Turkey

THE OTTOMAN AND EARLYREPUBLICAN PERIODS

The army officer Fuat Uzkinay's short documentary Ayastefanos'taki Rus Abidesinin Yikilisi (The Demolition of the Russian Monument at St. Stephen, 1914) is generally acknowledged as the first Turkish film. In 1915 General Enver, who was influenced by the practices of the film unit of the German army, established the Army Cinema Department with Weinberg as its first commissioner. This department and, later, the semiofficial organization the Veterans Association pioneered film production during the Ottoman period with war documentaries, newsreels, and a few features. In 1916 Weinberg attempted to make the first feature film, Himmet Aga'nin Izdivaci ( The Marriage of Himmet Aga ), but the shooting was interrupted with the conscription of the actors due to the Dardanelles War. The film was completed by Uzkinay in 1918. Pence ( The Claw, 1917) and Casus ( The Spy, 1917) by the journalist Sedat Simavi, were the first features shown to the public. The first period of Turkish feature filmmaking, consisting of eight films (mostly war and spy films and comedies adapted from French plays and Turkish novels), ended with the establishment of Turkey's first private studio, Kemal Film, in 1922.

Turkey entered a fast process of modernization with the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923. Within the framework of republican projects intended to create a new Turkish identity as well as a nation-state, government reforms distanced the country from its Islamic and Eastern past and brought it closer to contemporary western societies. Although the new republican state included music and performing arts in its modernization agenda, it did not touch cinema at all, nor did it attempt to press cinema into service in the construction of the new national identity. Lacking both state support and intervention, Turkish filmmaking began to take shape in the hands of Kemal Film and its director, Muhsin Ertugrul (1892–1979), one of the leading actors and directors of Turkish theater at the time.

Ertugrul dominated Turkish cinema until the late 1930s with some thirty films that all looked like plays on celluloid in terms of mise-en-scène and acting. After a transition period (1939–1950) during which theater's influence continued despite the end of Ertugrul's monopoly, Turkish films began to have a more cinematographic quality. Along with L̈utfi Ö mer Akad, who was the most significant director of the "cinematographers' period," Metin Erksan (b. 1929), Atif Yilmaz (b. 1926), Osman F. Seden (1924–1998), and Memduh Un (b. 1920), were the pioneers of the development of a cinematic language in Turkey during the 1950s.