Shakespeare in Turkish cinema: A cultural transfer ... | Ingenta Connect

JAFP 4 (1) pp. 17–37 © Intellect Ltd 2011

Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance Volume 4 Number 1 © Intellect Ltd 2011. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jafp.4.1.17_1

GÜL¸ SEN SAYIN Beykent University, Istanbul

Shakespeare in Turkish cinema: A cultural transfer from Hamlet to The Angel of Vengeance (1976) ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

Shakespeare’s works on the Turkish stage have a long and exciting history, whose roots go back to the reign of Ottoman sultans in the nineteenth century. However, Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most frequently performed and filmed play of all times, was visited late by Turkish cinema. In 1976, Metin Erksan appropriated Hamlet as Intikam Melegi/The Angel of Vengeance, also known as Kadin Hamlet/The Female Hamlet. This article, aligning with Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman’s views about the stages of cultural transfer, reviews the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in Turkish culture, and then discusses Metin Erksan’s The Angel of Vengeance (1976), both as an example of Lotman’s theory of intercultural transfer and an amalgam of Turkish cinematographic conventions like family melodrama and the National Cinema movement.

Turkish cinema cultural transfer Shakespeare Hamlet Yuri Lotman Metin Erksan melodrama

SYNOPSIS OF THE ANGEL OF VENGEANCE Hamlet is the daughter of a wealthy landlord in an indeterminate place in Turkey in the 1970s and she studies drama in the United States. She comes home for the funeral of her dear father who was shot dead in an accident

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while hunting on his own land. The social tradition in some parts of Turkey allows the brother of the dead husband to marry the widow. Thus, Hamlet stays back to see the wedding of her mother (Gonul) and her uncle (Kasim). When the ghost of her father tells her the truth about his death, Hamlet takes an oath of revenge. She leaves her fiancé, Orhan, whom she loves very much, persuades everybody to her ‘antic disposition’ and, together with her childhood friends Rezzan and Gul, organizes a traditional Turkish folk play (tuluat) to catch Kasim’s conscience. Kasim is caught, and realizing that Hamlet is dangerous, he sends her back to the States to be killed by a mafia father, who is a friend of Kasim. On the way to the airport, Hamlet finds Kasim’s letter in Rezzan’s handbag and reads her own death warrant. She runs away leaving her friends (Rezzan and Gul) there. In the meantime, Orhan’s suicide makes Orhan’s brother (Osman) pursue revenge and cooperate with Kasim to kill Hamlet. They prepare an accidental death like the one Kasim had done for Hamlet’s father, but the plan backfires. Hamlet shoots Osman and is wounded by him; Kasim accidentally shoots Gonul, and Hamlet at the end kills Kasim. Shakespeare’s texts, holding a mirror up to every age and culture, are particularly attractive to film directors. From 1900 onwards, many countries have produced Shakespearean adaptations on the screen, having distilled his text through their own cultural and artistic contexts. However, it was only belatedly, in the late 1970s, that Turkish cinema reserved a place for Shakespeare. Metin Erksan’s The Angel of Vengeance, also known as The Female Hamlet, is the first and only Shakespearean adaptation in Turkish Cinema. It was shot with a very small budget during a very interesting period in the history of Turkish cinema when the male-dominated Turkish audience was overwhelmed by sex films on the one hand and women audience were attracted by the Turkish family melodramas, which had been highly popular in the 1960s and early 1970s, on the other hand. Thus, Erksan’s attempt to take a western cultural icon as his subject and rebuild it mostly within the melodramatic conventions of the Turkish National Cinema movement is a courageous adventure from the past, worthy of appreciation even today. The film was nominated for the Golden Prize in The Moscow International Film Festival in 1977. Why did it take such a long time for Turkish cinema to welcome Shakespeare? How have Shakespeare’s texts been perceived in Turkish culture throughout different periods of history? This article, aligning with Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman’s views about the stages of cultural transfer, first reviews the reception of Shakespeare in Turkish culture and then moves to discuss The Angel of Vengeance, both as an example of intercultural transfer and a melting pot of the melodramatic conventions dominating the Turkish cinema of the period and the National Cinema movement which is still alive in Erksan’s films. In this context, a survey of Erksan’s previous works, major characteristics of the National Cinema movement and melodrama conventions in Turkish Cinema will help inform the discussion of the film.

YURI LOTMAN’S STAGES OF CULTURAL TRANSFER AND THE TRANSFER OF SHAKESPEARE TO TURKISH CULTURE In his recent work, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (1990), Yuri Lotman defines and investigates the stages of intercultural transfer that play an important role both in the formation of national culture and in the development

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Shakespeare in Turkish cinema: A cultural transfer from Hamlet to The Angel of Vengeance (1976)

of culture in general. Lotman, to formulate his theory of culture, coins the conception of ‘semiosphere’. As Mihhail Lotman of University of Tartu explains, ‘semiosphere’ is a concept which assumes that every text or culture is a semiotic entity, and for its own existence every semiotic entity needs the ‘other’. That is to say, to be able to produce new meanings every culture needs to be subject to the texts and signs of other cultures (Lotman 2002: 35). In Lotman’s theory of culture, the concept of semiosphere entails the idea that every culture is unavoidably visited or invaded by the texts of other cultures before it starts to produce its own original texts. The visited or invaded culture becomes a ‘receiver’ first. It absorbs various cultural texts and finally it becomes a ‘sender’. Yuri Lotman argues that every text, encoded in the context of its home culture in a historical period, is decoded with the language as well as the historical context of the other. During this process, the imported text is not only changed by the new contact, but it also changes the codes of the receiving culture, and hence gives way to a new text in its own right and to the development of its culture (Lotman 1990: 18). In Lotman’s theory, this is a dialectical process between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and here the crucial concepts are ‘binarism’ and ‘asymmetry’ (1990: 124). Lotman explains these terms respectively as ‘diversity of elements’ and their ‘different functions’ (1990: 125), or simply, these concepts refer to elements of the untranslatable which create the new meaning. If an imported text and its world-view are completely assimilated by the home culture, then no new information is created. Lotman’s example here is the Italian Renaissance, as it is the epitome of a cultural outburst of the foreign invasions of Italy. We can summarize Lotman’s views here as follows: Italy, set at the crossroads of many ancient and modern cultures [. . .] for a certain period became a text-receiver, because from the fifth century onwards Italy was shattered by the invasions of the Germans, then the Huns, then the Goths and Ostrogoths, Byzantines, but she absorbed all this flood of texts, and within her cultural space these warring and conflicting texts formed themselves into a whole. (Lotman 1990: 145) What Lotman observes for Italy and Italian culture is also evident in Turkish culture. The Ancient Anatolia, a ‘frontier’ in Lotman’s terminology, was exposed to the invasions of many eastern and western cultures, and became sometimes a battlefield, often a melting pot of many people of different ethnic origin and religion who brought with them their cultural codes. Although it did not result in a cultural explosion, like the Italian Renaissance, it produced a unique culture where Islamic, Christian and Jewish cultural texts existed together, shaping one another. Lotman (1990: 9) refers to a text not only as a ‘meaning-generating mechanism’ but also as ‘a condenser of cultural memory’. He states that ‘a text has the capacity to preserve the memory of its previous contexts’ (1990: 18), and Lotman’s example at this point is Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Nowadays Hamlet is not just a play by Shakespeare, but it is also the memory of all those historical events which occurred outside the text but with which Shakespeare’s text can evoke association.” (Lotman 1990: 18–19).

