Changing Turkey in a Changing World

Excerpt from Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy (2000) “Deep Nation: The National Question and Turkish Cinema Culture”, in Cinema and Nation edited by Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, Routledge, London, New York, Chapter 13.

It would not be an overstatement to say that the aspiring Turkish national cinema was grounded in a regime of severe censorship. The regulations that were introduced in 1939 (and which lasted until 1986) put film censorship in the hands of the Interior Ministry, implemented through a commission whose members were drawn from state departments, including the police and the military. The practices of the commission were particularly harsh, involving the scrutiny of the projects at the script stage, as well as the inspection of the final product (which meant the film-makers were bound to internalise the rules of censorship, not least for economic reasons). And central to its mission was both the protection and the projection of the national culture: Turkish censorship spoke the language of nationalism. So, as well as proscribing films which were ‘harmful to the order and security of the country’, or which ‘made propaganda on behalf of political, economic and social ideologies that are damaging to the national regime’, the censors were also on the lookout for anything that fell into the vague and expansive category of being ‘contrary to public decency, morality and national sentiments’ (Özön 1995:252). The censorship commission established itself as one of the firm guardians of Turkish national identity.

Film censorship provides a crucial index of the closure of the reflective sensibility of the Turkish nation. The acts of the censors tell us a great deal about the limits of the national imaginary: on the basis of what could not be afforded access into the national space of cultural and political reflection, we can see how the official nation could and wanted to imagine itself. In their decisions about what could be produced and distributed in Turkey, the censors worked ardently on behalf of the ideal image of their state and nation. The focus of their concerns changed over time. In the early days, a central issue concerned the representation of the Anatolian people. Thus, in 1956, they found it necessary to prevent a documentary film on the Hittites, made by Istanbul University, from being shown at the Berlin Film Festival, because the film made it seem as if Anatolia had not progressed over four thousand years: ‘This film shows that the primitive plough depicted in Hittite reliefs is the same as those used in Anatolia today’ (Özön 1995:274). In 1964, it was the turn of Metin Erksan’s Susuz Yaz (A Summer Without Water), which was refused official permission to participate at the same festival -though, it was unofficially exhibited, and won the Golden Bear award- because, as the head of the censorship commission later expressed it, the film ‘depicted rural life in Turkey in a “grotesquely” exaggerated way’ (Onaran 1994:112). Anatolia could only be seen in an ideal light. Thus, Metin Erksan’s first film Karanlık Dünya: Aşık Veysel’in Hayatı (Dark World: The Life of Aşık Veysel, 1952), was a problem because the wheat it depicted in the fields of Anatolia was too short (suggesting unproductivity)- these scenes were cut, and Erksan tells us, images of mechanical harvesters were also added at the request of the censors (from an American documentary) (MTTB 1973:33). These are just three examples from the many. As Nijat Özön notes, the line was always and everywhere clear and insistent: ‘Turkish land is not unproductive’, ‘Turkish peasants do not go around in bare feet’, ‘Turkish peasants do not wear torn clothes’ (1995:141).

Later, as the political climate of Turkey began to become more polarised, the focus shifted to deal with more serious social and political issues, with the issue of class becoming particularly sensitive. Yılmaz Güney’s film Umut (Hope, 1971), which depicts poverty and class exploitation in the south-eastern city of Adana, was banned outright in Turkey. And when the film was taken illegally out of the country to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Güney was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. The scenario of Yavuz Özkan’s Maden (The Mine, 1978), which portrayed the hardship and struggles of Turkish coal miners, was refused many times by the commission, which regarded it as a ‘film promoting discord, corrupting family life, and harmful to national customs and morals’ (Makal 1996a:141). The films of Erden Kıral in the late 1970s and early 1980s provoked the wrath of the censors for their portrayal of poverty in the south east. After a viewing of his film Hakkari’de bir Mevsim (A Season in Hakkari, 1983), which depicted the isolated lives of peasants in a Kurdish frontier village, the censorship commission claimed that ‘the dialogues weakened the authority of the state, and that the subject matter, which had been given a subversive treatment, was harmful to the integrity of both the state and the nation’ (ibid: 141). The fractures in the nation were becoming ever more apparent and dangerous, but still the censors demanded a cinematic image of national harmony and unity.