"On Contemporary Turkish Cinema (by Iain Robert Smith)
October 28, 2009 by Changing Turkey
[Excerpt from Iain Robert Smith, ''Beam Me up, Ömer': Transnational Media Flow and the Cultural Politics of the Turkish Star Trek Remake', The Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film&Television 61 (2008) 3-13.]
In the recent Turkish sci-fi comedy G.O.R.A. (2005), writer/star Cem Yilmaz thoroughly lampoons many of the Americentric traditions of Hollywood science fiction. After the film opens on a space station in which all the characters are speaking English, one character points out the anomaly, pleading, “Can we not have it in Turkish?” Indeed, Turkish turns out to be the galactic lingua franca in this narrative, with everyone—including the alien races—conversing in the Turkish language and using Turkish lira to trade. It is not America that has colonized the people’s consciousness—to paraphrase those infamous words of Wim Wenders—but Turkey. This pointed inversion of the U.S. bias in Hollywood science fiction narratives, however, is balanced with an obvious affection for said films, with the film also offering loving homages to such iconic U.S. films as Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999)."
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