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Then it would not be wrong to suggest that when a Hamlet performance on the stage or a film adaptation is produced all over the world, a new meaning is created out of the relationship between the ‘cultural memory’ of the text and the dynamics of the receiving culture. In other words, the receiving culture imports not only the text but also the history of textual and performance criticism of Hamlet from Coleridge to Greenblatt, from Olivier to Almereyda, moulding all this within its own aesthetic and cultural values. Lotman, furthermore, deals with the stages in the transformational process when an imported text comes into contact with the texts of the home culture. He explores the process of intercultural transfer in five stages. In the first stage, foreign texts are read in the foreign language, ‘a sign of belonging to culture, to the elite, to the best’ (Lotman 1990: 146), and hence, they ‘keep their strangeness’, and are considered to be more valuable than those of the home culture. During the second stage, ‘the imported texts and the home culture restructure each other’; this is the stage of ‘translations, imitations, and adaptations’ (1990: 146). The imported text and the world-view that was idealized in the first stage are now assimilated and interpreted by the home culture as its organic continuation (1990: 147). Thus, the new text has the characteristics of both the local and the imported cultures. Tom O’Regan, who applied Lotman’s views to Australian national cinema, interprets this stage by pointing to the labour division between the cultures. The local is the content, the flavour, the accent, and the social text, while the international provides the underlying form, values, narrative resolutions, etc. (1999: 287) In a third stage, ‘a tendency develops to find within the imported world-view a higher content which can be separated from the actual national culture of the imported texts’ (Lotman 1990: 147). In the fourth stage, ‘the imported texts are entirely dissolved in the receiving culture’ (1990: 147). Metin Erksan’s Intikam Melegi/The Angel of Vengeance will be discussed as the product of this stage. In this stage, the receiving culture begins to produce its own texts. About the characteristics of these texts Lotman says: [They are] based on cultural codes which in the distant past were stimulated by invasions from outside, but which now have been wholly transformed [. . .] into a new and original structural model. (1990: 147) Finally, in the fifth stage, ‘the receiving culture, which now becomes the general centre of the semiosphere, changes into a transmitting culture’, sending its texts ‘to other, peripheral areas of the semiosphere’ (Lotman 1990: 146). Lotman’s views about the stages of the transformational process can be applied to the transformation of Hamlet into Turkish culture as a visual narrative, as in The Angel of Vengeance. At this point, it is necessary to survey the reception of Shakespeare in the historical, social and political context of Turkish culture starting from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the date of the first production of Hamlet in Turkish cinema. Turkish culture encountered Shakespeare in the nineteenth century during the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, between the years 1792 and

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1807, was introduced to the ideas of the French Revolution by Selim III, the pioneer sultan of early renovations in the Empire (And 1972: 21). This was the first encounter of the Ottoman society with western and non-Islamic cultural values. This was followed by the Tanzimat in 1839, a period of wider-ranging cultural renovations and reformations in every aspect of life. Tanzimat was an attempt to restore the institutions of the collapsing Empire by ‘modernization’, whose synonym was ‘westernization’ of the cultural codes (1972: 18). Eventually, Ottoman culture borrowed French cultural texts in the early 1850s, and Shakespeare was introduced to Ottoman culture by the French Romantics. Shakespeare’s texts were read in French translations by the Turkish elite who could read French, and were performed by the Greek and Armenian minority groups in their own languages. The first production of Hamlet on the Turkish stage was in Armenian some time between 1859 and 1862 (Enginun 1979: 16). In Lotman’s theory, this is the first stage of Shakespeare’s cultural transfer, as his texts were read and performed in foreign languages other than Turkish, such as French, Greek and Armenian. Othello was the first Shakespearean play to be performed in Turkish in 1860. From then on, during the following two decades, the stages of ‘translations, imitations, and adaptations’(Lotman 1990: 146) start, and they correspond to the second and third stages of Shakespeare’s cultural transfer in Lotman’s classification. The first of Shakespeare’s plays to be translated into Turkish was Jean-François Ducis’s adaptation of Othello in 1876 (Enginun 1979: 22). This was followed by translations of The Merchant of Venice in 1884 and The Comedy of Errors in 1887 from their English originals (Paker 1986: 90). Apart from the translations of some excerpts from a number of other plays, including Hamlet in 1881 and some of the sonnets translated by Mehmet Nadir, we do not see any other translations of Shakespeare’s works until the early twentieth century (1986: 90). At this point of the transformation process, social and political messages of Shakespeare’s works are often bypassed because, as Saliha Paker points out, Shakespeare’s works in this period were received as successful poetry rather than drama. Not only the translations for the theatre but the concept itself of drama or the theatre in the Western sense were new in the Ottoman literary/cultural polysystem of the second half of the nineteenth century. (Paker 1986: 91) Therefore, Turkish culture in this period had to decipher not only the cultural codes of a foreign text but the theatrical sign system of a dramatic text. Fortunately, the visits of Italian, French and English travelling theatre companies to cities like Istanbul and Izmir aroused a deep interest in dramatic arts in Ottoman society, and contributed to the perception of dramatic texts. Eventually, this gave way to the establishment of early theatres by Armenian actors (Enginün 1979: 16). However, once the signs of dramatic texts were deciphered and the influential power of theatre on the masses was recognized, the Ottoman court was bothered by the political content of Shakespeare’s works. In 1889, Abdulhamid II, the despotic sultan who reigned for 33 years and caused a serious slowdown in cultural development, did not permit the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi to perform Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth in Istanbul as he ‘saw in them a challenge to absolute monarchy’ (Paker 1986: 91). However, he let Rossi perform The Merchant of Venice and some scenes from Othello,

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but the latter was a private performance only for the Sultan himself (Enginun 1979: 16). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, even the repressive regime of Abdulhamid II failed to prevent Shakespeare’s texts from spreading within Ottoman culture. Shakespeare became the chief source of inspiration for most of the Turkish poets in the second half of the nineteenth century. This influence was evident in the works of the well-established writers of the period, such as Namik Kemal (1840–88) and Abdulhak Hamit Tarhan (1852–1937), who were technically and thematically influenced by Shakespeare’s work. In 1908, when Sultan Abdulhamid’s reign came to an end with the Second Constitutional Era, called ‘me¸srutiyet’ in Turkish, also known as Young Turk Revolution, a new era of freedom in every aspect of life began. The Young Turks were artists, scientists or high-ranking military officials who were against the Ottoman monarchy. They were progressive modernists and supported westernization in social and political institutions of the Ottoman society. As a result of this, in 1908 we see a new translation of Hamlet by Abdullah Cevdet, a medical practitioner, intellectual and member of the Young Turks. As Saliha Paker states: It is not difficult to see that most of the translations and productions of this play are very closely related not only to some of the major events in the Turkish theatre but also to important changes or developments in Turkish political and cultural history in the twentieth century. Perhaps that occurred most obviously in 1908 when the publication (in Egypt) of the first full translation of Hamlet coincided with the Constitutional Revolution ending the forty-year rule of the despotic monarch, Abdülhamid II. (1986: 89) Cevdet’s translation of Hamlet, like his other translations, was a word for word rendering of the original text, and the highly poetic language of the target text made it difficult for even the educated Turks to understand. Therefore, Cevdet’s translation lacked ‘performability’ on the stage. However, it was performed in ˇ 1912 by Muhsin Ertugrul, ‘the father of the modern Turkish stage’ (And 1964: 77), the first Turkish Hamlet on the stage. Cevdet translated Julius Caesar in 1908, Macbeth in 1909 and King Lear in 1912. His translations were intended to ‘play a stimulating if not revolutionary role in the intellectual re-awakening of the Ottoman political and cultural milieux’ (Paker 1986: 92). As a member of the Young Turks, Cevdet supported the westernization movement especially in the cultural arena, and hence it was his political mission to translate Shakespeare’s texts into Turkish. If we go back to Lotman’s views, this is the third stage of the intercultural transfer, in which the home culture finds a higher content within the world-view of the imported text, but this higher content is unique as it belongs neither to the national culture of the imported text nor to the established cultural context of the home culture. In the fourth stage of Shakespeare’s intercultural transfer, his texts were entirely dissolved in the culture of republican Turkey. In 1927, four years after ˇ the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Muhsin Ertugrul, who had recently returned from Germany, translated Hamlet from German, directed it and played the leading role. This production was a breakthrough on the Turkish stage

