Romance, Love, and Sex Matters in Turkey
The Erotik Turkish Cinema
Dilber Ay
6/6

The answer is rooted in the inordinate amount of scorn that native Turkish film historians, critics, and conventional film-makers have heaped upon anyone associated with the 1970s erotik films era. According to these 'nattering nabobs of negativism', erotik Turkish film makers of the 1970s should be ashamed of themselves.

Memories of Dilber Ay
Yes, this 16mm film-clip sputters and yes, it's very grainy, but... as a luscious bit of pure nostalgia it can't be beat.
Dilber Ay shakes her booty... Click pic for film-clip!	Before blowing off her clinging boyfriend, Dilber Ay boogies to the beat of the Village People's infectious 1978 hit, YMCA -- as the opening credits roll for Püsküllü Bela (A Peck Of Trouble) aka Dilberim Kıyma Bana (Make Mince-Meat Of Me, Beautiful) directed by Çetin İnanç in 1979. It's a 2.9 MB Windows Media Video (.WMV) file.

Film historian Rekin Teksoy's comment is typical. He says,

"In the pre-1980 period, sex films initiated by Semih Evin's Parçala Behçet (Tear Me Apart, Behçet 1972) did not hesitate to push the limits of eroticism, with pornography. These movies with liberally inserted sexual scenes attracted large, mostly uneducated audiences."₁₅₂

You can almost see the contempt oozing from Teksoy's pen.

Teksoy isn't alone in his opinion either. Highly regarded film-historian Agâh Özgüç adds his weight to the naysayers, describing the 1979 Turkish seks furyası year as, 'a year in which every kind of cheapness and crudity came to pass in the Turkish cinema.'

And, the beat goes on...

In his documentary film on Arzu Okay, Turkish film archiver Nebil Özgentürk labels 1974-1980 as "Türk sinemasının karanlık yılları" (the dark years of the Turkish cinema).

Perhaps Özgentürk's disdainful labelling of the era goes part of the way towards explaining the shabby treatment Arzu Okay got when she received Yeşilçam's Orhon Murat Arıbunu cinematic award in 1999...

No sooner had the award been announced than three prominent holier-than-thou conventional film makers (Director Tunç Başaran, Actor Aytaç Arman, and Actress Lale Mansur) rose such a stink (to their everlasting shame) that the awarding committee met next day and rescinded the award -- the first and only time they've taken such chicken-hearted action in the history of the award.

Arzu Okay (who had a distinguished conventional film career before her erotik one) was gracious in the face of that repellent blue-nosed action, saying...