Documentary that features your favourite superheroes as you’ve never seen them before.
By Chris Tilly
Summer can be a depressing time in cinemas, the multiplexes filled with sequels, prequels, remakes and updates; the Hollywood conveyor belt churning out films frequently bereft of original ideas. But that’s nothing compared with what was happening in Turkey throughout the 1980s, the country’s lax copyright laws meaning that theft, plagiarism and piracy powered the industry, creating hundreds of bizarre hybrid features and are at once familiar and entirely alien.
Remake, Remix, Rip-Off endeavours to tell the story of those films, and if it had stuck to that narrative, it would have been a spellbinding documentary feature; the Not Quite Hollywood of Turkish cinema, featuring a twisted spin on characters and stories we all know and love.
Unfortunately, director Cem Kaya also has more serious stories to tell, about the country’s shifting political situation, about the social and economic changes of the time, about the television industry, about the porn industry, about censorship… the disparate list goes on and on. It’s a big, brave approach to a huge subject, but one that fails over the course of two hours.
Because while there’s undoubtedly overlap, the film struggles to find an accessible narrative through-line, with seemingly random stories rubbing shoulders with each other as the film flails around to an annoying degree. Which is a shame as when proceedings focus on RRR’s greatest selling point – those insane, quite possibly illegal, and hugely entertaining cover versions – the film is a blast.
Named after the road where the bulk of Turkey’s film production took place, ‘Yesilcam’ was the country’s answer to Hollywood, learning the art of film in the 1940s and 50s, blossoming in the 60s and 70s, and ultimately crafting more than 7,000 films, of admittedly varying quality.
That’s because at the height of the industry’s success, families were apparently renting more than 10 films a weekend, so the onus was on quantity not quality, with budgets small and turnarounds tight. They say that necessity is the mother of invention however, and Turkey invented a ‘copy-and-paste’ industry that flourished for decades.
Via talking heads, some of the major players claim that because there are only a finite number of stories in the world, the recycling of plots is inevitable. Others claim that there were just three screenwriters scribbling the majority of films scripts, so to get as many movies as the market required into production, they had to steal those plots, embelishing, adapting and updating.
Truth is, it’s probably a combination of both, but Turkish takes on celluloid classics The Wizard of Oz, Some Like It Hot and E.T. quickly became huge hits. There weren’t any cowboys in the country but they were making more westerns than their spaghetti-loving counterparts. Both Dracula and Tarzan were soon having adventures in Istanbul. And the Wuthering Heights story was told so many times that the film’s Heathcliff and Catherine montage really has to be seen to be believed.
They weren’t just direct remakes either, the films frequently given a local spin that turned them into true oddities. The Exorcist was retold with Islam rather than Catholicism the driving force, and First Blood was remade but with the addition of zombies and a motorcycle gang that was skilled in karate.
Long before The Avengers were teaming up, Yesilcam combined Captain America and Spider-Man for The Three Giant Men, with Spidey the sadistic villain of the piece. Similarly ‘Iron Fist’ combined The Phantom’s mask with Superman’s logo on his chest and the bat insignia on his belt. With the modern superhero movie looking like it’s being made to a template these days, the Turkish takes are genuinely fresh in comparison.
The film’s didn’t just rip-off story and character though, with actual music and footage also thrown into the mix. Crime films used The Godfather soundtrack while action sequences featured the Enter the Dragon score. Indeed The Man Who Saves The World used scenes from Star Wars, The Black Hole and more than a dozen other features, all set to a thumping disco score that itself was stolen.
This was moviemaking without rules, and the stories on the subject are both eye-opening and hilarious. One actor somewhat vaguely claims to have made between 500 and 1,000 movies, another – being more specific – states that he’s starred in 1,772, while another, more creatively, says that the negative from his films would stretch across the globe. Twice.
They are also pretty shocking, with work conditions poor, crews miserable, and health and safety so non-existent it’s a wonder that the actors – who performed their own stunts – are still alive to tell the remarkable tale.
But for every great anecdote, there’s an unexpected tangent, the film complaining about the length of TV episodes or recounting the sudden success of the sex boom or explaining the 1980 coup d’etat or documenting the recent destruction of an important cinema.
It probably makes sense in the director’s mind, but all feels a little random onscreen, the muddled approach meaning that the film is filled with violent tonal shifts, with humour and tragedy frequently making uncomfortable bedfellows.
There are certainly important stories to be told about censorship, unionisation, and the persecution and imprisonment of filmmakers who defied the state, but they perhaps deserve their own film, the fact that they are only vaguely touched upon here doing them a disservice.
So while the filmmakers should be applauded for casting their net so wide in an effort to detail the history of Turkish cinema, the documentary’s lack of focus means that it’s oftentimes hard to follow, coming to life when the subject is the remakes, remixes and rip-offs of the title but less successful when it endeavours to dig deeper.
Cem Kaya’s film is a long overdue celebration of a very unique form of filmmaking. It would be easy to laugh at the cheap and at times ridiculous nature of Turkey’s celluloid output, but instead RRR revels in the many ways, shapes and forms that Yesilcam subverted Hollywood icons, staples and archetypes. Unfortunately, the doc bites off more than it can chew when trying to place events in a wider context, unable to do justice to the more serious issues that were tearing the country apart at the time. The result is a documentary that entertains, confuses and frustrates in equal measure.
