This German documentary on Turkish popular cinema impresses in many ways, from the number of behind and before the camera personnel interviewed and allowed to speak for themselves by the self-effacing filmmakers in this age of the celebrity documentarian; the insightful remarks of well-selected academics, critics and fans; the wider context given and, above all, the number of films cited and expertly edited together.
The narrative begins with a number of luminaries from the Turkish popular cinema of the 1960s through 1980s commenting upon the finite number of plots that exist. They disagree on the exact number but together set up the titular three-R’s approach as inevitable and universal. There’s nothing new under the sun, indeed, though together those three R’s lead to others -- recombination, reinterpretation, reinvigoration, reflexivity -- when considered through an industry making 300 films a year on extremely tight schedules and low budgets.
What does it mean to watch a Turkish version of The Exorcist, Seytan, for instance, when the religious context is that of Islam rather than Christianity? Or Dracula in Istanbul, when there is the historical context of the Ottoman Empire and the Romanian Vlad Dracul? Or a superhero romp in which Spiderman, albeit in a green and purple costume, is a sadistic killer? Clearly in each case it’s going to be a very different experience from what the viewer is used to.
This said, there are plenty of reference points outside the hegemonic frameworks of Hollywood popular cinema and European/World art cinemas, with Bollywood, Italy, and Hong Kong being three that immediately come to mind.
The elements that suggest themselves, in varying quantities, from these reference points include the importance of the family film, of melodrama, and of pleasing the audience, and the unimportance of elite critics and copyright.
The discussions of the material realities of film-making in Turkey even into the 1970s are fascinating. Filmmakers did not have daily rushes and would instead only see what had been filmed after shooting had concluded. Film stock was in short supply, often only allowing for a one shot/take approach. If a filmmaker was supplied with 30 reels for each of five films, he might well opt to use 25 reels to enable him to make six films. If stock was bought on the black market it was liable to have different chemical characteristics, making colour matching an unpredictable business. Cinematographers rarely had filters to compensate for these vagaries and might improvise by using coloured gels derived from sweets -- which would then tend to melt under the heat from the lights.
In sum, improvisation was the name of the game with the real triumph that of actually being able to get films made full stop. Or, rather, not just to get films made, but also made without regular fatalities when untrained stars were generally performing their own stunts.
Though both a great introduction to Turkish popular cinema and a valuable guide for future viewing for those who’ve already seen some of the better known examples, such as Turkish Star Wars/Rambo/Star Trek/Wizard of Oz, there were a few niggles.
The dates given occasionally seemed off. For example there are clips from what is identified as a version of Dillinger, credited as 1971. The clips are also used an illustration of another important aspect of the Turkish approach, namely the re-use of existing scores, in this case that for The Godfather. However the Godfather wasn’t released until 1972 and John Milius’s Dillinger until 1973.
The discussion of how the political situation impacted Turkish filmmakers was a bit confusing. Though this could well be a consequence of the 1960s through early 1980s seeing a series of military coups and re-esablishments of civilian government, beginning this part of the narrative with the 1980 coup probably didn’t help.
Still, any film that can supply you with the frisson of Enter the Dragon’s John Saxon being mistaken for Kriminal’s Glenn Saxson, only for the interviewee to correct himself and the filmmakers happily including this, cannot but be considered a must see, if you know what I mean...
Showing posts with label turkish exploitation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label turkish exploitation. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 June 2015
Friday, 15 March 2013
Dunyayi kurtaran adam / Turkish Star Wars
As Pete Tombs mentions in his book Mondo Macabro a group of French Situationists once took a martial arts film, marketed as Crush Karate, and performed a detournement upon it, changing its title to Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
This comes to mind because Dunyayi kurtaran adam – literally The Man who Saved the World, apparently– has, as its colloquial name of Turkish Star Wars, would suggest qualities that seem almost to be those of an unconscious detouernement of its better known counterpart.