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because the emphasis was not on Shakespeare’s poetry but on the mise-enscéne of a Shakespearean play. As Saliha Paker (1986: 95) points out, unlike the previous examples, this new version of Hamlet is a ‘performance-oriented [. . .] theatre-text’ not ‘dramatic literature’. ˇ In fact, Muhsin Ertugrul’s translation of Hamlet coincides with a period of reforms in every aspect of life in the new Republic of Turkey. Reformation and renovation have always been associated with westernization in Turkish culture, and this time another state-initiated westernization movement under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk began. A language reform package was a very important item in Atatürk’s cultural renovation program, and it aimed at simplification and purification of the Turkish language from Persian and Arabic influence. In 1928, the Turkish Republic replaced the Arabic script with the Roman alphabet both to achieve universal literacy and to acquaint the masses with western culture (Paker 1986: 95). Here, it should be pointed out that like the translations of other texts from world literature, Shakespeare’s texts were translated in this period as a part of a national project, namely, the cultural awakening of a country. From the 1920s to the 1940s, many plays of Shakespeare were performed ˇ by the Istanbul City Theatre, directed by Muhsin Ertugrul. Twelfth Night (1929), The Taming of the Shrew (1930), The Merchant of Venice (1931), Measure for Measure (1935), Macbeth (1936), King Lear (1937 and 1938), Much Ado about Nothing (1937), The Comedy of Errors (1938 and 1940), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1938), Romeo and Juliet (1939) and Othello (1940) were all performed on the stage. Among these plays, Hamlet had a special status and was perˇ formed frequently. Talat Halman points out that Ertugrul directed and acted in more than 25 Shakespearean tragedies and comedies in 60 separate producˇ tions. Ertugrul personally staged ten of Turkey’s thirteen Hamlet productions over half a century. In this period, some of the above-mentioned texts were not only performed on the stage but were also translated to be published and distributed to the reader. Therefore, 1930s was the decade in which Turkish audiences and readers were educated in watching and reading Shakespeare plays. At the end of the 1930s, to take the national project of cultural awakening one step further, the Ministry of Education founded a Translation Office. University lecturers, writers and critics working in the Office translated the world masterpieces into Turkish. Their common translation policy was ‘linguistic simplicity and [. . .] a reasonable degree of adequacy with regard to the original sources’ (Paker 1986: 99). In the 1940s, however, it was the academics who inaugurated academic translations of Shakespeare’s plays that were received by critics ‘as both literary texts and theatre-texts’ (Paker 1986: 97). In 1941, the first academic version of Hamlet was translated into prose form by senior students and research assistants of English Department at Istanbul University under the supervision of Professor Halide Edip and Professor Vahit Turhan. This version included an ˇ introduction, commentary and notes for readers. Muhsin Ertugrul’s 1941 production of Hamlet was based on this translation (1986: 98). In 1944, Hamlet was translated once again by Professor Orhan Burian of Ankara University. This text, which deserved to be one of the school classics in the following two decades, was ‘adequate’ and ‘acceptable’ in the norms of translation, and was reprinted twice in 1958 and in 1966 (1986: 99). Burian’s translation was in prose and remarkable for its linguistic simplicity as well as its faithfulness to the spirit of the text. It was staged eight times; and in 1959, it was performed by the

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Istanbul City Theatre 170 times, successively, with Engin Cezzar in the leading role (And 1964: 78). Turkish people welcomed the new decade with the Revolution of 1960. This period from 1961 to 1969 was known as the period of more freedom in every aspect of life, including literature and the arts. This is the period when writers, playwrights, stage directors and film directors experimented with new themes and techniques. As far as Shakespeare’s plays are concerned, this is a very productive period, and in 1964, the quadricentenary of Shakespeare’s birth was enthusiastically celebrated with many Shakespearean productions both in Istanbul and Ankara (And 1964: 79). In Lotman’s (1990: 147) theory, this is the fourth stage where ‘the imported texts are entirely dissolved in the receiving culture’ and the receiving culture begins to produce its own texts. In 1965, Sabahattin Eyuboglu, one of the most successful translators of major western masterpieces into Turkish, translated Hamlet. According to Saliha Paker, the most remarkable difference between Eyuboglu’s translation and the previous translations lies in: Its free-flowing poetic prose, akin to free verse, which follows the lineation of the original, the diction being the same as that of contemporary Turkish poetry rooted in a simple and natural use of the language. (1986: 100) Since then Eyuboglu’s translation has been the most frequently used version of the Hamlet text, both on the stage and in the teledramas of the television channels. It should be pointed out that once again in the 1960s Shakespeare became a model for the Turkish playwrights of the period. In Saliha Paker’s (1986: 101) terms, ‘the plays as a whole have served as an innovative model’ for the native drama. Shakespeare’s approach to his subject matter, especially his use of politics, history and myth in his plays, influenced Turkish playwrights like Gungor Dilmen, Turan Oflazoglu and Orhan Asena. They used in their plays eastern myths and legends to point to contemporary social and political issues. Although Turkish people welcomed the eighties with another Revolution in 1980, fortunately it was another productive decade in the reception of Shakespeare’s plays. In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Shakespeare’s plays were translated into Turkish and they were performed on the stage with different interpretations. For example, in the 1996–97 theatre season, Isil Kasapoglu directed Eyuboglu’s Hamlet translation featuring contemporary costumes, with a strong emphasis on the political aspect of the play. Kasapoglu’s Hamlet questions the relationship between the individual and the political system. In 1981, one of the most distinguished Turkish poets, Can Yucel, translated A Midsummer Night’s Dream into colloquial Turkish. In 1982, Professor Bulent Bozkurt of Hacettepe University translated Hamlet. Although this translation was in poetic prose, the emphasis was not on Shakespeare’s poetry but on the ‘performability’ of the text. In 1984, Talat Halman brought together extracts from all of Shakespeare’s translated works and composed a unique play entitled Heroes and Clowns. This text was performed on the stage by a well-established actor, Musfik Kenter, during the 1984–85 theatre season, which once again aroused new interest in Shakespeare’s plays. In 1984, Professor Mina Urgan of Istanbul University published a reference book in Turkish, entitled Shakespeare and Hamlet.

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Within this adventure of intercultural transfer, Shakespeare’s Hamlet found a place in Turkish Cinema in 1976, when it was transformed by Metin Erksan into a new text, The Angel of Vengeance.

