinema” do not involve Turkey.
Moreover, Yeşilçam films that may be closest to Third Cinema emerged briefly in the
late 1970s, at a time when Third Cinema had already lost much of its international effect.
Turkey and its cinema also pose another problem for historians of international or
world cinema in terms of its place in geographical and film historical divisions. While
Yılmaz Güney has been almost unanimously the only figure in Turkish film covered by
film historians, there was a far broader active exchange between the popular cinemas of
Turkey and countries such as Italy, Greece, Iran and Egypt which, perhaps due to their
popular rather than their canonical nature, remain unexamined. For instance, while
Aristides Gazetas’s An Introduction to World Cinema (2000) does not even mention
Turkey, David Cook’s A History of Narrative Film (2004) mentions Turkey in a chapter
on the “East European Renaissance” under the subtitle of “Other Balkan Countries.”
Robert Sklar’s Film: An International History of the Medium (2002) mentions Turkey in
a chapter on “The Global Advance of Cinema,” which includes various countries ranging
from Australia to China, Soviet Union to Spain. Sklar, talks about Turkey under “The
Global Voice of Cinema,” mentioning four geographical locations: two countries, Turkey
and Brazil and two regions/continents Middle East and Africa. Moreover, as Sklar notes,
“The world has its share of ‘unknown’ cinemas – unknown not to their practitioners and
audiences but to mainstream criticism and historiography.” For him, the cinemas of India
and Turkey are among these “unknown” cinemas, only known through some figures such
as “Yılmaz Güney” whose name serves as the title of the part in which Sklar discusses
Turkey. So except Güney, not only Turkey’s presence in the international film histories is
“unknown,” but when Turkey is mentioned in such histories its location in relation to
other countries and cinemas is complicated. Depending on the historian, Turkey may
belong to East European, Southeastern European, Mediterranean, Balkan, and Middle
Eastern cinematic categories. Thus in talking about Demiryol or other Yeşilçam films,
one may deal with not only all such categories, but also how those categories affect and
are affected by these films. Clearly, Demiryol did not have an impact on “Third Cinema”
or these geographical categorizations of cinema. But in line with a cinematic
265
development in Turkey that is generally thought of as starting with a handful of Yılmaz
Güney films made late in his career, Demiryol, which is also known as Fırtına İnsanları
(People of the Storm), touches on a particular historical conjuncture in Turkey of the late
1970s where various ideological stances were fighting each other in the era preceding a
major overhaul of the political system. In this respect, Demiryol, which aimed to create a
“storm over Turkey,” raises the issue of political activism in cinema.
The film, true to its title, opens with images of the Haydarpaşa train station in
Istanbul, the last station on the Asian railroad across Anatolia (also known as Asia
Minor), across the Bosporus strait from the Sirkeci station, the last stop of the famous
historical Orient Express. As the trains arrive at and leave Haydarpaşa station, workers of
the state’s railway company, TCDD (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Devlet Demiryolları, Railways
of the State of the Turkish Republic), prepare for a strike. We see passengers on the
trains, including the protagonist Sibel, talk about the strike. While some curse the
workers, claiming that workers of a state company have no right to strike, some seem to
support their cause. One of the leading workers, Hasan (Fikret Hakan) is among the
organizers of the strike, and believes in the importance of the strike for the revolutionary
consciousness of the workers. However, Bülent (Tarık Akan), who is Hasan’s wife’s
brother, counters Hasan’s mode of legal struggle toward a revolution. Instead, he feels
that political activism requires quick and sharp measures, even though they may be
illegal. This contradiction is quickly countered with a melodramatic one typical of
Yeşilçam, one between the rich and the poor, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Yet there is a
major twist in this, too. The bourgeoisie, though depicted as against the strike and the
proletariat as a whole, is not represented through the introduction of an upper-class
character or through a romantic relation between characters coming from two different
classes. Instead, Sibel (Sevda Aktolga), who after getting off the train goes to a lavish
bourgeois house as a governess, seems to be the one who wants to be at the center of the
bourgeois life even though, for someone of her class, this is only a dream. She yearns to
be a part of an upper-class life and the easiest path would be to marry a rich man. By
telling the story of Sibel’s failed love, the film, differs considerably from a conventional
Yeşilçam plot, which opens the possibility of a romantic relationship between the
266
members of upper and lower-classes, and thus which also offers a fantasy of upward
mobility. While Sibel teaches English to Utku, Utku’s father Mete enjoys the company of
an English-speaking foreign group at an upper-class hotel restaurant. As Mete talks about
the developments in Turkey and the dangers of increasing unionization, foreigners advise
him that Turkey needs a more authoritarian government to put an end to the strikes,
especially the one that is starting at the railways. This bit of advice is also supported with
another one for an instant solution to the strike at the TCDD: “If you cannot stop their
strike, then to turn the public against the strikers, create a negative image of the strikers
as anarchists” (i.e., terrorists). The preparations for the strike, Sibel’s lesson with Utku,
and Mete’s meeting with the foreign group are all cross-cut, giving not only an
introduction to the two classes, but contrasting the two main groups through Sibel, who is
related to both. So from the outset, the film introduces characters through membership in
different groups, and as contrasting classes rather than individuals.
We see banners put out for the strike which serve as clear messages sent to the
viewers. These include, “We are workers, strong, and vanguards of the revolution” and
“Take over the military bases, let America be gone!” As a cut shows the aftermath of the
meeting with the foreign group, Mete asks Sibel to meet with him at the club after Utku’s
lessons. When Sibel arrives at the hotel, she wants to enjoy the place and sit at the
restaurant for a while. But Mete has no time to wait, so he immediately asks Sibel to
come to his hotel room for a quickie. It becomes immediately clear why Mete,
representing his entire class as “evil,” is in this relationship. In the meantime, at the
Haydarpaşa station, Hasan announces the start of the strike and gives a talk to the striking
workers struggling for the betterment of the country. Celebrating the start of the strike,
after Hasan’s talk, the strikers start to sing and dance. In the meantime, outside the
station, groups of university students from various left factions seem to be more
interested in staging an illegal demonstration than in supporting the strikers. Hasan and
his fellow workers are not happy with the situation that might easily get out of control.
The scene shifts to another location, where Hasan experiences a similar contrast. Along
with two of his friends, Bülent hijacks a Migros supermarket truck to a squatter
settlement. On the truck, Bülent, pointing his gun at the truck driver and trying to explain
267
his actions, asks the driver why he has hijacked the truck. The driver has no idea what is
happening. When they arrive at the squatter settlement, Bülent starts to invite all the
people to the truck, addressing them as “laborers.” As they start to distribute the goods,
he starts to yell slogans: “Damn the Exploiters,” “Damn Fascism,” “Long Live Our
People’s Struggle for Independence,” and “Come Join Our War!” When people gather
around the truck to pick up the free goods, the police arrive at the scene and the lowclass, unwitting residents of the squatter settlement find themselves in the middle of
crossfire. So Bülent’s attempt, countered by the righteous struggle of Hasan, is revealed
as an inappropriate way of dealing with social problems. It only produces a mess of food
and other goods falling from the truck as Bülent and his friend start to escape from the
police, dashing the hopes of the squatter settlement dwellers for free food. After one of
his friends is shot during the chase, Bülent and his other friend manage to escape by
hiding in a middle-class apartment building where they kidnap a young university student
who sympathizes with the leftists.
At this apartment flat, Demiryol’s story reiterates a common Yeşilçam trope
through an exceptional coincidence -- the kidnapped young girl’s older sister turns out to
be Sibel. Though both Bülent and Sibel’s sister try to convince her of the righteousness of
the worker’s cause, Sibel is very angry about the kidnapping. As Sibel tries to get rid of
these “anarchists,” Bülent’s friend decides to go to a phone booth across to street to call a
friend for help. In the meantime, the strike is getting more complicated because of the
strikebreakers that the strikers call “yellow unionist dogs.” The police arrive at the station
to assure safe entry for the scabs. Hasan, who is against violence, tries to communicate
with the new workers. He tells them that while over fifteen thousand workers are on
strike, the strikebreakers only number around a thousand, and should be ashamed of what
they are doing. He also tells them that if they all unite, they will have the power to create
the world anew. At that moment, after Bülent’s friend calls Hasan, the friend is shot dead.
At Sibel’s house, neighbors come to their house to watch the “Love Boat,” an American
series that connotes the dream of wealth and Western identity, but Sibel’s sister asks
them to come watch the series another day. Right at that moment, Hasan and his wife
arrive at Sibel’s house, and Sibel’s neighbors conclude that she has more important
268
guests, and go home. This interlude reflects several trends typical of the late 1970s. On
the one hand, both telephones and televisions were expensive enough that people would
not be able to phone before visiting, and they often did visit others in order to watch TV.
Yet at the same time, the television which so absorbed their fantasies was a reflection of
the United States, including the series Star Trek, Love Boat, Roots, and Dallas that were
taking over from the waning reign of Yeşilçam.
After they leave, Sibel’s sister stops Sibel from calling the police. Instead, Hasan
and Bülent’s sister take him to a hideout. Though both of his friends died because of the
hijacking, Bülent still defends what they did since he believes that revolutionary
conditions will only be possible through the creation of civil unrest and for that, violence
is necessary. Therefore, Bülent wants his gun back from his sister who keeps it from him
and continues debating with Hasan about the necessity of violence. Hasan, representing
the “rational” path, tells Bülent that he cannot enlighten the masses with cans of food.
Back at the station, young university student groups come and do a slide show about the
history of strikes in Turkey, thus also creating an instructive, documentary interlude for
the film’s spectators. The following day, at his hideout, Bülent peeks outside and sees
that life continues unperturbed. His sister brings him food and tells him that he needs to
grow up, finish school and get a good job. At the station, Hasan reads aloud messages of
solidarity that the strikers have received from other unions. After Bülent’s sister leaves
the hideout, police surround it and kill Bülent during a gunfight. Back at the solidarity
night, Hasan is informed about his death, and he and his wife rush back, to no avail. With
Bülent’s death, Demiryol breaks two important Yeşilçam conventions at once, killing the
star of the film, Tarık Akan, who also was not a part of a romantic affair.
Tarık Akan, whose real last name was “Üregül,” started out his acting career after
winning a contest for players. In the early 1970s, thanks to his boyish good looks, he was
one of the most sought after actors of romantic films, especially comedies, such as Aşk
Dediğin Laf Değildir (What You Call Love Is not Just a Word, Safa Önal, 1976), Çapkın
Hırsız (Playboy Thief, Atıf Yılmaz, 1975), and Yaz Bekarı (Summer Bachelor, Osman
Seden, 1974). But starting after 1977, he started playing in social realist films, all of
which interestingly had single-word titles, such as Nehir (The River, Şerif Gören, 1977),
269
Kanal (The Channel, Erden Kıral, 1978), Sürü (The Herd, Zeki Ökten, 1978), Maden
(The Mine, Yavuz Özkan, 1978), and Yol (The Way, Şerif Gören, 1982). Although he did
not change his last name, such a change of genres not only signaled a move for Akın
himself, but also a change in the notion of realism during this era. In terms of their effect,
however, these realist films were very far from altering Yeşilçam’s overall course.
Among the 193 films shot in 1979, 134 of them were shot on 16mm film, signaling the
mentality of low-budget quickies. Most of these were sex films, as will be discussed in
the next section. The genres of films in 1979 can be charted as follows:
1979
16mm Films
35mm Films
Sex Films
Realist Dramas
Romantic Films
Comedies
Action
Total
128
2
4
134
3
13
21
14
8
59
Table 5.2. The Genres of Films in 1979 13
Realist dramas of this era might be considered in two categories: “true” realist dramas
with elements of social realism, including Demiryol; and mainstream realist dramas of
Yeşilçam which involve a melodramatic plot and were more or less intended to exploit
the market’s potential demand for realist dramas. Among the fifteen realist dramas cited
above, only seven or eight would count as “true” dramas, while others were marked by
Yeşilçam, with a melodramatic plot and without the urge to present a political position.
Twelve of the twenty-five romantic films, which might also be considered family
melodramas, were films with singers, a trend which would continue into the 1980s. The
number of romantic films increases if one also considers romantic comedies as within
13
I must note here that I did not watch the majority of these films. I compiled this list from Agah Özgüç’s
dictionary of Turkish films (1998, v2) by looking at their short synopses, directors, and casts. Though the
exactness of the numbers I gave are quite suspicious (for instances Demirci (2004) noted that there were
121 sex films in 1979), it still gives an idea about the trends of that year.
270
that genre. Interestingly enough, only eight films, two of which were fantastic films with
superheroes, would count as action films even though these were popular in the first half
of the 1970s and also in the first half of the 1980s.
During Yeşilçam’s crisis of the late 1970s in mainstream filmmaking, social
realist films and sex comedies offered very different alternatives. As such, in Demiryol,
the death of Bülent signals a break in mainstream film language. After Bülent’s death,
Mete and his bourgeois friends are shown watching a film by the pool of a lavish garden.
They joke about the IMF and the lifting of embargoes on Turkey, even though at the
time, there were shortages of basic goods such as gasoline, vegetable oil, and sugar.
These particularly affected the lower-classes, who could not afford black market prices.
In the meantime, Sibel waits for Mete as he enjoys the company of his rich girlfriends.
From such an environment of happiness, the film cuts to the house of Hasan, where many
people are gathered to mourn Bülent’s death. Sibel comes home late, almost in the
morning and finds her sister awake, waiting for her. As they quarrel, her sister accuses
Sibel of being lost in the magic of the bourgeois life, and when she understands that Sibel
is sleeping with Mete, she tells Sibel that she is only an “object” in the eyes of the
bourgeoisie. A while after the quarrel, Sibel’s sister sees in a newspaper that Bülent has
been killed and decides to go to the station with her student friends. That night, Sibel’s
sister does not come back home. Sibel goes to the station and asks Hasan, who warmly
welcomes her, whether he has seen her sister. Sibel tries to ask for Mete’s help but he
refuses to even talk with her. Back at the station, we hear Hasan talking about how the
force of life is strong as he points to flowers growing from a stack of wooden crossties.
Sibel, hungry, joins the strikers in order to share the free food supplied for them. Strikers
are heard humming some leftist marches. Both the dynamism of the strikers and their
unquestioning acceptance of Sibel among them lead Sibel to do something for these
people who are helping her out. So she tells Hasan that she can teach English to the
workers, which makes Hasan laugh: “There is no need for English.” But the happy
environment of the strikers does not last for long, as the owners of newspapers publish a
bourgeois plot about the bombing of the Haydarpaşa station by the communists. It reads
as, “After loosing the majority, the union which is controlled by foreign powers
271
sabotaged their workplace.” Reading the news, the newspaper owners all smile as we also
see the station bombed by some “dark” forces, and the strikers trying to help the firemen.
The police arrive at the station, the strikers tell everyone around them that they need to
fight together against such provocations of the ruling classes. Then, the film quickly
jumps to various documentary clips from different demonstrations that took place in the
late 1970s coupled with a march: “Salute, Salute the Working Class of Turkey!”
Demiryol was an exceptional film in its difference from Yeşilçam and its activist
political language, which entails dynamism as well as many discontinuities and
unresolved plot elements, such as the situation of Sibel’s sister or the invasive footage of
demonstrations at the end of the film which is not directly connected to the plot.
Demiryol might be taken as a political application of the quickie mentality, filmed on a
low budget with a handheld camera, on-location shots, and many nonprofessional actors
especially in the scenes including crowd scenes such as those on the train, at the squatter
settlement and at the station during the strike. In this respect, the film not only employs
some elements of Neorealist cinema and the Third Cinema, it also shares Yeşilçam’s
quickie mentality. Yet it does not reproduce many of the conventions of Yeşilçam, such
as a lavish upper-class entertainment scene at a party, a bar or a hotel with the
involvement of one of the lower-class protagonists. In Demiryol, while Sibel seems to be
on the margins of bourgeois entertainments, Mete never lets her become a part of them.
In addition to the uncharacteristic absence of a romantic plot, the death of Bülent, played
by the film’s most important star actor, also breaks with Yeşilçam formulas. Nonetheless,
the film’s communication of its political message not only appears very suddenly, but
does so through a melodramatic presentation of the class relations depicted as a
Manichean conflict of pure good and evil. In this respect, Demiryol creates a centrist
view of the left, punishing all of the leftists who use violent tactics within the narrative.
In leftist terminology, the film is “revisionist” at best, contradicting its own alternate title,
Fırtına İnsanları. While the possibility of an approaching storm is indicated through the
footage of demonstrations that appears suddenly at the end of a film, in reality the only
storm that was to take place was not a leftist revolution, but the violent military
intervention and junta government between 1980 and 1983.
272
While censorship boards were easy on political films and sex films during the late
1970s, a time of democratic turmoil with coalition governments, early elections, and
economic crises, the military intervention of September 12, 1980 put an end to the
possibility of shooting political films. While Demiryol escaped the censorship boards’
strict monitoring of political films, the way it conveyed its message in around a seventyminute long, narrationally discontinuous film is questionable. As one entry on the
director Yavuz Özkan in an online user-driven Turkish dictionary, Ekşi Sözlük (Sour
Dictionary, http://sozluk.sourtimes.org/show.asp?t=yavuz+ozkan, 2004), which is sort of
a crosscut between Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary, indicated, “I would call him as the
Ed Wood of Turkey but I hesitate lest I disrespect Ed Wood by making this
comparison…if one compares Ed Wood’s films with those of Yavuz Özkan, the former
would be like Battleship Potemkin” (Bronenosets Potyomkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925).
Though such a claim would be excessively assertive, it is clear that in his early films,
Yavuz Özkan tried to veer away from the standards of Yeşilçam only to find himself
enmeshed in its poor production standards. In this respect, perhaps it would be better to
think of Demiryol in the mold of Eisenstein’s Stachka (Strike, 1925) more than his
Battleship Potemkin, as it ends with the working classes as the collective heroes
contrasted starkly with the agents provocateurs, the bourgeoisie, the police. However, in
contrast to the crosscuts of the evil classes featured in Demiryol, Stachka ends with
various high angle shots of the strikers at the station, thus never undercutting its message.
5.13. Takma Kafanı (Don’t Bother, 1979)
On a sunny Sunday in a public park, a man approaches a woman who is sitting
alone on a bench. Man: “May I sit next to you? The person you are waiting for did not
come and you do not know how to spend Sunday. Woman: “It seems the same has
happened to you. And when you saw me, you had an idea.” Man: “Yes, that is true. I had
a friend who did not come to our date and it is all over. She is the daughter of a rich
businessman whereas I am a poor and simple young man. My name is Bülent. Would you
like to hang out with this poor and simple young man?” Woman: “I see you are not shy.”
273
Certainly, Bülent (Hakan Özer) is not shy. Perhaps he also understands that the
melodramatic promise of a love relationship between a rich girl and a poor boy or vice
versa is not very realistic. A poor, simple man left out of society at a time of
modernization and migration, he is like so many men on the margins of the cities, living a
lower-class life in a squatter settlement. While such outsiders were the members of a
proletariat who were supposed to fight for the revolution in films like Demiryol, it was
this same proletariat that was defined as “lumpen” who was both portrayed in sex films
and consumed them in cheap and rundown film theaters.
While sex films followed Yeşilçam’s filmmaking practices, they could be
categorized as sex-comedies, sex-romances, sex-actions, and even some fantastic,
superhero comedies like Süper Selami. Many of these films are, not surprisingly, either
remakes of Yeşilçam, Hollywood or Italian films, or even remakes of Yeşilçam films
which themselves were remakes of Hollywood films. Obviously, while it is possible to
differentiate between hardcore and soft-core sex films, one might also list some sex films
with limited explicit scenes as 16mm romantic, action or comedy films. Understandably
enough, while eleven of the films made in 1979 (listed in the chart in the previous
section) involved the word “Love” in their titles, thirty-five of them involved words such
as woman and girl, as well as with adjectives that point to “beautiful” and “loose”
women. Many sex films were shorter than regular feature films of Yeşilçam. Instead of a
regular ninety-minute length of feature films, sex films for the most part ran around sixty
to seventy minutes, allowing projectionists at sex-film theaters to “montage” separate
hardcore scenes during the showing of regular erotic sex films.
Nudity and the sexploitative potential of moving images have been used as an
attraction from the earliest days of filmmaking. In Turkey, a similar history of female
nudity, eroticism, and sexploitation has been a part of cinema. For example, in the
Istanbul of the 1930s, paying attention to Hollywood style swimsuits and beach going,
one film writer, A. Fuat, noted that despite the reactionary character of the Hayes code “is
it not strange that the Americans were the first ones to show artists nude in cinema in
contrast to now?” (1934, 3) While Fuat singles out the French as the most courageous in
terms of the limits of nudity, he notes that American, German, British, and Russian
274
censor boards acted reasonably, and states that a beautiful body helps the success of a
movie. He goes on to note that nudity in Turkish cinema starts with a stuntwoman
wearing a slip in Muhsin Ertuğrul’s Sözde Kızlar (Supposedly Girls, 1924). A magazine
article published in 1967 noted that sex is a fresh subject at every time but one must not
forget about the educational qualities of sex in cinema. For this author, while Swedish sex
films of the time served such an educational and aesthetic function, the ever-increasing
nudity in Yeşilçam was based on seduction and attraction (Baydar 1967, 7). The same
magazine also noted that some new Yeşilçam films were ‘catching up with’ the Western
cinema by including footage of fully naked female bodies. This ever-increasing nudity in
Yeşilçam culminated in a period of sex films filmed between 1974 and 1980.
This page of Yeşilçam’s history has generally been purposely forgotten and
understood moralistically. Sex films were also seen as “lumpen,” or lower-class, and
were therefore forgotten in much the same way as was the violence of the military coup.
Yet it was these sex scenes which helped Yeşilçam to survive at all during its later years.
Of the approximately 6000 films made as part of Turkish cinema, Scognamillo and
Demirhan list 576 films under their “basic index of films in erotic Turkish cinema”
(2002, 279-287). Many filmmakers, who participated in the industry before, during, and
after this era, have aided in the process of forgetting by avoiding discussion of what
happened or how much they were involved in this period. Yet except for a number of
stars and filmmakers who had other financial options than cinema, a significant number
of Yeşilçam filmmakers were involved in sex films, especially during the early films
which were more comedic than pornographic. While various theater actors started to play
in these comedies, some actresses were transferred from low-budget Yeşilçam quickies to
sex films. Others used their willingness to show their bodies to grab at the limelight
offered by the silver screen. Regardless of the filmmakers, many people in Turkey have a
tendency to forget about this period. Those who were involved in these films, such as the
director of Takma Kafanı, refuse to talk about them. While those who have spoken
explain their participation as a result of economic necessity, Ülkü Erakalın, writing in
1999, said that he was still undecided about the truth of such excuses in his book. Under
the subtitle “I am finding myself,” he explains, “Yes, when I started to make these films,
275
I must have found my true self, with players whose acting was real, with real subject
matters and realities as such.” Erakalın’s remarks involve a process of questioning not
only his own sexual identity through these films, but his underlining of the “reality”
attached to sex films as a whole. What was that reality? Was it a reality which prevented
the redemption of these filmmakers? Was it about a patriarchal society and film world
which coincided with the demands and politics of the era? Had sex really been outside
the world of cinema in earlier eras? Did his questions also address the reality of filmic
language in relation to Yeşilçam?
While most filmmakers avoid remembering and thus make redemption
impossible, those who have spoken about the era refer to it both as a practice that was
wrong, but that nonetheless served for the sexual enlightenment of the male population in
Turkey. If there was such a social value, then, sex films indeed managed something that
the Kemalist regime’s own reform programs could not squeeze out of cinema. Yet it is
clear that this was not the primary impetus behind these films as they emerged from
European sex films and the low budget action adventure films of Yeşilçam, which
increasingly used nudity to draw viewers during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For
instance, one magazine report noted that the Anatolian spectators who could not go to
Istanbul’s night clubs loved the striptease scenes in various films. “Thus,” says the report,
“Anatolian film distributors are very careful about this when buying a film. If there is a
very good striptease scene in the film, they automatically buy that film to show in
Anatolia” (“Bu Sene...” 1966, 3). While nudity continued to increase in Yeşilçam,
especially in low budget films, with the success of a couple of sex comedies, sex films
presented another solution to Yeşilçam’s crisis and by the late 1970s, these soft-core
comedies turned into 16mm quickie pornographic films. In the early and mid-1980s, with
the introduction of video films, sex films of the 1970s continued to be available on the
video market, most of the time under the shelves, as well as in small theaters which
continued to show new foreign and old Turkish sex films.
The video market also served as another solution to Yeşilçam’s crisis in the early
1980s, when many films were made directly on videotape and marketed without the
intervention of movie theaters. While by the late 1980s Yeşilçam was considered largely
276
a phenomenon of the past, sex films continued to leave their mark on filmic practice in
these cheap video films, which often included scenes with nudity. This may be seen in
three different strands of filmmaking. There is a somewhat “arty” nudity in the films of
Yeşilçam auteurs in the mold of “French” films (such as those starring Müjde Ar); there
is a fairly standardized mainstream female nudity in romantic films or comedies (such as
those starring Hülya Avşar), and lastly there is a kitschy nudity of the low budget
quickies of late Yeşilçam (such as those starring Banu Alkan). Nonetheless, these new
female stars of 1980s cinema in Turkey did not come from the late 1970s sex films. Once
sex films were banned by the military regime, the majority of actresses found themselves
no longer employable in the film industry, part of a patriarchal society which would not
give, in the words of scriptwriter Bülent Oran’s terminology, its cinematic “prostitutes”
an opportunity to survive, but favored its “cuckolds” instead. According to Oran, this was
because of a far broader social structure: “When the girl does it, it is bad; when the man
does it, it is good” (in Demirci 2004, 156). This prejudice is evidenced yet again, decades
later, at the end of Scognamillo and Demirhan’s book on erotic cinema in Turkey, where
they present a “basic filmography of some female players in erotic Turkish cinema,” but
not a filmography of male players (2002, 261-277). One of the actresses of the sex films,
Zerrin Doğan, not only blames the film producers who forgot about these actresses in the
1980s, but also criticizes Turkey for not having a concept of “sex star” and pocket-size
cinemas showing sex films particularly in comparison with foreign cinemas (in Demirci
2004, 70-71).