While not an expert on Turkish popular cinema by any means, a few common factors have emerged in the films that I have seen, these generally being the ones that seek to imitate a Hollywood or other foreign success and rework it for the Turkish market.
First, Islam tends to play a more significant role. This makes sense in a film like The Turkish Exorcist, but seems out of place here as a substitute for Star Wars’ force.
Second, there is absolutely no shame in lifting footage or music from the source film or films – a factor that likely explains why Turkish Star Wars will never appear on a legitimate DVD release in the US or UK even if it were to be called Not Star Wars: A Turkish Parody in the manner of the tedious deluge of Not [insert name of intellectual property here]: An XXX Parody that US porn producers have inflicted upon us in the past few years.
Holy intellectual property law Batman!
Third, the Turkish films tend to be more violent than their foreign models. Here, for instance, there are various shots of people getting a mace or a spear in the face and another of a boy having his head being crushed by a robot.
The gore is, however, difficult to take seriously simply because it is so inept and comic-book/cartoon like in style.
This brings us on to a fourth difference, the one that relates most strongly to the detournement idea: the use that the filmmakers make of their appropriated footage and what they film themselves is just so at odds with European and North American stylistic norms as to appear inept.
A one-two of initial cheap shots occurs during the credits through the Musak type theme and the presence of two men with the unfortunate sounding forename of Kunt. Yes, this is a Kunt Film.
After just under two minutes of names scrolling upwards on a black screen in a reasonable no-budget version of Star Wars the action proper begins. Or, rather, an assemblage of footage of a rocket launch, the X-Wing crews preparing for the battle of Yavin, their Imperial counterparts on the Death Star and a voice-off that, over the course of two-and-a-half-minutes explains what is going on – if, that is, you speak Turkish. As the version I watched this time did not have subtitles, I could only go by memory and how it made a lot of religious references.
Then, at the four minute 30 second mark we are introduced to our two protagonists, both pilots of one of the various spacecraft seen flying about during the voice-off. Here we can see that the filmmakers have used back-projection to interpolate them in the place of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and so on. Unfortunately they also play some of the back-projected footage the wrong way and generally show such a lack of awareness of the rules of continuity editing that we cannot follow the battle nor determine which of the various spacecraft are being flown by our heroes.
While this is going on we are also introduced to the main antagonist. Here the filmmakers actually shoot some new footag eof their own, showing a cut-price Darth Vader alike and his various goons in their lair, one that looks more like the cavern-like interiors of the Mos Eisley cantina than the antiseptic ones of the Death Star.
Our two heroes than crash land on a planet. The landscape here is reasonably effectivve as an alien world, though the filmmakers then ruin the mood by showing the Sphinx, pyramids and a selection of hieroglyphs alongside reintroducing the voice-of-god narrator, making it seem that we have wandered into a Chariots of the Gods type documentary. At this point the musical accompaniment also switches to the portentous horror-movie tones of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue.
This proves, shortly afterwards, to be the cue for the introduction of a half dozen figures on horseback, They are either skeletons, in the manner of the Blind Dead, or merely men with skeleton designs, in the manner of the Marsh Phantoms of Captain Clegg.
Whatever the case, they are hostile and charging at our heroes. This leads to a long melee sequence in which our heroes prove adept at martial arts, while the filmmakers again illustrate their ineptitude by making it appear more as if the protagonists have been attacked by 20 or 30 riders. Taking two horses, they gallop to the accompaniment of the Indiana Jones theme. This is intercut with monsters jumping out in extreme close-up before us; exactly where these monsters are in relation to the two riders is unclear.
The men’s horses are then shot out from under them by some Cylon-B-grade robots and taken to a cliff-front settlement where the villains are torturing and murdering the locals, including the aforementioned head-crushing robot. On seeing this our heroes break free of their bonds and proceed to use their martial arts skills, as the Indiana Jones theme is again played.