METIN ERKSAN’S OTHER FILMS AND TURKISH CINEMATOGRAPHIC CONVENTIONS OF THE 1960S AND 1970S Metin Erksan ([1929] 1976), whose name has been associated with Social Realism and the National Cinema movements in the history of Turkish Cinema, studied History of Art at Istanbul University. He made his first film, Karanlik Dünya/The Dark World: The Life of A¸sık Veysel (1952) on the life of a famous Turkish bard, A¸sık Veysel. The film, which reflects the harsh living conditions in the poverty-stricken rural Turkey of the early 1950s, made Erksan one of the pioneers of the Social Realism movement in Turkish Cinema. However, the film was banned because the strict rules of the Board of Censors in the Turkey of the period did not permit the film to depict the poverty of the country. He made his second film, Gecelerin Otesi /Beyond the Nights in 1960, during the year of the revolution that launched a decade of freedom in arts as well as in the society. This is another social realist film that criticizes the evils of a rapidly developing capitalism and the westernization movement in Turkey. Erksan’s first literary adaptation, Yilanlarin Ocu/The Revenge of the Snakes (1962), based on Fakir Baykurt’s novel, deals with the rights of land ownership, which is another important social issue in the rural areas of Turkey. This film, too, was banned, but Erksan adamantly fought with the Board of Censors, and succeeded in persuading Cemal Gursel, the president of the period, to help him release the film. In 1963, Erksan shot another adaptation, Susuz Yaz/Dry Summer, which was based on a real-life story written by Necati Cumali. Dealing with the issues of sexuality and lack of water, over which peasants living in an Aegean village suffered, Dry Summer presents the dark side of life in a village and the predicament of rural woman, whose existence is recognized only as the object of male desire. The film, which was banned in Turkey, was rewarded with the Golden Bear Award in Berlin Film Festival in 1964. This was the first international success of the Turkish Cinema, resulting in the recognition of Turkish films and directors both in Turkey and in Europe. Kuyu/The Well (1968), which is about the abduction and rape of a woman by a man from the same village and the murder of the man by the victim at the end, expands on the theme of the adversities of being a woman in rural Turkey. Metin Erksan shot his masterpiece, Sevmek Zamani/Time to Love (1965), as one of the ardent defenders of Turkish National Cinema movement, which started in the early 1960s and ended in the late 1970s. Erksan, together with such directors as Halit Refig, Atif Yilmaz Batibeki, Memduh Un, Ertem Goreç and Duygu Sagiroglu, declared the manifesto of the National Cinema. Halit Refig summarizes the manifesto as follows: Turkish Cinema was born out of Turkish people’s need to see on the screen the contemporary appropriations of Turkish folk tales, legends, shadow plays, farces and cultural festivities. (1971: 75) Atif Yilmaz Batibeki, another pioneer of the movement, defines Turkish National Cinema as the cinema which takes its subject matters and themes

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from the life of local Turkish people and deals with these subject matters and themes not in western forms but in a technique peculiar to ‘us’, and hence creates a film language which is unique to ‘us’ again (Refig 1971: 274). Therefore, the directors of the National Cinema inaugurated a debate about the social function of cinema and argued that cinema, as a western form of art, should be a place to provide the audience ‘with invaluable insight into the ambivalent ˇ 2006: 149). nature of national identity’ (Erdogan Erksan and other directors of the National Cinema movement did not bother themselves with the danger of missing universal values as they defended their conviction that the universal could only be reached through the national. Sevmek Zamani/Time to Love, shot in the light of the views scrutinized in the manifesto, dealt with the theme of the traditional/eastern lifestyle and cultural values versus the modern/western lifestyle and cultural values in the Turkey undergoing westernization process. In fact, the westernization process was initiated with social and political reforms in the early 1920s by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and the first president of the Turkish Republic, and it was conceived as a social project of the young Turkish Republic with an aim to reach the level of social welfare in European countries. These reforms, however, were so radical that they led to a collapse of traditional Ottoman institutions such as the state, religion, family and education. It was not easy for the previous generations to adjust to the new lifestyle and the values of the young Republic. In the early 1960s, on the other hand, the aim of modern Turkey was to be an EU member; hence, a second wave of westernization was encouraged by the new constitution in 1960. Therefore, it would not be wrong to state that the westernization movement in Turkey was always imposed on the people, and thus was not warmly welcomed by the majority of the population in Turkey. Erksan’s Sevmek Zamani/Time to Love deals with the love of unequals – the love of a rich urban woman who represents the western lifestyle and a poor house painter who represents the eastern Anatolian values. While the poor man paints the mansion of a rich family on an island close to Istanbul, he falls in love with the photograph of the owner’s young daughter. However, when he meets the young woman herself, she falls in love with him, but he rejects a relationship with her and continues loving her photograph, the copy of the original. In the background of this love story, Erksan presents the power of spiritual love over physical love. The house painter rejects earthly love and keeps loving the image. This can be associated with the Sufi tradition of the Islamic philosophy. In the Sufi tradition of love, man was believed to be created in the image of God and ‘loving any created object automatically entails loving God since he is hidden in all the objects manifested in the universe’ (Suleyman 1999: 218). Therefore, there is only ‘the One Being in reality, and there is only one Beloved in reality, that is God’ (218). After Time to Love, Erksan made literary adaptations. He adapted Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights as Ölmeyen A¸sk/Undying Love (1966) to the cinema and gained experience in literary adaptations. In this period, he also shot the Turkish version of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist/Seytan. ¸ In the early 1970s, Erksan had to be content with making melodramas to satisfy the melodrama audience who still formed the majority. Feride (1971), Dagdan Indim Sehire/I Came Down from the Mountain (1974) and Sensiz Ya¸sayamam/I Can’t Live without You (1977) were some of Erksan’s melodramas. Having produced literary adaptations of some Turkish stories for the national television channel TRT, he gave up making films. Since the 1970s,

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Erksan has been teaching film theory and criticism at the University of Mimar Sinan, Istanbul. The Angel of Vengeance, a film from Erksan’s mature period, is a melting pot of the technical and thematic characteristics of Erksan’s previous films – namely, the films belonging to National Cinema movement and melodrama tradition. Like these films, The Angel of Vengeance deals with themes of land ownership and power relations in the rural areas of Turkey, as well as themes of westernization, the new capitalist economy, class conflicts and the predicament of the individual in changing social dynamics. These are the main motives of both National Cinema and melodrama conventions in Turkish cinema.

