Like many filmmaking practices outside Hollywood, Turkish cinema lacks a popular sci-fi genre. The main reasons for this are insufficient governmental or private funding and a competent labor force – all essential for producing the visual effects that lie at the core of mainstream sci-fi. In that sense, G.O.R.A.: A Space Movie (2004) was a turning point for the absent genre in Turkish cinema. Despite being a parody of many Hollywood films, such as Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999), the film is franchised as the first “real” or “serious” sci-fi film of Turkey (Beşiktaş Kültür Merkezi (BKM), 2022). The discourse of “professionalism” arises from the film’s successful blending of live-action and animation, made by Turkish effects artists with minimal reliance on transnational labor. Even though G.O.R.A. draws upon popular Hollywood texts, this transnational appropriation goes beyond mere replication. It merges its hypotext with local elements and earlier modes of Turkish filmmaking. This post is about how the style of G.O.R.A.’s animation sequences contributes to this transnational appropriation oscillating between Americanness, which is a heavy reliance on Hollywood blockbusters as hypotext, and Turkishness, which is the impact of this heavy reliance on the notion of national cinema. Thus, by investigating G.O.R.A.’s aesthetic, the post extends to a broader question: How does recontextualizing American texts complicate the self-understanding of a national cinema as “a stable set of meanings” with defined cultural borders (Higson 2002, 53)?
Figure 1. 216 the Robot interprets the symbols in Ceku’s coffee through his mechanic vision. 216, as an advanced technology, is used to highlight elements of Turkish culture.
G.O.R.A. situates the stereotypical visual motifs of sci-fi films, such as the so-called cutting-edge technology and the rational order of the spaceship, next to the stereotypical motifs of Turkish culture. For instance, Princess Ceku and 216 the Robot, members of Gora’s royal family, envy terrestrial life and perform “human activities” such as belly dancing or coffee cup reading. The latter defines practices of interpreting symbols formed by the coffee grounds to predict one’s future. In this scene, we watch how the Robot interprets the symbols in the princess’ cup through his vision, which resembles the interface of a surveillance camera. Instead of localizing or tracking a subject—an image rooted in the visual vocabulary of Hollywood sci-fi action movies—these green point-of-view shots give a detailed coffee cup reading by zooming in and out on the grounds (See Figure 1). This coexistence of national and transnational visual elements resonates with Higbee and Lim’s (2010) critical approach to transnationalism, a way of analyzing how transnational filmmaking activities can harbor the national paradigm instead of eschewing or obliterating it. They argue that the main problem of previous approaches for theorizing transnational cinema (Lu 1997, Higson 2000, Naficy 2001, Nestingen and Elkington 2005) is that “the national simply becomes displaced or negated in such analysis as if it ceases to exist, when in fact, the national continues to exert the force of its presence even within transnational film-making practices” (Higbee and Lim 2010, 10).
G.O.R.A. achieved such box office success that it created a cycle in the early 2000s with films parodying popular Hollywood texts (Örsler and Kennedy Karpat, 2020). Yet, appropriating Hollywood material is nothing new to Turkish cinema since it was common practice during the golden age of Yeşilçam, the mainstream filmmaking industry from the 1960s to 1980s. Yeşilçam heavily drew upon characters, plots, sound, and imagery of American, Indian, and Egyptian films and recontextualized them for the local industry (Örsler and Kennedy Karpat, 2020). The heavy reliance on transnational intertextual references complicates “the search for an essentialized notion of Turkishness within Turkish cinema (Smith 2008, 5). This explains why Yeşilçam films have long been considered low-brow cultural objects and dismissed in scholarly writings. Yet, as Smith (2008) argues, it is for the same reasons that Yeşilçam is rich for analysis since it questions the definition of national cinema. G.O.R.A.’s use of Hollywood material is a way to pay homage to Yeşilçam’s legacy of appropriation. This becomes clear when considering how the film is heavily influenced by Yeşilçam sci-fi films such as Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973) and The Man Who Saves the World (1982), respectively remaking “The Man Trap,” the first episode of Star Trek (1966-1969), and Star Wars (1977). Both productions have become cult objects outside Turkey for their notoriously bad aesthetic and narrative. Also, the two intersect in how they illegally use footage of their hypertexts, like their establishing shots with spaceships and galaxies. These shots necessitate CG methods that the local industry could not create at that time due to budgetary problems. While G.O.R.A. is influenced by the aforementioned American sci-fi narratives, it also aspires to differentiate itself from their low technical quality.
