REMAKE, REMIX, RIP-OFF: ABOUT COPY CULTURE & TURKISH POP CINEMA – Review

Review by Mark Longden

If you’re a bad movie aficionado, then chances are your knowledge of Turkish cinema comes from bootleg copies of “Turkish Star Wars”, “Turkish Star Trek” or “Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-Man”; gleeful ignorers of copyright law and common sense. If you’re more of a cineaste, then you might be familiar with the dark, deliberately paced dramas of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. This documentary, REMAKE, REMIX, RIP-OFF: ABOUT COPY CULTURE & TURKISH POP CINEMA, while more about the former than the latter, gives a real flavour of its times and is a fascinating insight into an industry we in the West know very little about.

Turkish cinema is known as Yeşilçam (literally: Green Pine), named after the Istanbul street which housed the most famous cinema and the offices of many production companies. At its height, 300-400 movies a year were produced there, from the 1950s to the coup of 1980; production continued after the coup, but at a slower pace, but was largely killed off by the 1980s pivot to TV, with a few of the film experts interviewed putting the date of its death around 1990. There was also a period, roughly mirroring the death throes of the American drive-in, where all cinemas showed was porn – although it seems some of the normal Turkish directors and stars took part in some “fruitier” entertainments.

The people interviewed, retired directors and actors, are very honest about their former profession, discussing how there are maybe only 31 (or 36, no-one is sure) different stories in the world, and all their work fits into one of those stories. There’s a wonderful montage which illustrates this – all the movies which used a certain waterfall for a love scene; love stories where one person had a terminal illness; revenge stories; musicals; and so on. Over and over again, with almost no differentiation between them. The writer / director of this documentary, Cem Kaya, has a great eye for a shot, and must have watched thousands of movies to find these segments that linked so perfectly.

What this era of Turkish cinema is most famous for is its copyright-ignoring remakes of movies from the West. “3 Dev Adam” – aka “Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-Man” is genuinely bonkers, portraying Spider-Man is an insane villain who loves decapitating people, and the great Mexican wrestling legend Santo as an oddball who likes shoving things down his pants.

My favourite, though, is “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam” (aka The Man Who Saved the World). Best known to English speaking bad movie fans as “Turkish Star Wars”, it uses whole scenes from George Lucas’s epic, while having a plot that is nothing like it at all. In fact, the end of it is our brave hero protecting space-Muslims from a sort of rough Darth Vader approximation by, er, chopping him in half with his magic gloves. It features either footage or music from 19 different American movies (!) but despite its reputation in these parts, several movie experts / bloggers who are interviewed are very generous towards it, citing its bizarre structure and energy as things to enjoy.

Its writer / star, Cüneyt Arkın, and director, Çetin İnanç, are two of the main talking heads in “Remake Remix Rip-Off”, and their stories are brilliant, a real insider’s view of an industry which had no money (there were only three scriptwriters in Turkey, apparently, so the reliance on outside stories when making 300 movies a year is perhaps more understandable); no health and safety laws (Arkin’s discussion of stunts which nearly went catastrophically wrong is amazing for its matter-of-factness) and no copyright.

While in one sense a celebration of that industry, Kaya is careful to show the context in which it operated, too. With so little money or protection, unions would try and organise and there would be huge protests at the appalling conditions. He also links that to the modern world – modern Turkish TV serials are two hours a week, and the budgets aren’t great, leading to protests on International Workers Day from people who would quite like them to be shorter so they can have a life, or not die of exhaustion.

The segment on the coup of 1980, where a military dictatorship engineered a crisis between left and right, using right-wing paramilitary groups then killing the leading members of both sides when they came to power, is dealt with honestly too (as this documentary was being made, the leaders of that coup had just been arrested, tried and imprisoned by Turkish courts). Filmmakers who’d made serious movies found censorship under the new regime for all sorts of strange reasons – one, a remake of “Bonnie and Clyde”, was censored because “bank robberies don’t happen in Turkey”. Directors would retreat from making naturalistic films into crazier entertainments, which is why we got some of the weird and wonderful movies we did.

Çetin İnanç makes the excellent final point that America is much more economically successful than Turkey, which made it a great deal easier for them to export their cultural products. There’s no market for bargain-basement hall-of-mirrors cover versions of popular US movies any more, and that’s sad for us all.

Hopefully, “Remake Remix Rip-Off” will be coming to a film festival near you very soon. It comes from a place of passion – for the country, for the movies, and for the people involved in creating all this insane entertainment. Wholeheartedly recommended.