Though suffering some injuries at the hands of the villains, they manage to drive them off and then have their wounds tended by a village woman. The playing of the Indiana Jones love theme and a shot-reverse-shot pattern of close-ups indicates an attraction between the woman and one of the men.
Love springs eternal, even in an unintentionally surreal Turkish Trash Masterpiece...
All this is only in the first twenty-odd minutes of the film. It runs an-hour-and-a-half.
This comes to mind because Dunyayi kurtaran adam – literally The Man who Saved the World, apparently– has, as its colloquial name of Turkish Star Wars, would suggest qualities that seem almost to be those of an unconscious detouernement of its better known counterpart.
While not an expert on Turkish popular cinema by any means, a few common factors have emerged in the films that I have seen, these generally being the ones that seek to imitate a Hollywood or other foreign success and rework it for the Turkish market.
First, Islam tends to play a more significant role. This makes sense in a film like The Turkish Exorcist, but seems out of place here as a substitute for Star Wars’ force.
Second, there is absolutely no shame in lifting footage or music from the source film or films – a factor that likely explains why Turkish Star Wars will never appear on a legitimate DVD release in the US or UK even if it were to be called Not Star Wars: A Turkish Parody in the manner of the tedious deluge of Not [insert name of intellectual property here]: An XXX Parody that US porn producers have inflicted upon us in the past few years.
Holy intellectual property law Batman!
Third, the Turkish films tend to be more violent than their foreign models. Here, for instance, there are various shots of people getting a mace or a spear in the face and another of a boy having his head being crushed by a robot.
The gore is, however, difficult to take seriously simply because it is so inept and comic-book/cartoon like in style.
This brings us on to a fourth difference, the one that relates most strongly to the detournement idea: the use that the filmmakers make of their appropriated footage and what they film themselves is just so at odds with European and North American stylistic norms as to appear inept.
A one-two of initial cheap shots occurs during the credits through the Musak type theme and the presence of two men with the unfortunate sounding forename of Kunt. Yes, this is a Kunt Film.
After just under two minutes of names scrolling upwards on a black screen in a reasonable no-budget version of Star Wars the action proper begins. Or, rather, an assemblage of footage of a rocket launch, the X-Wing crews preparing for the battle of Yavin, their Imperial counterparts on the Death Star and a voice-off that, over the course of two-and-a-half-minutes explains what is going on – if, that is, you speak Turkish. As the version I watched this time did not have subtitles, I could only go by memory and how it made a lot of religious references.
Then, at the four minute 30 second mark we are introduced to our two protagonists, both pilots of one of the various spacecraft seen flying about during the voice-off. Here we can see that the filmmakers have used back-projection to interpolate them in the place of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and so on. Unfortunately they also play some of the back-projected footage the wrong way and generally show such a lack of awareness of the rules of continuity editing that we cannot follow the battle nor determine which of the various spacecraft are being flown by our heroes.
While this is going on we are also introduced to the main antagonist. Here the filmmakers actually shoot some new footag eof their own, showing a cut-price Darth Vader alike and his various goons in their lair, one that looks more like the cavern-like interiors of the Mos Eisley cantina than the antiseptic ones of the Death Star.
Our two heroes than crash land on a planet. The landscape here is reasonably effectivve as an alien world, though the filmmakers then ruin the mood by showing the Sphinx, pyramids and a selection of hieroglyphs alongside reintroducing the voice-of-god narrator, making it seem that we have wandered into a Chariots of the Gods type documentary. At this point the musical accompaniment also switches to the portentous horror-movie tones of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue.
This proves, shortly afterwards, to be the cue for the introduction of a half dozen figures on horseback, They are either skeletons, in the manner of the Blind Dead, or merely men with skeleton designs, in the manner of the Marsh Phantoms of Captain Clegg.
