ASCA

Halit Refiğ's The Fight for National Cinema (1971) is a collection of essays on
cinema in Turkey written between 1965 and 1971.1 Although Refiğ started
his career as a critic, by this time he had become an established filmmaker
himself, with a filmography ranging from melodrama to social realist film.
Refiğ describes his book as an attempt to scrutinize the identity of Turkish cinema—
its existence and substance—and argues that intellectuals in Turkey despise this
cinema, particularly as a result of their unconditional admiration for the West and
its culture, including the cinema of the West.For Refiğ, cinema in Turkey can be
considered an extension of traditional Turkish arts. And because the film industry
in Turkey had grown by the mid-1950s to be one of the largest in the world, despite
the lack of formal state support or private investment, purely as a result of people’s
interest in watching local productions, Turkish cinema, to Refiğ, has the potential
to create a “national cinema.” Refiğ conceptualizes this potential as bringing to
the fore a cinema “that is separate from Western cinema and can counter it, and
relies on a shared historical culture where the Turkish element plays a dominant
and unifying role.” From this standpoint, Refiğ conceptualizes popular cinematic
practices in Turkey at the time as “people’s cinema,” whereas alternatives aiming
to depart from these are designated as “national cinema.” He does so not only
by delving into a discussion of the film industry’s economic structures but also
by raising questions about culture, national specificity, and the Westernization
processes exercised in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire and then in the
early years of the Republic of Turkey. At the same time, he tackles the narrational
strategies films adopt and their resemblance to traditional Turkish arts, as well as
trends and movements in world cinema.