Film Censorship during the Golden Era of Turkish Cinema

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Turkish film censorship during the 1960s and the early 1970s, a period not only marked by two military interventions (in 1960 and 1971), but also considered the golden era of Turkish film production. Through the release of 200–300 films a year (ranging frommelodramas to comedies, action and adventure to fantastic and superhero films) and the phenomenal popularity of its film stars, Turkish cinema of the time, constituted a major pastime and a significant site of identity formation and negotiation. Thousands of film censorship reports, which constitute the primary source material in this chapter, reveal that the Turkish state, too, conceived cinema as a powerful, even rival, discursive domain where various social identities and meanings were produced and circulated.