A “Novelist” Director in Yeşilçam: Lütfi Akad
In this article, I tried to evaluate Lütfi Akad's cinema thought focusing on his ideas about the novel and its potential in cinema, locate his thought and films in Yeşilçam cinema, and explain the relations of Akad’s cinema with the rest of the Yeşilçam. I used Walter Benjamin’s antagonism between storyteller and novelist in The Storyteller to analyze the relationship between Yeşilçam’s mainstream and Akad’s cinema. Where popular Yeşilçam cinema emerges from the melodramatic imagination, Akad’s films have a novelistic discourse. Akad, a director who sees cinema as a form of the novel, has a different position from the storytellers of Yeşilçam within the field. His position provides intellectual prestige but also turns him into a lonely figure against the Yeşilçam collective. In the formation, development, and prime periods of Yeşilçam, Akad’s position fluctuates related to the circumstances of the cinema. On the other hand, Akad gave artistic responses to these changes in the scope of his personal development and made his cinema career. By creating a cinema language within Yeşilçam, developing a critical discourse inspired by the novelistic realism against the politicization of cinema, and finally using this language and discourse to narrate the drama of Turkish people.
Mesut Bostan
