Remix, Remake, Rip-Off: a film about Turkish pop cinema
This is the trailer of a documentary by Cem Kaya: Remake Remix Rip-Off, about the copy and remake culture in popular Turkish filmmaking. Although not immediately related to my explorations around language and translation, it gives some context to my post Tulips and Videotapes published in Fictions.
Below is a presentation from the official Vimeo page:
Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the biggest producers of film in the world even though its film industry, Yeşilçam, didn’t have enough written material to start with. In order to keep up with the demand, screenwriters and directors were copying scripts and remaking movies from all over the world. Name any Western hit film, there's a Turkish version to it, be it Tarzan, Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, The Exorcist, Rambo, Superman or Star Wars. These quickly and low-budget produced look-alike movies were adapted to the taste of local audiences with huge success in the rural Anatolian hinterland. What they lacked in equipment and budget they compensated through excessive use of manpower both behind and in front of the camera:
If Luke Skywalker hits one time, Turkish action hero Cüneyt Arkın hits a hundred times - and we know, he means it!
In Istanbul Cem Kaya met with the fastest working directors, the most practical cameramen and the most hardheaded actors to have a closer look into the country's tumultuous history of movie making.
Remix, Remake, Rip-Off took 7 years in making in which Kaya watched thousands of movies and conducted about a hundred interviews.
Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil
Writer, Literary Translator, Artist based in Amsterdam.
Canan (she/they) publishes The Attention Span Newsletter, taking the time to reflect, to analyse and to imagine our societies through writing, art and culture; and City in Translation, fostering discourse and conversations around the art of translation.