About Movie Poster |
| Evolution and Characterstics of Turkish Movie Poster | Poster's Story: Four Types
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The decade 1965-1975 is important for Turkish cinema for being the golden years of this industry. The conditions that constructed the popularity of Turkish cinema, social and cultural life of Turkey within which these conditions were maintained as well as history and tendencies of Turkish movie poster should be explored in order to understand Turkish melodrama poster. |
| In the 50s the existence of the middle class, the equality of income distribution, production and consumption of local things left their place to inequalities between higher and lower classes, conservatism, migration, an ever consuming character of the society, and hence an orientation towards capitalism. So the 1960 military intervention and the 1961 constitution are interpreted by some as being good and revolutionary for intellectual life because of bringing an air of hope and freedom to the social and political lives. But after a while the movement within the cultural and social life unluckily came to an end and turned out to be a negative formation for the westernisation movement within the country because of the on-going restrictions in some respect. Turkish society was caught between 1950s' tendencies in a more strong way and it was in the middle of the duality between the East and the West. While the West seemed to offer improvement in material and intellectual level, the East seemed to convey the spiritual, social, and cultural values and islamic practices as taboos as well as our Anatolian characteristics those consist of an undeniable folk culture. The social every day life was politicised by the implementation of a variety of Westernised daily practices like clothing, life style, food, movies, or music. The society seemed to live their lives like the western oriented music arrangements having eastern spices inside. So Turkish people lost its identity as an eastern society while not being a totally Western society. In 1965, the change of the government stood for the starting point of the "restoration period" (Ozon 366) which involves strict inspections, tensions between the opposite thoughts, and the improvement of variations of political tendencies. The beginning of the 70s was the chaos years of Turkish political life with the rapid polarisation of political groups. The conditions caused new paths of individualisation gathered under the term arabesk (the name comes from the "Arabian", but in fact it's a cultural production and phenomenon of Turkish society that emphasises the low-quality of art and life style) to occur. The polarity within the social life became more evident in the middle of the 1970s as they can be observed in the interests of groups of people: Blue jeans, parka, Yeni Harman cigarette, Turkan Þoray, sex films, TRT, Socialism, Ajda Pekkan, Yilmaz Guney, Orhan GencabayÖ |
When Turkish cinema; which is accepted to begin with M. Ertu•rul in 1950; through 1965-1975 decade is observed, it can be seen that the unproductive years after the 2nd World War were over. The social movement in the 60s and society's addiction to the cheap and collective entertainment seem to be the reason of this vitalisation. Nevertheless, although the films and film production companies were great in number, there can be noticed a non-industrialisation of Turkish cinema. With the relaxation of 1960s the films about the realities of society as well as "Yesilcam" movies that answered the needs of the "consumers" occurred. After the television's extension and popularity unlucky conditions caused by economic crises, political events, and migration, the cinema theatres began to close up or the family melodramas left their places to arabesk melodramas, melodramas with singers, action and sex movies which had a less cost of production. It was the time for film companies to catch the male audience. So the female stars were cleared off from the screen, the family melodramas decreased in number and sex and action films as well as films with popular arabesk or folk music singers like Muslum Gurses, Ibrahim Tatlises began to be popular among men. |
Turkish melodrama was produced in close relation
to American, Indian, Egyptian, Iranian movies. The hybrid characteristic of Turkish melodrama conveyed
both the entertaining but conservative characteristics of these foreign cinemas in terms of being loyal
to social values since the target audience through the 1960s were the middle and the lower class families
and mostly women. These films had the already existing social norms, values, relations in themselves
with the component of tears. This narrative structure
was gathered from the popular novels, historical Turkish novels of Muazzez Berkant and Kerime Nadir, historical
love stories like Leyla and Mecnun and also American films which get along well with Turkish social norms from
1920s with its overloaded melodramatic, ornamented, attractive structure (Abisel 69).
Melodrama's characteristics are the very simple images of life with superficially and
non-psychologically but emotionally depicted love relations and characters, as well as the central
role of the accident and coincidence so that the audience would not have to think hard at all. The
women were going to cinema as to see the ordinary woman (like themselves) falling in love, sacrificing,
being betrayed, abandoned, etc. but most of the time reaching her love at the end. This cinema served the women
a pink but fatalist world with
the clear establishment of poetic justice in the form of a happy or morally satisfying endings.
And it does this by taking them away from their ordinary, boring lives as well as helping the social
values to last by the help of the formulas attempting to revitalise the
traditions by expressing them in more modern terms. In Yesilcam melodrama these formulas of traditional moral order even in the "clothes" of the modern
cause a conservative way of representing and expressing love as well as the repression of sexual act. |
