Remake, Remix, Rip-Off: About Copy Culture & Turkish Pop Cinema

This German made documentary is about the classic Yesilcham cinema in Turkey whose heyday was from 1960 - 1990. Yesilcham started out with a limited budget with rudimentary technical equipment to compete with Hollywood cinema where only the Westernized elites could afford a ticket and to have a national cinema to call its own.

Despite the crude productions, crass effects and copying of Hollywood films as central in this documentary, Yesilcham did produce some good, organic films in its own right in collaboration with musical artists such as Orhan Genchebay and talented actors Tarik Akan, Kemal Sunal, Hale Soygazi, Filiz Akin and many others but this does not get enough attention in this documentary - for a budgeted film industry that is quite an achievement.

However with hindsight they could off been better thought out and written with common sense, non pretentious with copyright laws and good basic training similar to Greek Cinema despite this the films will always be classics and stand the test of time.

The demise of Yesilcham started slowly in the 1980s and by the dawn of the 1990s due to the privatisation of television and with this the focus to making television series not films Yesilcham extinguished and the actors had to find new careers, however it marks a great era in cinema.

Throughout movie history there have been a lot of people stealing stuff from things that were successful, so what makes Turkish cinema (at a certain point of time) so much different than those other cases? Well you have to watch the documentary to fully get it, but let me tell you that they did insane things.

And this documentary delves into the whole thing. There is obviously much more background that could not be in the movie, even more outrageous stuff that would make you shake your head. Actually the director noted at a screening that he almost didn't get permission to have some of the footage in his movie, because the movie it represented had copyright infringement and other legal stuff. It sounds there is a whole different new story there. Anyway this is entertaining stuff if you like cinema and like to take a look behind the scenes ... of weird stuff

We've all seen them; those hilarious Turkish rip-offs. "Star Wars", "Spiderman", "The Exorcist", "Tarzan", "Dracula", "First Blood" and even "The Wizard of Oz". I imagine that since the days of the internet arriving in every person's home, you've gone through a number of these for a cheap laugh and recommended them to a friend just to see their reaction when they see the Turkish version of "Spiderman" in "3 dev adam", who appears as a brutal villain. There is no shame in this - the movies are ridiculous by any standard. It's hard to imagine that these movies were ones huge in their home country, and brought an audience unlike anything else. "Remake, Remix, Rip-Off: About Copy Culture & Turkish Pop Cinema", which screened at Fantasia International Film Festival 2015, shows a glimpse of this long gone era.

In Turk in the '60s and '70s, filmmakers didn't have the time or money to get scripts written so they decided to just take from every source of inspiration they could, mainly big American movies or Turkish novels. As the copyright laws were nonexistent they could borrow freely from any source imaginable, even going as far as taking complete soundtracks or even scenes from big movies like "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark". This was how the industry was in Turkey. People involved in the business had to go to extreme measures to create them on the cheap and fast. Sometimes that would mean doing dangerous things in front of the camera with no security at all.

Besides all the outrageous and bizarre things that were done to create these movies, "Remake, Remix, Rip-Off: About Copy Culture & Turkish Pop Cinema" brings out the sincere side of it all. It shows how people with no real knowledge in film cameras, effects, and equipment could put together their own camera dollies, make best use of editing, and sometimes come out with complete movies in just days - and still have an audience. This is unheard of in Hollywood. It is hard not to admire the work that was put into these productions, no matter how stupid or silly the outcome might have been.

The documentary takes a quick look at how the film business in Turkey changed in the '80s due to political decisions to censor the most absurd things - small things like cops running. Not to mention the state of the business today, which is miles away from the weird, eccentric times of the '60s/'70s - yet most people involved in this documentary look back with fondness.

Watching this documentary is just great for any fan of film. It can't possibly show us exactly how things went down back then, but it goes into the real heart and soul of creating movies simply for the money, if that indeed has heart and soul (this film proves it does). A must watch for the curious!

From the 1950s through to the 1990s, Turkey had no copyright laws, and Turkish cinema had no money to make the big budget films so popular in the West. They *did* have access to those Western movies, though, and so an independent movie industry was born, one which stole story- lines wholesale (from "Dillinger" to "Star Wars," from "Rambo" to "E.T.", to name but a few) and sometimes re-created them scene-for-scene with *very* low production values, or sometimes just inserted scenes direct from the original into their Turkish version remakes. This documentary finds and films various directors, producers, actors and screenwriters (one of whom points out that at one point, there were literally 3 screenwriters to churn out some 300 movies a year!), and shows us the history of this pop- culture phenomenon. While much of it is funny to see, there is also a serious side to the doc - after the military coup in 1980, there was a crackdown on the Turkish film industry; no, the right-wing extremists didn't care about copyright laws in the West, they didn't even care that the film-makers starting inserting porn scenes in otherwise "straight" movies, but they *did* insist that there be no criticism of the political regime, the ideology of the rulers, or the police. This censorship led to serious repercussions, the effects of which are still being felt today.

A really interesting documentary, about a huge film industry that the West has never heard of. If it comes your way, check it out - you will be dazzled by the ingenuity with which these filmmakers struggled to create their movies, you will laugh at some of the antics involved, and you will cry at the acts of political repression that ended an era.

Remake, Remix, Rip-Off is a German-Turkish co-production about the heyday of "Yesilcam" - the Turkish equivalent to Hollywood. Yesilcam was the name of a street in Istanbul, in which most film productions during the 1960-80s were made, sometimes several hundred each year. The documentary filmmaker Cem Kaya traced down dozens of people associated with Yeslca during its most vibrant years. In this documentary, the rise and fall of Yesilcam is depicted: the erratic years of unauthorized remakes during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the political and social struggles, casting a shadow over Turkish cinema in later years. The documentary closes with a topical perspective on the contemporary Turkish production of movies and TV shows, highlighting the hostile workplace environment, that has already cost lives, due to exhaustion on set and flawed planning. Remake, Remix, Rip-Off might not be perfectly structured and lacks a clear message, but the unique premise and its way to celebrate the imaginativeness of Turkish cinema is stunning.

Overall 7/10 Full review on movie-discourse.blogspot.de