Cinema in Turkey

With over six thousand films, Turkey has produced more films than any other country in the Middle East or the Balkans. Despite its prolific and popular nature, this national film industry has often been denigrated as imitative, simplistic, and underdeveloped. Taking up precisely these critiques, Cinema in Turkey provides a critical history of feature cinema in Turkey, considering how this cinema developed modes of communication reflective of both existingtraditions and region-specific responses to modernization and nation-building.Focusing on both popular films and art cinema, this study deals with the history of cinema in Turkey, including not only its high point during the golden age of Yesilçam (as Turkey's popular film industry of the 1960s and 1970s is known), but also its early years and its current revival, the New Cinema of Turkey. This book not only provides the first comprehensive history of Turkish cinema in English, but also attempts to introduce a contemporary film-theoretical perspective to theexamination of Turkish cinema, viewing it in a broader framework that goes beyond the canonical concerns of existing film histories and their art and auteur cinema related perspectives.

Refreshing, thought-provoking and informative., 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., 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., 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.

Savas Arslan is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.