Lessons from Turkish Masters

Art historians, media, critics, they all love to use the word revolution. Because every artist needs to be marketed as new for the story to continue. The tactic is simple: “praise the old, choose the new.” However, art is more about inheritance than revolution. No artist starts from scratch, they inherit from the previous generation, and they stand on the shoulders of the people who came before them. It’s the same in the cinema. Every film with a new label is actually the product of a slow evolution, a remix of the past. And what we appreciate in terms of novelty or originality is actually the artists’ perspectives, backgrounds, and personalities that add a freshness to the mix. Everything else is more or less inherited.

So I don’t look at filmmakers just as artists. I look at them as members of a family tree. And, as a filmmaker myself, I try to figure out where I sit on the branches. Here, I present a small family tree of Turkish masters and describe what I learned from each of them, to identify the shoulders I stand on as a Turkish filmmaker.

Self-Made Master: Lutfi Akad (1916–2011)

Lutfi Akad is known in Turkish as the “master without a master” because he started making films at a time when Turkey did not have enough intellectual and technical knowledge about cinema and filmmaking. He was trying to learn from films and magazines, and of course, with a trial-and-error style of filmmaking. He made a lot of immature films, each one improved his style, and eventually, the good ones arrived.

The Bride (1973) is my favorite film from his filmography. It is a good example of realistic social drama that looks at life exactly as it is.

The Lesson: You don’t need teachers; you can learn by researching and experimenting.

Arrogant Auteur: Metin Erksan (1929–2012)

Metin Erksan knew he was good, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. His film Time to Love (1966) has black-and-white cinematography as good as that of his contemporary Michelangelo Antonioni. But, of course, the film was built on a more Eastern idea: falling in love with a photograph of a person, rather than the person themselves. Erksan mixed it with the melodramas of the time, which was somehow a safe choice, but even so, he managed to create the film’s own world that feels quite idiosyncratic.

Erksan was obsessed with the theme concepts in his films, which made him perhaps the first auteur in Turkish Cinema. He claimed that he explored the theme of ownership in his films Revenge of Snakes (1962), Dry Summer (1963), and The Well (1968). Revenge of the Snakes (1962) is my favorite among them, which is actually an adaptation of Fakir Baykurt’s novel. It’s about fighting over a piece of land in a village when one family plans to build a house in front of another family’s yard. Although the film is about dramatic subjects, I was impressed by its detached, even somewhat ironic approach. It never takes itself too seriously and maintains a certain lightness which is in harmony with drama. This film also feels like a foundation of the rural spirit of Turkish films, which we never really escaped as Turkish filmmakers, as our cinema did not stop discussing the main issues in this film: property, justice, bureaucracy, poverty, and migration.

The Lesson: Be bold and even arrogant, trust your skills before anyone else does.

Architect of Intimacy: Ertem Egilmez (1929-1989)

Ertem Egilmez didn’t care about being “artsy”. He wanted to make films to entertain the audience. But he has auteur leanings, too. He was a master at using space and the ensemble cast. His use of space contributes to intimacy as he mostly structures his films around a single location, which creates familiarity in the audience. Foster Brothers (1976), Smiling Eyes (1977), and The Chaos Class (1974) are good examples of his films that mostly take place in a single location.

Egilmez never makes films about one character. He made films about groups: families, students, friends. He reshapes screenplays together with the actors and gives them a space to create during writing and filming. For his film The Chaos Class (1974), he made the actors hang out together for two weeks before they started shooting. They just hung out without cameras, so by the time they started filming, they weren’t acting like friends: They were friends.

Ertem Egilmez was a populist figure, but I believe this characteristic was very influential in shaping the blockbuster cinema culture and identity in Turkey during the 70s, which I actually appreciated a lot, as films of that era evoke sincere feelings in me every time I watch them.

The Lesson: Build a sincere and synergistic team with space for everyone to create, but not an arty farty.

Underrated Hero: Serif Goren (1944-2024)

Serif Goren‘s difference was this: He knew how to create atmosphere in a way that was rare in Turkish cinema in his time. Most films of that era show the events in a linear narrative, but Goren makes you feel the atmosphere as well. You can see this in his film Remedy (1983), which focuses on the encounter between a nurse and a shepherd in a snowy remote village. The film really makes you feel the cold. Also, he made his own version of The Revenge of the Snakes (1985), which is at least as good as Metin Erksan’s version (to the wealthy patrons of the arts: please sponsor a full restoration of Goren’s version).

To me, Serif Goren was an underrated figure in Turkish Cinema. He directed Palme d’Or winner The Road (1982), but the film is mostly associated with Yilmaz Guney, the film’s screenwriter. The point is that Guney wanted to direct the film himself, but he was in prison at the time. So Goren took the project, worked with the actors, and created the atmosphere.

The film tells the story of prisoners who are granted leave to travel and visit their families. It looks like a road story, but it is actually about moments and moods through its mise-en-scene, which feels like the touch of a director. So Goren’s ability to create atmosphere was evident in this film, one that Guney never achieved in the films he directed. The scene in which one of the prisoners tries to abandon his wife to die in the snowy mountains is especially moving: The man walks away, his wife stays behind; snow, cold, and death.