In such an environment, sex films have not been included in mainstream
Yeşilçam histories, nor have they been considered outside of a moralistic framework.
Following Erakalın’s remarks, these films brought Yeşilçam’s world of hayal down to
the ground of reality by presenting “prostitutes” and “cuckolds,” figures who always had
a place in Yeşilçam, but a place always defined as immoral, improper, and evil.
According to Bülent Oran, who differentiated between foreign films and Yeşilçam’s
Turkifications:
277
The traditions are diverse, the worldviews and ethical understandings are
different. The story will stay the same, but all behaviors will change in an
adaptation. I mean, it is kind of like walking a tightrope. You have to take the
selling parts of the film that you pinch from, yet create domestic characters. As
if putting on a mask, you keep in line with the [original] film while changing
the characters’ behaviors. For example, in the film that they want you to steal
from, the main character of a married woman cheats on her husband. In such a
scene, the spectators enjoy the moment with a mixed feeling of romanticism
and sexual emotions…The woman in the film…in the last resort is the wife of a
giaour. She can take a couple of her lovers to bed. Since her husband is not
Turkish, the audience is not interested in his being cheated on…But the woman
in our film is Turkish. Her husband is an honored Anatolian man. While
adapting, even though it is only in a film, if we have him betrayed by his wife,
then, it turns out to be pimping and no one could save this film from going
bankrupt. A film which has prostitutes and cuckolds for their lead roles would
automatically flop at the box office (in Türk 2004, 204).
Yet during the late 1970s, Bülent Oran also wrote several scripts for sex films. Much like
Oran, other scriptwriters of Yeşilçam also kept working in the industry. In this respect,
while they kept up with some of the basic elements of Yeşilçam’s melodramatic plot
structures, Oran’s argument about the decent woman and honored man is nowhere to be
found in many of the sex films. As one of the actresses of sex films, Zafir Seba said, “if
one takes out the bed scenes from these films, they would be just another film which
could be viewed as a family film” (in Demirci 2004, 60). Yet the majority of sex film
scripts do not signal this argument. Even though sex films kept up with Yeşilçam genres
and its practice of Turkification, the narrative worlds of these films are full of
exaggerated sexual themes which carried most of the filmic action. For instance, an early
sex comedy Hayret 17 (aka. Vay Anasına 17, Amazing 17, Osman Seden, 1975)
introduces a character with an “amazing” power of having sex non-stop seventeen times.
While such are the joys promised for men, as we will see below, women were also
willing within the filmic world to enjoy carnal pleasures with other men and even
women.
In Takma Kafanı, which does not credit the scriptwriter, the woman with whom
Bülent talks at the park is Aysel (Dilber Ay). According to Özgüç, Dilber Ay played in
various courageous scenes including some lesbian intercourse, fellatio, and masturbating
278
on a bathroom faucet (2000, 181). In this film, Bülent and Aysel are lower middle-class
characters who no longer present a melodramatic fantasy of vertical class movement.
Instead, as Özgüç notes, as Dilber Ay acted in one of the four truly hardcore porno films
of 1979 among the 131 sex films made that year, the world of these characters is a
“lumpen” pornographic one (2000, 180). In the film, the shy Bülent, a jobless but
handsome bum, soon explains that he is not that shy. As Aysel says, “Indeed you are a
Casanova.” The next scene finds Aysel at home touching her half-naked body, telling
herself that he will notice her someday and that she will not be like the other girls whom
he has deceived. While her mother wants the twenty-one year old Aysel to marry Kenan
(Ata Saka), Aysel is in love with Bülent, the son of a seamstress. When Aysel goes to
their house to pick up her clothes, Bülent who does not even remember her name, first
compliments Aysel but then tells her that she is becoming a spinster. While Bülent just
wants to enjoy her company for a while, Aysel is in love with him. Kenan, who loves
Aysel, warns Bülent to stay away from her. So the film’s opening introduces all the
characters and offers two options for Aysel: to marry the storekeeper Kenan and live
happily ever after or to enjoy life with Bülent for a while and then be stigmatized as a
“bad” woman. The subtext of this is a conflict of tradition and modernity: staying with
Bülent offers Aysel a more modern and individualistic life where she will make her own
decisions, while marrying Kenan and serving him as his wife offers her a traditional role
and a conservative lifestyle. Such a moralistic presentation follows Yeşilçam’s
conventions, even though there is not a love relationship between rich and poor
characters. While this frame may serve to place the film’s narrative in a more believable
setting in a squatter settlement among newly rising apartment buildings in Istanbul, it also
presents problems especially in terms of the interiors of the houses. Because Yeşilçam’s
practice of shooting on location was generally limited to some houses that were available
for filmmakers, the interiors of these lower middle-class houses all look rich and lavish,
for they used the available houses.
At home, Aysel keeps talking to herself as she takes off her clothes and touches
her own body in front of a mirror as she fantasizes about Bülent. Then, in a series of
coincidences they run across each other, and their growing interest to each other is made
279
clear as they think aloud. Accompanied by a pop song of the time, Aysel quickly finds
herself having sex with Bülent when she goes to his house to order a new dress for her
mother. As they make love to each other, Bülent’s mother comes home from the factory
of Necmi (Turgut Özatay) where she went to find a job for Bülent. The next day Bülent
goes to the factory, finds out that one of his ex-girlfriends, who happens to be his new
boss’s girlfriend, is also working there, and has sex with her. Though it may be a
different cut than the original, the copy of this film that I saw did not involve close-up
shots of the genitalia during intercourse, though there are close-up shots of women’s
genitalia. Such explicit scenes were “montaged” into the films at the film theaters. The
projectionists kept the hardcore part ready to run on another projection machine and then,
at proper times, they paused one projection machine before starting the other. According
to Cihan Demirci, at some theaters the ushers announced such scenes: “Hey guys, get
ready to shift gears!” (2004, 107).
Demirci notes two other tactics used in these sexploitation films. Agah Özgüç
referred to “convert” (dönme) films as those that were basically edited compilations of
scenes from earlier films marketed with a new name and poster. Such was indeed a
practice that was already at work in some action-adventure films, including some Yılmaz
Güney films such as Gaddar (Cruel, aka. Şeytan’ın Oğlu, The Son of Satan, d. Mehmet
Aslan, 1967). Indeed some of the thirty-seven films in which Zerrin Egeliler acted in
1979 (most probably setting a world record for the number of pornographic films starred
in during such a short time), were such “convert” films. In the same year, while Kazım
Kartal was the lead actor in twenty-five films, Naki Yurter directed thirty films, Recep
Filiz wrote the scripts for twenty-nine films, Sedat Ülker or Mükremin Şumlu was the
cameraman of twenty-five films. Bülent Oran also noted that he made a deal with
producer Necdet Barlık for fifty films but in his eighth script, the sex films started to be
banned by the censors (in Türk 2004, 301). The other trick that Demirci notes was called
“upholstering” (2004, 108). Unlike the ‘upholstering’ of music, this involved the use of
body doubles for hardcore scenes. But at times instead of using body doubles, footage
from different hardcore films was also edited into otherwise soft-core footage, a practice
made evident through the change of quality, color, and lighting of the different films.
280
According to Demirci, while the majority of sex films were dubbed, some hardcore films
made in 1979 and 1980 involved live recorded soundtracks because at the time the
filmmakers did not feel any need for dubbing and paying for dubbing or dealing with
detailed plots (2004, 109). But the majority of the films were dubbed by professional
dubbing artists who were theater actors, or by the players themselves.
After finding a new job and new lovers, Bülent does not call Aysel anymore.
Aysel, who turned into a “fallen” woman after loosing her virginity, sees that Bülent is
cheating on her. Helpless and crying, she runs across Kenan and asks him to take her
away. So Kenan takes her away to his apartment where they have sex, to the
accompaniment of a pop tune. In the meantime, at Necmi’s cabin in the woods, his
girlfriend and Bülent are enjoying themselves to the theme music of James Bond movies.
As the tune stops, we hear the dubbed moaning of the women, this time accompanied
with an instrumental piece of pop jazz. After having sex, they talk, accompanied by
another, tenser tune signaling the arrival of Necmi and his men, who beat up Bülent.
After hearing what happened to Bülent, Aysel rushes to his house where Kenan also
visits Bülent. But Bülent accuses Aysel of informing Necmi and he asks her to leave.
After getting better, Bülent decides to leave. Aysel asks to take her with him. Bülent
(without moving his lips!) tells Aysel, “You are a good girl, a calm girl. But I am an
energetic guy. I want a girl who will suit my lifestyle.”
Aysel (moving her lips) says, “What should I do to be the kind of woman you
want?” Thus the good girl Aysel decides to be the woman Bülent seeks. Forty-four
minutes into the film, its story ends at this point. The remaining twenty minutes of the
film take place at a house of illicit relationships and sexual fantasy. Aysel, choosing to
live her life with Bülent, finds herself in the middle of an orgy, smoking weed and
enjoying life, coupled with a pop rearrangement of a traditional folk song signaling
happiness. Normally, such a tune would be present during a party where people dance
and have fun. Here, we see people having sex and exchanging partners. As Bülent and
Aysel enter the place, nobody even notices them. Bülent says that this is a part of his life
and Aysel must be a part of this life if she wants to live with him. Aysel, after smoking
some weed and drinking some whiskey, starts to striptease to a pop jazz tune. As Bülent
281
watches, Aysel starts having sex with three guys. Then, Bülent takes Aysel to another
room and they have sex there. In the meantime, coupled with the sound of moaning
women, the film’s music keeps shifting from tense tunes to romantic ones. By the end of
the film, Aysel is on top of Bülent in bed. The camera zooms to Aysel’s face as she says
something to Bülent. We cannot hear what she says. As far as I can tell from reading her
lips, she says “It is so nice to have sex with you.” The real text, however, is carried by the
music that starts, with the lyrics, “People no doubt want to get pleasure from life.”
Discontinuities, unuttered speech, uttered but silent words, and inexplicable
situations are all parts of Takma Kafanı, placing it firmly within the Yeşilçam tradition
that rejects it. Yet it is not about a typical plot between a rich and a young character
ending in a happy marriage after the elimination of various obstacles. Instead, Aysel
makes a decision of her own, she chooses Bülent (a free willed life) over Kenan (a
conservative marriage). So in such a world of male fantasy, Aysel is woman that you will
always want to have, but don’t have to marry. As Oran said, it is the world of
“prostitutes” and “cuckolds,” a decadent life of drinking, drugs, and sex. Takma Kafanı’s
fantasy world is one that does not belong to Yeşilçam’s morality, but its melodramatic
modality. While the film’s setting and story repeat Yeşilçam’s tropes, Aysel’s choice of
pleasure over decency takes her away from a proper life. There are various stories about
how sex films were made, how many of the actors were drugged during filming, and how
they hired prostitutes to act in these films. In this respect, the world of sex filmmaking
belonged more to an underworld than to the star-ridden world of Yeşilçam. However, the
presence of these films in the history of “clean” Yeşilçam presented a problem for many
who tried to disregard the films. Unlike the realism of some films, sex films also came
with their own reality that ran against the moralistic sex image of Turkish society. While
nation building attempted to erase the many untold, often violent stories of its emergence,
sex films flourished in the unacknowledged underworld of a moralist and decent society.
While Yeşilçam played at being part of the moral world of the nation, it also hid many
untold stories of casting couches and shady deals. Similar to the social realist films of the
late 1970s, sex films were also ousted from the world of decency and political correctness
as defined by the military regime in the years between 1980 and 1983. Even Yeşilçam’s
282
own sex stars conceived of the period after the late 1970s in this way. Unlike Aysel who
chose pleasure over decency in the filmic world, Dilber Ay, who became a folk singer in
the 1980s, chose decency over pleasure. According to Ay, all the sex films, even the
pornographic ones, she acted in, did not involve penetration or “real” sexual intercourse.
“I was a virgin from my first film…to my last film…I became a woman after the sex
films were banned. That is, I shot all these porn films as a maiden. I can document this
fact with dated medical reports” (in Demirci 2004, 75).
5.14. A Last Word on the Golden Age of Yeşilçam
The genres set up within Yeşilçam, coupled with its dynamics of Turkification,
hayal, and özenti, proliferated during the two-decade-long popularity of Yeşilçam, during
which cycles of films led to various other films of particular genres and remakes of both
foreign and Yeşilçam films. As early as 1956, Yeşilçam was understood in terms of its
production of genres and how some genres became popular through the introduction of
cycles of films such as historical films, crime film, melodramas involving scenes of
singing, family melodramas, and village films (“Ebediyete Kadar” 17). In this manner, all
cycles involved a solution to a possible crisis that Yeşilçam could have experienced.
While bigger production companies specialized in star-ridden genre films, smaller
companies tried to use exploitative tactics to attract spectators. While, as has been noted
with reference to various films, the realist elements in Yeşilçam films are valued by many
critics, such realism was not only difficult to follow, but also very complicated and
ambiguous given the responsiveness of such films to Yeşilçam’s practice of filmmaking.
Thus while it might be possible to discuss the potential of realism in cinema, the terms of
such a discussion are doubly complex because Yeşilçam not only involves the
domestication of a Western medium, but also its rendering into a two-dimensional world
like that of Karagöz. Certainly, for many, it is possible to distinguish some auteurs who
made films outside the world of mass culture. One historian of Turkish cinema, Alim
Şerif Onaran (1994) did a study of various auteurs who essentially produced social realist
dramas and art films, while only talking about the films of mass culture in terms of their
283
genres such as historical films, salon films, comedy films, and arabesk melodramas.
While the reductionism inherent in the construction of such a dichotomy may seem like a
safe tactic, it is belied by the fact that some of the films I discussed above such as Bir
Teselli Ver, Şeytan and Canlı Hedef were actually the films of such auteurs. But even the
directors of these films would probably have singled out some of their films as exemplary
while disregarding others. Similar to the willed oblivion of sex films, this is also based on
a conception of a “true” and “proper” cinema that would enlighten the masses. Yet as I
tried to argue above, cinema went hand-in-hand with fantasy and entertainment, hayal
and özenti, and cinematic narratives were presented through a variety of genres that were
always at the center of a network of production and consumption.
The genres that made up the mass culture of Yeşilçam were not as limited as
Onaran’s four genres suggest, and they not only changed during the course of time, but
also led to the creation cycles and new genres. For instance, in a survey made in 1973,
spectators living in cities close to Istanbul first said that they loved domestic films more
than foreign films, and then talked about various genres. While young male spectators
liked “(secret) agent,” “comedy,” “action-adventure,” and “sex-adventure” films most,
female spectators sought “sad” films and “love” films. This suits the general
identification of “action” as a male genre and “romance” as a female genre. But in the
same survey, state officials such as teachers or low-rank clerks mentioned genres such as
“realist,” “drama,” and “educational” films, staying true to their professions as
representatives of state (“Halk Soruşturması…”). Such responsibility of the state officials
was also echoed within Yeşilçam, which produced a variety of War of Independence
films and village dramas in which republican officials fought against reactionary,
traditional forces in rural Turkey. This confluence with official policy is evident in the
absences as well as the presences in Yeşilçam films. In a 1973 article titled “Turkish
Cinema or Bazaar Mythology,” translated from the French magazine Cinéma 73, one of
Phillippe Denizot’s incisive observations about Yeşilçam concerned the limited visibility
of the Turkish police, army and state on the screen: “While in daily reality uniforms were
a part of the visible, cinema presented a different image of life” (1973, 6). Denizot added
that while Turkish leftists were portrayed in media as bank robbers, the real capitalist
284
robbers, as banks, were also not visible in Turkish cinema. A decade after Denizot’s
piece, Yeşilçam star Hülya Koçyiğit criticized Turkish censors saying, “Look, there are
some intangibles in Turkey: A judge is never bribed, a policeman is never a murderer,
and an industrialist is never corrupt. If you run against these in the story of a film, the
film will be halted by the censors” (1984, 14). According to Koçyiğit, these presentations
of good and proper heroes within a simple language of storytelling led to the demise of
Turkish cinema after the 1970s.
In comparison with the distribution of Hollywood genres, biopics, hard-boiled
detective films, and musicals were very rare in Yeşilçam, while singer films were
abundant. Initiated by the popularity of Egyptian singer films, various popular singers
who produced music outside of the restrictions of Kemalist cultural reform program made
films in Yeşilçam, e.g., Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır, Kara Sevda, and Bir Teselli Ver. These
served as a complete entertainment program for spectators, with songs, dances, and films
that involved romantic stories full of tears, action, and laughter. Even the rise of
television in the 1970s and video in the 1980s did not put an end to these films, and
various arabesk singers continued to make films in the 1980s. However, these singer
films were also different in terms of their locales. While Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır is called a
“salon” film, denoting an urban, bourgeois environment, Kara Sevda is a rural
melodrama and Bir Teselli Ver is an “arabesk melodrama” that takes place in a squatter
settlement formed by migrant rural populations in the outskirts of the cities. In that
respect, both Demiryol and Takma Kafanı present similar lower-class residential areas
outside the city centers. While Oğlum Osman, a “religious” melodrama, involves
elements of an urban setting similar to that of Hayat Bazen Tatlıdır and Şeytan’s locale is
similar despite its different political orientation. Unlike Oğlum Osman’s more traditional
urban presence, Şeytan belongs to the world of a modern, newly rising bourgeoisie.
While Şeytan and Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda could be taken as instances of two nonrealistic genres, they are both centered in Istanbul. Turist Ömer represented more or less a
typical middle-class Istanbul resident who did not care very much about anything. Kara
Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi, which brings to the fore an interplay of fantasy and history,
285
presents a touristic tour of Istanbul thanks to the on-location shots in the film which were
done in historical churches, fortresses and palaces.
The horror film Şeytan and the science-fiction comedy Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda
present two clear cases of “Turkified” remakes from Hollywood films, and Oğlum
Osman presents a practice of Turkification through the use of footage from Hollywood
films. Kara Murat Fatih’in Fedaisi not only presents a historical action-adventure film, it
also copies Hollywood by utilizing the vampire sub-plot in relation to Vlad the Impaler.
Similarly the crime-action film Canlı Hedef presents various tropes of gangster and
Western genres. The last two films, the social realist Demiryol and the sex film Takma
Kafanı, despite their breaks with some of the conventions of Yeşilçam, present various
instances of a melodramatic plot used to different ends. Takma Kafanı might be thought
of as a thirty-minute long family melodrama if the pornographic scenes were omitted.
A conventional way of dividing these films might be based on the relation
between genre and gender, based on their dose of action and romance. In this respect,
while the first four films I dealt with above might be related to more of a female
spectatorial practice, the remaining six films generally address male spectators. All of
these films offer a certain set of generic elements enmeshed with narrative predictability.
Following Rick Altman, one may say, “genre films must not only be similar in order to
succeed, they must also be different” (1999, 21). In this respect, while each of the above
films might be taken as offering some sort of a variation in their particular generic
structures, they at the same time repeat generic conventions by relying on a narrative
development that carried their generic status. In this respect, I noted how despite their
very different genres, Demiryol and Takma Kafanı both stray from the conventions of
Yeşilçam in comparable ways. But because of their respective generic identifications, one
as a social realist film that tries to stay away from a commercial star cinema, and the
other as a sex film that goes beyond the moral prerequisites of a melodramatic fantasy
world of romance, the breaks in the storylines of both films meet their own generic
characteristics. The predictability of unconventionality of Demiryol comes from its
killing of one of the main characters of the film acted by a star player and its presentation
of a story that does not rely on a love relationship, but on a collective political movement.
286
And Takma Kafanı’s choice of free-spirited pleasure over a moralistic life can be taken as
serving the male fantasy of a sexploitation film and thus it also relies on generic
predictability in that fantasy world, where pleasure is the essential value. Nonetheless, the
subtexts of both films are fairly conservative, the one favoring orderly protest over
anarchic revolution, and the other equating female virtue with virginity.
Finally, all of these films share a certain sense of nationalism and a practice of the
Turkification of a Western medium. This introduced not only a violently constructed but
an unacknowledged identification with a national community, serving to erase the other
communities within that nation. It also created a two dimensional rendering of a medium
like a Karagöz that carries a history of the world of Punch, without paying a lot of
attention to its own perspectival realist potential, favoring instead a nonillusionistic and
nonrepresentational mode of representation. In this respect, various writers have
considered Yeşilçam as not even two-dimensional, but a one-dimensional world of visual
storytelling. For instance, a former leftist, now Sufist scriptwriter and critic of Yeşilçam,
Ayşe Şasa noted that unlike polyphonic and counter-pointed Western music, Turkish
cinema has a local compositional understanding based on a monophonic musical
principle. For her, the Turkish cinema did not have the common contradictions between
sound and image, image and meaning, and theme and anti-theme; instead she claims that
it is based on a monophony of the parallels of sound and image, and image and meaning
(1993, 8). In contrast to Şasa’s interpretation, I see Yeşilçam instead as involving a
multiplicity of voices, a mish-mash of images, and a cacophony of soundtracks and
imagetracks, in which Turkification (translation and transformation) is enmeshed with
hayal and özenti in a melodramatic modality of genre crossings. Yeşilçam is about
movies, which move and which move us as they move. Their movement is a dialectics, a
movement from self to other, from thesis to anti-thesis, and then back to a renewed self,
and then to another other and so on. Karagöz had to go to the world of Punch, to
experience it and then come back to find a Karagöz who was already transformed,
displaced by his own movement. Then Karagöz had to move again, to go and see Punch
one more time perhaps. Can there be an end to such movement? I will try to answer this
question in the next chapter.
287
CHAPTER 6
YEŞILÇAM MELTS INTO THE 1980S
6.1. Turkey and Yeşilçam in the 1980s
The deaths and resurrections of Yeşilçam are numerous. The words crisis and
boom were an integral part of Yeşilçam’s history. Yeşilçam passed through many cycles
of crises and solutions created to overcome such crises. These were generally cycles of
films, such as those introduced in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1970s, sex films not
only presented a solution in terms of cycles, but also changed filmic equipment through
the introduction of 16mm negatives. Thus the change was not simply one of finding
novel ways to titillate an audience, but also a reduction in the physical quality of a film
industry already considered second-rate by many. In the 1980s, while the majority of
films were shot on 35mm negatives, a significant number of the films made were not
exhibited in theaters and were instead put on the film market directly through video. By
the late 1980s, Yeşilçam went into an even greater crisis characterized by a decrease in
the number of films made, as well as a decrease in the number of spectators. Nonetheless,
the number of films made under military rule between 1980 and 1983 remained quite
high, (1980: 68, 1981: 71, 1982: 72, and 1983: 78). Between 1984 and 1989, Yeşilçam
produced over a hundred films annually, peaking in 1986 and 1987, during each of which
nearly two hundred films were made. Nonetheless, in the early 1990s, not only did the
number of films made fall to around thirty per year, but the distribution and exhibition
networks of Yeşilçam were almost completely undermined.
288
Perhaps understanding Yeşilçam from its end point might be best considered in
relation to its starting point. The early Yeşilçam of the 1950s started to flourish at a time
when Turkey had just started to enjoy a multi-party regime with a gradual introduction of
capitalism accompanying Turkey’s membership in NATO and concurrent U.S. aid.
However, the big shift from a state-run economy toward a more privatized, capitalist
economy, or from the commercialization of the 1950s to the industrialization of the
1980s, with all of its vices and virtues, came after the 1980 coup. During its most
successful years, Yeşilçam was the industry of a still-traditional, semi-capitalist country
whose industrialization and integration into the capitalist system were mainly triggered
by the state itself; after the 1980s, private enterprise played an increasingly central role.
Moreover, it was during the 1980s that, for the first time, the values and principles of
Kemalist ideology, especially those based on statism, populism, and laicism, were
questioned by various portions of the population. At the same time, little by little, ethnic,
religious, and gender-based identity politics came to the fore and created new issues for
cinema to address.
Indeed, if Yeşilçam was a “Turkish” cinema characterized by Turkifications,
nationalism, and the republican hayal and özenti, what has come to be termed “new
Turkish cinema” has the capacity to be more of the “new cinema of Turkey” instead of a
cinema limited to and defined by its “Turkishness.” Recent discussions about ethnic
identities, reform programs initiated toward full membership in the European Union,
increasing class differences as a result of the capitalist economy, and a decrease in rural
population have all helped the movement toward such a change of scenery. In the 1990s,
the film industry started to receive support from Eurimages, opening the path toward
communication and co-productions with European filmmakers. During the same period,
discussions about transnational cinema were fostered by an increasing number of films
made by citizens of Turkey living throughout Europe, and the presence of Turkey’s films
at international film festivals, coupled with new international film festivals hosted in
Turkey, might all be seen as developments that followed the purported end of Yeşilçam.
However, these all reflect only one aspect of the film industry, that which mainly
concerns itself with “quality” films, some produced for festivals and art house theaters
289
and others conceived of as blockbusters in terms of their high budgets by Turkish
standards – i.e., some films in the 1990s had budgets over a million or two million
dollars. Another clue to the difference between this newer mode of filmmaking and
Yeşilçam can be found in the abandonment of the various practices of
postsynchronization which defined Yeşilçam as an industry.
What all of these changes, of both popular and art cinemas, put forward was the
long-postponed industrialization of the film market. Nonetheless, Yeşilçam continues to
exist in the quickies produced mainly for television channels and in television series and
serials. At the end of Yeşilçam, cinema has become a product that is in one or other way
integrated into the general frame of media industries and thus global capitalist markets,
especially through distribution networks in Turkey. Thus contemporary cinema in Turkey
is fundamentally different from Yeşilçam, to which we can now only relate in nostalgic
terms. The loss of Yeşilçam, its nostalgic and partly cultic reception nowadays, and its
projected simplicity, innocence and clarity are all traits of a melodramatic modality that
relates contemporary Turkey to a traditional and irretrievable past.
In periodizing the golden age of Yeşilçam cinema, I noted that the period of the
Second Republic was involved in a variety of socioeconomic and political changes. The
same can be said for the period of the Third Republic which started in 1980, as Erik J.
