Male Phantasy of Yeşilçam Cinema: “Emine or Mine, both are you baby!”

This essay focuses on the cinema adaptations of Pygmalion, which is written by Bernard Shaw, and the films following rouhly the same story line of Pygmalion. In the relevant films of Yeşilçam, i.e. Turkish cinema between 1960 and 1975, the film industry conceived the social tensions at that time in a dualistic view like rural-urban, east-west, poor-rich, modern-traditional, and figured them out in a melodramatic way of filmic narration. In this view, countless films have been produced and are viewed by a large majority of women. Pygmalion films suggest a kind of “ideal woman” which combines the modern way of life of the West and the traditions and beliefs of the East in one body. On the other hand, this image of the “ideal woman”, made up of two different performances of one woman, embodies the male phantasy in Yeşilçam, which permanently determines Yeşilçam’s view to social facts. Those films are subjected to the discussions in terms of the modernisation discourse of the nation-state and gender issues, nevertheless they are rarely dealt with in the social context of constructing the discourse of masculinity, femininity and the desire economy. In this paper, focusing on 17 films of that time period, first a contexual framework on modernisation and gender is given. After this, the discussion is mainly built on analysing the discourse of authenticity, love and desire in the selected films.