Critics, politics and cultural legitimation: An exploratory analysis of the Turkish film field

Abstract

In this article, we draw on the growing Euro-American literature on cultural recognition, legitimacy, and film criticism and focus on the classificatory struggles taking place in the Turkish film field. We content-analyze the criteria that critics deploy as they review films as recognized by different institutions and actors. Multiple correspondence analysis demonstrates that the distinction between artistic and commercial films is still very prominent. Moreover, the existence of political content in a film elevates its symbolic status, regardless of its production mode. To account for this peculiar finding, we explore a fraction of the reviews qualitatively. Our research contributes to the cultural legitimacy literature by crosschecking the effectiveness of recently posited trends and questioning the role of politics in the process of critical recognition in a specific national context located on the margins of Europe.