Abstract
In 1974, producer Hulki Saner hired acclaimed director Metin Erksan to direct an unofficial remake of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). The resultant film, ?eytan, took the plot, characters and set-pieces from the prior film and translated them into a predominantly Islamic setting. This process of intercultural dialogue exemplifies Yesilçam, a cycle of low-budget cinema from Turkey that flourished throughout the 1960s and 1970s in which elements of Western popular culture were being borrowed and remoulded into the Turkish context. Drawing on Tom O’Regan’s model of cultural exchange and transmission, this article seeks to build a model of intercultural dialogue attendant to the underlying tensions and negotiations within this hybridised cultural text, an issue of particular contemporary resonance at a time when the EU is proposing 2008 as the ‘Year of Intercultural Dialogue’ and Turkey is itself in talks over its accession to the EU. Building upon that oft used model of Istanbul as a ‘cultural bridge’ between East and West, this article shall examine how Turkish cinema of the 1970s drew upon and appropriated elements from US popular culture. While ?eytan has been dismissed by some cultural commentators as derivative plagiarism, this article argues for a more nuanced model of cross-cultural exchange based around dialogue and interaction, attendant to the interstitial relationships through which cultures meet and interact.
Highlights
Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. (Said 2003: xxii)
The film goes on to illustrate this thesis with a focus on Istanbul’s varied musical culture, which ranges from traditional Arabesque singers such as Orhan Gencebay through to contemporary acts, such as the rapper Ceza and the neo-psychedelic rock group Baba Zula
The Exorcist in Istanbul culture, ranging from the literary borrowings of the Edebiyyât-ı Cedîde (New Literature) movement in the early 20th century through to the more recent musical reworkings of the Dolapdere Big Gang. This tendency is evident within Turkish cinema of the 1970s, in which elements of American popular culture were being appropriated and utilised in a diverse range of cinematic contexts including 3 Dev Adam
Summary
If any issues in international relations have generated as much myth as that of an alleged ‘Islamic threat.’ Since the late 1970s, and more since the Iranian revolution of 197879, the issue of ‘Islam’ and of its supposed challenge to the ‘West’ has become a matter of enduring international preoccupation, and one which politicians within Western European states, as well as a number of Islamic leaders, have chosen to highlight. (Halliday 1996: 107). At the start of the narrative, neither Father Karros in The Exorcist nor Tugrul Bilge in Şeytan believe in ‘exorcisms’ and they attempt to explain away their respective lead girl’s troubles in terms of modern, scientific understandings of mental illness rather than seeing it in terms of ‘possession’ per se This scepticism about religious dogma forms the core theme of both The Exorcist and Şeytan, in that the various scientific methods for explaining the girl’s illness, which include psychotherapy, shock therapy, and a lumbar puncture, fail to clarify what happened to Gul. The key revelation in each character’s narrative trajectory is that scientific rationale cannot explain all that happens in the world and that we need to return to religion, a notion that has especial resonance in secular Kemalist Turkey. As Kaya Özkaracalar notes, ‘this is by no means a cosmetic issue for Turkey, but on the contrary, one of the major causes of social unrest in this country’ (2003: 214)
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