Banned Films, C/overt Oppression: Practices of Film Censorship from Contemporary Turkey

Abstract

This project explores how film censorship shapes film production and circulation at film festivals, public screenings, and theatrical releases since the early 2000s in Turkey. It argues that, over time, mechanisms of censorship under Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime became less centralized; practices of censorship became more dispersed and less and less “official;” and the various imposing actors and agencies have differed from those in previous decades. Though still consistent with longstanding state ideologies, reasons for censorship practices, now more than ever, must be complexly navigated and negotiated by producers and distributors of film, including festival organizers, art institutions, and filmmakers themselves, through self-censorship.Drawing on a number of in-depth case studies of films banned after 2000, this project analyzes these works within the political and social contexts surrounding their releases, as well as ethnographic data based on dozens of extensive semi-structured interviews with cultural producers over five years of fieldwork. The corresponding ethnographic fieldwork research reveals how the political climate in Turkey has affected (and worked to suppress) cultural production, freedom of speech, activism, and political resistance to the Erdoğan regime. It asks how political activism, speech, and events are converted into the visibility of image, sound, and text (as film) ultimately meets up with structures of the states that seek to obstruct or eliminate this mode of political engagement, not just through banning of artistic expression, but also through processes of delegitimization, investigatory targeting, threats, hate speech, and violence.