Whatever the case, they are hostile and charging at our heroes. This leads to a long melee sequence in which our heroes prove adept at martial arts, while the filmmakers again illustrate their ineptitude by making it appear more as if the protagonists have been attacked by 20 or 30 riders. Taking two horses, they gallop to the accompaniment of the Indiana Jones theme. This is intercut with monsters jumping out in extreme close-up before us; exactly where these monsters are in relation to the two riders is unclear.
The men’s horses are then shot out from under them by some Cylon-B-grade robots and taken to a cliff-front settlement where the villains are torturing and murdering the locals, including the aforementioned head-crushing robot. On seeing this our heroes break free of their bonds and proceed to use their martial arts skills, as the Indiana Jones theme is again played.
Though suffering some injuries at the hands of the villains, they manage to drive them off and then have their wounds tended by a village woman. The playing of the Indiana Jones love theme and a shot-reverse-shot pattern of close-ups indicates an attraction between the woman and one of the men.
Love springs eternal, even in an unintentionally surreal Turkish Trash Masterpiece...
All this is only in the first twenty-odd minutes of the film. It runs an-hour-and-a-half.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Kartal Yuvasi / Turkish Straw Dogs
Turkish popular cinema is a weird thing. Whereas Italian filmmakers would emulate Hollywood product with a clear eye towards international sales, their Turkish counterparts appear to only care about the domestic market. Besides the extensive appropriation of musical cues and footage that would have likely incurred legal action, the area where this is most apparent is the importance of religion within them. Sometimes this works, as with 'The Turkish Exorcist', where the source film already has a strong religious component, such that a commutation from one faith, Christianity, to another, Islam, is all that's needed. Sometimes, as with 'Turkish Star Wars' AKA the Man who Saved the World, it leads to something bizarre.
Kartal Yuvasi is basically Straw Dogs, transposed to 1970s Cyprus. Anyone who has seen Sam Peckinpah's film will immediately recognise strong similarities between the two films, along with areas of divergence.
The narrative begins with Murat, a doctor, returning to his home village after many years away, accompanied by his English bride-to-be Mary/Maryam. In Peckinpah's film, by contrast it was American scientist David Sumner who was the stranger and his English bride Amy who was returning to her old home.
The main curveball thrown, however, is that Murat is not the protagonist of the film, with that role instead being taken by his mother, a character with no counterpart in Straw Dogs.
This in turn relates to the film's specific politics, in which the cultural clash between the teetotal Turkish Muslim Cypriots (hooray!) and the drunken Greek Christian Cypriots (boo!) is to the fore. The latter, you see, have forced almost all of the former out and soon have designs upon Mary, who is presented as a likely convert to Islam.
This propagandistic aspect makes the film harder to enjoy than the likes of Turkish Star Wars, in that it's almost as techically inept but also more difficult to laugh at or off.
The final scenes of the film are the most awkward in this regard, juxtaposing the mother's defence of the house against the Greeks with library footage of the Turkish military in action.
In the end it's questionable whether the film is really Straw Dogs Turkish style or The Eternal Jew Turkish style (the village idiot character is called Moses).
Kartal Yuvasi is basically Straw Dogs, transposed to 1970s Cyprus. Anyone who has seen Sam Peckinpah's film will immediately recognise strong similarities between the two films, along with areas of divergence.
The narrative begins with Murat, a doctor, returning to his home village after many years away, accompanied by his English bride-to-be Mary/Maryam. In Peckinpah's film, by contrast it was American scientist David Sumner who was the stranger and his English bride Amy who was returning to her old home.
The main curveball thrown, however, is that Murat is not the protagonist of the film, with that role instead being taken by his mother, a character with no counterpart in Straw Dogs.
This in turn relates to the film's specific politics, in which the cultural clash between the teetotal Turkish Muslim Cypriots (hooray!) and the drunken Greek Christian Cypriots (boo!) is to the fore. The latter, you see, have forced almost all of the former out and soon have designs upon Mary, who is presented as a likely convert to Islam.
