Remake, Remix, Rip-Off is on the shortlist of the German Film Awards. The nominations will be announced in May 2015. With the pre-nomination the film is going to be shown at the 65th International Film Festival Berlin’s Lola@Berlinale section.Mavi Boncuk | LOLA at Berlinale
Remake, Remix, Rip-Off
Germany / Turkey 2014, 96 min, Turkish
Script, Direction; Editing Cem Kaya Producer Jochen Laube
Photography Meryem Yavuz Tan Kurttekin
Additional Photography Gökhan Bulut Erdal Bilici Aytunç Akad Emrah Yıldırım Christian Coslar Cem Kaya
Sound Gözen Atila Özkan Coşgun Emrah Yıldırım Gökhan Kırtaş Orçin İnceoğlu
Assistant Director Gökhan Bulut
Production Management Istanbul Zümrüt Burul Reşat Fuat Çam Erdal Bilici Cem Öztüfekçi Altan Sebüktekin
Transcription Sinan Bali Film Research & Assistant Editor Gözen Atila
Editorial Department ZDF Frank Seyberth Claudia Tronnier
UFA FICTION Post Production Supervisor Stephan Gehrke Legal Affairs Sascha Gottschalck
Producer Arda Erkman Assistant Producer Dilay Çakmak
İstanbul Işık Archive Alican Sekmeç Music ANADOL "Gurbet Bekçisi", 2010
Produced by UFA Fiction in Co Production with ZDF, Das kleine Fernsehspiel Sommerhaus Filmproduktionen Otomat Cine+ Funded by MFG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg
In the 60s and 70s Turkey was home to one of the world`s biggest film industries, even though it wasn´t prepared for it. Soon the filmmakers ran out of topics and they began copying scripts and movies from all over the world. Name any Western hit film, there`s a Turkish version to it, be it Tarzan, The Wizard of Oz, The Exorcist, Rambo, Superman or Star Wars. These quickly and low-budget produced look-alike movies were adapted to the taste of local audiences with huge success in the rural Anatolian hinterland. What they lacked in equipment and budget they compensated through excessive use of manpower both behind and in front of the camera: If Luke Skywalker hits one time, Turkish action hero Cüneyt Arkın hits a hundred times – and we know, he means it!
Cem Kaya grew up with Yeşilçam movies from Turkish video stores in Germany. His documentary illustrates the origin of copy culture of Turkish filmmakers, starting with Yeşilçam until todays television series. Because the Turkish television series market is one of the world's biggest. In Istanbul he met with directing legends, producers, actors and film scientists to capture a glance of the country's tumultuous history of movie making. Remake, Remix, Rip-Off took 7 years in making in which Kaya watched thousands of movies and conducted about a hundred interviews.
Interview partners Memduh Ün; Kunt Tulgar; Giovanni Scognamillo; Murat Özcan; Yılmaz Atadeniz; Birsen Kaya; Gülçin Uçer; Savaş Arslan; Sabri Demirdöğen; Melih Gülgen; İzzet Günay; Süheyl Eğriboz; İhsan Gedik; Hüseyin Zan; Cüneyt Arkın; Kayhan Yıldızoğlu; Sırrı Elitaş; Erdoğan Kapısız; Nilüfer Aydan; Fikret Hakan; Duygu Sağıroğlu; Aydemir Akbaş; Temel Gürsu; Nuri Alço; Rekin Teksoy; Gökay Gelgeç; Halit Refiğ; Yılmaz Köksal; Canan Perver; Altan Günbay; Süleyman Turan; Çetin İnanç; Fatma Girik; Türkân Şoray; Hülya Koçyiğit; Erol Batıbeki; Çetin Tunca; Metin Erksan; İrfan Atasoy; Selahattin Geçgel; Serhat Köksal; Ezel Akay; Banu Yeğin; Gülizar Çevik; Gülperi Ok; Hakan Gürtop; Ercan Yıldız; Hüseyin Kuzu; Oğuz Gözen; Mehmet Güler; Burçak Evren; Şeref Gür; Mehmet Çelik; Mehmet Çiçekci; Eşref Kolçak; Erdal Bilici; Metin Demirhan.
