From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class

Yılmaz Güney died in Paris on 9 September 1984, at forty-seven. Forty-two years have passed since his death. What remains of an artist stripped of his citizenship, whose films were banned, who could never return to his country, are still the undisputed greatest works of Turkish cinema — and, more important for us, a cinema in which working people saw their own face on the screen for the first time. This piece was written to tell that cinema and the person who made it, from the standpoint of class, and without subtraction.

Dear Young Comrades,

That you have heard the name Yılmaz Güney is almost certain; that you have seen his films is less so. This is natural: had he lived he would be eighty-nine today; most of his films are more than fifty years old, and some of them were banned for years. But the label “old film” is misleading for Güney. Cabbar of Umut still lives on the seat of a courier’s motorcycle; İsmail of Düşman in a day-labour market; Seyit Ali of Yol on an open-prison leave paper. Güney’s cinema has not aged, because the relations it tells — propertylessness, insecurity, the state’s gaze upon the poor, the shackle that family and honour clamp on the woman — have not disappeared.

This piece has two aims. The first is to say what Güney contributed to Turkish society in cinema and in politics: to give the grounds for why we call him “the enlightenment torch of Turkish cinema.” The second is to tell him not as a saint but as a Marxist. In Güney’s personality and in his early films there were serious lumpen and petty-bourgeois tendencies; he saw them himself, named them, and settled accounts with them. The value of a revolutionary artist appears not in being flawless but in how he faced his flaws. So we will tell both the bright side and the dark side, both with the same clarity.

The piece is long. First we will set the chronology, then the “Ugly King” phenomenon, then the films one by one, then his effect on cinema and on politics, then the errors and the reckoning, and at the end the question “what is his value for the class.”

I. Life story: chronology and context

Güney’s life is like a summary of Turkey’s political history from 1937 to 1984: he went to prison at every coup, came out with every wave of amnesty, and produced in every period of upsurge. The chronology must therefore be set beside the political calendar.

The child of Çukurova (1937–1958). Yılmaz Pütün was born on 1 April 1937 in the village of Yenice, Adana. His father was from Siverek, his mother from Varto; he was the child of a landless family, both Kurdish, who had migrated to Çukurova as cotton workers. His childhood was spent as a field hand in the cotton fields and in Adana’s outer neighbourhoods. As he would later say, he knew the people he told not from books but from beside him. He finished high school in Adana; he came to cinema by carrying film reels in Adana’s distribution offices, and he wrote stories on the side. He began to study law in Ankara and economics in Istanbul; he finished neither.

First conviction (1958–1962). For a story titled “Systems of Equations in Three Unknowns,” published in an Adana magazine in 1955–56, he was tried for “communist propaganda.” The case lasted years, and in 1961 a sentence of a year and a half in prison and six months of exile was made final. So Güney entered cinema not as an artist but as a young man with a record; his first encounter with the state was not a camera but a prosecutor’s office. In the meantime, through Yaşar Kemal, he had met Atıf Yılmaz, contributed to the scripts of Alageyik and Bu Vatanın Çocukları (1959), and appeared on screen as an actor in the second. In prison he wrote his first novel, Boynu Bükük Öldüler (They Died with Bent Necks); it was published in 1971 and in 1972 received the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize.

The “Ugly King” years (1963–1968). When he came out of prison he returned to Yeşilçam and within a few years became the country’s most prolific actor: in some years nearly twenty films. These were mostly cheap, quickly shot adventure films of guns and revenge. But something was happening: in Anatolia’s town cinemas, the people loved this dark, slight man, counted as ugly, to the point of frenzy. The nickname “Ugly King” was born in these years. What this phenomenon means we will take up in detail in the second section.

The move to directing (1966–1971). With At Avrat Silah (Horse, Woman, Gun, 1966) he went behind the camera. With Seyyit Han (1968) and Bir Çirkin Adam (An Ugly Man, 1969) it was clear he was looking for another cinema. In 1970 he shot Umut (Hope): the turning point of Turkish cinema. Then Ağıt (Elegy), Acı (Pain), Umutsuzlar (The Hopeless Ones) and Baba (The Father) (1971). This period is the cinematic counterpart of the great social upsurge of the late 1960s — the student movement, the union explosion, the workers’ resistance of 15–16 June 1970.

