Cem Yılmaz, Telecinematic Genre Revival and Ideology of the Turkish Film Remakes

Popular cinema in Turkey had mostly relied on adaptations of Hollywood cinema in its golden age in the 1960s to the 1980s. Transnational remakes of the time codified a negotiated aspect of modernisation discourse: nation-state myth, belief in progress/science and migration/visibility of women in cities. With the advent of television, the classic mode of Turkish film production (Yeşilçam-Green Pine) declined. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, parody films were widely recycled, revitalising the cinema industry in Turkey. Three classic Hollywood film genres stood out as the most parodied and Turkified: historical adventure, sci-fi and melodrama. The film parodies brought back earlier discourses, recodified, and deconstructed them by presenting alternative discourses to Hollywood genres’ and Yeşilçam remakes/adaptations’ modernisation discourses. The epitome of this critique came from the films of Turkish comedian, screenwriter, and director Cem Yılmaz with his parody films such as G.O.R.A. (2004), A.R.O.G (2008) and Arif V 216 (2018). With the entrance of Netflix, Cem Yılmaz was given two options: (1) making his films available to worldwide audiences through Netflix and (2) in return to produce his own genre-parody films. He did both and delivered a series of eight films titled The Life and Movies of Erşan Kuneri (2022). This chapter analyses Yılmaz’s recent film series on Netflix, how he positions telecinematic streaming Turkish cinema of today, reinterpreting/remaking classical Turkish genre films of the 1960s–1980s through parody’s critical transnational intertextuality that allows him to expose and reconstruct film genre ideologies.