MELODRAMA: AN INDISPENSABLE FORMULA OF TURKISH CINEMA BETWEEN 1965 AND 1975 Between 1965 and 1975, melodrama was the dominant and the most popular genre in Turkish cinema, with nearly two hundred melodramas produced per year. Therefore, the popularity of the melodrama as a visual narrative genre in Turkish cinema and hence the demand of the film market for it might be considered as Erksan’s major reasons for making use of the genre characteristics of the melodrama in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What attracts Erksan to a Shakespearean text are the themes that Shakespeare deals with. Family conflict, a power struggle for the throne and themes of revenge, love and madness in the text perfectly fit in with the characteristics of the melodrama genre. Therefore, in The Angel of Vengeance, Erksan resorts to the formula of the melodramas produced between 1965 and 1975, and hence, it is necessary to have a look at the characteristics of Turkish melodramas of the 1960s and 1970s. When Martha Vicinus explains the reason for the popularity of the Victorian melodrama in England she argues that: Domestic melodrama was the working out in popular culture of the conflict between the family and its values and the economic and social assault of industrialization. The clash between good and evil found in all melodrama provided the means for exploring social and political issues in personal terms. The exploration of contemporary concerns about class and gender gave melodrama its immediacy, while the placing of these issues in a personal context gave it emotional force. Melodrama is best understood as a combination of archetypal, mythic beliefs and time-specific responses to particular cultural and historical conditions. (1981: 128) Martha Vicinus’s definition of the domestic melodrama and how it functions in a changing society perfectly fits in the new social dynamics of the rapidly industrialized, urbanized and westernized Turkey of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when people were confused with the new values of an industrialized capitalist society. In other words, these melodramas of the period can be seen as ‘a cultural response to the growing split under capitalism between production and personal life’ (Vicinus 1981: 129). Besides, they reflected the fears and restlessness of the people who were afraid of losing their traditional values. As a matter of fact, uncontrolled economic growth in the 1950s gave way to imbalanced income between the classes and led eventually in the 1960s and

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1970s to the problem of migration from the agricultural East to the comparatively industrialized West. This social mobility and its side-effects are often projected in the melodramas of the period as a class conflict in the form of a love between couples who are socially unequal. Metin Erksan, like his contemporaries, resorts to melodrama formula ‘in articulating the desire aroused not only by class conflict but also by rural/urban and eastern/western oppositions’ ˇ 2006: 150). in the Turkish society of the period (Erdogan In these films, a son/daughter of a wealthy/urbanized/westernized family falls in love with a rural/working class/poor girl/boy, and the rich family severely rejects the union of the young couple. This suffering and pain end either in death or marriage of the couple and regeneration in the values of the urban/westernized/rich family. So, family melodrama is often interrelated with the theme of love contaminated by class issues launched as a natural consequence of modernization, namely the westernization of Turkish culture. These films were highly admired by the Turkish audience, because of its still-surviving traditional rural way of life and its values, such as those of close family ties and patriarchal values. Turkish melodramas were specifically popular among women audience (who were the majority), because the woman was presented in these films ‘as ˇ 2006: 145) and ‘the family was prethe site of production of meaning’ (Erdogan sented as the basic unit of the social texture in which the mainstream ideologies (class and gender conflicts) are legitimized and reproduced’ (Abisel 2005: 206) by the ‘male gaze’ and presented for women. In the most popular melodramas of Turkish Cinema, therefore, women take the leading part, as the films rely heavily on family conflicts and the good–evil dichotomy in the form of the urban/rich versus the rural/poor, including the love of social unequals, mistaken identities, multiple disguises, women deprived of their children by a cruel father, women going mad, men or women becoming millionaires overnight, betrayal, seduction, unrequited love and revengeful men or women. However, these melodramas, ‘marked by chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last minute rescues and revelations’ (Neale 1986: 6) and with their happy endings, provided a temporary resolution of conflicts between the individual and the new values of the society. These family melodramas were so popular among women audience in small towns and slum areas of big cities that local movie theatres had to have daytime ‘women only’ sessions to meet the increasing demand of women audience. These sessions became like sacred ritual sessions for women where they collectively felt miserable and wept because of the predicament of the main female character, or collectively laughed when she survived and was rewarded with marriage at the end. In the early 1970s, during a period of a new movement of sex comedies whose target audience was the male audience, The Angel of Vengeance/The Female Hamlet, with its female main character and its family plot, is obviously intended to attract the women audience of the Turkish family melodramas. Shakespeare’s universal themes of revenge, love, power struggle and family tragedy, then, easily find a place for themselves in the Turkish melodrama conventions of the period. What is more, Hamlet’s individual obsession with revenge is contextualized into Turkish social conventions as the blood feud, which still survives as a social law in eastern Turkey. The Hamlet–Ophelia love story is adapted into film as the love of social unequals, also having its roots in Turkish melodramatic tradition. Finally, power struggle for the throne in the original text finds one of its best contemporary expressions in the film, in the

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struggle for the land ownership between the brothers and in an indeterminate place in Turkey in the 1970s where a feudal way of life still survived. In short, Erksan takes an iconic text of the western drama and melts it not only in a different medium, cinema, but also in the local colours of a different geography, culture and its cinematographic conventions.

INTIKAM MELEGI/THE ANGEL OF VENGEANCE (1976) Erksan’s film is not a direct adaptation of Shakespeare’s text; there are some unavoidable changes (cuts and additions), owing either to Hamlet’s being a woman or to the Turkish culture. For instance, Hamlet’s being a woman requires a change in Ophelia’s gender but not in those of Horatio and Leartes, and therefore, Ophelia in the film is represented as a young man (Orhan). Similarly, whereas Hamlet’s name remains the same because it can be an acceptable gender-neutral name in Turkish nomenclature, other characters’ names are changed into Turkish forms. Furthermore, Elsinore is replaced by the mansion of a landowner and Hamlet is presented as this wealthy landowner’s only daughter who is studying drama in the United States and having a relationship with Orhan, the son of the housekeeper. Compared to the previous female Hamlets of the world cinema, Erksan’s Hamlet is revolutionary, because unlike the other actresses, such as Sarah Bernhardt and Asta Nielsen, who played Hamlet as a man or as a woman disguised as a man, Fatma Girik, in the film, plays Hamlet as a woman. Although it is revolutionary in representing Hamlet as a woman character, the reason for this remains uncertain in the film, as Erksan intends neither an argument on the representation of gender roles nor a social commentary on the status of women in Turkey in the 1970s. In fact, Metin Erksan explains the reason for choosing a female Hamlet in the film pointing to Saxo Grammaticus, one of Shakespeare’s sources for the text (personal communication with the director). Erksan states that his source of inspiration is another legend in Saxo Grammaticus in which Hamlet, the king of Denmark, is at war with Fortinbras, the King of Norway. After the news that the king has died at war, Gertrude, the queen of Denmark gives birth to a baby girl. Knowing that she cannot hold the throne without a son, Gertrude, by giving the baby her father’s name, Hamlet, hides the fact that the baby is a girl and raises her as a boy. Although it has become a worldwide tradition to cast well-established stage actors in Shakespearean films, Erksan prefers well-established film stars. He does not cast Ayla Algan, who was the first female Hamlet character on the Turkish stage, but Fatma Girik, who had already had a reputation for playing transvestite roles in Turkish family melodramas. Ayla Algan acted Hamlet in man’s dress; in other words, the character in the play was a man again. Erksan might have chosen Fatma Girik to be faithful to the original legend in Saxo Grammaticus and to avoid Algan’s early reputation as an actress who personified a male character on the stage. Tony Howard (2007: 211), in his book, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation, remarks that by choosing a female Hamlet in the film, Erksan pays homage to the new values of a modern Turkey established in the 1920s by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkish Republic. Howard points to Kemal Atatürk’s views about the important role that women should play in the reestablishment of a society. Howard, referring to Maureen Freely’s view that ‘Feminism in Turkey is not anti-men, it is anti-tradition’ (2007: 211), implies that by re-creating a female Hamlet, Erksan intends a film with a feminist slant