Figure 2. Arif beams himself out of the spaceship, only to find himself inside a garbage can in front of the entrance. He complains to the guard about the quality of Western technologies.
At the marketing level, the discourses on G.O.R.A.’s effects evoke an inferiority complex regarding Western technology. In the making-of documentary, crew members mention how G.O.R.A.’s visual and special effects and art direction are “professional,” “credible,” and “seamless.” By framing its effects as almost entirely Turkish and emphasizing terms that resonate with the effects industry’s obsession with digital realism, G.O.R.A. claims that when given the appropriate conditions, Turks can make Hollywood-standard popular sci-fi films. Ironically, in the story, Arif, the only character framed as Turkish, makes fun of and masters the so-called cutting-edge devices. While trying to escape the spaceship of the royal family, Arif beams himself out of the spacecraft using the aliens’ teleportation device. Sticking his upper body out of the trash can, he tells the guardian next to him, “What kind of teleportation system is this? Shame on you!” (See Figure 2). Arif is disappointed to find out that what he has seen in Hollywood movies, notably the state-of-the-art technology claimed to be the saver of Western civilization, is overrated.
G.O.R.A.’s effects were a way to prove the national cinema’s capabilities. One might ask how Turkey’s accumulated experience in effects production since G.O.R.A. can be operationalized aside from making parody, pastiche, and transnational appropriation. Contemporary Turkish cinema has given a few examples of sci-fi and fantasy films, such as Grain (2017), In the Shadows (2020), and Once Upon a Time in the Future: 2121 (2024). Yet, according to their box-office numbers, these films did not gather a broad audience like G.O.R.A.. This leads to the question of whether one absolutely needs parodical comedy or a star to make sci-fi in Turkey to compensate for the stylistic and technological gaps with Hollywood. Or does one absolutely need to take its reference point as Hollywood to reach a wide audience? While G.O.R.A. challenges how American myth-making shapes Turkish film history, it is also important to question Turkish cinema’s aesthetic capabilities beyond Hollywood hegemony.
References
Beşiktaş Kültür Merkezi (BKM). “18 YIL ÖNCE BUGÜN G.O.R.A. VİZYONDA! – Kamera Arkası Görüntüleri” [the making-of documentary, which was initially part of the DVD release]. Youtube. November 11, 2022, Video, 35:19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7fLO0w_t8A&t=1903s
Higbee, Will, and Song H. Lim. “Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies.” Transnational Cinemas 1, no: 1 (2010): 7-21.
Higson, Andrew. “The limiting imagination of national cinema.” In Cinema and Nation. Edited by Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 63-74. Routledge, 2000.
Higson Andrew, “The Concept of National Cinema.” In Film and Nationalism. Edited by Alain Williams, 52-67. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002 (Originally Published 1989).
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Nestingen, Andrew and Trevor G. Elkington. Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition. Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
Örsler, Mert, and Colleen Kennedy-Karpat. “Cem Yılmaz and Genre Parody in Turkish National Cinema.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 48, no. 1 (2020): 38-48. https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2019.1657060
Smith, Iain Robert. “‘Beam Me up, Omer’: Transnational Media Flow and the Cultural Politics of the Turkish Star Trek Remake,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 61 (2008): 3-13. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vlt.2008.0004.
Zeynep Aras is a first-year Ph.D. student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. She received her BA in Aesthetic and Practice of Cinema from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2020 and her MA in Media and Visual Studies from Bilkent University in 2023. Her master’s thesis examined analog effects in post-digital cinema by concentrating on the work of contemporary French directors. After receiving her degree, she served as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University for two semesters. The article “Les filles de Méliès: l’exception culturelle, analogue aesthetics and women filmmakers of le cinéma-monde,” which she co-authored, has been recently published in the Journal of French Screen Studies.