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NEZIH ERDOGAN
A paradigmatic shift
In 1997, veteran film star Tanju Gursu won the award for best male
actor at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival for his role in
Kopekler Adasillsle of Dogs (Halit Refig, 1997) The jury's decision
provoked heated debate because Gursu's character had been
post-dubbed by another film and theatre actor, Mus,fik Kenter.
It was questioned whether an actor who borrowed someone else's
voice should be honoured with such an award. In connection
with this, a newspaper published a series of interviews with various
well-known personalities, who expressed a range of opinions on
the matter Burcak Evren, film historian and critic, claimed that
dubbing "prevented film from naturalness and it became something
artificial' The young film director Mustafa Altioklar emphasized
the concept of 'credibility'- 'When a film is post-dubbed it is no
longer convincing hence the lack of sincerity When you shoot
the film with sound the player feels the magic more easily.'
ener en. the star of Yeilcam, the mainstream cinema of the
1960s and 1970s, and now superstar of the New Turkish Cinema,
referred to the difficulties of dubbing: 'The player forgets the
feelings of that particular moment of the shoot and during the
dubbing he tries hard to remember them' Altioklar argued further
1 Xante Orturt, Turk sinemasi that 'Cinema is fifty per cent sight and fifty per cent sound,
"ses" dryor / Turkish cinema
claims sound Radtkal
ignoring the sound means we start filming with only the remaining
23 October 1997 p 18 fifty per cent' ' This chimes with the claim made by the television
235
the operation itself always failed to meet the requirements of a fully-
fledged realist text Indeed it might be asked if Yeil<jam, as a
commercial cinema which is today best known for its naivete, bears
For a discussion of this see a striking resemblance to Brechtian alienation effects.7 However,
Kezban Guleryuz Smema ve
instead of hastily appropriating Ye^ilfam into Brechtian terms, I
turksel gergekhV'/ Cinema and the
Turtash way of reality Yem would rather draw attention to the tradition of Turkish non-
Turkiye nos 23/24 11998) lllusionism it inherited. This includes Karagoz (shadow play), which
pp 3156-7
uses two-dimensional cut-out figures, Orta Oyunu (a form of theatre
largely inspired by the commedia deliarte), whose cast consists of
comic types, and Meddah, a one-man show in which the performer
deliberately interrupts his story with irrelevant issues These are
Silent shooting is easier and more feasible. It saves time and thus
cuts down the production costs. Also, it offers the possibility of
casting good-looking actors with bad diction. In addition to that,
the prompter saves the players from wasting their time by
memorizing their lines That is, to cut a long story short, it offered
11 Yesilcam nasil doijdu, nasil many advantages."
buyudu nasil oldu ve yaasm
yem sineina'/'How Yesjlgam was Until then the existing sound studios were used for dubbing foreign-
born how it grew how it died
language films Interestingly, dubbing was already recognized as part
and long live new cinema in
Suleyma Murat Dinger (ed I Turk of what made foreign films enjoyable. Among the first dubbing
Smemasi Uterine Dusunceler directors were Ferdi Tayfur, who 'gave his voice to' Laurel and
I Thinking on Turkish Cinema
Hardy and The Marx Brothers, his sister Adalet Cimcoz, who ran an
(Ankara Doruk 1996), p 281
art gallery, and Nazim Hikmet, an internationally renowned poet who
12 See Cimcoz s memories on the had to flee to Moscow because of his Communist leanings.12 Turkish
early years of dubbing
audiences still have vivid memories of Tayfur's lmprovizations in the
Sozlendirme amlari / Memories
of dubbing Yem Sinema nos
studio, playing not only with the characters' lines but also with their
19/20 (June-July 1968) accents, creating alternative, and more familiar, identities for them
pp 40-42
than those originally conceived To his Turkish fans, for example,
Groucho Marx was known as Arak Palabiyikyan, an Armenian
name referring to his bushy moustache. So, in its early years,
dubbing did not merely serve as translation from a foreign language
into Turkish; it was also the means by which adaptations and
imitations were assimilated, creating identifiable characters and plots
13 By imitation I refer to taklid the for the audience ' 3
traditional theatre actor s
Obviously, conversion to post-dubbing cannot be explained solely
impersonation of a person or to
be more precise a type
by a studio's impatience over a faulty piece of machinery, rather it
can be seen as an anticipation of the shape of things to come. The
indigenous film business was given a premature spur, first by tax