Zürcher has called it (1994, 292). The three year long military rule not only froze
political life in Turkey, but it also left its mark on Turkish politics by concentrating
power in the hands of the state through the 1982 constitution. For Zürcher, military rule
not only involved putting an end to political polarization and the “suppression of
terrorism,” but also the suppression of all sorts of dissent and opposition. Throughout the
1980s, the freedoms and rights of the people were severely limited and the governments’
enforcement of laws was very strict and at times violent, thus creating a semi-democratic
and semi-authoritarian political regime. For example, even though some of the old
politicians who were banned from politics returned to active politics through a 1987
referendum that changed the 1982 Constitution, communist politics continued to be
illegal in Turkey for many years. At the same time, starting in 1980, the Turkish economy
started to abandon protective and subsidiary measures and the governments of the 1980s
290
instituted reforms fostering economic liberalization. The institution of a free market
economy involved measures such as privatization, the increase of exported goods, and the
integration of the economy with other world markets. However, such measures led to a
growth in the gap between the lower and upper-classes, while the burdens on the middleclasses increased due to increasing taxes to cut the budget deficits.
Apart from such economic and political developments, after the 1980s Turkey
experienced two important sociopolitical crises, one ethnic and the other religious. On the
one hand, Kurdish rebels who gathered under the illegal Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK)
started an armed rebellion which subsequently led to continuous violent altercations
between the rebels and the Turkish army, which some consider a low-intensity civil war.
On the other hand, the coalition governments with Islamic parties in the 1990s led to
political crises, leading the Turkish army to issue severe warnings about the
indestructible laicist nature of Turkey’s regime. Discussing Turkey, especially in the
early 1990s, Çağlar Keyder has noted that Turkish nationalism and the project of
modernization-from-above entered a crisis while leading to an increased gap between the
modernizing elites and the voiceless masses (1997, 45). Through the new dynamics of
economics and politics that involve globalization efforts, accession to the European
Union, and Turkey has become a player in global markets, and therefore not only has
been forced to implement a “legal basis for citizenship rights and the foundational
requirements for individual autonomy,” but also has faced the challenges of ethnic
separatism and Islamic fundamentalism (Keyder 1997, 46).
In light of such developments, the cultural field of the 1980s was marked by a
growing visibility of multiplicity in a capitalist market system under a tough political
regime. According to Nurdan Gürbilek, the 1980s were characterized by two
contradictory tendencies: the suppression of the voice and the boom of different voices
(2001, 21). Even though the military regime and semi-authoritarian rule continued to
suppress dissenting political voices, a decentered, fragmented visibility of previously
unheard voices came with the elaboration of cultural industries and the transformation of
newspapers, magazines, and television channels. For Gürbilek, the novelties of the
culture of the 1980s included increasing talk of gender and sexuality that led to a
291
publicization of the private sphere coupled with a discourse of individualism and
liberalization; an autonomization of images coupled with the growth of independent
media industries and the movement of the arabesk culture of the migrant populations to
the center of urban culture; a loss of linguistic causality and the emptying of the
meanings of words or their particular signification in relation to larger cultural and
sociopolitical processes, and an increase in the cultural gap between the lower and upperclasses that paralleled growing economic inequality. With the growing visibility of the
ethnic and religious others of the republican modernization project, the culture of the
1980s was marked by an increasing visibility of such multiplicity, which went hand-inhand with a very slow improvement in the political rights and freedoms of the people
under a semi-authoritarian regime.
The 1980 military intervention marked a break not just in sociopolitical terms but
also in the cultural field. The three-year rule of a junta and the rule of new political
parties after the 1983 elections strictly monitored cultural life by censoring films with any
sort of political or explicit content. This marked the end of sex films and of films with
political content, right or left. Spectators, who in the late 1970s had already started to go
to movies less frequently, almost stopped going to theaters at all during and after the
military intervention. This shift can also be tied to the increasingly widespread
introduction of television broadcasting and, more importantly, to the introduction of
video-cassette recorders. The main customers of this video boom were the middle-classes
and workers in Europe, both of whom could afford to buy VCRs and rent videotapes
regularly from the rental stores that popped up throughout the country. As I noted in
previous chapters, in relation to the periodization of Yeşilçam, various writers talked
about the ends of Yeşilçam’s “inflationary” filmmaking in the second-half of the 1980s.
In 1986, a new law concerning the works of cinema, video and music was passed and the
Ministry of Culture started to be involved in matters concerning cinema through control
and the eventual support of films in the 1990s. According to Giovanni Scognamillo, the
years between 1987 and 1989 constituted a period of “the last resistance, the last support
for a demolishing wall” (1998, 423). Indeed they did. As Scognamillo noted, the late
292
1980s marked not only a slowing down of the video market, but also an increase in state
television channels and new satellite receivers.
After the second half of the 1980s, the increasing domination of Hollywood
companies in the cinema market of Turkey became the primary concern of both
filmmakers and the government. In 1989, the Turkish government planned to limit the
dominance of United States film companies in the Turkish market and to support
domestic film production. To this end, Motherland Party MP Gökhan Maraş noted that
the draft of the planned cinema law that would replace the 1986 one was based on four
issues (1990, 10-12). The first had to do with transferring forty percent of the profits
foreign companies made in Turkey to local companies which would collect the money in
a fund to support domestic filmmaking. The second one was based on implementing a
minimum on the exhibition of domestic films in film theaters – one fourth of the films
exhibited by a theater in year would have had to be domestic. The third was a ban on the
dubbing of foreign films in Turkish, instead showing them with subtitles in an attempt to
make the viewing of foreign films more difficult. Finally, they planned to change the
censorship board by implementing a new control board similar to that of the United
States, with age restrictions. Though that draft could have helped in overcoming the crisis
in the domestic film market, serious objections came from the United States government.
According to Maraş, during his visit to the United States, Güneş Taner, a minister of the
Turkish government at the time, was informed about the U.S. government’s concerns
about that draft. Ultimately this draft was not realized as a law. According to columnist
Yalçın Doğan of the Turkish daily Hürriyet (Freedom), even the United States President
George Bush called the Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal at the time and said, “If you
pass that cinema law draft through parliament, I will decrease Turkey’s quotas of textile
products” (in Doğan 2004). Though it is very difficult to verify such a conversation,
especially as uttered in those words, it indicates that the U.S. government of the time was
concerned about that draft and thus it was never realized, marking the death-knell of
Yeşilçam cinema. As I noted earlier, Hollywood, though “Turkified” in Yeşilçam’s
imagination, has served as the constant dream of Yeşilçam. Interestingly enough, at the
beginning and at the end of Yeşilçam, one may talk about a critical involvement of the
293
U.S. government. While at the turn of the 1950s, Turkey’s membership to NATO, the
growing friendship between the U.S. and Turkey, U.S. aid, and the increasing
Americanization of Turkish culture aided the development of a vibrant cinema, at the turn
of the 1990s, Turkey’s integration to global capitalist markets, its continuing relationship
with the U.S. mediated by the U.S. aid, and the close involvement of the U.S. in
influencing the Turkish government and its policies on cinema had the opposite effect on
filmmaking.
Likewise, the 1980s also marked the final phase Yeşilçam cinema, which offered
two major tendencies: a continuing popular film production for the videotape market that
came to an end at the turn of the 1990s, and a continuous self-reflexivity. Concerning the
first tendency, though sex films were extinct from Yeşilçam’s practice, more and more
popular films involved partial nudity and bed scenes with film stars, including some of
the older ones. While Yeşilçam continued to produce many family melodramas, romantic
comedies, and action-adventure films, some of the “serious” filmmakers of the high years
of Yeşilçam were also responsible for what might be thought of as a new genre that is
generally referred to as “films about women.” There were also a variety of films that
indirectly touched on the period of the military regime which cost a lot of lives. Such a
move was also coupled with an element of “self-reflexivity” in many films of the 1980s.
Both the women’s and self-reflexive films can be considered as the products of a
sociopolitical conjuncture which is marked by a standstill and isolation following the
extreme politicization of the late 1970s. This standstill was also the case for box-office
numbers. Even though there was a considerable decrease in the number of films made,
Yeşilçam continued to make films. But these films were no longer viewed in theaters,
which were becoming extinct. Almost all of the theaters in small towns closed, while
some survived by showing domestic sex films of the late 1970s and foreign sex films.
Major theaters trying to survive in mid-size and big cities persisted by showing mainly
Hollywood blockbusters, which were themselves a solution to a crisis experienced by
Hollywood. Certainly, such a situation created a change in the spectatorial makeup.
Starting in the late-1980s, film spectators started to become a predominantly young,
urban population made up of either students or university graduates, whose taste leaned
294
more toward Western cinemas, especially Hollywood blockbusters. According to two
recent surveys conducted by the Turkish distribution company, Fida Film, the average
age of spectators in Turkey is twenty-nine. While in 1999, forty-three percent of
spectators were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, this percentage rose to
forty-four percent in 2002. In addition, while fifty-nine percent of these spectators are
university graduates, thirty-one percent of them are students and seventy-two percent of
them are single (http://www.fidafilm.com/ffinc/tr/ff_03_03.asp).
During the period between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, Hollywood films
were dominant in the market, spectators were mostly a young, urban population
frequently blamed as Americanized youth, and the majority of Turkish films did very
badly at the box-office or they went directly to the video market or television channels
without being seen in theaters. Giovanni Scognamillo has noted that, in the years between
1989 and 1996, among the 485 films made, 385 were not shown in theaters (1998, 425).
It is only in the last decade or so that some Turkish films have done well at the boxoffice, but these films are mostly funded by new capital and distributed by Hollywood
majors. What happened to Yeşilçam in the meantime, similar to the traditional newspaper
industry of Turkey, was its resurrection in a new economic order. As Turkey become
more of a capitalist economy and integrated with the global capitalist system through the
privatization efforts of the government, newly urbanized capital started to control
newspapers and private broadcasting channels, which emerged at the beginning of the
1990s. Private television channels provided new opportunities for the film industry in
Turkey. While some of these broadcasting companies provided support for films, which
also started to make sponsorship deals with big companies, some filmmakers started out
by shooting television commercials. More importantly, the television industry started to
employ filmmakers for television series and serials. Recently, the majority of the
filmmakers who survived the demise of Yeşilçam work for these television channels
through various production companies.
In short, then, what is generally termed the “new” Turkish cinema, with young
and new directors producing both art and popular films, emerged around the turn of the
1990s after and in line with all of the developments noted above. Actually, such a move
295
toward “novelty” in cinematic terms could have been dated back to the mid-1980s, when
a new strand of filmmaking started to appear. A move toward an art cinema with
intellectual overtones which started to increasingly engage with international film circles
started to become pronounced as early as 1984. For instance, Genco Erkal, who won the
best actor prize in the 1984 Antalya Film Festival, claimed that one could have called this
cinema outside Yeşilçam that was getting international acknowledgement “young” or
“new” cinema (Erkal 1984, 16). However, one of the most exceptional directors of
Yeşilçam, Atıf Yılmaz, quickly and incisively criticized such arguments about a “new”
cinema by underlining that such novel films were defining themselves solely against
Yeşilçam and falling for a plot that the films festivals in the Western countries were
forcing upon them. He said that such films were gaining recognition because they
satisfied the West’s demand for exotic films, films about very extreme and marginal
events, from Turkey and other Eastern countries, instead of focusing on the realities of
daily life (1984, 38).
Though such pronouncements on the advent of a new cinema in the early 1980s
were premature, such a cinema did emerge in the 1990s. In the years between 1987 and
1996, sixty-three directors made their first films. Noting this, Giovanni Scognamillo
comments that the high “inflation” of film numbers during the Yeşilçam era was replaced
by the “inflation” of directors in new “Turkish” cinema. Scognamillo adds to this the
following remarks, “Even though the motto ‘Yeşilçam is dead, long live the Turkish
cinema’ has not yet become appropriate, indeed the trend is in that direction…especially
in the eyes of the intellectuals” (1998, 478). Indeed, the demise of Yeşilçam also marked
the end of the “Turkish” cinema and its nationalistic identity claims. Though such a claim
would still be debatable in the eyes of many, not only in terms of the increasing number
of films that are coming from the ethnic minorities of Turkey but also in terms of
international co-productions and transnational cinemas, it has become more and more
difficult to locate a cinema that is primarily and necessarily “Turkish.” Instead a network
of global cinematic presences has created a question of national identities as well as an
understanding of Turkey based on a multiplicity of identities. However, such
296
developments have been gradual and faced with the pressures coming from the
establishment itself.
During the 1980s – or in its “late” stage before becoming officially “late” – the
majority of the films of Yeşilçam, as the popular film industry of Turkey, were not very
different from those produced during the 1960s and 1970s. Even though some new
filmmakers and even some new narrational forms might be considered as new “genres,”
late Yeşilçam essentially rehashed its earlier practices, leaving its inheritance not so
much to the new popular cinema but to television series and serials. While a recycling of
old genres took place in popular films, a general feeling of crisis was visible in films
about women. As for the films about the changes and transformations experienced by the
petty bourgeoisie, including intellectuals, filmmakers reflected on their own problems
and crises, as well as those of the industry. As a result of such a sense of isolation and
alienation from active sociopolitical life, some of the films had more and more selfreflexive plots dealing with the internal problems of both the filmmakers and the films
themselves.
6.2. Crises, Questions, and Reflections
The general mood concerning cinema in Turkey during the 1980s did not change
and almost all of the writers unanimously repeated the words “crisis,” “recession,” and
“the end of cinema in Turkey as we know it.” Atilla Dorsay, a prominent film critic,
talked of the 1980s as a period of recession when one could only stay optimistic and hope
for a miracle, adding, “Towards its centennial, cinema was over, at least for Turkey!”
(1989b, 26) However, considering this mood of crisis as unique to the 1980s was
shortsighted, since for many of its critics Yeşilçam had so often been characterized by
crises. For example, writing in 1964, Hayri Caner noted that Turkish cinema had many
problems: the crisis of finding new subjects, the need for new actors, the insufficiency of
film theaters, censorship, cinema law, the decrease in technical competence, the increase
in production costs, the low quality of films, and the commercialization of filmmaking
(9). Indeed such was Yeşilçam: no novelty, bad infrastructure, no support from the state,
297
but control and censorship, a continuous increase in costs thanks to inflation and the
importation of equipment from Western countries, and a commercial industry which did
not generally reinvest its profits into the industry. Such a mood continued well into the
early 1990s, when various writers started to notice a potential for change.
The change in Agah Özgüç’s yearly reports on Turkish cinema appearing in the
cinema magazine Antrakt (“Intermission,” which began publication in 1991), might be
informative in this regard. After noting that the cinema of 1991 reminded him of the
Turkish cinema of forty years earlier, Özgüç reminded his readership that while the
numbers of films made in 1951 was thirty-six, it was thirty-three in 1991 (1992, 12). In
his report on 1992, however, Özgüç noted that while many theaters had closed down,
new ones had opened. Nonetheless, it was difficult for domestic films to find open spots
in these new theaters. For Özgüç, domestic films started to find a solution through a
“conspiracy,” by making films not for exhibition at theaters, but for television: “If a film
is longer than ninety minutes, it is turned into a serial film by dividing it into two or three
episodes. If there is hope for finding an open slot at a film theater, this time the serials
made for television are shortened and summarized into ninety-minute films” (1993, 79).
In his report on 1993, Özgüç noted that the 1993 season could be interpreted as a
dynamic one, with the opening of new film theaters, festivals, prizes that the filmmakers
received from national and international exhibitions, and a rise in the number of films
made (1994, 12). While eighty-three films were made in 1993, only eleven of them were
exhibited in theaters, which were being divided into two or three smaller exhibition
salons to allow for a wider variety of films to be shown simultaneously. But such a
change also had another important leitmotif: the domination of Hollywood majors in the
exhibition and distribution networks of Turkey in the mid-1980s. This not only signaled
the eventual dissolution of Yeşilçam’s distribution network, which put an end to
Yeşilçam in its production, distribution, and exhibition patterns, but also marked the
introduction of a novel economic infrastructure for filmmakers. The important change
here was the distribution and exhibition of domestic films in Turkey by United States
companies such as Warner Brothers or UIP, while two other Turkish distribution and
298
exhibition companies in the market, Özen and Avşar Film, relied essentially upon
imported films (Özgüç 1994, 12).
Despite this change in distribution and exhibition, only four domestic productions
were listed among the fifty films with the highest box-office revenues. Among these was
a Yeşilçam-size blockbuster solution to the crisis of cinema, Amerikalı (The American,
1993), a comedy directed by Şerif Gören, which, with 354,656 spectators, was the sixth
film on the list. However, this did not mean that domestic films had a significant share of
the box-office. Apart from a change in the profile of the spectators, who had become
mostly young, educated, and urban, the balance between the box-office revenues of
foreign and domestic films also shifted. Giovanni Scognamillo noted that while in 1978
domestic films totaled 58.2 million tickets, this number fell to 3 million in 1992. The
decrease in the ticket sales of foreign films from 22.5 million to 10.1 million in the above
years shows how the film market had changed. For Özgüç, despite the domestic film
producers’ complaints, films with enough commercial and artistic appeal had a chance to
play at the best theaters with the best promotion through advertisements done by the
Hollywood majors in Turkey (1994, 13). Similarly, talking about the “winds of change”
in cinema, film producer Sabahattin Çetin said,
The 1990s will bring about major changes. In particular, the media boom that
we are experiencing has shown the surprises of coming years for those who are
interested in the Turkish cinema. Those who do not have a chance to revamp
themselves will be forced out from the historical scene, and be thrown away
with the winds of change. The filmmakers who are thinking through the
conventions of the old production mode will have major difficulties because
cinema has entered in a process of an organic integration with the other media.
This situation will bring forward a new type of producer: this producer is a
cultured man who knows foreign languages, who is familiar with world and
European cinema, and who contemplates projects with his/her European
counterparts. If eight or ten films are going to be made in the coming years, the
producer and creators of these films will be such people (in Baran et. al. 1993,
77).
Indeed, such was the case with the integration of the Turkish economy to the global
capitalist market that resulted in United States domination in film distribution and
299
exhibition, as well as with the introduction of European co-productions through
Eurimages. Moreover, companies such as Warner Brothers and UIP, started to support
some Turkish films as well as changing the distribution patterns of Hollywood films. Up
until the 1980s, many films were not imported to Turkey by Turkish distribution
companies in the year after their exhibition in the United States because the Turkish
companies generally waited more than a couple years for the decreases in the import
costs of mainstream films. One extreme example in this respect was The Exorcist, which
was not shown in Turkey until the early 1980s. Moreover, the copies of films that came
to Turkey were generally scratched, old copies that had been shown in various European
theaters before arriving in Turkey. According to Mehmet Açar, this situation was
changed by the U.S. companies, and Turkey started to have copies of Hollywood films
generally a year after their release in the U.S. (1995, 1189). For Açar, the American
companies brought better copies of films that we started to watch in better theaters. While
that was certainly true, as Açar himself also notes, it was not clear whether this was
because of the entry of American companies or because of the economic liberalization
and changing structure of the spectatorship in Turkey. Young, educated urban spectators
started to demand better films in the late 1980s, triggering such improvement of film
copies and theaters. Still, there are two dimensions to these changes. On the one hand,
the domination of the West in the global media industry eventually diminished the share
of Third World countries in their own domestic popular markets, raising the issue of
cultural dominance underlined by westernization or Americanization. On the other hand,
the repercussions of such domination in the film market have nonetheless been unable to
eliminate domestic production. Instead, in the case of Turkey, such new film production
has either been produced, distributed, and exhibited by Hollywood companies or has
continued to exist in other media channels, especially after the introduction of private
television channels.
In terms of this study, this change highlights the demise of Yeşilçam in the
cinema market, though it has been transformed into the format of television serials and
series. Yeşilçam, which had found a way to handle all sorts of crises it experienced over
the years, ceased to produce for exhibition at film theaters starting with the video boom in
300
the 1980s and continuing with production for television channels after the 1980s. Many
critics view each of these outlets as a dead end. On the other hand, for instance, Vedat
Türkali interpreted both video and television as helpers for cinema, even providing a
potential to advance the film medium (Türkali 1984, 69). The film producer Türker
İnanoğlu, who adapted very well not only to the video market but also to the recent
television serials and series market and is still an influential figure in the film market,
underlined the issues of copyright that the video market created, because there were
various public screening done with VCRs at coffee houses and restaurants in Turkey, as
well as with pirate tapes (1984, 68). Such a popularity of videotapes was also supported
by photo-novels and the state television during the 1980s, with each creating avenues in
which Yeşilçam could persist. Such persistence was particularly important in the
production, distribution, and exhibition chain of Yeşilçam. With the video boom,
exhibition networks had started to experience a major crisis, for which they tried to
compensate with erotic films and Hollywood blockbusters. But this did not stop a major
decrease in the number of film theaters, which fell from almost 2500 in 1970 to 1350 in
1975, 938 in 1980, 767 in 1985 and around 300 in 1990 (Özön 1995, 53 and Dorsay
1995, 17). But this situation started to change after the demise of Yeşilçam. While the
number of the spectators and film theaters has quadrupled since 1992, a trend of releasing
around 200 films a year, both foreign and domestic, has appeared since 1997
(http://www.fidafilm.com/ffinc/tr/ff_04_01.asp). This rise was concentrated in the three
big cities of Turkey, Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, which together are responsible for
seventy-five percent of the ticket sales in Turkey. But the distribution chains of Yeşilçam
underwent their greatest era of change during the 1980s. Because of the video boom and
the decrease in the number of exhibition halls, Yeşilçam distributors, who were basically
merchants, started to vanish, eventually giving way to large Turkish import and
distribution companies and the Hollywood majors. Thus in the 1980s, the production
costs of many films started to come from the video market and the production companies
that were also active in the distribution of films in the video market. However, according
to Dorsay, the increasing number of Hollywood films in the video market led to a cut in
301
the money coming to Yeşilçam from the video market and led to its eventual crisis in the
late 1980s. (1995, 17)
Through these avenues, Yeşilçam persisted by gradually extinguishing its limits
and the socioeconomic and political changes that culminated in the early 1990s, leading
to the demise of Yeşilçam as the mainstream avenue of filmmaking in Turkey. As noted
above, there had always been a constant demand for change and renewal in cinema in
Turkey and because of this, various practices of independent filmmaking had emerged.
While such efforts were enduring, the real challenge for domestic cinema was presented
with the dominance of Hollywood films. In that respect, Yeşilçam had to compete with
Hollywood blockbusters. But the Hollywood majors could rely upon promotion, video
sales, and even the sales of other products related to the films, such as toys and
videogames to enhance their profits. Under such novel conditions, Yeşilçam’s capacity to
compete with Hollywood was severely limited, especially with the increasing popularity
of television and the involvement of Hollywood in the distribution and exhibition of films
in Turkey. Yeşilçam, in the end, was a cheap domestic industry of a semi-capitalist,
“transitional” country.
The culmination of the modernization processes and the gradual integration of the
Turkish economy into the world markets led to the demise of Yeşilçam in two respects.
While the makers of popular films or quickies either quit filmmaking or made a transition
to the television market, the majority of the serious filmmakers including the new
directors relied upon comedies or more marginal, anti-Yeşilçam films. While there were
attempts to deal with or reconsider what happened during and in the aftermath of the
military intervention, such attempts were very limited and peculiar thanks to the
restrictive political atmosphere of the 1980s. After noting the fall of Yeşilçam cinema,
which was based on “being sympathetic toward the poverty, the culture, and the
weaknesses of the people,” Necla Algan says that “the new Turkish cinema is a deliberate
‘nightmare’ if viewed from the perspective of the old Yeşilçam” (1996, 6). This is
because of the individualist, exotic, and self-orientalizing themes brought about in the
films of the “serious” filmmakers of the 1980s, as I will elaborate in relation to the self-
302
reflexivity in the cinema of the 1980s in Turkey. But before that, I must underline how
Yeşilçam continued to persist throughout the 1980s.
This persistence of Yeşilçam as couch grass included various proclamations of the
end of Yeşilçam. Though it continued to exist in another medium, Yeşilçam’s demise
came after producing a series of genrifications and recyclings. Moreover, during that
time, the distinction between popular cinema and serious filmmaking was clarified and
underlined. In a survey done by the Fida Film distribution company, genres were listed as
follows: adventure, emotional/sentimental, comedy, horror, science-fiction, erotic, and
animation. They also added a new type of category, that of “films with awards” (in
Scognamillo 1998, 426). While this survey included foreign films, it was at least
indicative of the trade’s understanding of film genres in recent years. Thus those films
with awards, auteur or art films, were seen as the mainstream of “serious” filmmaking
during the 1980s, as they also found a counterpart in the spectatorial practices of the
rising young, educated urban spectators who demanded not only “quality” films, but also
more and more film publications. Starting in the late 1970s, the number of film
departments in Turkish universities also began to rise. Through such changes of
spectatorship and filmmaking, one may talk about three genrifications in the 1980s: selfreflexive, individualist auteur films, films about women, and social realist films. In
addition, “serious” films also catered to a new need to move away or escape from
political reality and towards an increasing state of fantasy within cinema. In this respect,
the hayal aspect of Yeşilçam was carried to another dimension, where various characters
of the 1980s cinema, through their dreams, escaped from the realities of daily life that
offered a harsh and violent past and helplessness in the present. Thus films dealing with
the military intervention were characterized by themes including depression and
insomnia, as well as with daydreaming and fantasy. On the other hand, popular cinema
continued to exist in a separate course by essentially producing for the video market that
was addressed to both the middle-class owners of VCRs in Turkey and homesick,
diasporic immigrant workers in Europe. Popular films continued to present films in
various genres, ranging from family melodramas to action-adventure films and comedies.
But as usual, they also involved “Turkifications” of popular Western films such as Star
303
Wars (d. George Lucas, 1977) and Lambada (d. Joel Silberg, 1990) or remakes of
Yeşilçam films themselves such as Kara Sevda and Sürtük.