It is claimed that Guney explained everything to Goren in great detail, but to me, being on set is a completely different matter. As a director myself, I believe it is impossible to create that spirit without actually being there. So I see Goren’s contribution to the film was significant as director, and Guney only remained as screenwriter, which was actually his real power as a filmmaker (there is also extensive academic research on this debate; you can see it here).

So when Guney’s screenplay is combined with a director like Goren, the result is inevitably a great piece of cinema. And all of these bring to my mind the idea: great things happen only when the right forces come together.

The Lesson: Don’t compete with your peers; collaborate.

Modern Alchemist: Nuri Bilge Ceylan (1959)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the name most of us know today. And I think he deserves his popularity. He knows how to stand on the shoulders of the past to build today. He takes the migration theme and makes it a modern dilemma in Distant (2002). In Three Monkeys (2008), he takes old Turkish melodramas and turns them into dark and psychological art. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), he continued to study the countryside like his predecessors, but this time, he made his lens transparent enough to look inside the individuals as well. And he didn’t just glance at rural Anatolia; in Climates (2006), he focuses on urban characters and uses long and static shots to make you feel the tension in a relationship. He saw the art of cinema more widely than any Turkish filmmaker before him. But he did not throw away tradition and heritage; he remixed it with his perspective and world cinema, and anything he could use to enrich his art.

And thanks to the circumstances, he achieved his first success in the 2000s while Turkey was flirting with the West, along with the Western art and cultural world, so that he found an ideal career path for himself. Otherwise, he might have been ignored, like most Global South artists of today, who are accepted only if they embrace the underdog role assigned to them.

Unfortunately, Ceylan’s filmography has started to imitate itself. I call this the Director Curve phenomenon, which we see in almost all directors. But he has already done great things in the art of cinema, and even if he didn’t make any more films, he more than deserves his position.

The Lesson: Widen your view to gather the world, then narrow it to give the chaos a style (but remember, the wind doesn’t always blow the way you want it to).

Learning is not Being Taught

Surely, there is much to be learned from masters around the world. The history of cinema is full of gems; perhaps some of them have not even been discovered yet. But no matter what, or who the source is, I think there is a subtle line in learning: once a master becomes your teacher and actively teaches you, or you ask for it, the learning loses its artistic value.

You know, being a good artist is not the same as being a good teacher. And no matter how good they are, they inevitably fall into that human error: giving concrete advice that does not make sense in the student’s own abilities and circumstances, which actually kills the sense of discovery and curiosity. So I don’t trust the master–apprentice model in art. One-on-one instruction tends to freeze things in place, like the ancient Egyptians, who made the same art the same way for centuries without changing it.

I have personally experienced this. People I trusted in terms of their work and vision started giving me advice far from my own needs and sensibilities when we met face to face. Interestingly, I made the same mistake myself; I gave similar advice when someone asked me, which is clearly not a good way to learn. Because when advice is addressed directly at us, our defense mechanism switches on immediately, and learning from it becomes psychologically difficult. It puts us in a mentor trap: you either obey or rebel, which brings you away from your own needs.

For me, art is best learned through role modeling, the way children do: They watch the world around them, absorb everything, and learn passively.

The Age of Teaching

Another problem is that there is a strong possibility that what you think you have learned from your teachers will turn you into someone selling the same recycled lessons to someone else. And actually (and unfortunately) most art education works this way:

1. You go to art school or courses.
2. You graduate and realize nobody’s paying you to be an artist.
3. You need money to pay the bills, so you go back to the same system and start teaching others.
4. Your students graduate, can’t find work, and they end up teaching, too.

Doesn’t it look more like a pyramid scheme than an inheritance?

I love the old saying: “Those who can do, do. Those who can’t do, teach.” Today, it’s a bit different. What I observe is that: Those who teach, exploit. They exploit dreams. Exploit ignorance. Exploit inexperience. Exploit insecurities. Exploit urgency. Exploit hunger. Exploit validation. Exploit envy. Exploit trust. Exploit ambition. Exploit loneliness. Exploit confusion. Exploit fears and desires…

Fair Trade

There is a possibility that a director or screenwriter you admire pays their rent by selling workshops. Even if they do not sell false hopes, students are still very fragile and full of expectations. They proudly announce to be students of particular artists. But taking paid lessons from them doesn’t mean they are sharing in their success. To me, they are just being exploited by it. And they don’t know that most artistic success comes from unpredictable circumstances, I mean, things you can’t package or sell. Let’s say you sell lemons; people can squeeze them into their salads and get 100% efficiency from them. That would be a fair trade. But selling art education, especially to young and inexperienced people, is a very different story that you can’t really measure its efficiency.

On the other hand, I believe real learning lies in people who focus on what they create. They are so direct and good at their thing (their work, art, and style) that others naturally see them as role models and learn from them in this way. I have learned the most from such people, and I would be proud if someone learned from me in the same way.

You can find the list of films mentioned in this post on my Letterboxd page here.