Cinema in Turkey
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Boasting nearly 7,000 titles, Turkey has produced more films than any other country in the Middle East or the Balkans. While the films enjoy great popularity at home, they haven't received the respect they deserve beyond their borders. Frequently, Turkey's cinema has been painted as imitative, simplistic or underdeveloped, casting it in shadow to the West. But things are finally changing. Turkish filmmakers like Nuri Bilge Ceylan are turning up in cinematheques worldwide. Critics are taking notice. And now general readers will have the overview they need to contextualize this remarkable body of work.Examining both popular genres and art films, Cinema in Turkey deals with the country's entire cinematic tradition, including not only its high point with Yesilcam-Turkey's popular film industry of the 1950s to the 1980s-but also its early years and current revival. In addition to surveying the cinematic landscape and recounting its history, Cinema in Turkey analyzes the arts conventions from which the first films emerged, region-specific permutations, and the cultural ramifications of Turkey's distinct forms of modernization and nation-building.
Features
- Presents an in-depth comprehensive survey of the overlooked but vibrant national cinema of Turkey
- Filled with over forty-five illustrations, encompassing a wide swath of Turkish film, history, and culture
- Offers the ideal introduction to Turkish cinema, which will appeal to cinephiles, general readers, and film students.
Reviews
"Refreshing, thought-provoking and informative."--Charlotte McPherson, Today's Zaman
"I believe that Cinema in Turkey is a groundbreaking work, the first of its kind in English that looks in detail at the conditions of production and exhibition that shaped Yesilcam's product over nearly five decades. It deserves to become a seminal text in Turkish film history."--Laurence Raw, Insight Turkey
"Full of fresh ideas, Arslan's book productively reconciles popular and art house cinema within this study of Turkey's national film tradition. It brings insights into matters of genre, alternative cultural geographies, cross-cultural adaptation, and transnational film historiography. And it successfully tackles the relationship between Western narratives and their appropriation within modernising peripheries." --Dina Iordanova, University of St. Andrews
"Ranging from international art films to the Turkish mainstream, from trash to high-art films, from feminist and auteur theory to Orientalism, from pornography to melodrama, from the Silent Era to New Media, this book is rich in its reference, deep in its understanding, and clear in its analysis." --Ronald Green, Ohio State University
About the Author(s)
Savas Arslan is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey. He is the coeditor of Media, Culture and Identity in Europe and the author of Melodrama (in Turkish).
