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
erreur - structure retour