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and this mission of the film would be approved by the modern Turkish women of the 1970s. However, it is possible to claim just the opposite of this view, as the film encourages the feud which mostly harms women’s lives by depriving them of autonomy and imprisoning them into the domestic sphere under male authority. Men kill each other for an acre of land or for family revenge and end up in prison leaving their wives and children all alone in life. In Hamlet’s struggle for revenge, the film encourages women audience to approve of the feud together with a repressive patriarchal ideology concerning how an ideal woman should behave. She should be a faithful wife and a good mother. She should not remarry after her husband’s death. In fact, Hamlet’s words about her mother’s re-marriage in the film, ‘She acted as a beast in heat’, unfortunately approve social machismo that modern Turkish women are trying to get rid of. Moreover, representation of Hamlet’s mother in her sexy costumes and Hamlet’s childhood friends Rezzan and Gul (Rozencranz and Guildernstein) in their bikinis as hedonistic figures or merely as sex objects can be explained in two ways. First, it can be related to Erksan’s personal passion about creating a national cinema in which modernism means westernization and westernization is the source of corruption and all social evils. Second, it is once again a way of approving the patriarchal ideology, which always tries to shape the woman according to the male desire. We can, thus, easily say that Erksan does not intend a woman’s film with a feminist message. He submits to the cinematographic conventions of the period and the demands of the film market. The mood of Erksan’s film is sunny, bright and high-spirited, with much of the action set in outdoor locations. Unlike the mainstream interpretations concerning Hamlet’s character in the cinema as a man of thought who cannot decide, Erksan interprets Hamlet as a woman of action who is ready to get rid of all the obstacles in the way leading her to revenge. In Erksan’s film, Hamlet’s discovery of the truth does not come gradually through a painful and self-torturing process of inquiring, questioning, meditating, hesitating and suffering but directly with the appearance of her father’s ghost. Once she sees the ghost, she believes in whatever he says. She never questions the ghost, nor ever thinks that she is the victim of her imagination. Such an interpretation eliminates the hesitation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which reveals his predicament as well as his intellectual, emotional and moral potentiality. However, Erksan compensates the loss in the proceeding scenes, especially in Hamlet’s madness scenes, by putting in Hamlet’s mouth soliloquies questioning the contrast between reality and appearance. The film starts with opening credits on Fatma Girik’s photographs taken from the film to the accompaniment of Shostakovich’s music, which is a direct influence of Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) on the film. The first sequence comes as an iris shot, in which an elderly man (Hamlet’s father) is shot in a hunting scene in a wood. So we realize that this is the cross hairs of a gun; the elderly man is deadly wounded, but before he dies, he looks at the camera, sees his murderer and the final expression in his face is astonishment. This scene is followed by the funeral scene where Hamlet’s exclusion and isolation from the rest of the group is emphasized by long shots in which Hamlet, in her black suit, looks at her father’s coffin absentmindedly. Here, the vertical composition of the frame, created by the trunks of the trees in the background, again signifies her exclusion and isolation. The first words of the film belong to Kasim (Claudius): ‘The most difficult speech is definitely the one

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made in a funeral.’ Kasim finishes his speech saying that his dead brother’s wife is his sister now and his daughter is his own daughter, and he promises that he is going to do his best to lessen their sorrow. This last sentence of Kasim goes along with family traditions because the death of the father in most of the rural areas of eastern Turkey makes his brother responsible for the welfare of the dead brother’s wife and children. However, Kasim’s words are replaced by his violent laughter in the wedding ceremony scene. This sudden jump, cut from his sorrowful speech in the funeral to his uncontrolled joy in the wedding ceremony, draws a contrast between the compassionate and trustworthy father figure of the previous scene and the passionate and pleasure-seeking character of this wedding scene. What is even more, Erksan’s use of low-angle shots and extreme close-ups of Kasim’s face create deformity in his face, and this complements the latter presentation of Kasim as an evil character. Meanwhile, Hamlet, masquerading in her white three-piece suit with a waistcoat with black and white stripes on it, a red tie and a red handkerchief, looks to have already recovered from the shock of her father’s death; having thrown cynical looks and words at Kasim and Gonul (Gertrude), she announces that she is not going back to the United States. While Shakespeare’s Hamlet cannot cast his ‘nighted colour off’ during the wedding, this sudden change in the mood of Erksan’s Hamlet reflected through her light-hearted cynicism creates ambiguity in her character. In fact, owing to the formula of characterization in Turkish melodramas, Erksan’s Hamlet character is depicted with only her visible peculiarities and without psychological motives. In other words, the psychological complexity of the character is reduced to a melodramatic simplification or in ‘excessive expressivity of melodrama’ (Skovmand 1993: 119). Another sudden transformation in Hamlet’s behaviour will occur with the switch from sanity to insanity in her madness scenes, but these scenes never damage her credibilˇ ity. On the contrary, this intensifies the melodramatic effect. As Nezih Erdogan argues: Characters who were never depicted as individuals, and who could not act but were ‘acted upon’, reinforced the melodramatic effect. Given such circumstances, it is not difficult to see why split identities have always been convincing for, appealing to, the audience. (2006: 151) The next sequence starts with a long shot of Hamlet and Orhan (Ophelia) on a ruined wharf by the sea. Much of the frame is dominated by the sea, and this visually signifies the unknown and the uncertain in the Hamlet–Orhan relationship. Also, the ruined wharf seems to foreshadow the future of this relationship. They are shot from the back, and the vast distance between them signifies not only the emotional distance between them, but also their impossible love. This symbolic composition of the frame was not a commonplace in the Turkish Cinema of the period. Most Turkish directors failed in expressing themselves in film language and showing the invisible via the visible on the screen. Instead of using mise-en-scéne within the frame, they preferred to use long dialogues to convey their messages. In this scene, Hamlet begs Orhan not to love her anymore, as she is no longer the same person because she now has a mission to fulfil. She severely protests against her mother’s marriage and gives away her suspicion about the accidental death of her father.

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Unlike Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Erksan’s Orhan is a mature and strong character (this will problematize his suicide, of course) and he seems to be ready to help Hamlet in her mission, though he does not knows it yet. The ghost scene is naturally the most problematic scene for a modern adaptation, as it is difficult for the director to turn the unbelievable into the believable. Hence, Erksan does not even attempt to resort to realistic techniques for this particular scene. On the contrary, he inserts surrealistic details to abstract the setting from the real world, implying that the ghost might be the production of Hamlet’s own imagination. To serve this purpose, Erksan uses extreme close-ups of Hamlet’s face, and he also uses vertical and geometrical compositions in the frame, which deform the setting and distort the reality. Erksan’s ghost appears in a black costume with a black hat; all the special effects peculiar to western film conventions, such as the dark and gloomy atmosphere, the threatening music, the smoke and the low-angle shots are there to represent the ghost’s unnaturalness. In Turkish film conventions, however, a ghost usually appears in comedies, in white from head to toe because the dead person in Islamic tradition is buried not in a coffin, but in a piece of white cloth called kefen. The ghost tells Hamlet the truth about his death, that he was killed by his brother, causing Hamlet to make an oath of revenge. Having introduced the major conflict of the film, Erksan visualizes Hamlet’s madness both in clothes and in manners. There are five madness scenes, and these prolonged scenes are Erksan’s additions to Shakespeare’s text probably with a double purpose. First, these madness scenes, in a way, compensate the loss both in Hamlet’s personality and in the philosophical, intellectual and emotional effects of the film in general. That is to say, representation of Hamlet as a person with unhesitating submission to the ghost’s will, and hence her representation as a person of action rather than a person of thought, weakens Erksan’s characterization of Hamlet. Unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Erksan’s character never questions the ghost’s entity and never hesitates to take the power for revenge. Erksan uses the madness scenes to convey Shakespeare’s themes, such as the deceptiveness of both reality and appearance, the borders between sanity and insanity and the meaning and meaninglessness of life and death. Second, in these madness scenes, Erksan is once again exhibiting his Sufi view about the paradoxical nature of visible reality. We have already seen these views in Erksan’s Sevmek Zamani/Time to Love (1965). Also, these madness scenes keep the attention of the audience alive, as the madness motive has always been one of the indispensible ingredients of the Turkish melodrama tradition. In the first of these madness scenes, Hamlet is presented as blowing a horn in a red uniform that is worn by the members of military bands in Turkey. This scene takes place in a wood where Orhan (Ophelia) is painting. Hamlet cynically questions Orhan about the validity of his realistic painting, which is the exact copy of the visible and therefore reflects only the surface reality and fails to depict the invisible or the inner reality of things. This scene is immediately replaced by another madness scene in which Gonul (Gertrude) and Kasim (Claudius) are lethargically sleeping under the sun in their hammocks. Singing birds in the background, multi-coloured flowers in the vases and the purple and red velvet blankets covering Gonul and Kasim are all appealing to the senses to reveal the sensuality of the couple. Hamlet appears wearing the armour of a medieval knight - as she has a mission to accomplish - holding a mirror up to her mother and stepfather to show them the outer reality, emphasizing the fact that mirrors do not show the inner reality; what they see is the body and face

