The
nation of Turkey probably owes Nino Rota nearly its entire GDP in unpaid
royalties. During the 1960s and 1970s there was no copyright law in Turkey, so
the rough and tumble film industry based on Istanbul’s Yeşilçam Street “borrowed”
liberally, but nothing was as frequently “re-purposed” as Rota’s “Love Theme
from The Godfather.” Cem Kaya surveys
the resulting knock-off films and the filmmakers who cobbled them together in
the awkwardly titled Remake, Remix,
Rip-Off: About Copy Culture and Turkish Pop Cinema (trailer here), which screens
today during the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.
Turkish
filmmakers ripped off just about every popular Hollywood film, including John
Ford westerns, even though they made no sense in a Turkish cultural context.
Easily the most notorious are the riffs on Stars
Wars and E.T. that lifted
extensive scenes from the original films—naturally, without prior permission.
Yes, they look absolutely crazy, but in a dingy, decidedly un-fun kind of way.
Even the most adventurous midnight movie patrons are unlikely to be tempted by Omer the Tourist Travels to Space, a
rather sad looking shadow of Star Trek.
Frankly,
the problem with Re-Re is that it is
neither fish nor fowl. It invites us to gawk at the cheesy clips on display,
yet is laboriously struggles to find some higher meaning in the phenomenon than
the obvious quick cash-ins. Unfortunately, Kaya completely lacks the self-aware
attitude that makes sly, thematically related documentaries like Mark Hartley’s
Not Quite Hollywood and Mike Malloy’s
Eurocrime! so raucously entertaining.
To make matters worse, the film often veers off on unrelated tangents, filming
leftist trade unions as they protest the current state of things in the
moderately reformed Turkish film industry.
Arguably,
there is something embarrassing about the Turkish film industry’s crass
compulsion to copy. While interview subject Centin Inanc was recycling Hollywood
films in ostensibly Turkish packages, the Japanese and Hong Kong film
industries were producing iconic works inspired by their national history and
folklore. Even Cambodia was regularly producing original fantastical Angkor epics,
which sadly did not survive the Communist Khmer Rouge insanity.