This propagandistic aspect makes the film harder to enjoy than the likes of Turkish Star Wars, in that it's almost as techically inept but also more difficult to laugh at or off.
The final scenes of the film are the most awkward in this regard, juxtaposing the mother's defence of the house against the Greeks with library footage of the Turkish military in action.
In the end it's questionable whether the film is really Straw Dogs Turkish style or The Eternal Jew Turkish style (the village idiot character is called Moses).
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Aska susayanlar seks ve cinayet / Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder
One of the criticisms frequently leveled against Italian genre cinema is that it is derivative or imitative. As Luigi Cozzi said, producers and backers didn't want to know what your film was about but rather what films it was like. Yet few went as far down the copyright infringing route as Patrick Lives Again, that unofficial sequel to the original Patrick. The more usual approach was that taken by the various zombie films that appeared in the wake of Dawn of the Dead: It was clear what their inspiration was, but there was enough that was different and sometimes even original.
From what I've seen, Turkish exploitation cinema is another thing entirely. Most notoriously the so-called Turkish Star Wars uses footage from George Lucas's film, intercut with new material, and large chunks of score from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then there are the Spiderman, Superman and Batman films.
What we have here, meanwhile, is a Turkish version of Sergio Martino's 1970 giallo The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, with both plot and scenes lifted wholesale.
Even so, the filmmakers do make some changes and additions:
The maniac in the opening scene is more clearly visible, and identified by his victim before she dies as having a scar. This makes the Mrs Wardh character, Mine, suspect that he could be her ex-lover, the Jean one, Tarik, with whom she had an intense sado-masochistic relationship.
The Mr Wardh character, Metin, is sexually incapable, thus providing a further justification/rationale for his wife's falling for the George Corro one, Yilmaz, when she's introduced to him by her friend, the Carol Brandt one, Oya, at a party.
When Mine is blackmailed over this relationship and Oya goes to meet the blackmailer she isn't killed, merely chased and forced to drop the money.
In final third, the identities of the conspirators against Mine are also different, as is the ending.
The film is also differently paced, in that it runs barely an hour rather than 90 minutes. There's less emphasis upon drama and suspense and more upon action, with the general approach being to get straight into, through and out of each scene via the fastest route possible. Hollywood-style visual grammar and decoupage are conspicious by their absence. While it's not intentionally avant-garde, the effect is often just as jarring. This is particularly evident in the approach the filmmakers take to scoring, where a few bars culled from Morricone and Nicolai crime scores or an original chord, riff or beat almost sound like experiments in sampling, looping and layering.
The killer...
attacks...
there's going to be a lot of this...
what the... oh, it's a subjective shot from the victim's POV of a plane coming in to land...
and re-uniting Mine and Metin
You can also see that the filmmakers are trying to emulate their model(s) and inject a touch of visual inspiration, with zooms; odd angles; rapid cutting; or the likes of shots partly through liquid-filled glass or the maniac's dark glasses in the foreground; taken at ground level from behind a car; or of Mine framed through the gap between the handle and body of an old-style telephone.
More importantly in terms of their target audience -- read young Turkish men wanting Meral Zeren more than Edwige Fenech or to be Kadir Inanan rather than George Hilton -- the filmmakers don't skimp on the exploitation goods. Just about every woman quickly get undressed down to her underwear, often naked -- though, it should be noted, with no full-frontal nudity -- and, undoubtedly more disconcertingly for more sensitive types, abused, threatened or slashed up.
The scene that best exemplifies this is when a woman comes home, takes off her coat, revealing that she is naked beneath it, goes into the shower and is then slaughtered. Perhaps she was one of the women at an earlier party who was wearing a paper dress that got torn off. But there was no mention of a paper bra and panties.
For today's audiences, the film also has the attraction of providing cultural and historical insights, in terms of showing modern, swinging post-1960s Turks, along with no mentions whatsoever of Islam and little sense of moral disapproval. A lot of this stuff, whether fashions, decors, hairstyles, vehicles or dialogue is also, of course, highly entertaining from a kitsch/camp/trash perspective, if you're not interested in that sort of thing: “You smell of alcohol and cigarettes.” “A man should smell of alcohol and cigarettes.”