Though a variety of these genres could be exemplified through detailed film
analyses here, I will try to focus on four films from the 1980s Turkish cinema in an
attempt to understand the recycling and vanishing of Yeşilçam. I will first deal with a
“Kemalist” film that was released in 1981, during the military rule, Öğretmen Kemal
(Teacher Kemal, d. Remzi Jöntürk) to elaborate on the mood and the conjuncture of a
frozen political life in Turkey which could only have produced such popular occurrences
of the formal ideology of the state. The second film I will deal with is one of the
comedies of the 1980s, Çarıklı Milyoner (The Millionaire with Sandals, d. Kartal Tibet,
1983), which presents the enduring theme of the conflict between rural and urban cultures
as well as including background in the tradition of fairy-tales and oral narration. On the
other hand, the third film, Gülüşan (d. Bilge Olgaç, 1985), though based on a fairy tale
and though centering on village life, may be seen as an example of films about women
and was directed by one of the only persisting woman directors of Yeşilçam. Finally, I
will try to conclude my discussion on 1980s cinema in Turkey and on Yeşilçam with an
“individualist,” “self-reflexive” auteur film, Film Bitti (The Film Is Over, d. Yavuz
Özkan, 1989) and through it, a discussion of the end of the Yeşilçam narrative in its
relation to a history of filmmaking which was based not only on an ambiguous synthesis
of the traditional and the modern, but also on a passage from the traditional to the
modern, from a Karagöz-style, two-dimensional and oral narration to a more perspectival,
modern capitalist culture, despite its own low budget aesthetics and excessive language.
What is important in this shift is not only the ends of Yeşilçam, but also the
introduction of novelty and modernity through the new cinema of Turkey. Though this
did not come through the films of the Yeşilçam directors of the 1980s, their films’ fall
from grace and peculiarities in the 1990s came to the fore only after the self-reflexivity
and reconsiderations of these filmmakers. As Seçil Büker said in 1990, Yeşilçam’s late
period involved “a questioning of itself. Our directors, and our players, are questioning
what they and others did in the past. When the questioning starts, it means that selfcriticism has also started” (in Özdemir, 12). In such a venue of self-criticism that
304
embellished the cinematic world of those filmmakers who attempted to make serious
films and different films from those of Yeşilçam, there also appeared attempts at, as
Engin Ayça put it, “individual narration” and “individual creators,” a transformation from
Yeşilçam’s oral narration to more of a “written narration” (1985, 80). However, as Ayça
noted this distinction, the “age old problems” of Yeşilçam cinema continued not only to
exist but also to determine mainstream popular cinema in Turkey. Such a change toward
the partial elimination of Yeşilçam came after the late 1980s, only after further
capitalization and Americanization of culture in Turkey. This was accompanied by the
rise of those newer types of film spectators, including me, who have been more
accustomed to Western culture and thus have demanded more and more in relation to the
continuity of filmic discourse, the quality of filmmaking and special effects, and the
sophistication of narratives. This was the primary difference between the spectators and
the film writers of the post-1990s and those who came before them: the young, educated
urban petty-bourgeoisie not only demanded more and more from filmmakers in Turkey,
they themselves became filmmakers starting after the 1990s, after a nostalgic
consumption of old Yeşilçam films with a variety of Western films both on the video
market and in film theaters.
Thus when seen through the eyes of the contemporary spectators in Turkey,
Yeşilçam cinema, as framed by nostalgia, is about the innocence of not being a part of the
global and modern world of capitalism that has altered Turkey with increasing rapidity
since the 1980s. Such a dream and imagination of happiness, romanticism, innocence and
purity, which was the quintessential makeup of Yeşilçam, was no longer able to disregard
the very impure social and political history of Turkey in the 1990s. While Yeşilçam had
actually been produced in a rather unromantic Turkey branded by violent socioeconomic
transformations, military interventions, political oscillations, and violence, such an
environment ended with the globalization of the country during the 1990s. The new
social order was not about collective or communal hayals and özentis, or the protocols of
Turkification, but about individual capitalistic hayals and özentis, or the rendering and
Turkifications of the West on a personal level. But as I will try to elaborate below with
305
reference to films, such a conjuncture only came after the transformations and changes of
the 1980s cinema.
6.3. Öğretmen Kemal (Teacher Kemal, 1981)
Produced immediately after the 1980 coup, the film Öğretmen Kemal exhibits
many of the tensions within the aspirations of the military regime and those who
supported its firm reiteration of republican ideology as instated sixty years earlier. As
already noted, Berna Moran underlined the main theme of the Turkish novel as
westernization, especially during the late Ottoman and early republican eras. The novels
of this period created a hierarchical organization of characters based on their status:
military and civilian bureaucrats were at the top of this scale, while a peripheral,
commercial bourgeoisie seemed to act as the ruling class, and the ruled were the workers,
peasants, and small craftsmen (1994, 8-9). Though the republican regime’s nationalist
outlook refused to admit such a class-based stratification of society, a reading of such
early novels offers a power structure administered through such class divisions. A new
genre of social realist novels, “village novels” appeared after the Second World War,
criticizing the ongoing problems of rural life in Turkey. Yet these novels, also circling
around the theme of modernization or its effective lack, stayed true to the Kemalist
modernization project by giving primacy to the representatives of the regime in the
village, such as soldiers, teachers, and other civilian bureaucrats, and by conceiving of
Kemalist modernization as the proper mode of progress. Thus such novels, even if they
offered character-building and psychological clashes of the characters, coupled at times
with class conflicts, stayed schematic in their presentation of the village, and of good and
evil in rural life.
In general, Yeşilçam’s dealings with rural life were not different from these
themes in Turkish novels. The pattern of western influence in viewing rural life can be
seen as early as the first rural drama in Turkish cinema, Muhsin Ertuğrul’s Aysel, Bataklı
Damın Kızı (Aysel, the Daughter of a Muddy Hut, 1934), a “Turkified” version of a story
by the Swedish Selma Lagerlöf. While social realist films involved the village as a site of
306
clashes between traditional and modern forces, such a frame was also useful for family
melodramas. Scognamillo notes that starting in the 1940s, the village was just another
location for melodramas (1973a, 8). In general, however, the recuperation of rural life
and its conflicts relied upon a tradition of village novels. According to Scognamillo, the
first “realist” village drama was Aşık Veysel’in Hayatı (The Life of Folksinger Veysel, d.
Metin Erksan, 1952) which paralleled the realist village novels of the same era. Some
such social realist films emphasized the character’s psychology as well as placing a stress
on the fight between the dominant and dominated classes. However, the discourse of
modernization inscribed in the Kemalist censor boards of the time led to the censorship of
Aşık Veysel’in Hayatı such that the scenes that involved arid fields and poor quality crops
were omitted from the film. In addition, Erksan was forced to add scenes showing
abundant fields worked by modern agricultural machines. Using such symbols, as already
discussed, it had been possible for Kara Sevda to bring about an ambiguous relationship
to such a Kemalist discourse by, in a sense, hiding a critique behind agricultural
machines. Films in the mold of Kara Sevda started even earlier, especially with the films
of the director Muharrem Gürses. According to Scognamillo, Gürses created a village
atmosphere where “extreme emotions clash with each other in a bloody and deadly fight
and its characters suffer, are furious, burn with violence and vengeance. Such was the
‘melodramatic’ village, not tied to reality” (1973a, 11). On the other hand, rural life was
portrayed as a milieu of “suppression, difficult living conditions, traditional customs,
static norms, and violence because of its structure” (1973a, 13). As a result, such an
imagery of rural life, for Scognamillo, was “en marge,” simultaneously real and surreal.
This situation of being on the margins had to do with the partial success of Kemalist
reform projects, at least in terms of their presence and visualization in the rural setting
through gendarmerie, teachers, and other state officials and with the inevitability of a
change and modernization in rural life with the introduction of novel technologies that
demanded fewer workers and created a wave of migration and immigration to the cities.
Apart from these two main approaches that imagined a “melodramatic” village
and a “realistic” village, Yeşilçam’s portrayals of village life also include a third
approach which may be termed a “Kemalist” village, where a fight between the state’s
307
modernizing forces and reactionary, traditionalist forces takes place. While Kara Sevda
may be taken as an example of the first approach, I will try to elaborate on the two other
approaches below with reference to the films Gülüşan and Öğretmen Kemal. While
Gülüşan reflects a revised version of social realism in the 1980s, Öğretmen Kemal
presents the Kemalist image of the countryside as imagined in the worst nightmares of
the elite. While, on the one hand, Kemalist phrases such as “the villager is the master of
the homeland,” aided in the conception of a pure, innocent, and naïve village life, this
idealized conception had its counterpart in the conception of villagers as the great
unwashed, the backwards, uneducated, primitive forces that had to be tamed through the
project of the modern nation. But in the 1980s, especially during military rule, the filmic
presentation such a Kemalist dream was no more than a cliché, a rehashing of Yeşilçam
and positivist modernism. Not only does it attempt to present Kemalist ideology through
identification with the teacher Kemal, who is the utmost follower of Mustafa Kemal, but
it also schematically repeats and reproduces its ideology through the melodramatic touch
of Yeşilçam. As elaborated before, the Kemalist nation-state and its national cultural
project set Islam and tradition as the enemies of its project of modernization and
westernization. Thus in Öğretmen Kemal’s project of modernization, his enemies are the
religious leader, the feudal landlord, and the non-Muslim merchant – the regional upperclasses – while the unwashed masses, the poor villagers and especially their children, are
to be modernized-from-above.
Such national narratives of modernization are not unusual and can also be found
not only in the cinemas but also in the literatures of various non-Western countries
including China, India and Egypt. With a discourse of modernization, westernization, and
nation building, these films present the clash between the traditional loci of power and
the modernizing elite and their representatives, by placing the former in the category of
evil and the latter in the category of good. In the early stages of nation building, such
films presented the themes for the foundation, institution or development of a national
sense, cause, and identity. As Ravi Vasudevan notes about the Indian popular cinema of
the 1950s, these films offered themes on “social justice and the formation of a new
personality” that were communicated through “a popular democratic perception which
308
worked through some of the rationalist and egalitarian approaches of the liberal-radical
intelligentsia, but on its own terms” (2000, 116). Such terms owned by the intelligentsia
translate well into republican Turkey, through the Kemalist modernizers’ image of a rural
life that would be comparable to those of European countries. As such, while republican
novels and early and high Yeşilçam consumed such narratives, the oddity of Öğretmen
Kemal arises not from its compliance with such a general category of modernizing
discourses, but from its “belatedness” in relation to the project of modernization. In part,
this is directly related to the self-presentation of the military regime, which had
celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Atatürk the previous year, and which used
the opportunity to project itself as a regime which represented the rebirth of his values.
Yet the film’s ham-handedness in presenting the good teacher among the evil villagers
only underscores the fear of the masses upon which the military regime had taken power.
In these narratives of modernization, the characters of village life are defined, true
to melodramatic plot lines, along the lines of good and evil, which also are under a larger
ideological umbrella of the national good and the enemies of the nation. Typically, the
characters are structurally divided into two groups: on the one side of the Manichean
conflict there are the characters representing tradition, such as the landlord, the religious
figure, the merchant or trader, the village elders, and the bandits; and on the other, the
modern ones such as the teacher, the soldier, the doctor, the officially appointed or
elected village leaders and other state officials. This distinction resonates also with
another conflict that is laid out between the poor and the rich. Modernization discourses
are intended to represent the people, especially the villagers. Therefore, in rural dramas,
the rich are generally corrupt and traditionalist, maintaining an alliance with other
traditional forces in an attempt to conserve the status quo. Another prototypical character
of these narratives is a comic figure, such as a fool, beggar or child, who, by siding with
the modernizing hero, triggers communication between the sides in tension, as well as
providing comic relief. The comic figure also voices the “truth” of modernization as
coming naturally because in his/her folly resides virtue. Thus the voice of reason
transferred into the voice of the wise fool’s discourse takes a new shape by helping the
communication of the message of modernization to the peasants. Lastly, the women in
309
these texts are unanimously good. While it is common to find a strong mother figure who
helps the modernizing hero in his cause, there is usually also a young woman/girl figure
who allows for a romantic relationship.
Öğretmen Kemal opens in 1980, in a village of the central Anatolian city of Bolu
where a group of students and their teacher come to visit the grave of Teacher Kemal,
whose gravestone is the blackboard which he used at the clapboard school he constructed
and on which only his first name and birth date are written. The name of the village is
Karalar which means “darks” or “blacks.” As the students gather around the grave, an old
and mad-looking woman Ayşe (Meral Orhonsay) starts crying beside it. As one of the
students asks who she is, their teacher Hasret (Funda Gürgen), who forty-two years ago
happened to be a child in the same village, replies: “Now I will tell you the story of
Teacher Kemal who was born in 1891 and has never died.” In a blatant attempt of
identifying Teacher Kemal with Mustafa Kemal, his birthday is exactly a decade after
Mustafa Kemal and the film takes place in 1938, in the year of Mustafa Kemal’s death. In
case this isn’t obvious enough, in the credits the filmmakers not only thank the military
governors of the city, but also dedicate the film to “the memory of the eternal and the
greatest teacher of all,” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (lit., father of Turks).
After these facile identifications with Mustafa Kemal, with a flashback to 1938,
the film’s actual story starts when the bandit Durali (Fikret Hakan) gets a message from
his lover Hasret (lit., longing) delivered by the shepherd boy Ali. Then, they notice a state
official coming to the village. In the village, the zealot merchant Şerif (lit., sacred,
descendant of Prophet Mohammed) is selling illegal tobacco to the villagers, before the
“fool” of the village Çayır Mustafa (“grass-eating” Mustafa) criticizes him for asking
exorbitant prices. As the shepherd Ali informs the villagers of the oncoming stranger, all
the villagers start to hide their goods, thinking that the official must be a tax collector –
implying, of course, that the only official they were accustomed to seeing during the
Ottoman period was someone who would take from rather than provide for them.
Thinking he is a tax collector, the villagers treat him with the utmost respect and serve
him well – Şerif’s daughter Ayşe even offers him a drink, triggering eye contact between
the two. But when they learn that he is only a teacher, Şerif tells him that he must leave
310
as soon as possible because in Karalar there are no schools and no kids to go to school.
But Teacher Kemal (Cüneyt Arkın) is adamant about constructing a school building and
he gets local support from an old crippled veteran missing an arm. Still wearing his
military gear sixteen years after the end of the War of Independence, Gazi Dayı (Uncle
Veteran) salutes Teacher Kemal and invites him to his house. Quickly, Teacher Kemal,
Gazi Dayı, and Çayır Mustafa form an alliance to build the school and Teacher
immediately starts to teach by saying, “The state and nation are the same, single entity.”
With this alliance, the film’s excessive clarity takes another step, as the combination of
these three names refers directly to Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; in which Gazi was the
honorific he earned during the war for independence and was used until 1934, when with
the institution of surnames he was awarded the moniker Atatürk, father of the Turks, by
parliament.
As the trio of burgeoning modernizers starts to look for a place to build the
school, they come across Hasret who carries a cow bell as a necklace because her mother
does not want her to get lost. Hasret’s “longing” for education finds an instant answer in
Teacher, who tells her that she will be able to take off that cow bell when she comes to
school. In other words, with the education that she will receive, she will no longer be an
animal! The spot that Teacher chooses to build a school not only happens to be owned by
the landlord of the village, but also has a wishing tree, a site where people tie pieces of
fabric to make wishes in a ritual considered superstitious both in official Islam and,
obviously, in a secular order. Teacher thus must fight against both the feudal regime and
blind faith in order to build the school. He orders the village leader to gather the villagers
and start building the school and a bridge for the students to cross the creek. Next day,
the villagers escape from work as Şerif warns Teacher to stay away from the wishing
tree. But Teacher starts to cut the tree, yelling, “I will bring you down, blind faith,
collapse the sophistry that made my people illiterate; be gone the dark thought of the
ages!” But, true to the Yeşilçam tradition, Teacher’s lips do not move as he keeps hitting
the tree with an axe. The fall of the tree makes the villagers, under the leadership of Şerif,
rush toward Teacher accompanied by tense music. Teacher also lectures the villagers:
311
“Look, my friends, I am against violence, I am a man of peace, and I am a soldier of
Atatürk. Those who work are with me, those who are lazy are against me.”
Ayşe tells Teacher that her father is the servant of the landlord and that they will
ally against him. But, a couple days later, with the help of the shepherd boy Ali, the trio
of Gazi, Mustafa, and Kemal start building the school on their own. Leading the villagers
who carry the coffin of a child who died of an epidemic disease, Şerif first stops the
villagers and then starts his obnoxious overacting. After making the villagers sit down
and start watching his play, he points towards Teacher, shudders with his entire body, and
says “The wind of Satan is blowing from the hill of the wishing tree.” He keeps
shuddering and talks about how the bad luck will kill their livestock and diminish their
harvest. He runs back to the villagers, picks up shepherd Ali among them, saying, “You
lost your brother, and it will be your turn soon. The Satan is there, the curse is there!”
The trio keeps working and singing folk songs of heroism, but the village kids, led by
shepherd Ali, start throwing stones at Teacher, as if they are stoning Satan. After Ali
throws stones at him, Teacher says “Sure, the rose thrown by a friend wounds us.” But
this reply, taken from another historical figure, Pir Sultan Abdal, presents a sub-theme of
Alevites, who are the followers of Ali, similar to Shiites. It is the shepherd Ali, who
although he first threw stones, is the first to realize the error in his ways, begins to cry
and asks for Teacher’s help.
Teacher first stops Şerif from writing his talismans to heal kids, and instead takes
them, against the will of their parents, to the creek to give them a bath in cold water.
Then, Teacher gives them medicine and, with the villagers, they wait by the creek until
morning. Signaled by the crowing of roosters and joyful music, in the morning the
children rise from their bed of death. Then, all of the villagers except Şerif come to help
Teacher after apologizing for their “illiteracy.” But the beat of a drum signals the arrival
of the landlord, making Şerif happy. The landlord, Dayı Bey (Eşref Kolçak) asks Teacher
to kiss his hand. Teacher Kemal refuses, saying that his only teacher to respect is Mustafa
Kemal. That night, Durali visits Hasret and learns that the school is being built. Durali
fears the situation since then the state will have a hand in the village, putting him at risk
as a bandit. The next day, a small troupe of gendarmes arrives at the village and warns
312
the village leader to help Teacher. Named Ataokulu (lit. the School of the Father) after
Atatürk, Teacher starts his first class by introducing the students to Mustafa Kemal, the
“big savior” and the “biggest teacher.” He writes the name “Atatürk” on the blackboard
to teach the letters to his students.
The plot thickens as Leon, the Jewish trader, pays a visit to the landlord to talk
about the start of the sap collection season. Thus an evil trio is formed between the
landlord, Şerif, and Leon. Because all the children who would have collected the sap are
at school, they decide to ask Durali to eliminate Teacher. Durali shoots him and, thinking
that he is dead, takes a bottle out of the Teacher’s bag full of notebooks and pencils for
his students. But Teacher, who was not wounded with the first shot, yells at Durali not to
drink it, as it is full of poison. Durali throws away the bottle and shoots at Teacher again,
this time wounding him. Though “poison” is written on the bottle, the illiterate Durali had
been about to drink it and understands that Teacher has saved his life. As Durali takes the
bullet out from Teacher’s shoulder, Teacher explains that his pocket watch, a gift from
Atatürk, saved his life by blocking Durali’s first bullet. Then, he tells Durali that Atatürk
himself was saved by such a watch during the war. After learning about this striking
coincidence, Durali asks the teacher whether he used guns before. Teacher replies: “We
have forgotten about guns, now we have our pens.” Then, Durali tries to fight Teacher to
show his prowess, but Teacher beats him because he knows how to “box” instead of
fighting without technique. Teacher Kemal, who happens to be a jack-of-all-trades,
learned boxing from the British soldiers while he was a prisoner of war. After this, Durali
and Teacher of course end up being friends.
When Teacher returns to the village, he finds that the school has been turned into
a stable by the landlord, who assumed that he would be killed by Durali. The landlord
tries to kill him, but Teacher threatens him by reminding him what happened at the
Courts of Independence. In the early years of the Republic, these courts of no appeal
persecuted many people in Turkey, especially dissidents. The evil trio decides to start a
“cold war” with Teacher. They first sabotage the bridge in an attempt to get rid of the
teacher. The children fall from the bridge supposedly crying out for help, although it’s
clear that the children are jumping into water that is barely a meter deep! So Teacher
313
Kemal saves not only the children but also the day, just before the landlord plans his next
evil plot, by arranging a marriage with Hasret. In the meantime, Teacher Kemal learns
about the death of Mustafa Kemal. He goes out and starts crying, as he walks in the hills
on his own, mad like Mecnun looking for his Leyla. Then, he promises to teach many
students to follow Mustafa Kemal’s cause. Ayşe finds him and expresses her
condolences. Then Ayşe offers herself as consolation in an attempt to fill the gap of
Mustafa Kemal. But Teacher refuses. He returns to the village only to find a man on
horseback riding through town, bandying about a bed sheet stained with the blood from
Hasret’s defloration, thus announcing it to the village. Durali comes to the school bearing
a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a gun in the other, but Teacher asks him to leave the
building because of the gun. Then, the illiterate Durali comes eye to eye with the gaze of
Atatürk from a photograph of him at the front of the clapboard schoolroom. He asks
whether the man in the picture is his father. Teacher replies, he is the Father of us all.
As the landlord inaugurates the sap season by sacrificing a sheep to be shared
between the villagers, Teacher sees Hasret walking behind the landlord’s horse as his
fourth wife. The landlord not only represents pure evil, but is also thus shown as a
remnant of the Ottoman era with land given to him by the empire and with three wives
wearing veils supposedly in late Ottoman style. Angered by both incidents, Teacher
marches away from the villagers, yelling, "Now, I am leaving. I am punishing you. You
will not learn and get an education. You will live like animals far away from running
water, electricity, radio, and civilization. You will be dominated, exploited. If you do not
want this, come to school!" After this agitating talk, the villagers follow him. In the
meantime, Ayşe disguises herself as Hasret in order to save her. At home, the landlord
finds out about this, and beats and rapes Ayşe before calling in the “gaiour” Leon,
wearing a chartreuse polyester shirt of the 1970s, to rape Ayşe as well. In the meantime,
Teacher sends Hasret to the city for an education, and Durali, who runs into her, learns
what has happened. After being raped, Ayşe goes mad and falls from the bridge, as the
landlord tells Şerif that Teacher raped Ayşe. After pulling the drowning Ayşe from the
(same shallow) water, Teacher tries to save her by giving her artificial respiration which
looks more like he is cupping her breasts. Because Ayşe is in shock and unable to talk,
314
the villagers start to beat Teacher with sticks. Yet it is soon clear that the sticks are
actually made of carved styrofoam which fall apart on his head! In a finely tuned last
minute rescue sequence, Durali arrives at the village, kills the landlord, his men, and
Leon. Then, Durali asks Şerif what happened to Ayşe and, for an instant, blames Teacher
(as a 1980s minibus passes by in the background). Suddenly, Ayşe starts talking and tells
Durali what happened. Having gotten rid of the Ottoman elements and ethnic minorities
that threaten the republican regime, Durali throws his knife and gun away, in a symbolic
act reiterating the end of the war. Typical of a plot inspired by westerns, in these closing
sequences the gendarmes, symbolic of the good cops and state order, finally arrive
bearing sheet metal for the roof of the school. As Teacher hugs his students and makes
sure that they will not get wet during the rainy season, he asks everybody to turn their
backs if they love him, and then falls over, thus passing away. In a series of crosscuts, the
sign of Ataokulu burns as Teacher slowly falls down. The ending credits are coupled with
a folk song which is an ode to the war dead and with an overnarration voiced by Durali
saying, “Teacher Kemal, you need to see how our new school, our new village looks!”
But, alas!
Öğretmen Kemal perfectly reproduces the tropes of earlier village narratives. It
does this so perfectly that it starts to exceed the limits of perfection and turns from an
ideologically informed representation into a parody. Öğretmen Kemal brings together
multiple themes of republican ideology: the paternalistic nationalist discourse, the
Kemalist fight against Islam, Ottoman identity, and non-Muslim ethnic minorities. As
Atilla Dorsay has noted, “the film is a half-western and half-comic book adventure of the
teacher of Mustafa Kemal” (1995, 362). With its facile messages (education is
civilization, illiteracy belongs to an animal-like state), slogan-like ideological statements
(opening an Ataokulu in Karalar village), simplicity (the trio of Gazi, Mustafa, and
Kemal), banality (teaching how to write and read “Atatürk” in the first class), stereotypes
(Islamic, Ottoman, and non-Muslim elements as the enemies of the nation-state) and
clichés (Hasret, e.g. Longing “longs” for education, Şerif, descendant of the prophet,
contrasts Kemalism with zealotry), Öğretmen Kemal would indeed serve, thanks to its
pushing of everything to its limits and its overuse of all prejudices and archetypes,
315
something that lies beyond its intentions. While it is possible to read national narratives
as open to excesses due to their own discursive ambiguities, such views generally
underscore incompleteness in the signification of national narratives. In Öğretmen Kemal,
there is instead an over-signification, an excessive clarity of its own discursive claims.
Instead of creating ambivalence in relation to its narration that could not completely
reproduce its own origins, identity, or semantic network, Öğretmen Kemal not only
creates a straightforward taxonomy of “us and them” but it also obviously believes in and
defends its own taxonomy. In this, there is no effort toward the creation of semantic
coherency or rational premises. Instead, the film proudly repeats its own classificatory
scheme based on a series of binary oppositions: civilized versus primitive, human versus
animal, modern versus traditional, science versus religion, British boxing versus Ottoman
wrestling, Turk versus non-Turk, the evil Ottoman-Muslim-non-Muslim trio versus the
crippled-mad-educating trio of Gazi Mustafa Kemal; in short, ominous evil versus
omnipotent good.
With a backdrop of military rule, then, the film’s taxonomy becomes more and
more meaningful: There is no demand for a national narrative to be willingly shared by
the members of a community. Öğretmen Kemal is a filmic product of extreme conditions
and, as Teacher Kemal makes abundantly clear as he threatens the landlord in the film,
either you accept the nation or choose your damned fate as determined in the
Independence Courts, with trials offering no mechanism of defense, that release the
believers and hang the refuters. Almost sixty years after the foundation of the republic as
a nation-state with its claims of pure ethnic identity and progressive vision, the moment
of the military rule was no longer invested in claims of the righteousness of its existence,
but in a state of emergency and martial law, as emphasized by the opening credits
thanking to the military regime. Yeşilçam cinema changed its tone at the times and in the
aftermath of military interventions. The first Kemalist military intervention that came in
1960, likewise had led to an end to the themes of religious exploitation in the films of the
late 1950s, giving way to films that portrayed Turks as civilized city dwellers during the
1960-1961 film season (Kuyucaklı 1961, 3). Similarly military rule between 1980 and
1983 not only put an end to sex films and political films, but also triggered a variety of
316
films that were made in support of the military regime’s outlook. Öğretmen Kemal, seen
from the milieu of a military rule and martial law, perfectly fits that bill – such was the
primary and historical response of Yeşilçam to the military intervention.