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which is not more than a ‘cover’. Deep inside the cover is the ‘essence’ where murder, cruelty and barbarism are all hidden. In this scene, Hamlet’s words about the existence of such dichotomies like good and evil, truth and lie within the inner worlds of people are Erksan’s additions to the original text, and obviously they disturb Kasim (Claudius) as Erksan’s camera shows in close-ups the feelings of restlessness and fear in his face. The scene ends with Hamlet breaking the mirror. The third of the madness scenes comes with the accompaniment of a wellknown Turkish song, Makber, meaning ‘grave’, whose lyrics praise the dignity and beauty of death, drawing a picture of death as a fantastic dreamland. Here, Hamlet is presented as reading a book in a bed which is not in a room, but in open air, on top of a hill; opposite the bed there is a door which opens nowhere. The whole scene has the quality of a surrealistic painting. When the poor housekeeper (Polonius) comes to enquire the reason for Hamlet’s strange manners, Hamlet rebukes him, saying that the doors must be knocked on, and she forces him to knock at the imaginary door and pass through it. Not only does this scene serve to make Hamlet’s madness believable for Polonius, but also the lyrics of the song Makber/Grave prepare the background for the next madness scene where Hamlet will utter her ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. The next madness scene takes place on a deserted hill, where Hamlet, in her tailcoat, is conducting an imaginary orchestra which consists of not musicians but instruments, which are left on music stands. The music that she conducts is again Shostakovich, and it comes from a tape. Hamlet, in this scene, seems no longer to be playing a game to convince the others of her madness, but to be bursting out hysterically, as she probably cannot cope with the things in her mind. When the music stops, we hear the applause, which is also coming from the tape. Hamlet bows in reverence for her imaginary audience and utters the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, adopting an exaggerated acting style. In Shakespeare’s text, these lines show Hamlet’s meditation on life and death. However, Erksan reads this soliloquy as ‘to be insane or not to be insane’, as the whole scene, instead of focusing on the oscillating mind of Hamlet between the questions of life and death, shows her oscillating between sanity and insanity, and in Erksan’s mise-en-scéne Hamlet prefers insanity. She seems to be completely isolated and alienated from the real world, and this is visualized by a number of low-angle shots and close-ups. When Orhan (Ophelia), who watches this imaginary performance of Hamlet, approaches her in astonishment, the scene is replaced by the so-called nunnery scene, in which Hamlet tells Orhan that she has never loved him. However, at the end of the scene, a close-up of her face shows her eyes with tears, probably as a proof of her love for Orhan. In the next sequence, Hamlet is visited by her childhood friends, Rezzan and Gul (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), and they, reminding her of her drama background in the theatre, suggest performing a play to change Hamlet’s mood. Hamlet adores this idea and wants them to find out three tuluat players. Here, instead of the travelling company of the original text, Erksan’s addition of the tuluat, the traditional Turkish drama depending on improvisation rather than a text, is a very creative insight, and it serves its purpose – to catch Kasim’s (Claudius’s) conscience – probably better than that of Shakespeare’s text. The film reaches its climax and the crisis within the play scene, because, in this scene, Hamlet implicitly points to her uncle as someone who has killed his brother in pursuit of sex and property. Erksan’s mise-en-scéne here creates both a tuluat and, at the same time, an Elizabethan-hall performance

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setting. Hamlet, wearing a black cloak with big white skulls printed all over it, appears on a high platform with a medieval castle decoration in the background. As the leader of the chorus, Hamlet first discusses the function of the theatre; then, the performance starts with a musical show to the accompaniment of a song whose lyrics question the corruption in the established order where the mean, the banal and the evil devour the good. Moreover, the song, whose lyrics were written by a famous poet, Orhan Veli, was composed by a well-established Turkish musician, Timur Selcuk, who was often associated with the leftist youth movement that had the connotation of ‘rebellion’ in the Turkey of the 1970s. So the play scene is outstanding with its sociopolitical local colour elements successfully attached to Shakespeare’s text. Hamlet’s second costume in this scene, with her top hat, tight blue jeans, braces and t-shirt, complements the rebellious mood created by the song, and eventually comes as a shock for Hamlet’s audience. Especially, at the end of the performance, Hamlet turns her back to the audience, bends over and, in a rude gesture, presents her rear-bottom to the audience, an act which is not considered proper behaviour for the daughter of such an aristocratic family. A landowner like Kasim (Claudius) and his company, who always vote for well-established conservative rightist parties (whose primary aim is to imprison Turkish women in a domestic sphere with proper feminine behaviour), will inevitably be disturbed by a young lady behaving in this way. After the first resentment, the play scene continues with the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’, the play-within-a-play scene, whose aim is to ‘catch the conscience’ of Kasim, and it achieves its aim. During the play-within-a-play scene, when Kasim watches the re-enactment of the murder of a man by the hand of his own brother, Hamlet fixes her accusing eyes on her uncle and studies his face. A close-up of her face shows her eyes full of pure rage and hatred. Hamlet’s implicit accusation, associated with another disrespectful behaviour in front of the guests, comes as the last straw for Kasim. He cannot take Hamlet’s challenge and leaves the room. There are some scenes in Shakespeare’s plays that are interpreted and performed in different ways by the directors, and these various interpretations enrich Shakespearean criticism. One of them, the closet scene in Hamlet, has been performed in a variety of interpretations both in cinema and on the stage. Erksan’s bedroom scene takes place in Gonul’s (Gertrude’s) bedroom; a large, white, oval room with a round bed with a pink plush bedclothes (representing sensuality) takes up much of the frame. Gonul is in an all-red costume, whereas Hamlet is in white. Hamlet’s emphasis throughout the scene is not on her father’s death and her revenge, but on her mother’s unfaithfulness to her father. The most unlucky victim of this mother–daughter quarrel scene is, of course, the housekeeper (Polonius), who is trying to overhear the conversation behind a curtain. Hamlet, thinking that it is Kasim, kills him with a paperknife. The victim is not Kasim but Orhan’s father. Now Kasim is sure that Hamlet is dangerous and threatening his new position, and therefore, should be sent back to the States. In the following scene, Hamlet is talking to Kasim about her compulsory visit to the States. Hamlet wears a black transparent dress and exhibits her body as she walks on a big rectangular table, similar to the catwalk of a fashion show. Erksan’s Hamlet is not sent to England to die, but to the States to be killed by Joe Stampanato, a mafia godfather. Kasim’s mafia relationship proves him to be a ‘dark’ character who is doing illegal things, and in his personality Erksan seems to be