12 March and the second conviction (1972–1974). After the 12 March 1971 coup he was arrested in March 1972 on the ground that he had hidden THKP-C militants (Mahir Çayan and his comrades) in his house, and was sentenced to heavy imprisonment. In prison he wrote novels and stories: Salpa, Sanık (The Defendant), Hücrem (My Cell), Soba, Pencere Camı ve İki Ekmek İstiyoruz (Stove, Windowpane and We Want Two Loaves). He came out in the general amnesty of 1974.

Arkadaş and Yumurtalık (1974). In the first months of his freedom he shot Arkadaş (The Friend); the film shook a generation that year. Then he began shooting Endişe (Anxiety), on the cotton workers’ wage struggle in Çukurova. On 13 September 1974, in a fight that broke out in a restaurant in Yumurtalık, Judge Sefa Mutlu was shot and killed. Güney was arrested and sentenced to nineteen years of heavy imprisonment. This event is the darkest point in Güney’s life, and we will take it up separately in section six. His assistant Şerif Gören completed Endişe.

Directing from prison (1974–1981). For seven years he was held in Selimiye, Kayseri, Toptaşı, İmralı and Isparta prisons. He did not cut himself off from cinema; on the contrary, he wrote his greatest films in this period, from his cell. He sent scripts, shot-by-shot notes, actor instructions out by letter; Zeki Ökten shot Sürü (The Herd, 1978) and Düşman (The Enemy, 1979), Şerif Gören Yol (1981–82) from these notes. In 1975 he also brought out the magazine Güney; successive cases were opened against him for the pieces in it. Prison became a school for Güney: years of systematic reading, theoretical writing, political debate.

Escape, exile, Palme d’Or (1981–1984). A year after the 12 September 1980 coup, on 9 October 1981, he left Isparta Semi-Open Prison on a holiday pass and fled the country. He completed the edit of Yol in Switzerland, then in France. In May 1982 Yol won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (shared with Costa-Gavras’s Missing). On 26 October 1982 the junta stripped him of his citizenship; his films were banned in Turkey, copies seized. In 1983 in France he shot his last film, Duvar (The Wall). On 9 September 1984 he died of stomach cancer in Paris; he was buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. His citizenship was restored in 1993, nine years after his death. Yol could be shown in Turkey only in 1999.

Let us summarise the chronology in a single table:

Year	Güney	Political context in Turkey
1937	Born in Yenice, Adana, in a cotton-worker family	Single-party period; large landownership and seasonal field labour in Çukurova
1961	A year and a half in prison + six months exile for a story	After 27 May; the 1961 Constitution and the founding of TİP
1963–68	Dozens of films a year; the “Ugly King” is born	Union upsurge, founding of DİSK (1967)
1970	Umut	Workers’ resistance of 15–16 June
1971	Ağıt, Acı, Umutsuzlar, Baba	12 March memorandum
1972–74	Prison for hiding THKP-C militants	Kızıldere; martial law
1974	Arkadaş; Yumurtalık affair; 19 years in prison	General amnesty; Cyprus operation
1975–77	Güney magazine; scripts from prison	Nationalist Front governments; fascist attacks
1978	Sürü (Zeki Ökten)	Maraş massacre; martial law
1979	Düşman (Zeki Ökten)	Economic crisis, toward the 24 January decisions
1981	Escape from prison	12 September junta
1982	Yol Palme d’Or; stripped of citizenship	Junta constitution referendum
1983	Duvar	Election under junta oversight
1984	9 September, death in Paris	The junta regime’s “civilian” continuation
1993	Citizenship restored	—
1999	Yol shown in Turkey for the first time	—

What the table says is clear: Güney’s three great periods of production (1970–71, 1974, 1978–82) coincide with three periods of upsurge in class struggle in Turkey; his three imprisonments with three periods of repression. This is the document of how far an artist’s life can be bound up with the life of his own class.

II. Yeşilçam’s leading men and the “Ugly King”: the person in the street comes onto the screen

To understand Güney one must first understand the cinema he came up against.