Still, as noted above, its faithfulness to republicanism is excessive, leading to a
trashy feel. The introduction of a sub-theme of Alevite references through the quotation
of Pir Sultan Abdal and the two Alis, the shepherd boy Ali and the bandit Durali, both of
whom help the good trio, does not go well with the reality of a backwards Sunni village
maintaining the anachronistic mores of the Ottoman regime. More importantly, multiple
mistakes that pervade the film, such as the styrofoam bludgeons that fall apart, the
drowning in shallow water, and anachronistic minibuses, create an excessively distracting
mise-en-scène. In the eyes of contemporary spectators the film not only offers a trash film
experience, but also turns into a parody of the ideology it is intended to defend. The
film’s clichés and mistakes present a different viewing experience for the contemporary
spectators than may have been the case in the early 1980s. In contrast to the nostalgia
which the naivety and absence of mimetic realism which earlier generations of Yeşilçam
film awaken, this film borders on an unconscious parody of the 1980 military
intervention. Rather than sending an expressive ideological message, the film instead
places the signifiers of Kemalist ideology in an eclectic and self-contradictory syntax that
undermines its reception. Thus Öğretmen Kemal, as seen from a contemporary
perspective, is not about an image of a “true” Kemalist village, but a coincidental irony
and parody of that image. Like the excessive overacting of Şerif based on full-body
shuddering, the film itself shivers and trembles because of its overconfidence and
plodding deliberateness, opening itself up to carnivalesque laughter. Such was the
secondary and ahistorical response of Yeşilçam to the military intervention.
6.4. Çarıklı Milyoner (The Millionaire with Sandals, 1985)
“This film is the first adaptation of traditional Turkish performing arts in which
everything relies on imitation and jokes/gags.” Starting with the above premise in its
opening credits, Ertem Eğilmez’s Şabanoğlu Şaban (Şaban, the Son of Şaban, 1977) was
317
one of the solutions that mainstream Yeşilçam found for its looming crises. Before that
film, Eğilmez directed an extremely popular comedy series of four films starting with
Hababam Sınıfı (Keep-on Class, 1975), which included Kemal Sunal as a character
named “Cow Şaban.” Due to the popularity of this series, the “Cow Şaban” character
went on to star in seventeen films between 1977 and 1985 which are known as “Şaban
films.” The Şaban character was also carried onto the private television channels in the
1990s through a couple of television series. In a Masters thesis that he wrote on his own
films, Kemal Sunal underscores two transformations in Yeşilçam as critical for the
characters he played: the first was the introduction of color film in the early 1970s and
the second is a move from “action comedy” to “situation comedy” in the mid-1970s
(2001, 134). While the character Şaban is constructed against in a backdrop of traditional
fairy tales and jokes that came through oral narration, Sunal sees his own character on the
screen as an ordinary man who has good intentions, and is pure, clean, and clumsy, but
who also rebels against unjust situations (2001, 136-137). The clumsy Şaban not only
triggers elements of action comedy, but also relies on the characters of traditional
comedies in the performing arts. However, such a characterization was not novel to
Yeşilçam, for there are a variety of characters such as Dümbüllü, Cilalı İbo, and Turist
Ömer who similarly relied upon traditional performing arts, presenting characters who
combined Karagöz, İbiş and fairy tale characters such as Keloğlan. Likewise, Yeşilçam’s
mainstream solution of popular comedies in the late 1970s involved elements of these
characters, and added the novel tropes of action and situation comedy.
Just three years before making the above statement about creating an “authentic”
comedy based on traditional performing arts, Ertem Eğilmez had claimed that the Turkish
audience was “dumb and watched every film presented to them.” After mentioning that it
was only possible to make “direct and natural situation comedy” in Turkey, Eğilmez
added, “Our audience does not understand sarcasm, parody or ‘absurd’ jokes; for
instance, they do not laugh at cold, American jokes…but they say, ‘show us an exciting
situation and we will laugh’” (1974, 33). A decade after that interview, Eğilmez, not only
parted ways with Sunal, who went on to star in his various comedies, but also claimed to
change his stance in relation to comedy, saying, “It is generally reported that our people
318
are fond of crude comedy and slapstick…I am not that inclined to give people such easy
laughter” (1984, 37). The contradiction in these two statements emerges from the military
intervention which not only changed the outlook of the country, but also that of
filmmakers who made popular, mainstream comedies. Kemal Sunal also expressed a
preference for his later “social realist” comedies made in the late 1980s. In addition to
these, he also acted in a variety of “Turkifications” from Western comedies such as
Çarıklı Milyoner, a “Turkification” of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
and Şabaniye (d. Kartal Tibet, 1984), a Turkification of Tootsie (d. Sydney Pollack,
1982). This was not very surprising given the general practice of Turkification as an
integral part of Yeşilçam. In this respect, even his films such as Sahte Kabadayı
(Imposter Tough Guy, d. Natuk Baytan, 1976), İnek Şaban (Cow Şaban, d. Osman F.
Seden, 1978), İyi Aile Çocuğu (The Child of a Good Family, d. Osman F. Seden, 1978),
and Bıçkın (Roughneck, d. Orhan Aksoy, 1988) are all loose Turkifications of Alexander
Dumas’ Les Frères Corses (The Corsican Brothers, 1844) with Kemal Sunal playing two
identical characters, either twins or look-alikes.
These mainstream Yeşilçam comedies starring Kemal Sunal are still popular in
Turkey and television channels continuously rerun them. Much like other Yeşilçam films
which are also shown on television channels, Sunal’s comedies not only offer a simple
storyline but also the basic traits of Yeşilçam. Like so many Yeşilçam characters, Şaban
is most of the time a migrant from a rural area and who faces the challenges of adapting
to industrial, urban environments. However, mostly unsuccessful in this process of
adaptation, such dwellers of squatter settlements in the peripheries of modern and
westernized city centers experience a divided, marginal everyday practice, no longer rural
but not quite urban either. Within this experience of marginality, Sunal’s characters
search for a true path, purity, friendship, and love (2001, 161). However, they face the
difficulties of urban environments as the upper-classes set obstacles before them. The
rich, urban enemies of Sunal’s characters are not only eliminated by Sunal’s Anatolian
heroes, but these protagonists also enjoy a heterosexual love relationship at the end of the
films. Taken in this vein, the majority of Sunal’s work not only rehashes the usual
Yeşilçam conflicts between good and evil, rich and poor, and rural and urban, but also
319
resolves these conflicts through the melodramatic modality, triggering the completion of
a heterosexual romance and reinstating the virtues of the common man. Though Kemal
Sunal characters are clumsy, foulmouthed, and disorderly, they only appear so until
purity and innocence emerge victorious and restore the virtues of the common man which
they represent.
Opening at a bourgeois mansion, Çarıklı Milyoner is quick to show the death of
billionaire Hilmi Tok (Ali Şen) who leaves everything to his son, Bayram Tok (Kemal
Sunal). Similar to Longfellow Deeds, Bayram is a goodhearted fool playing with his
drum as the village kids follow him. Even though many villagers think that he is mad, he
is loved in the village, and young girls even flirt with him. As Bayram plays his drum at a
wedding ceremony, his belated dad’s assistant and lawyer in a Mercedes come to the
village to inform him of his inheritance.
In Istanbul, his relatives send their young girls to flirt with Bayram, who does not
seem to like being surrounded by relatives and journalists. A reporter, Suna (Necla Nazır)
finds a way to meet Bayram by introducing herself as a poor, lower-class woman.
Surrounded by relatives, his father’s assistant, and his lawyer all of whom are after his
inheritance, Bayram finds refuge with Suna, who is not a “bounty hunter.” As Bayram
takes her to a restaurant where the violin player plays Fiddler on the Roof, he makes
obscene jokes and asks for food typical of the countryside. When people make fun of
him, Bayram fights as needed but always finds a way of overcoming such problems. In
the meantime, his relatives try various plots to persuade him to give them his inheritance.
As Suna starts to write her reports in the paper, she also coins a nickname for him, calling
him the “The Millionaire with Sandals,” referring to his rural rawhide footwear.
Bayram does not like city life, decides to return back to his village, and asks Suna
to marry and come with him. Sending her last report to the paper, Suna asks her head
editor (Memduh Ün) to stop reports about the Millionaire with Sandals because she has
also fallen in love with him. But the editor publishes the report nonetheless. The next
morning, after seeing the report, Bayram wears a pair of sandals and meets with Suna,
chastising her for lying. Then, in an attempt to terminate his urban identity, he takes off
his clothes, puts on his drum and starts to play. Later he throws away some of his money
320
from the roof of an apartment. Seeing this, his father’s lawyer persuades the police to
send him to an asylum. There, Bayram refuses to meet with Suna. He then appears in a
court case to prove that he is not mad and to claim back his inheritance. But he does not
even hire a lawyer and refuses to talk or defend himself. As all the witnesses lie in court,
Bayram does nothing except nod his head and smile sarcastically. Somehow Suna
persuades him to talk and Bayram defends himself by explaining all of his acts through
his rural, low class identity: “If you now decide that I am not mad, I will distribute all of
my wealth to my workers in my companies and then I will take my drum and move back
to my village because I was happy and peaceful down there. I am tired of this big city.”
The judge decides that he is not mad.
Whether the Millionaire with Sandals returns to his village or not, the film offers
two simple traditionalist conservative messages: rural, Anatolian guys are by definition
decent and virtuous, and cities or modernization in general are evil. Such was the
conservative line of Yeşilçam, where you would never see evil coming from lowerclasses. Moreover the location of evil was not aligned with the upper-classes or the
bourgeoisie. Instead, Yeşilçam offered an alternative, melodramatic outlook in which the
mankind is already divided into two, as good and evil, and evil was something related to
morality and ethics. Those who are immoral could have been from any class or group, but
the point is that in the end, good always prevails. As such, in Yeşilçam’s mainstream
comedies, evil, much in line with the Keloğlan fairy-tales, was eliminated by the goodhearted, decent village boy. It was only through such a rehashing of Yeşilçam’s
mainstream that such comedies continued to be made under military rule. True to
Yeşilçam, while Bayram’s relatives, his father’s assistant and lawyer, and the newspaper
editor are evil, the judge, Suna, Bayram, and his father’s and Bayram’s servant are good.
While the latter three characters reinstate the morality of common man, the judge
representing the state gives official support for such morality. He wrote in his thesis,
“Kemal Sunal is the symbol of the crises of values and the transformations that have
taken place in Turkey since the 1950s” (2001, 161). Far from being representative of such
transformations and far from offering solutions to such crises, what Kemal Sunal’s
characters offered was nothing more than Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality and
321
morality. Though in their plots they open up an anarchic world, these comedies restore
order and morality in their resolutions. In this respect, almost all of his films not only fit
the requirements of military rule of the early 1980s, but also of all the contemporary
television channels which add a number of “beeps” to mute his obscenity and rehash his
films that combine traditional comic characters with action and situation comedies.
6.5. Gülüşan (1985)
As one of the rare woman directors of Yeşilçam, Bilge Olgaç produced popular
films that diverted from Yeşilçam’s earlier conventions. But as noted above, Yeşilçam of
the 1980s presented a number of novelties which were also visible in the family
melodramas starring arabesk singers influenced not only by the social realist films of the
1970s, but also by the changing conditions of the status of the migrant lower-classes in
Turkey. In this respect, a certain strand of arabesk singers’ films, especially those with
teenager, singers such as Küçük Emrah (Little Emrah) or Küçük Ceylan (Little Ceylan),
were increasingly concerned with the impossibility of a melodramatic resolution. The
lower-class characters of these films were less and less exposed to high-class riches.
Though coupled with a high dose of traditionalism, conservatism and moralism, these
films not only reflected the reality of the migrant classes that started to take over modern,
urban centers but also reflected an undermining of Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality of
a happy, pure exchange between rich and the poor.
As Selim İleri has noted, with reference to the popular romance writer Kerime
Nadir, high Yeşilçam period salon comedies and family melodramas dealt with pathos
and domestic sensitivities set in a foreign decor. “First domestic sensitivities are turned
into pathetic cries. Then the tabloid aspect is introduced in a Western, lifeless, detached
atmosphere” (1973, 13). Instead of following this convention of 1950s and 1960s pulp
novels, these 1980s arabesk singer films were marked by an increased dose of pathos
through the bald visualization of prostitutes, addicts, and poverty. As indicated in one of
the songs of Küçük Emrah, these stories were about “the downtrodden, on their own,
helpless, poor orphans, those who know no happiness, they always cry, never smile.” In
322
the 1980s, the tone of arabesk films changed, becoming even more pathetic and helpless.
Two things may have triggered this change. The first is the socioeconomic
transformations of the time that were increasingly felt by the lower-classes, such as rising
inflation, worsening economic conditions, and the increasing visualization of the
difference between classes through the media. Beforehand, the migrant population’s
visibility in urban centers was limited. As the new populace of the urban centers came to
outnumber those who had been born there, both economic and sociocultural differences
became more and more starkly apparent. Moreover, in the 1980s as political voices were
suppressed, the voice of arabesk singers, ethnic minorities and women started to be more
apparent in the public realm. Such a multitude of individual voices was also conditioned
by an erasure of collective voices in a depoliticized arena.
Some film writers have suggested that there could have been a subtle political
content in the films of some arabesk singers such as İbrahim Tatlıses, who became
particularly famous during the 1980s and was known for the ‘sweet voice’ he adopted as
a surname. For example, film writer Nezih Coş attempted to find a realistic approach
similar to that of Yılmaz Güney arising from the “sincere pathos” and naturalism of
Tatlıses’s films. Coş imagined that the autobiographical aspects of Tatlıses’s films, which
depict his rise from worker to famous singer could be turned into a realistic film language
(1984, 19). In Tatlıses’s Yorgun (Tired, 1983), his character, also named İbrahim Tatlıses
is a famous singer who is tired and bored of fame and individualistic, materialistic
culture. One day, he helps a teenager whom he comes across on a street and remembers
his youth through him. Then he meets a working class woman with whom he falls in
love. Though such autobiographical elements, including the interweaving of real and
filmic life, seem to offer a realistic approach, these films eventually restore traditional
morality and adapt themselves to Yeşilçam in their rehashing of “realism” in Yılmaz
Güney’s manner. What Coş has missed here is the melodramatic modality’s adaptability
and its use of realism to strengthen its own dramatic effects. Though in Hollywood, with
the support of excellent sets and special effects, this generally involves an improved
mise-en-scène, Yeşilçam has never been able to compete on such terms. Instead,
Yeşilçam’s solution in various arabesk singer films was to adapt itself to a more realistic
323
film language that started to develop in the late 1970s. While one strand of arabesk singer
films rehashed high Yeşilçam tropes such as the love affair of a rich girl and a poor boy,
the other more “pathetic” ones rehashed a more realistic language. The latter films did
not necessarily involve two protagonists who differed in their class positions, but instead
focused on the lives of lower-class characters. However, evil is always present in these
films as well. Their major difference was in their visualization of evil. In some, evil was
conceptualized as a precondition, without being clearly or strongly visualized.
Conversely, some other films might often represent evil in extremely violent terms.
The evil characters of late Yeşilçam appeared through two different types who
used different means to reach their ends. For instance, while Coşkun Göğen is known as
“Rapist Coşkun,” Nuri Alço is known more for his sophisticated tactics (e.g., making
women high on drugs or adding sleeping pills to their drinks) in making good women
into “fallen” women. Among those women was also a star actress of the 1980s, Ahu
Tuğba, who is playing in a television series, Esir Gönüller (Captive Souls, 2005) with
Nuri Alço. When the two talked about Yeşilçam of the 1980s in a recent interview, they
gave a number of clues about how they conceived themselves as players. When asked
whether she has a special place in the fetishistic history of Turkish men with her leopardskin bikinis, Ahu Tuğba replies, “I started a new era: I kissed, I made love…After my
parents got a divorce, I played in those roles for revenge. Suddenly I became an artist.
My family was disgraced at the time. But nowadays the families themselves take their
sons and daughters” to play such roles (Tuğba and Alço 2005). While Tuğba touches on
how Turkey has changed since then in the conception of sexual and moral purity and
cleanliness, she also remembers that in their films, Nuri Alço always slapped her
wonderfully, and she explains how she accepted the slaps with grace. In the same
interview, Nuri Alço explains how, when they asked the producer-director Türker
İnanoğlu to tell them about the script and what their roles were, İnanoğlu told them,
“What script? One of you will play the prostitute, the other the pimp” (Tuğba and Alço
2005). Alço was a dignified pimp and a sophisticated rapist, in contrast to Coşkun
Göğen’s typecasting as a “pervert rapist.”
324
Thus while Yeşilçam’s tropes of good and evil continued to persist in the cinema
of the 1980s, they were modified through a series of developments in Yeşilçam cinema.
Mimicking nudity in the adventure films and the sex films of the 1970s, nudity in the late
Yeşilçam became a common trope. In contrast to Bülent Oran’s avoidance of
protagonists who might be understood as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘cuckolds’ during the 1960s
and 1970s, the mainstream films of the 1980s took advantage of such stereotypes and, in
doing so, created salacious protagonists while maintaining a conservative moral stance.
Nonetheless, while Nuri Alço was the evil character, Ahu Tuğba did not play any evil
characters in 1980s cinema. Instead she, as the protagonist, enjoyed the carnal pleasures
of life as a woman. Such popular action and romance films of late Yeşilçam, involved a
move toward the presentation of female characters as individuals, making their own
decisions and living accordingly. But when asked about what Ahu Tuğba brought to
Turkish cinema, Nuri Alço replies, “She kissed, made love. She gave a good reply to
those who said that they do not kiss, they do not make love” on screen. In contrast to
Bülent Oran’s conception of Yeşilçam’s male and female characters, though late
Yeşilçam films involved “Turkish” female characters enjoying life in filmic texts, this did
not change the resulting conception of these female characters in society. As in one of
Tatlıses’s films, Günah (Sin, 1983), which presented the drama of life as experienced by
lower-classes, the bus driver, who falls in love with a dancer in a night club still needs to
overcome the obstacle of loving a “fallen” woman. Thus, true to the Yeşilçam tradition of
women washing away their sins, he takes her to a beach on a cold day and asks her to
clean herself in the sea. A female character like Ahu Tuğba might be a protagonist, but in
such a moral order, she could never be a role model or offer social change in relation to
women’s sexual freedom. Instead she is proud of being an example of “what the young
girls must not do.” The inability of such films to offer such a change underscores how,
even as they created new tropes, they still functioned well within the moral codes of
Yeşilçam’s melodramatic modality.
Despite this emphasis on sexuality, it was also during the 1980s that some of the
female high-Yeşilçam era stars played roles in which they portrayed urban individuals
making their own decisions, choosing their own trajectories and making love on screen.
325
In this respect, the partial change of women’s roles both in society and in Yeşilçam is
noticeable in late Yeşilçam films. While many talk about a genre of “films about
women,” the majority of these films were made by male directors. As Çetin Öner said,
“The Turkish cinema has always discovered novel things. In the forties, it discovered the
efes [bandit heroes of the Aegean region], in the fifties, the War of Independence, in the
sixties, leftists, and in the eighties, women” (in Özdemir 1990, 12). Like other novelties
of Yeşilçam, it was the men or male directors who discovered the woman or femininity in
Yeşilçam of the 1980s; except actresses and a handful of female filmmakers, almost all of
the producers, directors, scriptwriters, cameramen and other film crew were male. Until
1990, only sixty-six of 5514 films were directed by a total of nine woman directors
(Öztürk 2004, 34). In other words, only 1.19 percent of the films made before 1989 were
directed by women, and there were no women directors before 1950. However, between
1990 and 2002, this proportion rose to 5.76 percent, with a total of sixteen women
directors making thirty of the 521 films in this period (Öztürk 2004, 34). In a book on
women directors, Semire Ruken Öztürk divides these women directors into three
different categories: the first women directors “who were not men” (i.e., not having a
particular gender-based agenda) who made films between 1951 and 1980, the women
directors of “the cinema of women” between 1980 and 1990, and politicized women
directors, between 1990 and 2002 (2004). Though she talks about the late Yeşilçam
period as “the cinema of women,” she names only two directors in that category, Nisan
Akman and Mahinur Ergun, who made a total of five films in the years between 1986 and
1989. On the other hand, the remaining nine films made between 1980 and 1989 were
directed by two of Yeşilçam’s female directors, Bilge Olgaç (eight films) and Türkan
Şoray (one film), who were listed by Öztürk among the women directors “who were not
men.” It is worth noting that thirty-seven of the ninety-six films directed by women were
directed by a single director, Bilge Olgaç. According to Öztürk, Olgaç did not make a
“cinema of women” because, in the mold of Yeşilçam’s tradition, she did not address the
problems of women as such, but instead saw the problems of women as a part of the
system, of “the problems of classes and the economic infrastructure” (2004, 87). For
Öztürk, Olgaç did not create a “cinema of woman” because of the following
326
characteristics: Olgaç problematized “the feudal system, the order of landlords and
patriarchy;” in her films “women who marry older man end up going mad or dying;” “the
violence against women (concrete acts such as sexual assault, rape and beating) is shown
and criticized;” and “honor is an important value and turns into an apparatus of power in
the hands of men” (2004, 85-86). If these do not constitute a woman’s cinema, I am not
sure what would.
Bilge Olgaç, who started to direct films in 1965, made a variety of actionadventure films in her early career. As she said about these early films,
We were doing our job. We had no idea of cinema being an art. At that time,
we were in cinema to put bread on the table. Thus we did not think about the
men and women in our films. I never thought about why I was making a
woman take off her clothes. We did whatever the film demanded (in Öztürk
2004, 78).
Though Olgaç’s films become more socially realist, she did not direct any films between
1975 and 1984, first because of the popularity of sex films and then because of the
military intervention. While she thought about shooting sex films, she decided against it
not for feminist reasons, but because she felt she could not understand their mentality (in
Öztürk 2004, 80). Her later films, between 1984 and until her death in 1994, generally
address the problems of women due to tradition. As Deniz Derman has noted, Olgaç
“tells stories based on women, but unlike other women directors, she does not do so by
turning the mirror on herself” (1997, 32). Derman interprets Olgaç first as a director, then
as a “woman director” of art cinema. She also notes that Olgaç tried to find solutions for
the problems of women in a patriarchal society (1997, 34). Derman refers to a group of
films she has dubbed “the woman trilogy” of Olgaç, three films she made between 1984
and 1987: Kaşık Düşmanı (One’s Wife, 1984), Gülüşan (1985), and İpekçe (Silky, 1987).
Although all three of these films are interesting and raise various issues
concerning the feudal structure and the patriarchal workings of society, in this discussion
I will focus on Gülüşan. Olgaç summarizes the film as follows:
327
This film takes place in a house with four people. One of the four is blind…
There is only one reason to make a film out of this story: polygamy (kumalık),
barrenness, the relations between woman and man. In addition it has a different
side to it: a little fantastic, fairy-tale like and its point of departure is a fairytale. Human beings may change due to the conditions of life. We are trying to
look with a magnifying glass at a person’s secret feelings (in Öztürk 2004, 83).
In other words, Olgaç’s film is about the power relations among human beings and about
how every particular relationship and condition creates its own power relations. In
Gülüşan, a barren man – a character surprisingly different from Yeşilçam’s multitude of
characters – abducts a blind girl as his third-wife and thereby creates a change in the
hierarchy of relations between the members of his own household.
Osman Şahin wrote the Gülüşan’s story based on a fairy-tale. As in most of her
films, Bilge Olgaç herself wrote the script and directed the film. With an original score
by Timur Selçuk, the film’s credits appear on a shot of long grass, indicating a rural
setting. As the camera tilts up from the grass to the plateau, we see the miller Mestan
riding his horse into a village. In his own village, Mestan has two wives – the older,
Cennet (Güler Ökten) and the younger, Zekiye (Meral Orhonsay). But neither woman has
given birth, and Mestan plans to take yet another wife. So he travels on horseback from
one village to another to find one. On the road, Mestan comes across a very beautiful
underage girl, Gülüşan (Yaprak Özdemiroğlu), standing with a lamb by her side. He
abducts her. But when he brings the girl home, he and his wives realize that she is blind.
Through a flashback, Mestan thinks about how he could have made such a mistake.
Gülüşan’s family, who is very poor, learns from someone in their village that she has
been abducted and that she might actually be fortunate since the man who took her
looked well off.
At Mestan’s home, Mestan keeps asking his younger wife Zekiye to help
Gülüşan, who keeps calling Zekiye “auntie.” But Zekiye, who as Mestan’s second wife
was his favorite before the recent arrival, does not seem willing to help. Mestan decides
to take Gülüşan back, but she tells him that she would not be able to explain the situation
to her family after spending a night away. Through overnarration, Mestan realizes that
this blind girl is his destiny. So he returns with Gülüşan and they have a wedding
328
ceremony. On the wedding night, Gülüşan is scared as Mestan tries to touch her. The next
morning, Zekiye is angry about the situation, but Cennet, who has already experienced a
similar situation, looks comfortable with what is going on and quietly relishes Zekiye’s
anger. Mestan feels bad about his fate and talks with Cennet about how she and Zekiye
had turned out barren, while Gülüşan is blind.
Mestan goes to town and buys a lot of gifts (jewelry, clothes, etc.) for Gülüşan. In
addition to colorful clothes, he brings her a mirror. While he brings nothing for Cennet, it
is Zekiye who is particularly disappointed with the few gifts she receives. While Mestan
enjoys life with Gülüşan, Zekiye is not happy with her fall from grace. Mestan pays a
visit to Gülüşan’s family and gives her parents some money. He asks his first two wives
to treat Gülüşan well while he is gone. But his growing interest in and love for Gülüşan
leads Zekiye to treat her poorly. Mestan creates a very smooth and soft room for Gülüşan,
whom he does not want to fall and get hurt. While the women, including the neighbors,
are covered, Gülüşan is not: her inability to see makes her unable to understand, and
therefore ward away, being seen and thereby coveted. The neighbor questions Mestan’s
virility and wonders whether he could be barren rather than the women. Indeed Gülüşan
has her period, leading Mestan to think that Gülüşan is also barren. In other words,
Mestan cannot come to grips with his own barrenness, and this is the core of the tragedy
which spirals out of control as a result of a tradition based on male virility.
