Censorship of Turkish cinema

Censorship of Turkish cinema was a state review system that governed theatrical release and reached deep into the work of producing films. It did more than prohibit particular titles: its rules, discretionary decisions, and approval procedures influenced the scripts filmmakers pursued, the material they revised, and the time and expense required to bring a film to audiences. In the account of the film business, censorship appears both as official control and as an everyday production problem, mediated by personal connections, specialist scriptwriters, and commercial calculations.

Scope and Arbitrary Power

For years, the narrator had known from news reports that domestic and foreign films had to pass state censors before theatrical release. The scale of that authority became clearer when he began working with Lemon Films. Public attention tended to focus on high-profile decisions, such as the banning of Lawrence of Arabia for insulting Turkishness and the cutting of sex scenes from Last Tango in Paris. But the board’s influence extended well beyond such prominent cases.

Hayal Hayati, a director and producer who also served on the board, described the boundaries as wide-ranging. Films were expected to avoid sexual material and interpretations of Islam, Atatürk, the Turkish army, the president, religious figures, and several ethnic and religious groups that the state regarded as sensitive subjects. The formal limits did not, however, fully explain how decisions were made. For half a century, board members had not only enforced state priorities but had also developed personal agendas, banning works that annoyed or offended them. Censorship could therefore be unpredictable: the authority to decide what was acceptable was concentrated in a body whose members could exercise it arbitrarily.

Hayal Hayati’s own experience showed that service on the board offered no guarantee of protection. He had recounted banning films for reasons that treated ordinary subjects as threats: a story about a security guard was said to demean security guards; a woman’s new romance was judged offensive to motherhood; and a truant child’s adventures were considered harmful to schooling. After his term ended, his own costly film was banned in full. A dinner scene about a family disagreement, along with two other quarrels, was considered damaging to the family. Hayal Hayati believed the decision was personal as well as capricious, and the incident made plain that filmmakers could not rely on the board to apply its standards consistently.

Permission and Script Doctoring

The industry tried to reduce the risk of a total ban by persuading the state to divide review into two stages. In the first, a screenplay went to the board for approval of its subject and scenes. This process brought with it a complicated bureaucracy of permissions and bribery, as well as agents and agencies offering to guide applications. In the spring of 1977, while considering which agent to use for the Blue Rain screenplay, the narrator and Feridun spent time weighing those choices at the Lemon Films offices. Gaining approval was not simply a matter of submitting a work: filmmakers had to navigate a system in which access, advice, and unofficial payments could affect the path to release.

One specialist in that path was Demir the Typewriter, a former boxer and well-liked Istanbul Greek known for rewriting screenplays on his typewriter. His method was to smooth material that might alarm the censors: he softened conflicts between rich and poor, workers and employers, and victims and wrongdoers, while tempering a hero’s critical closing speech with reassuring references to the flag, the nation, Atatürk, and Allah. He was also valued for turning extreme or coarse moments toward a lighter, more innocent tone. Even large companies that routinely bribed the board entrusted scripts to him, sometimes simply to give them the distinctive charm associated with his revisions.

Lemon Films sought Demir’s help with Blue Rain. During a visit to his home in Kurtuluş, Feridun, Füsun, and the narrator saw the old Remington associated with his reputation and learned that Demir had a heavy backlog. His twin daughters helped with the work, and one of them eventually returned the screenplay, revised with Füsun in mind. By then, three months had passed. Füsun was irritated by the delay, while the narrator noted that Feridun’s own work had also been slow. The episode shows how censorship affected a production even without a documented ban: the anticipated need to make a script acceptable inserted another stage, another intermediary, and months of waiting between the project and its next step.

Production Choices and Film Form

The need for a screenplay to be ready for production had a practical meaning: it had passed the board or obtained the permissions thought necessary for safe passage. In a period when few commercially appealing screenplays cleared review, directors and producers who needed to make one or two films a year could accept projects they had not previously considered, provided approval was already secured. Over time, the board’s pressure to smooth and remove troublesome elements contributed to a uniformity that made many films feel predictable. The industry’s dependence on permission thus shaped not only what could be shown but also which projects were feasible to make.

The production of Broken Lives illustrates the attraction of a ready screenplay amid those constraints. In January 1981, Feridun told the narrator he had a script that was ready, though crude, and the narrator agreed to finance it. Filming began in May. Despite sharing its title with an eighty-year-old novel, the film’s story belonged to a different setting: its heroine, played by Papatya, became known for performing love songs while pursuing revenge against a man who had violated her when she was young. The film was shot in the Peri Cinema, refitted with tables to represent a nightclub. The project’s commercial prospects, rather than its fidelity to the older novel, drove its production, and it demonstrates how pre-approved material could become a route into filmmaking even when its artistic ambitions were limited.

Public Reception and the System’s Reach

Censorship operated within a film culture that remained popular despite its constraints. Earlier, an open-air screening of a film starring Orhan Gencebay had made the audience’s emotional response part of the experience: viewers followed a melodrama concerned with sexual violation, marriage, and shame, while the narrator watched both the screen and Füsun. A second film shifted the emphasis to the pain of love. These scenes establish the emotional subjects that popular cinema brought before large audiences, but they do not identify either film as a particular censorship case. The distinction matters: the account presents censorship as a pressure on production, not as an explanation for every plot or audience response.

Broken Lives received hostile reviews but drew enthusiastic audiences in Istanbul and the provinces. Viewers cried during its songs and celebrated the heroine’s revenge; the actor who played the villain was even punched and spat upon in the street after the role became widely associated with him. The film’s success helped bring back moviegoers who had stayed away during the years of political violence before the military coup. As cinemas revived, the Pelür Bar again filled with people making film deals or seeking visibility. The success made the narrator a more prominent producer and attracted actors and camera operators to his table. Censorship had helped produce a standardized, permission-conscious industry, but it did not eliminate popular demand: films could still move audiences, revive business, and give commercial influence to the producers who managed to get them made.