Turkish Film and Art Film Ideal

Turkish cinema in the novel is neither simply dismissed as commercial entertainment nor celebrated as an untouched art form. Its artistic possibilities are repeatedly tested by the conditions of making films: the need for a backer, the censor’s power over scripts, the pressure to produce work with popular appeal, and the audiences who fill the cinemas. Kemal approaches this world first through Feridun’s ambition and his own fantasies about Füsun’s future as a star, then through years of watching films and, finally, as a producer whose investment helps bring Broken Lives to the screen.

Artistic Ambition and the Commercial Film Industry

Feridun presents himself as an experienced young filmmaker who has worked in Yeşilçam as a set hand and assistant director and written eleven screenplays. Although his work has been produced, he considers those films below his ambitions. He distinguishes the familiar commercial melodramas made for a mass audience from the different kind of film he hopes to make, and describes himself as unwilling to direct merely because he has been told he is ready. His claim is not that Turkish films lack an audience: he recognizes the public’s enthusiasm while criticizing the conventions that, in his view, keep films from becoming more ambitious.

Kemal’s first response to Feridun’s plans is inseparable from his feelings for Füsun. After hearing her husband describe a screenplay for which he cannot find a producer, Kemal imagines Füsun becoming a celebrated star and pictures himself beside her at a premiere. He recognizes, on the drive home through Beyoğlu, that the couple may see him as a wealthy relative who could help finance their filmmaking ambitions. Rather than resenting the possibility, he continues to imagine Füsun’s success. The episode exposes a gap between Feridun’s practical need for backing, Füsun’s possible future in film, and Kemal’s private fantasy: he is drawn to the film project partly as a route into an imagined life with her.

That gap persists when Kemal begins accompanying Füsun and Feridun to the cinema. During the summer of 1976, they see more than fifty films at open-air cinemas across Istanbul. Feridun finds out where each film is playing and guides their searches through a rapidly changing city, where new buildings, crowded streets, and unfamiliar districts can make the cinemas difficult to find. The outings acquaint Kemal with a popular film culture he had previously encountered only rarely. They also place his individual hopes alongside a wider public: families, children, workers, and other spectators gathered to watch melodramas.

Popular Melodrama and the Audience

The films make social concerns legible through emphatic stories of love, suffering, and honor. In one film starring Orhan Gencebay, a poor fisherman is caught between his patron’s power and the consequences of violence against a young woman. The film connects her suffering to questions about marriage, sexual honor, and shame; its audience’s quiet during a central exchange makes those questions palpable to Kemal. He feels his own shame surfacing, though he cannot separate it from his discomfort at watching with Füsun. The film’s emotional conventions thus do more than entertain him: they give shape to feelings he had kept obscure.

A second Gencebay film recasts distress less as anger than as endurance. Its songs and story present love’s pain as a condition shared beyond the individual couple. Kemal is moved by the film and by the spectators around him, but his attention is divided: he watches Füsun as well as the screen, hoping to understand what she feels. She remains absorbed in the film and does not return his look. The contrast matters. Popular cinema gives Kemal an expressive language for his own emotions, but it does not grant him direct knowledge of Füsun’s interior life.

The summer screenings also reveal how filmgoing is bound to place and public life. The open-air cinemas draw audiences into neighborhoods that Kemal would not otherwise know so intimately; many of the gardens he visits will later disappear or be replaced by other uses. For the duration of the screenings, however, the spectators’ collective attention and reactions make cinema a social event as well as a work on a screen. The films’ stylized plots may be implausible to Kemal, yet their ability to provoke silence, recognition, and feeling is part of their significance.

Censorship, Permission, and the Limits of the Script

The route from screenplay to screen is governed not only by artistic judgment and financing but by state approval. Hayal Hayati explains that censorship could sometimes be survived through cuts, allowing a film to reach cinemas and recover its investment; an outright ban was the more ruinous possibility. The process was divided into stages, beginning with review of a screenplay’s subject and scenes. Permission created its own bureaucracy, along with agents who offered to guide applications and a system in which bribery had become part of the surrounding practice.

Feridun and Kemal confront these conditions while preparing Blue Rain. In the spring of 1977, they discuss which agent to use, weighing the practical question of how to get a screenplay through the board. Demir the Typewriter is valued for revising scripts so they will be acceptable to censors. His method smooths conflicts between rich and poor, employers and workers, and victims and wrongdoers, and can soften a film’s critical statements by adding reassuring references to nation, religion, or Atatürk. Even producers who can already obtain approval may seek his revisions for the distinctive lightness he brings to a script. His work demonstrates that censorship affects not only whether a film can be shown, but also how conflict and criticism are written in the first place.

The meaning of a screenplay being ready is similarly industrial rather than purely artistic: it has passed review or secured the permissions needed for production. When few popular screenplays receive that clearance, filmmakers dependent on making one or two films a year may accept scripts they would not otherwise have chosen. Years of cutting away what is sharp or original contribute to a sameness in the films. In this environment, artistic intention is constrained by the combined risks of state rejection, lost investment, and the need to keep working.

Broken Lives: Investment, Production, and Reception

In January 1981, Feridun tells Kemal about a cleared screenplay with commercial prospects. Its premise involves a rich man who seduces and abandons a young woman, who later becomes a singer and seeks revenge. Kemal considers the material unsuitable for Füsun and beneath Feridun’s standing, but agrees to finance it, in part because he wants to make Feridun happy. That decision shifts Kemal from a spectator and would-be patron of an imagined film about Füsun to an active producer backing a project whose subject and lead performer are not the ones he had once pictured.

Feridun begins filming Broken Lives in May 1981. Despite taking its title from an older novel, the film’s story belongs to the streets and nightclubs of 1970s Istanbul rather than the world of its literary namesake. Papatya plays a singer whose songs and patient pursuit of revenge organize the melodrama. Production itself draws on established conventions: the old Peri Cinema is rearranged to serve as a nightclub, and the filmmakers use free kebabs to attract people who will fill the scene as spectators. The film industry’s compromises are visible not only in its scripts but in the practical work of making a convincing crowd.

The critics dismiss Broken Lives, but audiences in Istanbul and the provinces respond enthusiastically, and the film becomes a box-office hit. Its final scenes move viewers to tears, while the heroine’s revenge prompts a strong collective response. The success helps bring audiences back to cinemas after the years of political violence and insecurity known as the terror years. It also revives business at the Pelür Bar, where people from the film world again gather to make deals or be seen. Kemal’s standing rises with the film’s commercial fortunes: he is treated as a prominent producer, and people in the industry seek his company.

The outcome does not resolve the tension between art and commerce. Feridun’s earlier ideal of making a different kind of film remains set against an industry in which permission, money, established melodramatic forms, and audience response determine what gets made and seen. Broken Lives succeeds on terms its makers could measure—attendance, public reaction, and renewed business—while its production also exposes the compromises behind that success. For Kemal, the film world is at once a cultural industry and a personal entanglement: a place where he can finance Füsun’s circle and become publicly influential, even as his private fantasies remain distinct from the work and ambitions of the people around him.