Acting as though he were blind, Mestan creates a path out of ropes for Gülüşan to
walk from the house to the pigeon pen, the creek, and the mill. Along the path, there is a
covered well. Mestan’s helper watches what is going on without letting Mestan notice.
While Gülüşan tries to use one of her paths, Mestan’s helper stops her. When she comes
back scared, Zekiye criticizes her for showing herself to strangers. They then fight over
Mestan. In a slow-motion sequence, Cennet starts beating both Zekiye and Gülüşan,
claiming Mestan for herself. Mestan arrives home and takes away Gülüşan on his horse
leaving Cennet and Zekiye behind. As power relations in the family shift, Cennet and
Zekiye start to ally against Gülüşan. Upon his return, Mestan binds both of them to a tree
and starts beating them with his whip. Zekiye tells Mestan that Gülüşan is also barren.
Mestan says that it is his fate not to have kids. The next day, Gülüşan tries to go to the
329
pigeon pen but not only has her path of ropes changed, but the well on the way has been
opened. Gülüşan falls in the well and dies. Both Cennet and Zekiye watch Mestan as he
touches her dead body. Then, a white pigeon enters the well and Mestan’s horse runs
away, as if it is Gülüşan’s soul leaving.
Gülüşan, with its sad ending and original musical score, despite being dubbed,
departs from Yeşilçam’s conventions and deals with how human emotions change
depending on particular conditions. While all women in the film share a common
problem as the victims of polygamy, their individual relations shift according to their
conditions. Before the abduction of Gülüşan, Zekiye had enjoyed the status of favorite
wife. But with Gülüşan’s arrival, Zekiye is forced to ally with Cennet, with whom she
had not been in good standing beforehand. As the two turn from victims of polygamy to
evil characters who cause Gülüşan’s death, Gülüşan is triply victimized, first by being
blind, then by being abducted as a third wife, and finally by being persecuted by the other
wives. Making matters even worse, Mestan, who falls in love with the blind girl, enjoys
this situation. As Derman notes, because Gülüşan is blind, “she is not ashamed of being
naked. The visual pleasure that Gülüşan lacks becomes a richness that Mestan consumes
and takes pleasure from” (1997, 34). But this belle captive, as the prime object of
Mestan’s pleasure, is destined to die. As both Zekiye and Cennet watch Mestan crying
and touching Gülüşan’s dead body, they are the ones who take pleasure from her death
and his barrenness, as his dominance over his family vanishes. However, the film’s
ending never clearly shows whether both Cennet and Zekiye or one of them, or even
someone else, redirected Gülüşan’s path of ropes to the well. Instead the film focuses on
Mestan: how he first found love in the pure, clean, and white but fragile and blind
Gülüşan who is indeed a “princess,” true to the film’s fairy-tale atmosphere. But the
fairy-tale does not offer a happy ending with a magician to open the eyes of Gülüşan.
Instead Gülüşan turns into a victim of the polygamous hierarchy by leaving Mestan
barren.
While many of the earlier films of Olgaç would comfortably fit in Yeşilçam,
Gülüşan may also be thought as a particular genre of “village realism,” relating the
problems of tradition and a feudal, patriarchal social structure. Such a realistic look at the
330
village could be found in the 1950s, but many of these early Yeşilçam films were cut by
censors, creating a “pink realism” as it has been called by Nijat Özön (1995b, 141).
Talking about Metin Erksan’s Yılanların Öcü (The Revenge of Snakes, 1961), Özön
noted that though the film’s realism did not have the “cold-blooded, objective quality of a
document,” the film still marked a departure from “pink realism.” Yılanların Öcü, based
on a novel by the leftist writer Fakir Baykurt, was shown in theaters after a special permit
was issued by the president of Turkey, Cemal Gürsel, who was the leader of the generals
who conducted the 1960 military intervention. When the film was shown in Ankara, it led
to anti-communist demonstrations, but was shown nonetheless and did okay at the box
office. Later, when Özön found the “straightforward realism” that he was demanding
from Erksan’s film, it was in Yılmaz Güney’s film Umut, which he took as very similar
to Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). In 1971, a month before
the 1971 military intervention, Özön wrote, “Umut, without suspicion, is the most realist
film that our cinema could have realized until today” (1995b, 206). Though Özön did not
compare the two films, one may say that the realism of these films differs in its
presentation of the fight between good and evil. In its hopelessness, Umut points to the
system as the source of poverty in a manner similar to Gülüşan. Though Gülüşan’s
setting is a closed and limited world of four people, this not only allowed Olgaç to focus
on the individual characteristics of her characters, but also lets her problematize how
power relations shift according to changing conditions.
During Yeşilçam’s lifetime, the majority of Turkey’s population was living in
villages where poverty, traditions, and a relatively feudal order continued to determine
the lives of many people. Such a social “reality” inevitably produced a literature and
cinema about village life. Though there might be variations in Yeşilçam’s approach
towards rural life, villages presented a ready mise-en-scène for filmmakers. In this
respect, those films which stayed away from melodramatic binary oppositions differed
from films like Öğretmen Kemal which takes the village as the location of the Kemalist
dream. But Olgaç’s film, in spite of its realistic presentation of human relations in a
patriarchal society, also carries elements of fairy-tales within its symbolism, e.g., the pure
and clean princess like a white pigeon. In this, Olgaç’s films, though aligned with
331
Yeşilçam culture, are remarkable for such symbolic elements and for the economy of
their mise-en-scène. Thus while she made popular films, she is at the same time on the
margins of a patriarchal, moralist Yeşilçam, and thereby moves away from its strictures.
6.6. Filim Bitti (The Film Is Over, 1989)
Such unraveling of the codes of Yeşilçam was hardly unique to Gülüşan. On the
contrary, it is perhaps nowhere more apparent in the painfully self-conscious Filim Bitti,
which raises the issue of the end of Turkish film in its own right. Yavuz Özkan, who late
in his career defended the idea that directors must also be producers of their films, was
well aware of the problems of filmmaking in Turkey. In an article about “The Adventure
of a Film’s Creation,” he wrote:
Cinema means money. If you do not really have money, then you do not have
sufficient technical capabilities. When you are planning your films, you are
always limited by the conditions you are in. You might not have enough
workdays for shooting. You need to shoot the film in a set time frame. You
work not at the locations you wish for, but at those you can find. At all levels,
the crew you work with is limited in productivity due to… economic
[difficulties] and more importantly, they do not have the conditions to renew
and develop themselves in terms of their work. The technology you have is
used, with minimum capacity because there is not enough knowledge for it to
reach full capacity. Because of this, even the raw film is used without utilizing
all of its characteristics. While Western cinematographers work with a bag full
of filters in each film they shoot, during the shooting of a film, two or three
filters are enough for us. In the tradition of Turkish cinema, the idea of using
light based on individual locations, the “lighting” of players, and the telling of
a story have only been slowly left behind. After shooting a film under such
conditions, a new adventure starts at the post-production stage. All films in
Turkey are better when they are silent. During dubbing, you have to accept the
unacceptable. At times, sound effects can make a film unbearable. In this
country, I have not yet witnessed composed music adding anything to a film
(1993b, 73).
In Filim Bitti, Özkan touches on many of these problems by relating the story of a film’s
shooting. Though he does not deal with the pre-production and post-production of the
film, Filim Bitti is about how a film is shot. The characters do not have names, and we
332
only know them by their jobs such as jeune, jeune damme, director or producer.
According to Özkan, the absence of names underlines an “independent attitude” and thus
allows for a broader discussion of the problems associated with filmmaking (“Filim Bitti”
1990, 14). For Özkan, the idea of making a film within a film arises from an attempt to
present two sides of life, one real and the other filmic, and to analyze the human in these
two contrasting realms.
Starting with such premises, Filim Bitti exhibits a self-conscious structure. It
begins with a director (Halil Ergün) writing a script (the film’s script is written by Yavuz
Özkan) on a typewriter at his office. The producer brings in a news story about the lead
players, who have just been divorced. To the accompaniment of classical music, during
the credits we see an empty studio, filmmakers preparing the stage, the producer talking
with the players, and the director at the dentist. On the set of the film, the prompter reads
the script, and a man and a woman on a bed repeat their lines. As Özkan said, the films
are better when they are silent. In the film within the film, the jeune (Kadir İnanır) says,
“I love you.” Jeune damme (Zeliha Berksoy) says, “Me, too… Look outside.” But the
snow outside is not falling as it should, so the director yells at the special effects crew,
who is throwing buckets of artificial snow down from the ceiling. As the woman and the
man look at each other lovingly, we hear people talking and yelling each other, as well as
noises generated by various members of the crew trying to tear apart styrofoam to make
snow fall and to shake the pine trees seen through the set’s bedroom window. While the
film in the film is shot silently and we hear the prompter talking and the studio’s noise,
all of which make fun of this chaos made possible by dubbing, Filim Bitti itself is
dubbed! So what we hear is not the noise of the set but instead an artificial noise of the
set created during postsynchronization with the help of sound effects and dubbing artists,
including the players.
Thus the film begins with a presentation not only of a low-budget mentality with
cheap special effects, but also a love relationship between Kadir and Zeliha’s characters,
even though in the frame film, they are divorced. Even though they do not have names in
the Filim Bitti within the film, to make things a little more clear, I will refer to Kadir
İnanır’s character as Kadir, Zeliha Berksoy’s character as Zeliha, and Meral Oğuz’s
333
character as Meral. And I will refer to Kadir in the film within the film as K1, Zeliha as
Z1, and Meral as M1. Likewise, since the film itself is called Filim Bitti, I will refer to
the film within it as FB1. To clarify the characters and how they reveal themselves in the
film and in the film in the film, the chart below seems useful:
Real Life
Filim Bitti
FB1
Kadir İnanır
Kadir
K1
Zeliha Berksoy
Zeliha (Kadir’s Wife)
Z1 (K1’s Girlfriend)
Meral Oğuz
Meral (Kadir’s Girlfriend)
M1 (M1’s Wife)
Table 6.1. Characters of Film Bitti and FB1
Filim Bitti is about unexpected passages from itself to FB1 and a reversal of the
relations in the frame film and the film framed. At lunch in Filim Bitti, the director,
Kadir, Zeliha, and Meral (Meral Oğuz) who plays the wife of K1 in the film, sit together
while the film crew all sit at another table. The director asks Kadir and Zeliha whether
their divorce will affect the film. It quickly becomes clear that it will, as they get in a
fight as the director explains that FB1 is a love story. At her upper-class home in FB1, Z1
calls her boyfriend K1, who is married to M1. K1 comes over and his mistress Z1 kisses
him just before the director stops them. He asks Kadir to be more enthusiastic while
kissing Zeliha; his request is accompanied by tense synthesizer music. But Kadir is not
very willing, since the divorce is still very fresh. In FB1, Z1 and K1 are lovers, so Kadir
needs to appear enthusiastic about kissing. But because his ex-wife Zeliha is the one who
kisses him, Kadir accuses her of getting his face wet. The director gets angry and asks a
crew member to bring in the producer to talk with the players.
In FB1, K1, who is a conductor, behaves coldly to M1, even though he does not
want to make her feel bad because she treats him very well. At home, M1 starts a
romantic synthesizer tune and asks him to dance with her. As they dance, K1 feels guilty,
even though as Kadir, he enjoys the dance. When they stop, he tells M1 that he loves Z1.
They stop dancing. The man asks for his wife’s forgiveness. Right at that moment, a fire
breaks out on the set. The dance tune continues as the crew tries to stop the fire. After
334
Zeliha refuses to talk with Kadir, he takes Meral on a boat ride. On the boat, Meral tells
Kadir, “You are wonderful. So you left her. How funny. You leave me in the film and go
to her. But in real life you leave her and come to me. What if she learns about our
relationship?” Kadir replies, “What relationship? Does just taking a boat ride together
mean we are in a relationship?” Alone at home with a picture of Kadir on the wall, Zeliha
is depressed since she still loves Kadir. The next day, Zeliha tells the assistant director
that she likes the “magical” love story of FB1, but she also adds, “Would such a story be
possible in real life?” While Filim Bitti shifts between its own reality and the story of F1,
I must add that, to my knowledge, there is thankfully no gossip or any stories about Kadir
İnanır and Zeliha Berksoy or Meral Oğuz having a relationship before, during or after the
shooting of Filim Bitti.
In FB1, as it snows “styrofoam” outside, Z1 and K1 go to a restaurant where M1
arrives a little later. Accompanied by violin and accordion music at the restaurant, both
M1 and K1 try not to look at each other. During the intermission, Kadir fights with Zeliha
again. Then the director asks for a rehearsal of the scene in which K1 and Z1 talk in the
restaurant’s restroom. Again, the scene is not compassionate enough, and the director
asks for romantic music to make them feel comfortable. During filming in Yeşilçam it
was not very important which song of a particular singer was upholstered. Rather, sound
editors considered the mood and the genre of the music. As Özkan said, music composed
for a film does not add anything to films in Yeşilçam. Instead, upholstering some music
appropriate for the mood is enough, at least as long as it avoids making things worse! But
in many cases, one ends up with upholstered songs in foreign languages that, say, have
lyrics related to death as the protagonists kiss. The content is not important, for it is the
mood that counts when upholstering music.
The next day, K1, who is the conductor in FB1, is going to perform at a classical
music concert, but the assistant director informs the director that the producer is not
willing to pay for the extras who would act as the audience. He explains that the
producer advised them to use the orchestra members as the audience in a separate shot. In
other words, the orchestra members of FB1 are also asked to act as the spectators for the
music they perform. But in Filim Bitti, through a series of crosscuts, we see the orchestra
335
members both performing and in the audience along with all of the film crew in a
Felliniesque scene. While M1 and Z1 look at each other in the performance hall, all the
orchestra members including K1 are also in the same audience. Here, Yavuz Özkan
squarely lays the blame for the mistakes and discontinuities of Yeşilçam on the tight
purse strings of meddling producers. As Özkan said, cinema means money and it is the
producer who is the boss. If the producer demands all the film crew to be in the audience,
then, so be it, and Kadir, in the audience, may enjoy K1’s performance in the FB1.
After the concert, M1 asks Z1 to talk about their lives. The same night K1,
drinking alone at home, is anxious. Late at night, both M1 and Z1 come home and M1
tells K1 that though she still loves him, she wants to get a divorce. The director yells
“Stop!” Again another unexpected cut passes from FB1 to Filim Bitti and then, Kadir
leaves with Meral, leaving Zeliha to cry by herself. Though Zeliha tells the director that
she wants to quit, the director persuades her to persist a little longer. In the meantime,
Kadir and Meral fight in Kadir’s hotel room. Kadir throws her out semi-naked and throws
her clothes out after her. By himself, Kadir starts crying and yelling: “Dammit! Nobody
loves me.” Then, he calls his mom!
The next morning, the producer is angry, so he comes and blames the director:
“You asked for ten more boxes of film...You filmed each scene three or four times. Is this
a Hollywood production? Even worse, is there not even one erotic scene?” As the
director leaves in order not to fight with the producer, Zeliha says, “But it is turning out
to be a good film, an art film.” The producer replies, “What am I going to do with an art
film?” Zeliha says, “But boss, now the art films sell.” The producer rushes behind the
director and tells him, “This is what the audience demands: eroticism, violence or
comedy. You must tickle the audience, make them jump out of their seats, and arouse
their nether regions.” But the director asks the producer to leave the studio, for he is the
boss there. As Özkan reflects on the realities of filmmaking in Turkey, he lets the
producer compare their films with those of Hollywood. But Özkan himself also has the
problem of comparing his films to Western cinema. He knows that the conditions of
filmmaking in Turkey are not comparable with the West, but still makes films. Instead of
a bag full of camera filters, he uses only two or three filters and instead of utilizing his
336
negatives to their full capacity, he just records what is there without spending energy on
technical finesse. Nonetheless, he still writes, produces, and directs films believing that
the someday cinema of Turkey will also be appreciated by the Europe, and then by the
world. As such he is also a part of the dream of Yeşilçam, to catch up with the level of
the West, as in the founding motto of the Turkish Republic.
In FB1, M1 and Z1 befriend each other, while K1 is alone in another room. The
next morning, they find K1 sleeping on the couch. M1 and Z1 prepare breakfast and
listen to Chris de Burgh’s A Rainy Night in Paris, in which he croons in contrast to the
plot of the film: “Ah but in her eyes he sees / Her words of love are only words to please.
/ And now the lights of Paris / Grow dim and fade away, / And I know by the light of
Paris / I will never see her again.” In FB1, K1 comes in, sees both Z1 and M1, and asks
for coffee. But K1 played by Kadir is indeed played by Kadir İnanır, who, as a film star,
is known to be one of the most macho seducers of women. As viewers are reminded in a
recent television commercial where his gaze makes all but the ‘highest quality’ white
goods break, his look is irresistible not just for women, but also for men. Naturally, K1
gets his coffee. After breakfast, M1 starts to pack her clothes and leaves K1’s house. In
contrast to de Burgh’s song, FB1 is about the sacrifice of a woman who loves her man.
But in Filim Bitti, during an intermission and sitting in her jeune damme chair, Zeliha
seems to flirt with the director as Kadir and Meral sulk, wandering around at opposite
ends of the studio. Zeliha is the jeune damme, not Meral. But to make Zeliha angry, Kadir
goes to Meral’s stage room and apologizes to her, which saddens Zeliha. But with a scene
in FB1, Kadir and Zeliha’s relationship takes a turn for the better. After giving a ride to
M1, K1 comes home and kisses Z1. But after playing the flirt and blame games against
each other, Zeliha and Kadir kiss each other so intensely that the director stops them and
asks them to act as if they feel bad about M1’s departure, and they do so.
After that scene, the director tells the crew to give full steam to a scene to be shot
with insufficient equipment. This is a long traveling shot and, because they are about to
run out of negative film, they only have one chance to shoot the scene. As the director
yells for snow, K1 and Z1 are at home preparing for a love scene. The producer arrives
and starts to watch along with a film critic (Komet) the shooting of a scene, and the crew
337
keep reusing a very limited amount of equipment for the scene (e.g., they keep
remounting a three or four meter long piece of rail to create the effect of a traveling shot
on a fifty meter long railing). After the crew performs well, the producer says, “This is
acrobatics! If you are going to make them lovers, put them in a bed and let them make
love.” The critic with the producer nods his head, “You are right...For some reason, our
directors do not make do with their limitations and thus they end up being laughable.”
When the director comes to talk with them, the film critic hands him the pie he brought
for the crew and repeats the same criticism. After the director thanks him for the cake, he
throws the pie in his face. This must be the not-so-secret desire of Yavuz Özkan himself,
who, in the article quoted above, goes on to blame critics and spectators as follows:
As for the press, it continually refers to “the crises of Turkish cinema” and this
clichéd feeling of “support” is fed by the “ooh, ahh,” exclamations written
under the erotic photos of the players in the film. On the other hand, apart from
those experienced film critics who sincerely follow the developments and
attempted self-renewal in our cinema and its results, there is also another group
who rejects and judges everything. I have not seen this group write a critique
for a long while. They constantly, crudely attack Turkish films in particular. It
is as if the condition of existence and acceptance as somebody important is
through rejection. I have not yet read a single line from this group about the
aesthetics, language or the form of a film. Having tasted blood, they make
incessant war cries: “Not good,” “a disgrace,” “a disaster,” “a travesty,” “must
be hung,” “must be thrown away.” I cannot understand where this hatred comes
from and why it has been sharpened so much. Yes, it is possible to talk about a
disaster in this country, but of what does this disaster consist? (1993b, 73)
But in Filim Bitti, there is also a silent character who keeps watching what is going on
between the director and the producer, the players and other crewmembers. Though he
does not talk, he is the studio’s tea deliveryman, who serves tea as he witnesses
everything. As such, more like a non-professional player, he seems to be the “real” tea
deliveryman of Filim Bitti’s set, representing the spectators. Özkan also has a lot to say
about the spectators:
The prejudiced spectators have already made their decisions before seeing the
film. This is “a Turkish film!” Even if they go to the film theater, they do not
338
forget to come equipped with their weapons. The “intellectual” spectators’
faction watch the film to reject, they do not care about any value in the film.
Thus the extraordinary liberty of rejection and judgment is fully experienced
(1993b, 73).
In contrast to the “prejudiced,” “fake-intellectual” spectators Özkan talks about, the tea
deliveryman is the “real” spectator for whom the film is made. It is because of this that
rather than siding with the critic, he grins when he sees that the director throws the pie on
the critic’s face.
The same day, the crew party together, singing a Turkish folk song to celebrate
the successful shooting of a difficult scene. Kadir stays outside without joining them, so
Meral takes him a drink. The director tells the crew that they have ten more days to
complete the film. As Özkan said, filmmakers are destined to work on tight schedules. In
Filim Bitti, it starts raining outside, and the crew goes out to dance under the rain. Even
though the film makes fun of a similar practice with the fake snow, here it is apparent that
this scene was made on a sunny day with rain from watering cans and hoses, again
pointing up Filim Bitti’s impoverished special effects. Kadir and Meral stay inside as the
director dances with Zeliha in the “rain.” But then Zeliha comes back inside and starts
talking with Kadir, telling him that she cheated on him many times while they were
married. Though she lies to him, Kadir starts beating her up in the studio and Meral asks
for help from the crew. Zeliha steps on the stage made for the concert scene, Kadir
follows her and hits her with a metal pipe as the crew watches them from among the
chairs in the seating area. Divided from the action by a proscenium, all of the
crewmembers are thus made into the spectators of the film, and Kadir stands alone on the
stage while Zeliha lies on the floor, dead. So Kadir, who cheated on his ex-wife Zeliha
himself, punishes her for lying by killing her. On the other hand, in FB1, it was M1 who
was taking off, sacrificing herself to make K1 and Z1 happy. While in the “art film” FB1,
K1 and Z1 are the protagonists who lived happily ever after, in the self-reflexive, realist
film, the “macho” Kadir who sleeps with Meral, kills Zeliha because of her supposed
indecency and in real life, Kadir İnanır and Zeliha Berksoy did not have any relationship
at all.
339
Writing from Özkan’s category of “intellectual” critics, Kurtuluş Kayalı first talks
about the self-questioning of Turkish cinema as its basic and widespread tendency and
then plays with the titles of films as he criticized this tendency of self-reflexivity (1990,
7). Kayalı thought the questioning of these films was not deep, and remained superficial,
without touching on general social issues. He said, “Perhaps A Big Solitude [Büyük
Yalnızlık] is being experienced. Maybe at some point it will be said that The Film Is
Over.” Indeed the film was over by then. But Kayalı also criticized the award given in
1990 to the directors of these two films, Memduh Ün and Yavuz Özkan, at the 3rd Ankara
Film Festival because they were directors of the “old” Yeşilçam. Instead, he asked for
greater consideration of post-1980 Turkish cinema, because it was different. While Kayalı
seems to fit Özkan’s category perfectly through the majority of his statements, there is still
some truth to them. The films of the 1980s were questioning themselves and at times, this
questioning was esoteric and excessively self-reflexive, and a feeling of solitude was at
hand. Moreover, films in the style of Yeşilçam were coming to a close. Though they still
received awards, they were slowly fading away, leaving more and more space for
newcomers to the cinema world.
In the six-year period between 1991 and 1996, a total of 311 films were made,
including 16mm films. Among these 311 films, only seventy-four were shown in theaters
-- a problem also experienced in the cinemas of European countries at that time. However,
according to Agah Özgüç who supplied the above numbers, it was also in this period that
a series of novelties were introduced, such as an increase in the quality of filmmaking;
cinema complexes with well-developed projection systems, modern interior design, and
computerized ticket sales; newly opening film ateliers serving young people; and an
increase in the number of short films (Özgüç 1997, 5). Özgüç also added that except for
these technically superior films that were generally distributed by Hollywood majors, the
remaining films were mostly made for television, to some extent maintaining Yeşilçam’s
practices (1997, 6). As such, novelties in the production, distribution, and the exhibition
network of cinema in Turkey were changing how cinema was made and conceived. In this
respect, The Film Is Over was a timely film. Around the last moments of Yeşilçam or just
around the time of the end of the film as Yeşilçam knew it, or simply when Yeşilçam Was
340
Over, Yeşilçam became excessively self reflexive, by reflecting on its own reflection, by
imagining its own imagination, by dubbing its own dubbing, and by dealing with its own
fallacies while creating more of them! What remained hereafter were nostalgia and
bereavement, irony and agony.
6.7. “The People of Our Street”
In the opening of this text, I tried to relate Yeşilçam to couch grass and cited a
poem by İlhan Berk who told the story of “a couch grass living silently on the Anatolian
plain, before the famine.” Though it enjoyed life as it is and would not change the earth
for anything, something killed its heart, its life force. Since then, as Berk wrote in 1953,
“it does not want to live.” But departing from Berk’s couch grass which did not want to
live anymore, Yeşilçam was persistently and aggressively growing in the 1950s. As it
became very popular and dynamic starting in the 1960s, it turned into “our street,” a
communal world of escape. As actor Ahmet Mekin noted in his 1961 article, “The People
of Our Street,” every street has its own characteristics (1961, 17). The name of the street
is Yeşilçam (lit. Green pine), but nobody knows why it is so and there are no pine trees
on the street. Mekin’s continues as follows:
The people of our street… do not live on their own street… the mornings are
wild on our street. Yelling, shouting, conversations, and excitement... Cars,
cameras, projectors stand in front of the offices of producers, and boxes and
boxes of raw film are carried about. Stuntmen…snack on whatever they can
find… Directors, reviewing their work plans for the day, determine the cast of
players. At such moments there is nothing to say to the anxiety or the
annoyance of the producers if one of the main players has not been seen yet…
this is the cacophony just about every day on our street. No doubt one day, we
will have big studios and a housing complex set up for the artists around it.
And in this manner OUR STREET will become history. Even if this is a hayal,
I like it.
