Selections from The Fight for National Cinema, by Halit Refiğ

Halit Refiğ’s The Fight for National Cinema (1971) is a collection of essays on cinema in Turkey written between 1965 and 1971.¹ Although Refiğ started his career as a critic, by this time he had become an established filmmaker himself, with a filmography ranging from melodrama to social realist film. Refiğ describes his book as an attempt to scrutinize the identity of Turkish cinema—its existence and substance—and argues that intellectuals in Turkey despise this cinema, particularly as a result of their unconditional admiration for the West and its culture, including the cinema of the West.² For Refiğ, cinema in Turkey can be considered an extension of traditional Turkish arts. And because the film industry in Turkey had grown by the mid-1950s to be one of the largest in the world, despite the lack of formal state support or private investment, purely as a result of people’s interest in watching local productions, Turkish cinema, to Refiğ, has the potential to create a “national cinema.” Refiğ conceptualizes this potential as bringing to the fore a cinema “that is separate from Western cinema and can counter it, and relies on a shared historical culture where the Turkish element plays a dominant and unifying role.”³ From this standpoint, Refiğ conceptualizes popular cinematic practices in Turkey at the time as “people’s cinema,” whereas alternatives aiming to depart from these are designated as “national cinema.” He does so not only by delving into a discussion of the film industry’s economic structures but also by raising questions about culture, national specificity, and the Westernization processes exercised in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire and then in the early years of the Republic of Turkey. At the same time, he tackles the narrational strategies films adopt and their resemblance to traditional Turkish arts, as well as trends and movements in world cinema.

Although Refiğ takes a somewhat excessive nationalistic approach in the book, we as film scholars find his work extremely significant. This is not only because The Fight for National Cinema is one of the first attempts to open up a theoretical discussion on popular cinema in Turkey and deviations from it; we also see his book as one of the early examples of addressing the question of national cinema in a broader context, before national cinema became a substantial topic in film studies. In this respect, Refiğ’s book and the segments we selected from it for translation in this issue raise vital questions about what constitutes national cinema in relation to stylistic, artistic, and economic trends, and about the possibility of a national “specificity” that responds to theoretical discussions, in terms of both Turkish cinema and national cinema in a broader context. To provide readers with a better understanding of the selections from The Fight for National Cinema, it will be useful to introduce the political, economic, cultural, and cinematic contexts in which Refiğ’s conceptualizations came into existence and in which they functioned.

As with other national contexts, the nation-building process in Turkey was based on a denial of particular versions of the past, particular views of religion and diverse cultures, communities, and ethnicities. In this respect, Feroz Ahmad notes that Turkey did not rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, as is often suggested: “It was ‘made’ in the image of the Kemalist elite, which won the national struggle against foreign invaders and the old regime” and founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923.⁴ To achieve the ideal of a secular and modern state, and at the same time underscore the break with the Ottoman legacy, the founders of the republic embarked on a program of political, economic, and cultural reforms. These reforms encompassed the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate and the office of the caliphate, changes in headgear and dress to match Western fashions, and the closure of religious convents and dervish lodges. Religious titles and tribal and clan names were proscribed, and citizens were required to take up surnames instead...