Restoring, preserving and exhibiting the neglected popular cinema of Turkey
26 September 2024
Spotlight on Arts & Humanities
Low-budget, unauthorised imitations and adaptations of Hollywood blockbusters have long been the butt of the joke. But remakes of popular classics such as Star Wars, The Exorcist, and Some Like It Hot indicate more than a disregard for copyright, as explored in our Spotlight on Arts & Humanities piece with research by Dr Iain Robert Smith from the Department of Film here at King’s.
The birth of remakesploitation
Remakesploitation films appeared in industries around the world throughout the mid-to-late 20th century. Turkey’s own brand of the phenomenon began in the 1950s with films like Tarzan Istanbul’da (Tarzan in Istanbul, 1952) and Drakula Instanbul’da (Dracula in Istanbul, 1952), but had grown to such an extent over the course of the 1960s that by the 1970s, Turkey’s film industry had become one of the biggest in the world, coming in third after the US and India.
A large majority of films released during this period, which has come to be known as the Yesilçam era of Turkish cinema, were made by a handful of private production houses situated on Yesilçam Street in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul. Key to their formula for commercial success were low budgets and fast turnarounds. By reworking titles which had already proven popular in the US, these studios were able to rapidly produce high quantities of films tailored to Turkish audiences that could guarantee financial returns in a domestic market.
Dr Smith explains that “this was a period in which international copyright laws were not being strictly enforced within Turkey. This meant that filmmakers were able to borrow plotlines, music and even footage from Hollywood films without fear of being sued.” Superman, Star Trek, The Exorcist, Batman and The Wizard of Oz represent just a few examples of titles remade by Yesilçam studios during this time.
Restoring, Preserving and Exhibiting
The Restoring, Preserving and Exhibiting the Neglected Popular Cinema of Turkey project saw Dr Smith collaborate with The Cinema Museum(London) and the Yunus Emre Institute to showcase popular films from this period in Turkish film history. Building upon the earlier digital restoration of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (also known as The Turkish Star Wars), the primary goal of this project was acquiring, scanning, and digitally restoring the 1973 Turkish superhero film Üç Dev Adam (Three Mighty Men), thereby contributing to the restoration and preservation of Turkey’s culturally significant but neglected popular cinema.
In Iain’s book, The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema, he highlights that this action-packed drama set in Istanbul, which revolves around the clash between Captain America, El Santo the Mexican wrestler, and Spiderman, stands out as one of the ‘most significant…[Turkish] comic book transpositions’ of its day.
The initiative aimed to draw wider attention to remakesploitation films as valuable subjects through which to discuss wider questions of globalisation and cultural exchange. Films such as the Turkish remakes of Star Trek (Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda, 1973) and The Exorcist (Şeytan, 1974), Dr Smith remarks, ‘”are often dismissed as kitsch objects of curiosity’”. This perspective fails to grasp the fact that such works often exhibit immense creativity and offer invaluable insights into how culture spreads and adapts across geographical boundaries.
Throughout the 20th century, the spread of American popular culture has often been seen as a hegemonic global force but my research argues for an understanding of what precisely happens when these American products are appropriated and reworked by other cultures. This is particularly significant in relation to Turkey given that this is a country that is often understood as a cultural ‘bridge’ between East and West. A film such as Metin Erksan’s Şeytan (1974), which is a near shot-for-shot remake of The Exorcist albeit with the iconography of Catholicism replaced with Islam, has much to tell us about transnational processes of cultural exchange and the geopolitical dynamics of power during this period.
Dr Iain Robert Smith
Turkish Star Trek poster
Film Festivals
In April 2022, Dr Smith curated a weekend film festival at The Cinema Museum in London which featured HD digital restorations of the Turkish reworkings of Star Wars, The Exorcist, Death Wish, Star Trek, and Some Like It Hot, and all with newly translated English subtitles. Following the festival, a workshop was organised involving guest scholars from Turkey, documentary film makers, and representatives from The Cinema Museum and the Yunus Emre Institute. An unexpected outcome from the workshop was that Dr Smith discovered a lead on a complete print of Üç Dev Adam held in a Turkish film archive. Up to this point, he has only had access to an incomplete 35mm print – a development that presented a significant obstacle to his digitisation efforts. Thanks to this chance discovery, efforts to restore this inventive contribution to Turkish cinema continue.
In September 2023, the festival travelled across the UK to the Star & Shadow Cinema in Newcastle. The following November, Dr Smith collaborated with the Seattle Turkish Film Festival.
Dr Smith is currently preparing for a screening of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (AKA Turkish Star Wars) at Grindfest 2024 at the Regent Cinema in Christchurch, Dorset whilst working on a larger project which will help restore, preserve and exhibit titles from a range of different national cinemas. By arguing for the significance of neglected popular cinema traditions, Dr Smith’s work helps to expand our understanding of the politics of cultural globalisation, at the same time shifting the parameters by which film history is typically assessed.
This project was funded by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King's.
