Turco-Westerns: Aesthetic and Thematic Politics of a Transnational and Translocal Genre

Abstract

What can one interpret about life in the Turkish frontier, ethnic identity, and Turkey-U.S. relationships from Westerns made in Turkey? How did the cinematography and iconography of the Western genre translate into Turkey? How does a national cinema industry adapt an iconic film genre, and what transnational flows enabled the syncretization of the Western genre into the Turkish silver screen? Examining the history of cinema in Turkey with a focus on films produced between 1959 and 1975, when there was a noticeable Western genre film production in Turkey, I explore the Turkish Western subgenre in this period and catalog them under a new parameter: Turco-Westerns. With my coining of Turco-Westerns, I imply that these Westerns are not Turkish but rather Turkey-ish: carrying all the ethics, politics, and aesthetics that come from being related to Turkey as a land carrying various types of subjectivities. My thesis explores these questions, alongside the Turco-Western canon, by exploring the aesthetic and thematic politics of Düşman Yolları Kesti (Enemy Has Cut Off All the Roads; dir. Osman F. Seden, 1959), Çifte Tabancalı Damat (Dual-wielding Groom; dir. Nuri Ergün, 1967), and Aç Kurtlar (The Hungry Wolves; dir. Yılmaz Güney, 1969) as case studies. Through this study, I negotiate the political and aesthetic motives of the Turco-Westerns that translocalized the Western genre to Turkey. By approaching Turco-Westerns through the critical perspective of translocalization, I am highlighting and negotiating how Turkish filmmakers integrated the elements of the Wild West into Asia Minor (also known as Anatolia) which formed the setting of their movies or rendered the filmic conventions of the Western and myths of the Wild West with characters and cultural references about Turkey.