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pointing to the illegal sources of money and property of the Turkish rich (who relied on the protection of feudalism in the 1970s), and to be questioning the established order once more. Although Erksan, by cutting the Fortinbras story, understates the political aspect of the original play, his references to the Turkish politics of the 1970s seem to imply that there is something rotten in the state of Turkey. The last sequence of the film takes place in the same woodlands where Hamlet’s father had been killed at the beginning of the film. Dressed all in white and armed with a rifle, Hamlet is presented just like her father at the beginning of the film. She is seen through the cross hairs of Osman’s (Leartes’s) rifle, and is fatally wounded by him. However, she manages to shoot him dead. Kasim (Claudius) and Gonul (Gertrude), who have been told the bad news by Halil (Horatio), rush to the woodlands separately; and Kasim, mistaking Gonul who has worn a white dress like Hamlet’s, accidentally shoots Gonul. Hamlet hunts the unarmed Kasim when he kneels down by Gonul, but lets him run away, saying that she never shoots at a defenceless man. Finally, Hamlet shoots Kasim, and the final scene shows Hamlet in slow motion violently tearing down with her own rifle the shooting range made in the form of a huge revolver. The final scene is a frozen photograph of Hamlet’s almost insane face in confusion and despair. So, at the end of Erksan’s film there is a deviation from the original text and the revenge tragedy traditions to do justice to the poetic tradition of the Turkish melodrama conventions of the 1970s, in which the hero often survives while the wicked are punished and the good and fair are rewarded. Hamlet survives by accomplishing her mission. However, the questions remain: is she sane or insane; is this her victory or defeat? The final frozen scene takes the audience to the unknown fate of the Angel of Vengeance. Her tearing the shooting range down is the only glimpse of hope which gives the audience hints of a life in which there will be no place for feud, guns, violence and murder.

CONCLUSION Erksan’s The Angel of Vengeance is the first, and not the worst, attempt of Turkish Cinema to create a dialogue with Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s text, according to the principles of Yuri Lotman’s (1990: 146) fourth stage of intercultural transfers, has been ‘transformed through the many asymmetrical transformations into a new and original structural model’. In other words, a Shakespearean text, a western, Christian cultural icon, crossing all the boundaries of geography, language and culture and passing through various phases of reception, from the Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, has been indigenized, hybridized and reconstructed by the resources of Eastern European or Middle Eastern and Islamic codes of Turkish culture. In the meantime, Erksan’s interest in dealing with social wounds, his anti-establishment attitude and the influence of the National Cinema manifesto on his film career are evident throughout the film. Finally, the local film-making traditions such as the melodramatic formula, ideas and concepts of cinematography, film genres, acting and directing as well as other elements of the local culture take their part in the production of The Angel of Vengeance/The Female Hamlet. Of course, they have all been affected, and/or changed by the encounter with Shakespeare and Shakespearean Cinema.

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REFERENCE Abisel, N. (2005), Turk Sinemasi Uzerine Yazilar, Ankara: Phoenix. And, M. (1964), ‘Shakespeare in Turkey’, Theatre Research, 6: 2, pp. 75–85. ˙s Bankası Kültür ——— (1972), Turk Tiyatrosu: 1839–1908, Ankara: Turkiye I¸ Yayınları. Enginün, I. (1979), Tanzimat Devrinde Shakespeare Tercumeleri ve Tesiri, Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlari. ˇ Erdogan, N. (2006), ‘Narratives of resistance: National identity and ambivalence in the Turkish melodrama between 1965 and 1975’, in C. Grant and A. Kuhn (eds), Screening World Cinema: A Screen Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 145–59. Erksan, M. ([1929] 1952), Karanlik Dunya: Asik Veysel’in Hayati (Dark World: The Life of Asik Veysel), Atlas Film, Turkey. ______ (1962), Yilanlarin Ocu (The Revenge of the Snakes), Be-Ya Film, Turkey. ______ (1965), Sevmek Zamani (Time to Love), Troya Film, Turkey. ______ (1966), Olmeyen Ask (Undying Love), Arzu Film, Turkey. ______ (1968), Kuyu (The Well), Lale Film, Turkey. ______ (1971), Feride, Saner Film, Turkey. ______ (1976), Intikam Melegi (The Angel of Vengeance), Ugur Film, Turkey. Hamlet (1964), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. Howard, T. (2007), Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King Lear (1937, 1938), (Kral Lear), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. Lotman, M. (2002), ‘Umwelt and semiosphere’, Sign Systems Studies, 30: 1, pp. 33–40. Lotman, Y. (1990), Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (trans. A. Shukman, intro. U. Eco), London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd. Macbeth (1936), (Makbet), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre.. Measure for Measure (1935), (Olcuye Olcu), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. Much Ado about Nothing (1937), (Kuru Gürültü), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. Neale, S. (1986), ‘Melodrama and tears’, Screen 27: 6, pp. 7–22. O’Regan, T. (1999), ‘Cultural exchange’, in T. Miller (ed.), A Companion to Film Theory, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 262–94. Othello (1940), (Otello), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. Paker, S. (1986), ‘Hamlet in Turkey’, New Comparison 2: Autumn, pp. 89–108. ˙ Refig, H. (1971), Sinema Kavgasi, Istanbul: Hareket Yayinevi. Romeo and Juliet (1939), (Romeo ve Julyet), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. Sayin 12 October 2001, Personal interview with the director. Skovmand, M. (1993), Screen Shakespeare, Arhus: Arhus University Press. Suleyman, D. (1999), ‘From Rabi’a to Ibn al-Farid: towards some paradigms of the Sufi conception of love’, Unpublished PH.D. Thesis, University of Leeds, UK. The Comedy of Errors (1938, 1940), (Yanlisliklar Komedyasi), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. The Merchant of Venice (1931), (Venedik Taciri), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre. The Merry Wives of Windsor (1938), (Windsor’un Sen Kadinlari), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Istanbul City Theatre.

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The Taming of the Shrew (1930), (Hircin Kiz), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Darulbedayi Sahnesi, Istanbul. Twelfth Night (1929), (Onikinci Gece), Muhsin Ertugrul, dir. Darulbedayi Sahnesi, Istanbul. Vicinus, M. (1981), ‘Helpless and unfriended: Nineteenth-century domestic melodrama’, New Literary History, 13: 1 (Autumn), pp. 127–43.

SUGGESTED CITATION Sayin, G. (2011), ‘Shakespeare in Turkish cinema: A cultural transfer from Hamlet to The Angel of Vengeance (1976)’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, 4: 1, pp. 17–37, doi: 10.1386/jafp.4.1.17_1.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Gül¸sen Sayin is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Beykent University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author of a book in Turkish titled Martin McDonagh Tiyatrosu/The Theatre of Martin McDonagh. She has published articles on Shakespearean adaptations and contemporary Irish drama. Contact: Beykent University, Department of Translation and Interpreting, Sisli Ayazaga Campus, Ayazaga 34396, Istanbul, Turkey E-mail: [email protected]

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