When Yeşilçam was over, “our street” had indeed lost its dynamism. “The people of our
street” did not go to a Cinecitta alla Turca; instead it moved to the studios of television
stations or various production companies that popped up in the newer business centers of
341
Istanbul. As I have noted above, Yeşilçam, much like the republic itself, is always
imagined in a constant crisis and thus never good enough and always open to
development. Up until its demise in cinema, as shown in film theaters, Yeşilçam had
always been expected to do this or that. But these demands were all based on
comparisons with the West and with other film industries that were thought to be a step
ahead of Yeşilçam. Thus, Karagöz had to have a hayal and özenti, he had to go to the
world of Punch to learn from him. That was his task, but before going to the world of
Punch, Karagöz was not simply traditional or feudal. Instead, he had already discovered
its ways of dealing with the Western medium of which he was, in his own right, a player.
Haunted by the late Ottoman period painter Şeker Ahmet Paşa’s painting,
Woodcutter in the Forest, John Berger writes that the painting involves a subtle
strangeness in its use of perspective. After explaining the spatial ambiguities and
perspectival problems of the painting, Berger notes that, “academically speaking,” these
are the paintings “mistakes;” “they contradict for any viewer…the logic of the language
with which everything else is painted. In a work of art such inconsistency is not usually
impressive – it leads to a lack of conviction” (1980, 80-81). Berger adds that these
mistakes are not conscious, but unintentional, which leads him to ask two questions:
“Why was the painting so convincing…how did Şeker Ahmet come to paint it in the way
he did?” (1980, 81) While the furthest tree looks closer than anything else in the painting,
Berger also thinks that this double vision has an authority about it. “Its precision is
existential. It accords with the experience of the forest.” For Berger, there is no horizon
in the forest; as you are embraced by the forest, you are simultaneously inside it and
seeing yourself from outside it. This situation in Şeker Ahmet Paşa’s painting is due to
the two opposing ways of seeing that Şeker Ahmet inherited, one European that he
learned in Europe and the other Ottoman-Turkish. While the former relies on physical
space and its perspectival representation, the latter, for Berger, is based on spiritual space,
signs and embellishment. “Light was not something which crossed emptiness but was,
rather, an emanation. For Şeker Ahmet the decision to change from one language to
another must have been far more problematic than might at first appear to us” (Berger
1980, 82-83). So for Berger, Şeker Ahmet had to have an ontological shift to a spatial
342
perspective vanishing on the horizon of unilinear time. For Berger, Şeker Ahmet is
different from Courbet or Turgenyev in that he identified with the woodcutter and saw
the forest as he does, instead of looking at it as a “scene” from the world as conceived by
realists. Şeker Ahmet’s is related more to earlier narrative forms which are “more twodimensional, but not for that reason less real. Instead of choice, there is a pressing
necessity. The only choices are about treating, coming to terms with, what is there”
(Berger 1980, 83).
As I have tried to elaborate above, Yeşilçam’s realism was of a different mold,
one that is direct, dealing with what is there. It is a realism that is “irrefutable, expected,
and unexpected” in a combination of two-dimensionality, oral narration, and life despite
its attempt to be realistic like Courbet or Turgenyev. So the failure and mistakes of
Yeşilçam in this respect are not because it is less real than that of the Western cinemas,
but a different experience of life (i.e., reality), introducing a double vision, that of
Karagöz and Punch simultaneously. In a sense, Yeşilçam is like Şeker Ahmet who
expressed himself in a Western medium but brought with him an Eastern makeup.
Certainly such a clash of two separate entities, even the pairs of a binary opposition,
could not have produced something other than an ambivalent synthesis. From the point of
view of Westerners and the westernized elite, it would at times seem a facile and failed
imitation and at other times a distorted imitation which offers various avenues of
analysis. From the point of view of the majority of its historical spectators, it would
combine entertainment with a sense of reality – it was not coincidental that many of the
villains of Yeşilçam were sworn at or beaten up when seen by spectators in their daily
lives. From the point of view of the contemporary spectators, at times it would be a good
source of laughter, at times television entertainment, at times a source for the remakes of
television serials, at times a field of study, and most of the time a nostalgic era that would
be remembered with some longing, and with a barely perceptible grin.
When asked whether Yeşilçam was determined by the feudal order and the rural
populations of Turkey, Nijat Özön disagrees. He talks about how Yeşilçam was
acknowledged by the rural populations. “There is a tradition, an oral tradition; which I
have called Karagöz cinema. That obliterates our cinema” (1996, 6). Indeed so. Yeşilçam
343
was not destroyed when it was telling these stories, but instead when the rural or urban
spectators with rural origins were no longer paying for the tickets to go to a film theater
and acknowledge them through the medium of cinema. However, these stories have not
withered away; instead they keep being repeated on various television channels, not only
through series and serials, but also through reality and quiz shows. What happened in the
meantime was a change in the structure of film spectators who became younger,
educated, urban, modern and westernized. This new generation of younger spectators has
grown up seeing Yeşilçam films on video or television and as such, the viewing of
Yeşilçam now belongs to these mediums. As for the contemporary films of Turkey, they
are also in the field of interest of young spectators. Recent domestic blockbusters
(generally made with a budget from a million dollars to four or five million dollars, the
majority of which are comedies) have received attention from a wide range of age
groups. Among these films are Eşkıya (The Bandit, 1996, d. Yavuz Turgul), Propaganda
(1999, d. Sinan Çetin), Vizontele (Vision-tele, 2000, d. Ömer Faruk Sorak), and G.O.R.A.
(2003, d. Ömer Faruk Sorak).
This change in filmmaking, film, and film culture has also been indicated by
others during last two decades, especially after the rise of private television channels
which relied upon the re-runs of Yeşilçam films in the first half of the 1990s and then
which started to produce their own series and serials. Engin Ayça, who pointed out that
Yeşilçam is not over but changed in its medium, asks whether it is possible to argue that
“cinema can only exist in film theaters…or is it time to have a different approach to the
issue? Is cinema a different thing now?” While the majority of Yeşilçam’s filmmakers
either refused or could not catch up with a shift to television, those who continued to
work for television found themselves in a new popular culture industry of filmmaking,
this time not making feature films but television series or serials. Ayça’s explanation of
the changes that came after Yeşilçam deals with film culture and how it changed through
the introduction of television. For him, during the high years of Yeşilçam, those who
watched foreign films (read as the westernized elite) were seeing a very limited number
of Yeşilçam films. With television (and one might also add videotapes) Yeşilçam’s
spectators started to see foreign films, though they were dubbed. For Ayça, with these
344
developments, the elite and the masses, as the spectators of two different strands of
cinema started to learn each other’s language and this increased their tolerance for each
other’s tastes. He also noted that television exposed its viewers to different forms of
narrative film, especially documentaries which had been totally ignored by Yeşilçam.
“Therefore their culture and language of seeing cinema got diversified. So today’s
Yeşilçam spectators have not given up their tendencies, but have become more tolerant,
able to have more perspectives and open up to various products” (Ayça 1994, 52). As
such, Yeşilçam died one of its many deaths before coming back to life in television. But
with television came a change in film culture that also changed contemporary cinema in
Turkey, i.e. the new cinema of Turkey. While new American cinema’s or new
Hollywood’s birth is comfortably located in the early 1970s, the timing/periodization of
new cinema in Turkey is arguable (the transformation from Yeşilçam to new cinema of
Turkey is also “belated”). In my estimation, it came around 1990, led by the introduction
of multiple television channels. The second television channel of the state broadcasting
company, TRT, started in 1986 and the first “private” television channel of Turkey,
Magic Box Star 1, started in 1989. Now in addition to more than twenty national
channels and many more local channels on air and in cable, with digital satellite receivers
one may also receive hundreds of television channels from Turkish and foreign satellites.
Before these developments, the mood in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was
dim and depressed, and many people in Turkey were hopeless not only about Yeşilçam
but also about the future of cinema in Turkey. But there were some who had some sort of
instinctual belief in cinema itself. One such figure was the director of Filim Bitti, Yavuz
Özkan, who, when asked in an interview whether he was hopeful about the situation of
cinema in Turkey, said,
The word hopeful would not suffice to explain my feelings. I believe that our
cinema is getting ready for living through extraordinary times. The Turkish
cinema has given the initial signs of leaving behind a period of search and
transition. Now it is at pains to be a cinema that will be talked about more in
Europe and then in the world. These days, when they say that our cinema is
over, is ending, I feel like it is boiling like the mouth of a volcano.
Nowadays, our cinema experiences the impatience of creating its own
345
language, aesthetics, and a strikingness (çarpıcılık) that certainly will settle
down soon. It is determined to quickly get rid of its insufficiencies of script,
dialog, and rhythm. By solving these problems in a short time, it will first
embrace our people and then flow outside its borders. That is what I think.
You might question how it is possible to be that hopeful under such
insufficient conditions. We have worn down the seemingly impenetrable
shield of impossibilities enough. We will all see that this belief of mine is not
merely a utopian vision (1992, 65).
Yeşilçam was about rhizomatic growth, Turkification, hayal and özenti. To realize its
hayal and özenti, and to grow persistently, aggressively and violently, as Karagöz, it paid
a visit to the world of Punch. There it made an agreement with Punch, with Hollywood in
particular, which would later bring back some Hollywood majors. Upon Karagöz’s
return, however, Turkey was at a standstill, under the violent repercussions of the military
intervention. So during that standstill, coupled with an experience of the West, Karagöz
reflected on himself and in his reflection, he saw a void that reflected his own image to
his own eye. As he kept reflecting upon his image, he became increasingly self-reflexive.
Only after such experiences of Karagöz did it become possible to talk about a new
cinema of Turkey, a cinema able to go beyond a particular mode of production,
distribution, and exhibition beyond, a nationalistic zealotry and a particular melodramatic
modality. Though these changes have taken place, the age-old problems between popular
and serious cinema, realist and melodramatic film, have not withered away. Instead they
have taken a new form. On the one hand, new popular films have caught up with parts
and portions of Hollywood’s finesse thanks to money coming in from Hollywood majors,
private television channels, and sponsorships. These films continue to be popular.
However, the big divide that has come to the fore is the distinction between popular films
and unpopular films, i.e., art/auteur/serious films. Though these latter films do not
generally do well at the box-office, they have brought about a filmic discourse and
narrative with fewer “flaws,” with a particular economy of the image and of narrative,
and with critical acclaim both in Turkey and abroad. Under the new, global capitalist
conditions of filmmaking, such is the state of cinema in Turkey. Connected with two
bridges, one dating to 1973, the other to 1988, and with an undersea tunnel in the making,
cinema in the hometown of Yeşilçam and in Turkey remains partly on one side of the
346
bridges and the tunnel, and partly on the other, and the looming question is about the
strait in-between.
347
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION
This study has introduced a history of cinema in Turkey before its reemergence
during the 1990s, focusing on a particular period of popular cinema, Yeşilçam, which
extends across four decades between the 1950s and 1980s. As an example of a national
cinema, Turkish cinema presents us with two significant issues. The first is the underrepresentation of Turkey in mainstream histories of world cinema and in the English
language: to date, there are no books on Turkish cinema. Secondly, even though there are
histories of Turkish cinema in the Turkish language, the majority of these histories have
disregarded popular cinema. These histories generally have favored realistic or
intellectual films and have been written with a preference for auteur and art cinema,
which has informed the creation of a mainstream canon. Thus both filmmakers and film
historians have generally ignored popular films in Turkey that they presume bad or
unworthy. Yet these films constitute not only the vast majority of films made in Turkey,
not only the vast majority of those watched and loved, but even the majority of the
oeuvre of supposedly auteur filmmakers, who have nonetheless come to be recognized
only through a very unrepresentative selection of their films. Responding to these
absences, this study has addressed two ignored sites of filmic discourse: that of a history
of cinema in Turkey in the English language and that of a discourse on this cinema which
critically considers the often disregarded works of popular cinema in Turkey.
To write a history of cinema in Turkey is both a challenging and complicated task
not only in terms of what periods to foreground, what films or directors to choose and
what concepts or theoretical perspectives to utilize, but also in terms of how to deal with
348
the history of the Turkish republic. Here, I have tried to address these issues and
presented a history of a national cinema, especially its popular feature films including all
major genres. Certainly, such a project has its own shortcomings. How could a history of
a cinema that produced over six thousand films be represented by specific analyses of a
handful of films, mentioning of only a handful of filmmakers, and employing the
individual perspective of a student of the history of cinema in Turkey? I have tried to
balance not only the existing distinctions in terms of popular and auteur filmmakers, but
have also presented both major and minor filmic productions. Though an informed
selection process, this study has aimed less to provide an encyclopedic overview of
Turkish cinema than to provide readers unfamiliar with Turkey with a discussion of how
its popular cinema has emerged. I can only hope that this study will act as a means of
incorporating cinema in Turkey into broader discussions of international cinema as new
films by Turkish filmmakers increasingly enter the international arena. For readers more
informed about Turkey and its cinema, I hope this work will trigger further discussions
on how to discuss popular cinema in Turkey in its own right and in relation to that of
other non-Western countries.
One of the most concrete conclusions of this work has been to provide an
alternative to the existing periodization of Turkish cinema as written by Nijat Özön,
which considered the field on a linear and ever-evolving model, along the lines of André
Bazin’s discourse on cinema. Özön argued for a progression toward complete realism as
part of the technological history of photography and cinema. One question I have asked
was in relation to the possibility and even desirability of reaching such a perfect realism.
Instead, I have argued that Özön’s view is preconditioned against popular cinema. More
importantly, I have underlined that Yeşilçam produced its own “realistic” film language
that is a crosscut between Western and the Eastern ways of seeing. While many
filmmakers took their references from Western cinemas, and especially Hollywood, such
references are all translated into the vernacular, which I have called “Turkification.” Yet
while such modification of Western practices has been a standard element in the
modernization policies of Turkey, what emerges in this study is that the Turkification
undertaken by cinema was in diametric opposition to the “Turkification-from-above”
349
generally practiced by the republican regime. Rather, Yeşilçam produced its own
“Turkification” practices, at times supporting the establishment and at other times
digressing from it. In doing so, Yeşilçam pointed to the conflicts and contradictions of
modernization and westernization in Turkey.
One of the other shortcomings of existing histories of Turkish cinema has been
their political affiliations. Here, instead of a voicing a demand for films to be realist,
leftist, rightist, or popular, I wanted to underline how the socio-economic and political
processes of the history of Turkey have played out through the medium of film. To this
end, I employed a tripartite organization in this study. Firstly, I tried to provide a history
of how cinema entered Turkey and how it was produced, exhibited, and distributed.
Secondly, I presented detailed analyses of a number of films to familiarize those who
have not been exposed to the examples of cinema in Turkey. Finally, I tried to present a
theoretical perspective that dealt with the writing of the histories of national cinemas by
glancing at a particular popular cinema that involved a field of coexistence of
contradicting and incommensurable tendencies.
One of the central questions that I tried to answer was based on the distinct
qualities of Yeşilçam films that have led to a disinterest in them, particularly in
mainstream histories of world cinema. Although it has produced more films than many
comparable national cinemas, cinema in Turkey has not been cited as making any
significant contributions to world cinema. In answer to this question I have noted that
Yeşilçam not only successfully served the domestic film market, but also created its own
filmic language that relies upon an unruly combination of the cinematic form with that of
existing oral storytelling conventions and performing arts. In explanation of this
phenomenon, I employed the notion of hayal, thereby introducing two different aspects
of Yeşilçam: its “image” of Western cinemas and a “dream” of being like them, as well
as its ties to traditional forms of art in Turkey which give Yeşilçam an inherent twodimensionality, anti-illusionism and non-realism that comes from shadow plays and
traditional theatrical forms. The notion of hayal underlines Yeşilçam’s dream of being
like Hollywood in addition to its difference from Western cinemas. Thus, I have argued
350
that because of its inherent difference, Yeşilçam never had a chance of realizing its dream
of being as good and as dominant as Hollywood.
In contrast to hayal, the other concept introduced as a means of coming to terms
with Turkish film, by employing the concept of özenti, I have dealt with the question of
Yeşilçam’s identity. Beyond a conception of Yeşilçam as a popular cinema defined by an
existing national essence, the notion of özenti is related to a particular history of the
imagination of a national essence that claims to bring together the members of the
national community. More importantly, özenti is also about a movement from the self
(Eastern) to the other (Western) and a supposed return to the self. Here, I noted that it is
not possible to return the self, and instead suggest that what is more crucial is the
continual movement between the self and the other that this inability to return engenders.
Yeşilçam was not only responsive to the developments that were going on in the Western
cinema, but it also vernacularized such developments through Turkification.
However, the emphasis on the continual movement between the East and the
West takes us away from formalist categories in relation to national cinemas, and thus
underlines the movements and relations between different national cinemas. In this
respect, I introduced Yeşilçam’s relation to Hollywood, Egyptian, and Italian popular
cinemas, among others. In this relational network, I also argued that Yeşilçam’s poor
quality is often considered through its melodramatic modality. On the one hand,
Yeşilçam’s filmic texts employed a melodramatic modality similar to the early Western
cinemas. Yeşilçam dealt with the realities of life in melodramatic terms, but it also
addressed its spectators directly in presenting its complete entertainment program
involving tears, laughter, tension, and catharsis.
Yeşilçam’s difference from Western cinemas and its “belatedness” led to the most
central question of this study. This question is not simply that of defining Yeşilçam, but
also of examining the competence of the existing terminology of film studies in
understanding it. Through introducing a number of terms – Turkification, hayal, and
özenti – that may have relevance in terms of the socio-cultural processes of Turkey, I
underlined that Yeşilçam was simultaneously realistic and non-realistic, illusionistic and
anti-illusionistic. Thus singling out Yeşilçam as a purely populist cinema with escapist
351
texts or as a cinema of melodrama or Karagöz is problematic. Instead of such a position
imbricated through a view of mass and low culture, this study maintained that a certain
practice of the cinematic form in a non-Western national context as in the case of
Yeşilçam brought about its own particularities that appear as peculiarities if seen through
the lenses of existing paradigms.
Instead, I underlined that cinema in the Muslim-Turkish part of Istanbul started on
the screen of the traditional shadow play and Yeşilçam maintained a trace of this
inheritance throughout its history. It continually oscillated between two screens and two
ways of seeing, one Eastern and the other Western. Filmmakers in Turkey dealt with a
Western medium by bringing their Eastern makeup into the picture. Thus the terms that
have emerged in this study with which to analyze Turkish film construct a vocabulary for
a different aesthetic played out within this filmic tradition. Yeşilçam is not a coherent and
unified entity, but rather a fragmented and Janus-faced one, neither quite Western nor
Eastern. Yeşilçam presents us with a rhizomatic formation that oscillates between
combinations and contradictions, segregating and nomadic, fascisizing and revolutionary.
Seen in this regard, this study aimed to contribute to the knowledge of popular cinemas
not through a distinction between popular and art or auteur cinemas, but through an
attempt to understand a certain popular cinematic practice as responsive to socioeconomic and political changes over the course of the twentieth century.
352
LIST OF REFERENCES
Abisel, Nilgün. Türk Sineması Üzerine Yazılar (Writings on Turkish Cinema). Ankara:
İmge Kitabevi, 1994.
Açar, Mehmet. “Türk Sinemasında Amerikan Hakimiyeti” (The American Dominance in
Turkish Cinema). Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye Ansiklopedisi (The Encyclopedia
of Turkey in the Republican Period). Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1995.
Ahmet, Nuri. “Amerikan Filmlerine Dair” (Concerning American Films). Sinema
Gazetesi (Cinema Newspaper) 3 (1929): 3.
Akad, Lütfi. Işıkla Karanlık Arasında (Between Light and Dark). Istanbul: Türkiye İş
Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2004.
Algan, Necla. “80 Sonrası Türk Sinemasında Estetik ve İdeoloji” (Aesthetics and
Ideology in the Turkish Cinema after the 1980s). 25. Kare (25th Frame) 16
(1996): 4-9.
Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1999.
“Amerika Sinemalar Paytahtı Holywood’a Birisi Erkek Diğeri Kadın İki Genç
Gönderiyoruz” (We Are Sending Two Young People, a Man and a Woman, to the
American Capital of Cinemas Hollywood). Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema Newspaper)
5 (1929): 8.
And, Metin. Geleneksel Türk Tiyatrosu: Köylü ve Halk Tiyatrosu Gelenekleri
(Traditional Turkish Theater: Traditions of Peasant and People’s Theaters).
Istanbul: İnkılap Kitabevi, 1985.
353
_____ Osmanlı Tiyatrosu (Ottoman Theater). Ankara: Dost Kitabevi Yayınları, 1999.
_____ “Karagöz’de Muhavere” (Dialogue in Karagöz), in Sevengül Sönmez ed.
Karagöz Kitabı (The Book of Karagöz). Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2000.
_____ “Çağdaş Tiyatro Açısından Karagöz ve Orta Oyunu” (Karagöz and Theater-inthe-Round in terms of Modern Theater), in Abdulkadir Emeksiz ed. Orta Oyunu
Kitabı. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2001.
_____ “Traditional Performances,” in Halil İnalcık and Günsel Renda eds. Ottoman
Civilization 2. Ankara: Ministry of Culture, 2002.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Revised ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
Arakon, İlhan. Interview by İlker Mutlu. Unpublished. Istanbul, 2004.
Atadeniz, Remzi Yılmaz. “Remzi Yılmaz Atadeniz’le Söyleşi” (An Interview with Remzi
Yılmaz Atadeniz). Interview by Metin Demirhan in Fantastik Türk Sineması
(Turkish Fantastic Cinema) by Giovanni Scognamillo and Metin Demirhan.
Istanbul: Kabalcı Yayınevi, 1999.
Awde, Nick. “The Grass is Always Greener: Karagoz Comes to London.” 2005.
Available online at http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/7343/thegrass-is-always-greener-karagoz-comes.
Ayça, Engin. “Yeni Türk Sineması ve Eski Sorunları” (New Turkish Cinema and its Age
Old Problems). Video/Sinema 11 (1985): 80-81.
_____ “Türk Sinemasının Periyodizasyonu: Engin Ayça ile Söyleşi” (The Periodization
of Turkish Cinema: An Interview with Engin Ayça) Interview by Zahit Atam ve
Bülent Görücü. Görüntü (Image) 2 (1994): 43-52.
354
Baran, Tamer, Saim Yavuz ve Hülya Arslanbay. “Pek de Parlak Değildin ’92” (You
Were not That Bright, 1992). Antrakt (Intermission) 16 (1993): 74-78.
Baydar, Tuncay. “Soyunan Kadın” (The Undressing Woman) Sinema Postası (Cinema
Post) 242 (1967): 7.
Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Trans. by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967.
Belgil, Vehbi. “Yerli Filmciliğimize Ait Meseleler” (Problems Concerning Our Domestic
Filmmaking). Yıldız (Star) 59 (1952): 20-21.
Bennett, Michael Todd. “Anglophilia on Film: Creating an Atmosphere for Alliance,
1935-1941.” Film and History 27 (1997): 4-21.
Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Berger, John and Jean Mohr. A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe. New York:
Viking Press, 1975.
Bhabha, Homi. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition” in
Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Bozdemir, Banu. “İki Güzel Sinema Olayı” (Two Beautiful Events of Cinema). 2001.
Available online at http://www.intersinema.com/yazar/filmografi/20011207.asp.
Brooks, Peter. “Melodrama, Body, Revolution” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine
Gledhill eds. Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. London: British Film Institute
Publishing, 1994.
Browne, Nick. “Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese
Melodrama” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill eds. Melodrama:
Stage, Picture, Screen. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1994.
355
“Bu Sene Strip-tiz Türk Filmciliğinin Kurtarıcısı Olmuştur” (This Year Striptease
Became the Savior of Turkish Filmmaking.” Sinema Postası (Cinema Post) 197
(1966): 3.
Caner, Hayri. “Türk Sineması Ne Olacak?” (What Will Turkish Cinema Be?). Sinema
Ekspres 7 (1964): 9.
Cantek, Levent. “Türkiye’de Mısır Filmleri” (Egyptian Films in Turkey). Tarih ve
Toplum (History and Society) 204 (2000): 31-38.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged
Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Cezar, Mustafa. Interview by Canan Suner and Sedat Balkır. In Ahmet Öner Gezgin ed.
Akademi’ye Tanıklık 1: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi’ne Bakışlar, Resim-Heykel
(Witnessing the Academy I: Views on the Academy of Fine Arts, PaintingSculpture). Istanbul: Bağlam Yayıncılık, 2003.
Cohan, Steven. “Case Study: Interpreting Singin’ in the Rain” in Christine Gledhill and
Linda Williams eds. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.
Constantinidis, Stratos E. “Greek Film and the National Interest: A Brief Preface.”
Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18 (2000): 1-12.
Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film. 4th Ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton
and Company, 2004.
Coş, Nezih. “Tatlıses Sineması ve Ayşem” (The Cinema of Tatlıses and Ayşem).
Video/Sinema 7 (1984): 18-19.
Çakmaklı, Yücel. Interview by Savaş Arslan. 2002.
Çalapala, Rakım. “Türkiye’de Filmcilik” (Filmmaking in Turkey), in Filmlerimiz (Our
Films). Istanbul: Yerli Film Yapanlar Cemiyeti Yayını, 1947.
356
Çeviker, Turgut. “Genelev Kadınlarıyla Sinema Soruşturması” (An Interview on Cinema
with Women Working in Brothels). Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 18 (1974): 3541.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
5th Ed. Trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994.
Demirci, Cihan. Araya Parça Giren Yıllar (The Years of Montaged Scenes). Istanbul:
İnkılap Yayınları, 2004.
Denizot, Philippe. “Türk Sineması ya da Çarşı Mitolojisi” (Turkish Cinema or Bazaar
Mythology). Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 4 (1973): 3-6.
Derman, Deniz. “Yönetmen: Bilge Olgaç” (The Director: Bilge Olgaç). 25. Kare (25th
Frame) 19 (1997): 31-34.
Doğan, Yalçın. “Silah Bir, Sinema İki” (Number One: Guns, Two: Cinema). Hürriyet
(Freedom). 20 July 2004.
Dorsay, Atilla. “An Overview of Turkish Cinema from its Origins to the Present Day” in
Christine Woodhead ed. Turkish Cinema: An Introduction. London: University of
London SOAS Turkish Area Study Group Publications, 1989.