cuts, then by migration within Turkey from rural areas to big cities
and the sounds of intermittent fighting between Ekrem's men and the
guards. The sound-effects thus function only as 'images of sounds'
and are not intended to produce a reality effect. A final signiticant
discrepancy relates to singing. which also functions in a curious
manner. This is especially important. for Ye$lqam as a genre is
dominated by melodrama. Many of the films exploit singing both for
its entertainment value and to enable a twist in the narrative. A
common plot t'ollows a poor female character who becomes a tamous
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org at Bahcesehir University on July 22, 2010
Ferdis body doer not
acknowledge E k m ' s
presence unbl he IS spoken to
Sdralk/Sbeerwalker
ScrBen 43 3
2 4 2 Autumn 2002 Nezih Erdogan Mute bodies disembodied voices
observations are insightful Does Yeilcam allow for or produce a
thinking subject7 Do the actors all speak the same thing 9 I would
argue that, as far as the dubbing described above is concerned, they
do not speak at all. Their bodies are given over not to homogenous
thinking subjects but to Logos expressing itself through voices that
were only slackly attached to bodies Hence Yes,ilcam is like the
shadow-play master whose voice remains the same by way of the
differences it produces It might well be suggested that the voice in
Yeilcam is the voice of Yes,ilgam: the utterances are instances of
Logos which dictates its moral universe and orchestrates the
unfolding narrative An analysis of the scripts may confirm this Onat
The play between the voice and the body may be still more
complicated, however The voice may be seen to establish a
character, but then transcend it by restoring the distance between
audience and character onscreen. This may be understood through
'loss of sight", an often ridiculed theme which is very common in
Turkish melodrama. I will argue that this subgenrc may serve as an
object-lesson for my purposes in this essay
In his essay on Indian melodrama, a genre which heavily
influenced Turkish cinema, Ravi Vasudevan argues that the man's
26 Ravi Vasudevan Melodramatic loss of sight connotes his indifference to the woman's desire.26
mode and the commercial Hindi
Indeed, in Ask MabudesilGoddess of Love (Nejat Saydam, 1969), for
cinema notes on film history
narrative and performance in the
example, former lovers Leyla (Turkan oray) and Ekrem (Cuneyt
1950s Screen vol 30 no 3 Arkin) encounter each other in a music hall. Leyla does not know
119891 p 36
that Ekrem has had an accident and has lost his sight Ekrem shivers,
and when his companion asks him what happened he replies that he
Women lose their sight, too They are either already blind when the
film opens (f/j ArkadaslThree Comrades [Memduh Un, 1958, 19711.
SerserilThe Tramp |O Nun Ergun, 1959]) or lose their sight very
31 which confirms Freud s castration early on (Havatim Sana Feda)3* Therefore, unlike the men who pay
scenario for their misunderstandings, women's loss coincides only with the
initial narrative thrust. And while men begin to see in the finale,
women's acquisition of sight, instead of concluding the film, gives
the narrative a final push, the beloved one is still to be attained The
woman has to choose the right man from several who claim the
same identity, and has to return the male voice, which is the source
of her desire, to the onginary body The emblematic film here is U<,
Arkadas It features Muhterem Nur as a blind girl who earns a living
by selling safety pins on the street Three musicians, all male, seeing
that she is vulnerable to the dangers of the big city, take her to their
ramshackle house. Here they construct a make-believe world for her.
convincing her that she is living with successful musicians in a
luxurious villa. They find the money necessary for an operation to
cure her blindness, but the moment she regains her sight they
disappear. She goes on to become a famous singer and starts to
search for them. On finding the house where they used to live, she
realizes she had become a part of, and target for, their fiction Even
the portrait which they had told her was of an aristocratic ancestor
turns out to be a kitsch painting of an ape In the end she finds them
by following the distant sound of their voices.
Havatim Sana Feda. meanwhile, tells the story of Zeynep (Turkan
oray), who loses her sight in a car accident. Harun (Cuneyt Arkin).
who is responsible for the accident, tries to help Zeynep financially
only to find that she is too proud to accept such an offer and is full
of hatred for the man who caused her loss of sight Zeynep finds a
job as a singer in a music hall, whose owner agrees to employ her
I would like to thank Lewis Keif Johnson and Zafer Aiacagok for their helpful comments and suggestions