A Last Slice of Turkey

Having spent the week talking about various Turkish films, it's probably best to wrap it all up by briefly look at the background to their production.  It's easy to laugh at the crudeness of their production, but it is important to remember that many of them were made when the indigenous Turkish film industry was still in its infancy.  As mentioned earlier, most of these Turkish action and superhero movies don't feature optical effects as the technology and experience simply didn't exist in Turkey at the time.  In view of the restrictions and lack of resources the film makers had to work with, it is frankly amazing that any of these movies got made at all.  Rather like Ed Wood, who was so in love with the idea of film-making that, even though he had no discernible talent for it, that he was prepared to make them with no money or resources, I find the Turkish dedication to trying to replicate the sort of foreign film product they loved, in the face of impossible odds, admirable.  Although I'm no expert on the history of Turkish cinema, these types of film seemed to start appearing in significant numbers in the mid sixties, indicating that they might have been a response to the start of national TV broadcasting in the country.  In common with film industries everywhere, the Turkish producers and exhibitors had to fight back against this new rival by offering audiences something they couldn't see on TV: Turkish versions of their favourite film characters.

Which brings us to another important point about these films which co-opt Hollywood and European characters and tropes into a uniquely Turkisk cinematic vision - they represent an important milestone in Turkey's cultural development.  The fact is that we all like to see people who look and sound like us doing heroic stuff on screen.  Hence the appetite in Turkey for indigenous versions of Republic serials, superhero films, TV series like Star Trek etc, relocated to Turkey and featuring familiar Turkish stars.  Modern Turkey is still a relatively young nation, existing in its present form only since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War One, so these films represent part of the process of establishing their national identity.  The Turks have always been in an odd position geographically and culturally, seemingly never really accepted by Europe, which tended to refer to them as belonging to 'Asia Minor' rather than Europe.  Yet, at the same time, they weren't really part of Asia, geographically or culturally, nor were they part of the Arab Middle East.  By taking these various iconic characters from Europe and the US and making them their own, the Turks were  effectively asserting themselves as being the equals of their originators.  .Anyway, I've only scratched the surface of Turkish exploitation films this week.  There are many, many more, replicating just about any English language hit you can think of - there are at least two Turkish Rambo knock offs, a Turkish Rocky, the notorious Star Wars and Superman imitations, even a version of the Italian giallo movie The Strange Perversion of Mrs Warhd (1971).  While some are straightforward remakes, many work ingenious twists on their originals.  They are of variable quality, by the early eighties colour was the norm, (a response, perhaps, to Turkish TV going into colour in 1981), and production values, (while still incredibly cheap), improved.  I have to say that watching these films has left me with a deep and profound love for Turkish movie schlock.  All credit to 'The B-Zone' on Roku for showing them this past week - it was quite an experience!