The Turkish paradox
Turkey became aware of the invention of the Lumière brothers almost immediately, whose film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station was shown in Istanbul as early as 1896. The modernization undertaken by Mustafa Kemal when he came to power in 1923 defined other priorities than the development of a film industry. Until 1939, there was only one truly active director in Turkey, Muhsin Ertuğrul, who was at the helm of a Greek-Turkish production, The Wrong Way released in 1933, intended to bring together two countries undermined by years of war. Foreign productions made a few incursions into Istanbul, such as Journey to the Land of Fear (Norman Foster, 1943), a spy story about an American engineer who has to deal with Nazi agents, to which Orson Welles, a great globetrotter, contributed a lot. The Mask of Dimitrios (Jean Negulesco, 1943), also based on a novel by Eric Ambler, again explores Istanbul and its underworld. At the end of the Second World War, the film industry suddenly experienced an extraordinary boom, which placed Turkey among the world's leading producers, which was not without some paradoxes: the production, although plethoric until the 1970s, was not really disseminated outside its own borders, and was characterized by a genre cinema, willingly eccentric, with rushed finishes, which was accompanied by the establishment of a real star system. The titles of Hassan the Jungle Orphan (Orphan Atadeniz, 1953), also known as Tarzan in Istanbul, or Dracula in Istanbul (Mehmet Muhtar, 1953), or the sub-genre that has been nicknamed the "kebab western" give an idea of the inspiration that prevailed at the time, which does not mean that the films were not interesting. Curiously, the 1970s saw a wave of erotic films, which the military coup of 1980 put an end to and which today have no more than a curiosity value. In the meantime, the second James Bond film, Kiss from Russia (Terence Young, 1964), presented Western audiences with what were then only rare images of Istanbul: 007's journey took him to the Basilica Cistern or to Sulukule, the historic district of the Roma community, now razed. A new adaptation of Ambler, Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964), an old classic of the heist film, further roots in the imagination an Istanbul where spies and bandits of all kinds seem to have made a date. In the course of a turbulent century, Istanbul has in fact been a stopover for many travelers, as shown in Elia Kazan's America, America (1963), a long autobiographical fresco that evokes the Armenian genocide and the reasons that pushed many refugees, facing Turkish oppression, to emigrate. Alain Robbe-Grillet also shot a confusing, even abstruse film there, L'Immortelle (1963), but which pays full tribute to the splendor and uniqueness of the city.
A thousand and one lives of Istanbul
The important titles of Turkish cinema in the 1980s were more likely to invest in remote areas of the country, such as Yol, la permission, directed from prison by Yilmaz Güney, which examined the wounds of the Kurdish people and won the Palme d'Or in 1982. The authoritarian regime as well as an unprecedented economic crisis weakened Turkish cinema and it is really in the mid-1990s, then at the turn of the 2000s, that it experienced a new boom. At the forefront of this revival was Soubresaut dans un cercueil (1996) by Turkish Cypriot director Derviş Zaim, for example, about the tribulations of a petty criminal through an Istanbul stripped of all glamour. More, if not overly, stylized, Hammam the Turkish Bath (Ferzan Özpetek, 1997), featuring a legendary hotel, the Pera Palace, tells how an Italian man inherits a Turkish bath in Istanbul, and the homosexual loves that make him stay there. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's name has become synonymous with a voluntarily arid cinema that is not without its rewards: Uzak (2004) takes the viewer through a picturesque but unusual Istanbul, covered in a blanket of snow, and gives an almost palpable sensation of it.
Foreign blockbusters are making a comeback, whether it's with new James Bond movies, The World Is Not Enough (Michael Apted, 1999) or Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012) and its chase through the Grand Bazaar, or action movies like Taken 2 (Olivier Megaton, 2012), whose visions of the city are not without some clichés. At the very least, the city's rooftops and the exceptional, albeit touristy, views they show warrant a mention. A new adaptation of John le Carré's The Mole (Tomas Alfredson, 2011) revives the memory of an Istanbul nest of spies, the lot of cities placed at the crossroads of civilizations.
The Turkish diaspora in Germany has given rise to directors who return to their roots, such as Fatih Akin in his documentary on the Istanbul music scene: Crossing the Bridge - The Sound of Istanbul (2005). His second film, Julie in July (2000), already led his hero, at the end of an eventful road movie on the shores of the Bosphorus and Head-on (2004), Golden Bear in Berlin, oscillated between Hamburg and Istanbul. Two Girls (Kutluğ Ataman, 2005), set in part in the upscale Etiler neighborhood far from a postcard Istanbul, captures the concerns of two teenage girls, foreshadowing, if you will, the public and critical success of Franco-Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang (2015) about five sisters eager to escape a patriarchal power that suffocates them and whose journey comes to an end on the shores of the Bosporus. Cat lovers, of which there are many, may want to take a look at Kedi: Cats and Men (Ceyda Torun, 2016), a documentary that depicts the city and its hundreds of thousands of stray cats, boasting exceptional shots at ground level or through drones.
While Nuri Bilge Ceylan continues to collect awards (including the 2014 Palme d'Or for Winter Sleep), a word should be said about Turkish mainstream cinema, which attracts the majority of viewers to theaters: comedies, romantic or not, and action films are popular diversions in a troubled political and economic context, such as the films of star comedian Cem Yilmaz - the latest of which is called Ali Baba and the Seven Dwarfs (2015). Ölümlü Dünya (Ali Atay, 2018), with its improbable plot - a Stamboulian family runs a contract killing business alongside their restaurant - is an example of a cinema that unabashedly treads on Hollywood's toes. Biopics are also popular, such as Müslüm (Ketche and Can Ulkay, 2018), about the life of the famous singer Müslüm Gürses, or Champion (Ahmet Katiksiz, 2018), a love story in the world of horse racing. Turkey has jumped on the bandwagon of series, with Börü, a spectacular action series in which propaganda is not absent and which has been adapted to film. We recommend Bartu Ben (2019) by the talented Tolga Karaçelik, about the daily life and neuroses of a thirty-year-old gay man in Istanbul. In November 2020, the series Bir Başkadır, Ethos in French, released on the Netflix platform, was a real success in Turkey. This creation by Berkun Oya, playwright, director and producer, paints a dark picture of contemporary Turkish society with all the tensions that run through it, but without ever falling into cliché or caricature.