If you've never seen any gialli - unlikely for a reader of this blog, I know - then this probably isn't the Turkish exploitation film for you, but if you have and want to start exploring then its an intriguing and entertaining introduction that may well leave you wanting more...
From what I've seen, Turkish exploitation cinema is another thing entirely. Most notoriously the so-called Turkish Star Wars uses footage from George Lucas's film, intercut with new material, and large chunks of score from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then there are the Spiderman, Superman and Batman films.
What we have here, meanwhile, is a Turkish version of Sergio Martino's 1970 giallo The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, with both plot and scenes lifted wholesale.
Even so, the filmmakers do make some changes and additions:
The maniac in the opening scene is more clearly visible, and identified by his victim before she dies as having a scar. This makes the Mrs Wardh character, Mine, suspect that he could be her ex-lover, the Jean one, Tarik, with whom she had an intense sado-masochistic relationship.
The Mr Wardh character, Metin, is sexually incapable, thus providing a further justification/rationale for his wife's falling for the George Corro one, Yilmaz, when she's introduced to him by her friend, the Carol Brandt one, Oya, at a party.
When Mine is blackmailed over this relationship and Oya goes to meet the blackmailer she isn't killed, merely chased and forced to drop the money.
In final third, the identities of the conspirators against Mine are also different, as is the ending.
The film is also differently paced, in that it runs barely an hour rather than 90 minutes. There's less emphasis upon drama and suspense and more upon action, with the general approach being to get straight into, through and out of each scene via the fastest route possible. Hollywood-style visual grammar and decoupage are conspicious by their absence. While it's not intentionally avant-garde, the effect is often just as jarring. This is particularly evident in the approach the filmmakers take to scoring, where a few bars culled from Morricone and Nicolai crime scores or an original chord, riff or beat almost sound like experiments in sampling, looping and layering.
The killer...
attacks...
there's going to be a lot of this...
what the... oh, it's a subjective shot from the victim's POV of a plane coming in to land...
and re-uniting Mine and Metin
You can also see that the filmmakers are trying to emulate their model(s) and inject a touch of visual inspiration, with zooms; odd angles; rapid cutting; or the likes of shots partly through liquid-filled glass or the maniac's dark glasses in the foreground; taken at ground level from behind a car; or of Mine framed through the gap between the handle and body of an old-style telephone.
More importantly in terms of their target audience -- read young Turkish men wanting Meral Zeren more than Edwige Fenech or to be Kadir Inanan rather than George Hilton -- the filmmakers don't skimp on the exploitation goods. Just about every woman quickly get undressed down to her underwear, often naked -- though, it should be noted, with no full-frontal nudity -- and, undoubtedly more disconcertingly for more sensitive types, abused, threatened or slashed up.
The scene that best exemplifies this is when a woman comes home, takes off her coat, revealing that she is naked beneath it, goes into the shower and is then slaughtered. Perhaps she was one of the women at an earlier party who was wearing a paper dress that got torn off. But there was no mention of a paper bra and panties.
For today's audiences, the film also has the attraction of providing cultural and historical insights, in terms of showing modern, swinging post-1960s Turks, along with no mentions whatsoever of Islam and little sense of moral disapproval. A lot of this stuff, whether fashions, decors, hairstyles, vehicles or dialogue is also, of course, highly entertaining from a kitsch/camp/trash perspective, if you're not interested in that sort of thing: “You smell of alcohol and cigarettes.” “A man should smell of alcohol and cigarettes.”
If you've never seen any gialli - unlikely for a reader of this blog, I know - then this probably isn't the Turkish exploitation film for you, but if you have and want to start exploring then its an intriguing and entertaining introduction that may well leave you wanting more...
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