The Participants 2007:
The Widening Gap Between Critics and Mainstream Cinema
By Nil Kural (Turkey)

When I first started to write film reviews as a freelance critic for a film magazine four years ago, the work charmed me. As a result, I decided to finish my undergraduate education as soon as humanly possible and tried to find a full time job. As a coincidence or by pure luck, I managed to find a job in a new monthly film magazine called "Filmarti". The preparation of the content, the whole process of writing, editing and publishing was exhausting but I woke up every morning happy to go to work for two years.

During the two years that I worked at "Filmarti", I had a chance to observe the Turkish cinema industry very closely. And I witnessed a huge change. Some genres that never found a place in Turkish cinema before started to come up. These are big action or disaster films with budgets like one million dollars, which is a very big budget for Turkish films and B type horror movies influenced by Japanese horror cinema. Although these films are not high quality examples of cinema, Turkish audience showed a huge interest in those films and they broke record after record at the box office.

In the meantime, the art house cinema also developed in its silent but deep way. Some auteur directors started to be noticed internationally. Directors such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Semih Kaplanoglu, Kutlug Ataman, Reha Erdem shot their films usually financed by Euroimages. Their films got international attention or awards at festivals. But of course, the audience was insensitive and left the cinema theaters empty.

This roughly draws the general picture. It could be seen clearly that the inevitable will happen soon. The Turkish cinema audience will be fed up with the quality of the mainstream Turkish movies and stop going to cinemas once again like they did many times before. We, as film critics, tried to prevent this from happening by writing neutral views showing these films' weaknesses. This was also an attempt to warn the directors of mainstream movies and to push them into creating above average examples of mainstream films. Instead of development, something very rare happened. The directors accused the critics of a lack of knowledge and a grudge developed between critics and directors.

As a result of this complicated situation, the responsibility of critics becomes bigger. We are trying to encourage directors who are trying new things and respecting cinema as an art form. By writing in different mediums, we may also encourage the audience to take an interest in the works of art house cinema directors and make these directors happy with the box office at home. Although, Turkish cinema is at break point, fighting to be an industry, the local and original film magazines are closing down and magazines such as "Empire" or "Total film", which are mostly in transition, are coming into the picture. This is also unexpected since the audience prefers Turkish films. So the gap widens between the critics and mainstream directors as well as the readers due to transition magazines. As a result, Turkish cinema has become kind of an action movie like the ones they imitate. We have crossed our fingers and wonder what will happen in the next scene.

Nil Kural

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