Dilek Kaya
Dilek Kaya is Professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema at Yaşar University (Izmir, Turkey). She has published essays in national and international journals on a variety of topics, including the history of Turkish cinema, Turkish Yeşilçam stars and their audiences, the censorship of domestic and foreign films in Turkey, Islamic cinema, and cinema exhibition and cinemagoing in Izmir . She is the author of The Midnight Express Phenomenon: The International Reception of the Film Midnight Express (The Isis Press, 2005; Georgias Press, 2010). She is also the director of the feature-length documentary film Kazım (2018).
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This article focuses on Birleşen Yollar/Crossroads (Yücel Çakmaklı, 1970), which pioneered the Islamic National Cinema Movement in Turkey. The film discursively constructed Turkish secularist modernization as cosmetic Westernization and promoted the Islamic way of life as the only means to true happiness—a popular theme of Islamic cinema in the late 1980s and 1990s. Although the film-makers discursively posited it as an ‘alternative’ film, they followed the narrative conventions of melodrama, the most popular genre of the time. Moreover, they worked with famous mainstream stars. In other words, the film-makers chose to communicate the then marginal message of Islamism by reconfiguring and Islamicizing the mainstream rather than rejecting it all together. In this respect, Crossroads was an early example of the Islamist project to Islamicize modernity in Turkey that would gain momentum in the 1990s. The article attempts to reconstruct the film’s historical and continuing significance by locating it within a broader discursive context and by exploring its historical development from its production through to its passage through censorship and public reception. The article also discusses the continuities between the film’s discourse and current debates on secularism and Islamism in Turkey.
This article focuses on Birleşen Yollar/Crossroads (Yücel Çakmaklı, 1970), which pioneered the Islamic National Cinema Movement in Turkey. The film discursively constructed Turkish secularist modernization as cosmetic Westernization and promoted the Islamic way of life as the only means to true happiness—a popular theme of Islamic cinema in the late 1980s and 1990s. Although the film-makers discursively posited it as an ‘alternative’ film, they followed the narrative conventions of melodrama, the most popular genre of the time. Moreover, they worked with famous mainstream stars. In other words, the film-makers chose to communicate the then marginal message of Islamism by reconfiguring and Islamicizing the mainstream rather than rejecting it all together. In this respect, Crossroads was an early example of the Islamist project to Islamicize modernity in Turkey that would gain momentum in the 1990s. The article attempts to reconstruct the film’s historical and continuing significance by locating it within a broader discursive context and by exploring its historical development from its production through to its passage through censorship and public reception. The article also discusses the continuities between the film’s discourse and current debates on secularism and Islamism in Turkey.