_____ “Antalya 89, Elde Var İyimserlik” (Antalya 1989, What Is Left Is Optimism).
Beyazperde (White Screen) 1 (1989): 26-29.
_____ 12 Eylül Yılları ve Sinemamız (The Years of September 12 and Our Cinema).
Istanbul: İnkılap Yayınları, 1995.
_____ Yılmaz Güney Kitabı (Yılmaz Güney Book). Istanbul: Güney Yayınları, 2000.
“Ebediyete Kadar” (Until Eternity). Akis (Reflection/Echo) 96 (March 10, 1956): 17.
357
Eğilmez, Ertem. “Ertem Eğilmez’le Namuslu bir Söyleşi” (A Namuslu (lit. honorable)
Interview with Ertem Eğilmez). Interview by Vecdi Sayar. Video/Sinema 4
(1984): 36-39.
Eğilmez, Ertem ve Sadık Şendil. “Ertem Eğilmez ve Sadık Şendil’le Konuşma” (A
Conversation with Ertem Eğilmez and Sadık Şendil). Interview by Engin Ayça
and Nezih Coş. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 12 (1974): 16-33.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama”
in Christine Gledhill ed. Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and
the Woman’s Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987.
Erakalın, Ülkü. Film Karelerine Gizlenen Anılar (Memories Hidden in Film Frames).
Istanbul: Arıtan Yayınevi, 1999.
Erdoğan, Nezih. “Ulusal Kimlik, Kolonyal Söylem ve Yeşilçam Melodramı” (National
Identity, Colonial Discourse and Yeşilçam Melodrama). Toplum ve Bilim (Society
and Science) 67 (1995): 178-198.
_____ “Narratives of Resistance: National Identity and Ambivalence in the Turkish
Melodrama between 1965 and 1975.” Screen 39:3 (1998): 259-271.
_____ “Violent Images: Hybridity and Excess in The Man Who Saved the World” in
Karen Ross, Deniz Derman and Nevena Dakovic eds. Mediated Identities.
Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2001.
Erdoğan, Nezih and Deniz Göktürk. “Turkish Cinema” in Oliver Leeman ed. Companion
Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film. London and New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Erdoğan, Nezih and Dilek Kaya. “Institutional Intervention in the Distribution and
Exhibition of Hollywood Films in Turkey.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television 22:1 (2002): 47-59.
Erickson, Hal. “Biography of Hugo Haas from All Movie Guide.” 2005. Available online
at http://entertainment.msn.com/celebs/celeb.aspx?mp=b&c=315796.
358
Erkal, Genco. “Genco Erkal.” Interview by Osman Balcıgil. Video/Sinema 1 (1984): 16.
Erksan, Metin. “Metin Erksan’la bir Konuşma” (A Conversation with Metin Erksan).
Interview by Rekin Teksoy. Sosyal Adalet (Social Justice). 2 April 1963.
_____ Atatürk Filmi (The Atatürk Film). Istanbul: Hil Yayın, 1989.
Erman, Hürrem. “Yapımcı Hürrem Erman’la Konuşma” (A Conversation with Producer
Hürrem Erman). Interview by Nezih Coş, Atilla Dorsay and Engin Ayça. Yedinci
Sanat (Seventh Art) 6 (1973): 22-37.
Evren, Burçak. Sigmund Weinberg: Türkiye’ye Sinemayı Getiren Adam (Sigmund
Weinberg: The Man Who Brought Cinema to Turkey). Istanbul: Milliyet
Yayınları, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Ferrington.
Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967.
“Filim Bitti” (The Film is Over). Beyazperde (White Screen) 5 (1990): 14.
“Filmcilik: Şimdi Ne Olacak?” (Filmmaking: What Will Happen Now?) Akis (Echo)
(1958): 32-33.
Franko, Ayşe. “Turkey” in William Luhr ed. World Cinema Since 1945. New York:
Ungar, 1987.
Fuat, A. “Sinemada Çıplaklık” (Nudity in Cinema). Holivut (Hollywood) 46 (1934): 3.
Gavin, Kit. “Homo Eroticus.” Available online at http://www.cinemanocturna.com/homoeroticus_review.htm.
359
Gazetas, Aristides. An Introduction to World Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Company, 2000.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Co., 1983.
Georgakas, Dan. “Greek Cinema for Beginners: A Thumbnail History.” Film Criticism
27:2 (2002-2003): 2-8.
Gledhill, Christine. “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation” in Christine Gledhill ed.
Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film.
London: British Film Institute, 1987.
_____ “Rethinking Genre” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams eds. Reinventing
Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.
Gökmen, Mustafa. Başlangıçtan 1950’ye Kadar Türk Sinema Tarihi ve Eski Istanbul
Sinemaları (A History of Turkish Cinema from its Beginning to 1950 and Old
Istanbul Film Theaters). Istanbul: Denetim Ajans Basımevi, 1989.
_____ “Sponek Birahanesi” (The Beer Hall of Sponek). Klaket (Clapboard) 13 (2000):
59-60.
Gülyüz, Aram. “Erotik Film Çekmek Bana Zevk Verdi” (Shooting Erotic Films Gave me
Pleasure). Interview by Aynur Erdem. Sabah (The Morning). 15 October 2004.
Güney, Yılmaz. “Yılmaz Güney Arkadaş’ı Anlatıyor” (Yılmaz Güney Narrates Friend)
Interview by Nezih Coş and Engin Ayça. Yedinci Sanat 18 (1974): 3-7.
_____ “Yılmaz Güney’le Konuşma II” (Conversation with Yılmaz Güney II). Interview
by Nezih Coş and Engin Ayça. Yedinci Sanat 19 (1974): 3-17.
Gür, Ceyhan. Zeki Müren: Şimdi Uzaklardasın (Zeki Müren: You Are Now Far Away).
Istanbul: AD Yayıncılık, 1996.
360
Gürata, Ahmet. “Adolf Körner: Müteahassıs mı? Şovmen mi?” (Adolf Körner: Expert or
Showman?) Geceyarısı Sineması 9 (2001): 26-27.
Gürbilek, Nurdan. Vitrinde Yaşamak (To Live in the Shop Windows). 3rd ed. Istanbul:
Metis Yayınları, 2001.
Güvemli, Zahir. Sinema Tarihi: Başlangıcından Bugüne Türk ve Dünya Sineması (A
History of Cinema: Turkish and World Cinema from its Beginning to Today).
Istanbul: Varlık Yayınları, 1960.
“Haberler” (News). Artist 49 (1961): 29.
“Halk Soruşturması 3: Balıkesir ve Sakarya” (Public Survey 3: Balıkesir and Sakarya).
Interviews by Zeki Yusuf Borazan and Merdiye Akyüz. Yedinci Sanat 9 (1973):
34-50.
Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the
Medieval Near East. 3rd ed. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,
1996.
Havaeri, Seyfi. Interview by Savaş Arslan. 2002.
Hazar, Özdemir. “Yeşilçam’ın Girdiği Çıkmaz” (The Dead-end Yeşilçam Is in).
Akademik Sinema (Academic Cinema) 3 (1969): 31-34.
“Hollywood’a Dönen Şu Istanbul” (This Istanbul Which Turned into Hollywood). Yıldız
(Star) 37 (1951): 9, 24.
İleri, Selim. “Kerime Nadir Adı Teminattır” (The Name Kerime Nadir Is a Guarantee).
Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 2 (1973): 10-13.
İnanç, Çetin. “Çetin İnanç ile Söyleşi” (An Interview with Çetin İnanç). Interview by
Metin Demirhan in Fantastik Türk Sineması (Turkish Fantastic Cinema) by
Giovanni Scognamillo and Metin Demirhan. Istanbul: Kabalcı Yayınevi, 1999.
361
İnanoğlu, Türker. “Video ve Sinema Birbirine Düşman Değil” (Video and Cinema Are
not Enemies). Video/Sinema 1 (1984): 68.
Jusdanis, Gregory. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National
Literature. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Kamil, Şadan. “Şadan Kamil ve Bir Dönemin Sineması” (Şadan Kamil and the Cinema
of an Era). Interview by Ali Sekmeç and Okan Ormanlı. Klaket (Clapboard) 14
(2000): 14-22.
Kaplan, Yusuf. “Turkish Cinema” in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith eds. The Oxford History of
World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kasaba, Reşat. “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities” in Sibel Bozdoğan and
Reşat Kasaba eds. Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey. Seattle
and London: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Kayalı, Kurtuluş. “Türk Sinemasında Med Manzaraları” (Views of Low Tides in Turkish
Cinema). Beyazperde (White Curtain) 6 (1990): 7.
Kenç, Faruk. Interview by Hülya Arslanbay. Antrakt (Intermission) 24 (1993): 25-27.
Keskin, Sacide. Interview by Engin Ayça. Video/Sinema (Video/Cinema) 11 (1985): 8283.
Keyder, Çağlar. “Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s” in Sibel
Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba eds. Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in
Turkey. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Koçak, Orhan. “Ataç, Meriç, Caliban, Bandung: Evrensellik ve Kısmilik Üzerine bir
Taslak” (Ataç, Meriç, Caliban, Bandung: A Sketch on Universality and
Particularity) in Sabahattin Şen ed. Türk Aydını ve Kimlik Sorunu (Turkish
Intellectuals and the Problem of Identity). Istanbul: Bağlam, 1995.
362
Koçyiğit, Hülya. “Hülya Koçyiğit.” Interview by Osman Balcıgil. Video/Sinema 1
(1984): 14-15.
Konuralp, Sadi. Film Müziği: Tarihçe ve Yazılar (Film Music: History and Writings).
Istanbul: Oğlak Yayınları, 2004.
Kudret, Cevdet. “Orta Oyununun Oyun Yeri ve Bölümleri” (The Playground and Parts of
Theater-in-the-Round), in Abdulkadir Emeksiz ed. Orta Oyunu Kitabı (The Book
of Theater-in-the-Round). Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2001.
Kuyucaklı, Orhan. “Geçtiğimiz Film Sezonuna Umumi Bir Bakış” (A General Look at
the Last Film Season). Artist 47 (1961): 3.
Maccinema: The Macedonian Cinema Information Center. “Year 1905.” Available online
at http://www.maccinema.com/e_hronologija_detali.asp.
Makal, Oğuz. Sinemada Yedinci Adam (A Seventh Man in Cinema). 2nd Ed. İzmir: Ege
Yayıncılık, 1994.
Maraş, Gökhan. “ANAP Kırşehir Milletvekili Gökhan Maraş: Amerika’daki Sığır
Çobanlarının Kültürüyle Bizim Kültürümüz Kıyaslanamaz” (Motherland Party’s
MP from Kırşehir, Gökhan Maraş: You Cannot Compare our Culture to That of
American Cowboys). Interview by Nilgün Gürkan Aslanbay. Beyazperde (White
Screen) 3 (1990): 10-13.
Mekin, Ahmet. “Bizim Sokağın İnsanları” (The People of Our Street). Artist 38 (1961):
17.
Moran, Berna. Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış 2 (A Critical Look at the Turkish
Novel 2). 3rd Ed. Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1994.
_____ Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış 1 (A Critical Look at the Turkish Novel 1). 5th
Ed. Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1995.
363
Muvahhit, Bedia. “Bedia Muvahhit’le Konuşma” (A Conversation with Bedia Muvahhit).
Interview by Atilla Dorsay and Engin Ayça. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 9
(1973): 90-93.
_____ “Bedia Muvahhit’le Konuşma” (A Conversation with Bedia Muvahhit). Interview
by Atilla Dorsay and Engin Ayça. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 10 (1973): 94-100.
Müren, Zeki. “Zeki Müren ve Renkli Filmi” (Zeki Müren and His Color Film). Interview
by Hayri Caner. Yıldız (Star) 12 (1963): 11-13.
_____ “Zeki Müren’den bir Demet” (A Bouquet from Zeki Müren). Interview reported
by Ender Uslu. 1992. Available online at
http://www.sanatgunesi.com/bir_cift_soz_ender_uslu.htm.
Nutku, Özdemir. “Tanzimat’ın Getirdiği bir Tür: Tuluat Tiyatrosu” (A Genre that
Tanzimat Brought: Tuluat Theater). 2000. Available online at
http://www.tiyatronline.com/Tuluat.htm.
Okan, Tuncan. “Zam Kuyruğundaki Sinemacılar” (The Filmmakers in the Line of Price
Rise). Kim (Who) 12 (1958): 36-37.
Onaran, Alim Şerif. “Muhsin Ertuğrul’un Operet Filmleri” (The Operetta Films of
Muhsin Ertuğrul). Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 9 (1973): 74-82.
_____ Muhsin Ertuğrul’un Sineması (The Cinema of Muhsin Ertuğrul). Ankara: Kültür
Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1981.
_____ Lütfi Ö. Akad. Istanbul: Afa Yayınları, 1990.
_____ Türk Sineması: I. Cilt (Turkish Cinema: Volume I). Ankara: Kitle Yayınları,
1994.
Onat, M. Sami. “Yerli Filmlerimiz” (Our Domestic Films). Beyazperde (White Screen) 3
(1990): 52.
364
Oral, Ünver. İbişli Kukla Oyunlarımız (Our Puppet Plays with İbiş). Istanbul: Kitabevi,
2002.
Oran, Bülent. “Senaryo Yazarı Bülent Oran’la Konuşma” (A Conversation with the
Script Writer Bülent Oran). Interview by Atilla Dorsay, Nezih Coş, and Engin
Ayça. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 3 (1973): 15-26.
_____ Interview by Savaş Arslan. 2002.
Önal, Safa. Interview by Savaş Arslan. 2002.
Özdemir, Cüneyt. “Açıkoturum Notları: Seksen Sonrası Türk Sineması” (The Notes from
Open Table: Turkish Cinema after the 1980s). Beyazperde (White Curtain): 6
(1990): 12-13.
Özder, Musa. “Toros Dağlarında Sinema Soruşturması” (An Survey of Cinema on the
Taurus Mountains). Interview by Osman Şahin. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 19
(1974): 50-53.
Özdeş, Oğuz. “Bu Sezonda Yerli Film Olarak Neler Göreceğiz?” (What Domestic Films
Are We Going to See in this Season?) Yıldız (Star) 37 (1951): 8-9, 24.
Özerdem, Mahir. “İtalyan Filmciliği ve Biz” (Italian Filmmaking and Us). Yıldız (Star)
60 (1954): 6.
Özgüç, Agah. “Beş Tavuk Bir Horoz” (Five Chickens, One Rooster). Yedinci Sanat
(Seventh Art) 16 (1974): 70.
_____ “Bir Yılın ‘91’ Ardından Türkiye” (Turkey After a Year, 1991). Antrakt
(Intermission) 4 (1992): 12-15.
_____ “1992’de Türk Sineması” (Turkish Cinema in 1992). Antrakt (Intermission) 16
(1993): 79-81.
365
_____ “Türk Sineması ’93” (Turkish Cinema, 1993). Antrakt (Intermission) 29 (1994):
12-17.
_____ Türk Film Yönetmenleri Sözlüğü (A Dictionary of Turkish Film Directors).
Istanbul: Afa Yayınları, 1995.
_____ Türk Filmleri Sözlüğü: 1991-1996 (A Dictionary of Turkish Films). Volume 3.
Istanbul: Sesam Yayınları, 1997.
_____ Türk Filmleri Sözlüğü: 1914-1973 and 1974-1990 (A Dictionary of Turkish
Films). Volumes 1 and 2. Revised 2nd ed. Istanbul: Sesam Yayınları, 1998.
_____ Türk Sinemasında Cinselliğin Tarihi (History of Sexuality in Turkish Cinema).
Expanded 2nd ed. Istanbul: Parantez Yayınları, 2000.
Özgüven, Fatih. “Male and Female in Yeşilçam: Archetypes Endorsed by Mutual
Agreement of Audience and Player” in Christine Woodhead ed. Turkish Cinema:
An Introduction. London: University of London, SOAS Turkish Area Study
Group Publications, 1989.
Özkan, Yavuz. “Yavuz Özkan: Sinemamız Kendi Dilini Yaratmanın Sabırsızlığını
Yaşamaktadır” (Our Cinema Experiences the Impatience of Creating its Own
Language). Antrakt (Intermission) 4 (1992): 65.
_____ “Bir Filmin Yaratılma Macerası” (The Adventure of a Film’s Creation). Antrakt
(Intermission) 16 (1993): 73.
Özkırım, Çetin A. “Yeşilçam Sokağından.” Sinema 59 (September 1959): 3.
Özön, Nijat. Türk Sinema Tarihi (A History of Turkish Cinema). Istanbul: Artist
Yayınları, 1962.
_____ İlk Türk Sinemacısı Fuat Uzkınay (Fuat Uzkınay, the First Turkish Filmmaker).
Istanbul: Türk Sinematek Derneği Yayınları, 1970.
366
_____ Karagöz’den Sinemaya, Türk Sineması ve Sorunları I: Tarih, Sanat, Estetik,
Endüstri, Ekonomi (Turkish Cinema and its Problems from Karagöz to Cinema I:
History, Art, Aesthetics, Industry, Economy). Ankara: Kitle Yayınları, 1995.
_____ Karagöz’den Sinemaya, Türk Sineması ve Sorunları II: Eleştirme, Eleştiri
Yazıları, Sinema ve Toplum, Denetleme, Sinema ve TV (Turkish Cinema and its
Problems from Karagöz to Cinema II: Criticism, Film Critiques, Cinema and
Society, Control, Cinema and Television). Ankara: Kitle Yayınları, 1995.
_____ “Nijat Özön’le Söyleşi” (An Interview with Nijat Özön). Görüntü (Image) 5
(1996): 2-14.
Özuyar, Ali. Sinemanın Osmanlıca Serüveni (The Adventure of Cinema in Ottoman).
Ankara: Öteki Yayınevi, 1999.
Pütün, Elif Güney. “Pof Pof Diye Yürür, Palyaço Hareketleri Yapardı” (She Used to
Shuffle and Act Like a Clown). Interview by Melda Davran. Milliyet
(Nationality). (14 September 1999).
Roudometof, Victor. “Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the
Macedonian Question.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14:2 (1996): 253-301.
Sason, Leon. “Türkiye’de Sinema” (Cinema in Turkey). Artist Yıllığı (The Yearbook of
Artists) (1961): 19-50.
_____ “Bir Film Nasıl Çevrilir?” (How is a Film Shot?) Artist Yıllığı (The Yearbook of
Artists) (1961): 101-5.
Sayman, Aydın. “Türk ve Dünya Sinemasının Konumu” (The Position of Turkish and
World Cinemas). Gerçek Sinema (True Cinema) 2 (1973): 11-20.
Scognamillo, Giovanni. Scognamillo, Giovanni. “Köy Filmleri” (Village Films). Yedinci
Sanat (Seventh Art) 4 (1973): 8-14.
367
_____ “Türk Sinemasında Yabancı Uyarlamalar” (Foreign Adaptations in Turkish
Cinema). Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 9 (1973): 61-73.
_____ Türk Sinemasında Altı Yönetmen (Six Directors of Turkish Cinema). Istanbul:
Türk Film Arşivi Yayını, 1973.
_____ Cadde-i Kebir’de Sinema (Cinema in Cadde-i Kebir). Istanbul: Metis Yayınları,
1991.
_____ Türk Sinema Tarihi: 1896-1997 (A History of Turkish Cinema). 3rd and expanded
ed. Istanbul: Kabalcı Yayınevi, 1998.
Scognamillo, Giovanni and Metin Demirhan. Fantastik Türk Sineması (Turkish Fantastic
Cinema). Istanbul: Kabalcı Yayınevi, 1999.
_____ Erotik Türk Sineması (Turkish Erotic Cinema). Istanbul: Kabalcı Yayınevi, 2002.
Sconce, Jeffrey. “Trashing the Academy.” Screen 36:4 (Winter 1995): 371-393.
Sekmeç, Ali. “Faruk Kenç’i Kaybettik” (We Lost Faruk Kenç). Klaket (Clapboard) 15
(2001): 4-7.
“Sesli Filmlere Dair” (Concerning Sound Films). Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema Newspaper)
7 (1929): 7.
Seyirci. “Yaşasın Sesli Film!” (Long Live Sound Film!) Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema
Newspaper) 20 (1929): 4.
“Seyircisizlik ve Kapanan Sinemalar” (The Lack of Spectators and the Film Theaters
Closing Down). Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 16 (1974): 63.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the
Media. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
368
“Sinema Biletleri Pahalıdır!” (Film Tickets are Expensive!) Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema
Newspaper) 19 (1929): 10.
“Sinema Kanunu Çıkmazsa 1968’de Türk Sineması Batacak” (The Turkish Cinema Will
Go Bankrupt in 1968 if the Cinema Law is not Passed). Sinema Postası (Courier
of Cinema) 256 (1967): 9.
“Sinema: Meydanı Boş Bulanlar” (Cinema: Those Who Seized an Opportunity). Kim
(Who) 23 (1958): 30-31.
Sinema Yıldızları (Cinema Stars). Istanbul: Akşam Kitaphanesi, 1934.
“Sinemalar ve Seyirciler: Sinemalardan Fransızca Kalkmalıdır” (Cinemas and Spectators:
French must be Banned from Film Theaters). Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema
Newspaper) 20 (1929): 4.
“Sinemanın Para Babaları” (The Patrons of Cinema). Sinema Postası (Courier of
Cinema) 254 (1967): 10.
Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Sklar, Robert. Film: An International History of the Medium. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 2002.
Solelli, Sezai. Yıldız 1948 Yıllığı (1948 Yearbook of Yıldız). Istanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi,
1948.
Sorlin, Pierre. Italian National Cinema: 1896-1996. London and New York: Routledge,
1996.
Standage, Tom. “The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century
Chess-Playing Machine.” 2002. Available online at http://www.theturkbook.com.
369
Sunal, Ali Kemal. TV ve Sinemada Kemal Sunal Güldürüsü (The Kemal Sunal Comedy
in Television and Cinema). Istanbul: Om Yayınevi, 2001.
Sütüven, Seyit Ali. “Yılmaz Güney’in Sırrı” (The Secret of Yılmaz Güney). Mutlak Fikir,
Estetiği ve Sinema (Absolute Idea, its Aesthetics and Cinema) 1 (1977): 7-10.
Şasa, Ayşe. Yeşilçam Günlüğü (The Yeşilçam Diary). Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1993.
Şen, A. Fatih. “Bir Salgının Patolojik Anatomisi” (A Pathological Anatomy of an
Epidemic). Mutlak Fikir, Estetiği ve Sinema (Absolute Idea, its Aesthetics and
Cinema) 1 (1977): 11-13.
Tansuğ, Sezer. Çağdaş Türk Sanatı (Modern Turkish Art). 4th ed. Istanbul: Remzi
Kitabevi, 1996.
Taştepe, Nazif. “Set İşçileri ve Figüranlar Konuşuyor” (Stage Workers and Stunts
Speak). Interview by Osman Aslandere. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) 12 (1974):
15-19.
Tayfur, Ferdi. Interview. Video/Sinema 11 (1985): 82.
“Tenkit.” Sinema Gazetesi (Cinema Newspaper) 2 (1929): 3.
Thompson, Kristin. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” in Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen eds. Film Theory and Criticism. 5th Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999.
Tulgar, Kunt. Interview by Savaş Arslan. 2002.
Tuğba, Ahu and Nuri Alço. “Ahu Tuğba ve Nuri Alço İkilisi Yıllar Sonra Kamera
Karşısında” (The Pair Ahu Tuğba and Nuri Alço is in front of the Cameras after
Many Years). Interview by Şermin Sarıbaş. Hürriyet Pazar. (March 20, 2005).
370
“Türk Film Dostları Derneğinin İlk Toplantısı” (The First Meeting of the Association of
Turkish Cinephiles). Yıldız (Star) 92 (1952): 11.
Türk, İbrahim. Senaryo: Bülent Oran (Film Script: Bülent Oran). Istanbul: Dergah
Yayınları, 2004.
Türkali, Vedat. “Vedat Türkali ile Konuşma” (A Conversation with Vedat Türkali).
Interview by Nezih Coş, Abdullah Anlar and Engin Ayça. Yedinci Sanat (Seventh
Art) 16 and 17 (1974): 18-45 and 44-62.
_____ “Vedat Türkali ile Eski Filmler Üzerine” (On the Old Films, with Vedat Türkali).
Interview by Vecdi Sayar. Video/Sinema 3 (1984): 67-71.
Türkmen, Nihal. “Orta Oyununda Ehemmiyet Derecesine Göre Tipler” (According to
Their Grade of Importance, Types in Theater-in-the-Round), in Abdulkadir
Emeksiz ed. Orta Oyunu Kitabı (The Book of Theater-in-the-Round). Istanbul:
Kitabevi, 2001.
Vasilevski, Gjorgi. “History of the Macedonian Film.” Trans. by Zaharija Pavlovska.
Available online at
http://www.macedonia.co.uk/mcic/cultureandart/filmandtheatre/film.asp.
Vasudevan, Ravi. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2000.
Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theatre. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press Limited,
1992.
Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised” in Nick Browne ed. Refiguring American Film
Genres: Theory and History. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1998.
Wright, Jane. “Jewel is out of the Shadows.” 2005. Available online at
http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/030305/f030305_04.htm.
371
Yerli Film Yapanlar Cemiyeti (Domestic Filmmakers Association). “Cemiyetimizin
Maksat ve Gayeleri” (The Aims and Objectives of Our Association) in
Filmlerimiz (Our Films). Istanbul: Yerli Film Yapanlar Cemiyeti Yayını, 1947.
“Yerli Filmlerin Zaferi” (The Victory of Domestic Films). Yıldız (Star) 60 (1954): 3.
Yılmaz, Atıf. “Atıf Yılmaz ya da bir Sinemacının Çeşitlemeleri” (Atıf Yılmaz or the
Variations of a Filmmaker). Interview by Sungu Çapan. Video/Sinema 3 (1984):
36-38.
_____ “Türkiye’de Yeniden Politik Sinema Yapmanın Zamanı Geldi” (The Time to
Make Political Cinema in Turkey Has Come). Interview. Görüntü (Image) 6
(1997): 20-23.
Zürcher, Erik Jan. Turkey: A Modern History. London and New York: I. B. Tauris and
Co Ltd Publishers, 1994.
372