INDIEWIRE REVIEW: There's a strong temptation in writing about "Remake, Remix, Rip-Off," considering it's playing at the Göteborg International Film Festival in Sweden, to forge some labored pun about "sweding," a more systematized version of which is essentially what the indigenous Turkish film industry thrived on from the mid-1940s to the late '80s. But Cem Kaya's raucous, heartfelt documentary quickly renders that comparison irrelevant — this is not the ironic recreation of Hollywood classics for consumption by a bunch of hipster kids temporarily embracing a lo-fi approach to mass culture. It's the ethos that was embraced for roughly four decades by what was at one point the fifth largest national film industry in the world that reached untold millions in viewership both at home and through the Turkish diaspora. Still today it exerts a powerful influence in the remaining film and TV infrastructure, and in the nostalgia felt by a new generation of commentators and critics, but perhaps most lasting of all, is its legacy in shaping the storytelling style and tastes of a nation.It may not have been an ironic movement, but that's not to say there's no irony employed here — devotees of the kitsch, the campy, and the so-bad-it's-insanely-good will find much to tickle them, especially in the witty, lightning-edited compilations of clips from the old films in question. Whether used to illustrate the cheapie approach to location scouting (a compilation of scenes from different films all unfolding against the same waterfall backdrop had our audience howling), or to dubbing (ditto the moment in the crap dubbing montage in which a dog barks a clearly human "woof woof!"), or to soundtracking (the theme tune to "The Godfather" appears to score about 95% of the films), these compilations are an absolute joy.
Even in their stupidest, crassest moments — like the car chase in which we cut from anguished actor to a tiny toy car turning over, or "The Exorcist" rehash, or the sweded "Superman," which begins with a shot of planets that are clearly Christmas tree baubles — they are presented with very endearing sense of affection and creeping admiration. Well-crafted for maximum entertainment value, it's like Kaya's aware that any one of these films might, absent the sheen of nostalgia that one who had grown up with them might have, be just too tedious to sit through for any length of time. So these digestible glimpses give us a frenetic flavor without filling us up, and remain among the freshest, funniest film clip compilations we've seen in ages.
But it's not all just clips — the film also includes substantial interview footage with the directors and actors of the time, which is seldom less than riotously entertaining in its own right. The level of self-awareness the participants have is remarkable and unaffected: the actors shrug off doing their own stunts, recycling their own costumes, and appearing, as one claims, in anywhere from 500-1000 films, while the directors and producers are occasionally more defensive (or even sometimes rueful), but mainly because they're totally aware of their place in the artistic pecking order. Mostly they emerge as roguish self-professed Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich (Hollywood) to give to the less fortunate (rural Turks, themselves). But the unapologetic, mischievous glee with which they recount their extraordinary tales of making-do-and-mending (a diverting sequence showing how to construct a makeshift dolly by nailing bars of soap to the legs of a table and wetting the "tracks" on which it slides, is a masterclass in homespun, practical genius) gives a joyous kind of nobility to their unmistakable rip-offs.
Unmistakable they are, from the story lines to the soundtracks to, occasionally, actual footage, all proudly lifted and mixed and matched from big international imports, with the kind of insouciance that only a culture of non-existent copyright law can breed. In fact, as a couple of critics and bloggers argue persuasively, the very shoddiness of the productions forced their own kind of gonzo creativity, with occasionally quite hypnotic and/or hilarious results, as in the superhero "The Iron Fist," who wears The Phantom's mask but has the Superman logo emblazoned across his chest and the Batman insignia on his belt.
Edited down from the 110-minute cut shown in Locarno, even the film's newly trim 96 minutes does flag in the final section when, after the brimming wit and brio of its first hour plus, the focus shifts and the momentum slows. But it's hard to hold the slackening of pace against Kaya when his intentions are this good, and the results valuable, if not as electric as before. After all the stories of seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night productions and splicing together photo negatives to make film reels, he finally brings the story of Yeşilçam (the street on which the production houses were located, which therefore gives its name to the whole industry of the period) right up to date. Necessarily more somber, as it approaches events in Taksim Square in 2013, the film traces the end of the Yeşilçam era signaled first by the encroaching competition from adult movies and TV, then by the tentative introduction of copyright regulations, before it's finally given a symbolic full-stop with the sad demolition of the spectacular movie palace that was the Emek cinema.
Kaya spent seven years making his film, and the breadth of his knowledge of his subject (he is the son of Turkish immigrant parents who grew up watching these films as VHS bootlegs that found a huge expat audience in Germany) and his affection for its excesses is palpable. Despite all the illegality, Yeşilçam embodied a kind of innocence that is pretty much gone from this changing world, but "Remake, Remix, Rip Off," while it may bite off a little more than it can comfortably chew, stands a wonderfully fond, funny memorial to a lovably outlaw national film industry and the cowboys, pirates, and celluloid bandits who populated it. [B+]