Fate of Silents with Arabic Letter Intertitles in Turkey

Excerpt from an article by Agâh Özgüç
November 27 2021

Mavi Boncuk |

For lack of space or for various reasons, our films were thrown away here and there, and sometimes they were burned ruthlessly. By the way, let's talk about a memory of movie theater operator and producer Cemil Filmer about this movie burning incident.

After Şakir-Kemal Seden, İhsan İpekçi, Halil Kamil, Fuat Rutkay and Hürrem Erman, Cemil Filmer is one of the most important producers of a period. Filmer was not yet a producer in 1928; It is an importer and operator of foreign films. It works with American majors such as Paramount and Warner Bros.

"... The decision made overnight reduced the value of the films printed with old letters in the hands of us filmmakers to zero. I took all the old films I had to Hürriyet Hill, struck the match and burned them. It was a great devastation for us to replace them with new ones. We worked day and night for five years to compensate for the damage." "We had to work without earning anything," says Cemil Filmer.

Fortunately, not all of the films that Filmer "lit the match" with are local productions, they are all foreign-made. But why did he burn all those films?

There must be a reason.

The incident goes like this.

When the Latin alphabet was adopted and the use of Arabic letters was banned as a result of the law approved by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in November 1928, filmmakers were left in a difficult situation. Especially film importers...

According to the fourth article of this ten-article law, all intertitles of imported foreign films will be translated into Turkish. However, our filmmakers have so many films with subtitles consisting of old letters in their warehouses...

However, converting these subtitled films into Turkish letters in a short time was both difficult and costly depending on the conditions of those years. Even though a group of famous film importers, including Cemil Filmer, applied to the authorities with a joint petition to solve this problem, the result does not change. In an unexpected decision, the filmmakers' demands for a solution were rejected. Cemil Filmer, who was very disappointed, burned the films for this reason.

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