Between tradition and modernity: Yeşilçam melodrama, its stars, and their audiences

Abstract

Melodrama, the most popular genre of Yeşilçam cinema (1960s Turkish popular cinema), provides a useful source for unravelling the social contradictions and anxieties caused by the Turkish modernization/westernization process, in that the films both construct modernity as a desired state and criticize it as cosmetic westernization. Against this background, this article considers the images of Yeşilçam stars both as agents of the ambivalent discourse on modernity in films and as embodiments of truly modern/western lifestyles outside cinema. The article explores the social reception of the stars' off-screen images, based on letters published in two popular cinema magazines of the period. It is observed that rather than fully identifying with the stars' off-screen images and trying to escape to the ‘modern' attractive world of the stars, many audience members attempted to bring stars to their own world and back into the traditionalistic and moralistic universe of melodrama. The article interprets these attempts as ‘creative adaptations' through which audiences meet, negotiate, and appropriate modernity, of which the cinema and stars are part, in their own fashion.