The Yeşilçam of the 1960s was a cinema of the “jön.” The jön — from the French jeune premier — is the film’s young, handsome, well-spoken male lead: Ayhan Işık, Göksel Arsoy, Ediz Hun, Cüneyt Arkın. The social content of this figure matters. The jön was a fair-skinned, Istanbul, well-dressed, “refined” man; he was either rich or became rich at the end of the film; class difference was crossed by love. The poor girl married the rich boy, and the whole social abyss between them closed with a wedding. This cinema told the millions who had migrated from Anatolia to Istanbul, who lived in gecekondus, who worked in factories or on building sites, “the story of people not like you,” and wanted them to aspire to it.

Güney fitted this mould in no respect. He was dark, short, his face was coarse, he spoke with an Adana accent. By Yeşilçam’s measures he was “ugly,” and it was impossible for him to be a jön. Yet in the mid-1960s something unexpected happened: in Anatolia’s town cinemas, in Istanbul’s outer neighbourhoods, the people claimed this man with passion. Producers were astonished; critics looked down on him. The nickname “Ugly King” was born of mockery and became a crown.

The sociological explanation of this is simple and important: Güney was the first man on the screen who looked like them. The face, the voice, the stance of the cotton field hand, the construction worker, the gecekondu dweller, the one just in from the village, had become a hero for the first time. In Güney’s films the hero was not from Istanbul but from the provinces; not refined but hard; he was not rising inside the system, he was standing up to it. Most of these films were artistically weak and ideologically — we will see in a moment — problematic. But they had broken one thing: the rule that the labourer could exist on the screen only as the “kind-hearted poor man” or the “comic servant.”

Güney later analysed this phenomenon himself. The reason the people loved the “Ugly King,” he said, was not that those films were good, but that the people saw their own anger, their crushedness and their longing for revolt in this figure. The problem was this: that figure carried out revolt as individual revenge, with a gun, alone. That is, it took the people’s real feeling and showed them a false way out. Güney’s move to directing is precisely the attempt to resolve this contradiction: to carry the trust and attention the people had given him into a cinema that would wake the people, not put them to sleep.

This passage is highly instructive from a Marxist standpoint. Güney did not advance by rejecting the “Ugly King” films, but by using the mass bond they had won. He could shoot Umut because millions already loved the man who played Umut’s Cabbar. The artist’s bond with the masses had come before the quality of the art; quality was built on that bond. This order is not an accident, and it holds a lesson for young comrades: to be able to say something to the people, the people must first be listening to you.

III. The films: what they tell, what they make one live

Güney acted in some hundred and ten films, directed close to seventeen, wrote more than fifty scripts. Here we will take up one by one those that remain in cinema history, what they tell, and what they make the viewer live.

Umut (1970): the impossibility of individual salvation

Cabbar is a man in Adana trying to keep five children by driving a horse-cab. One day a car crushes his horse. The cab is horseless, Cabbar is out of work. The car’s owner is rich, the police are on the rich man’s side; Cabbar has no hope of compensation. He cannot pay his debts, the cab is seized. In desperation he follows a hodja; the hodja tells him there is treasure buried in the desert. Cabbar, with his friend Hasan, begins to dig for treasure in barren ground. The film ends with Cabbar, eyes bound, turning in circles on the empty land.

Umut is not Italian neorealism — De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in particular — adapted to Turkey; it is a class-sharper version of it. A bicycle is stolen, a horse dies; in both the labourer’s means of production is taken from his hands. But Güney’s Cabbar, unlike De Sica’s Antonio, seeks a way out outside the order: treasure. The meaning of the treasure is clear: the miracle of individual salvation. The lottery, finding gold, “making it one day” — the only form of hope offered to the poor. The film shows the emptiness of this hope in a concrete image: a blindfolded man turning in circles. Hope is the film’s title and the thing the film rejects: this kind of hope is the deepest form of hopelessness.

The censorship board banned the film on the ground that it “showed Turkey as backward.” Güney appealed to the Council of State, the ban was lifted; in 1970 the film took the grand prize at Adana’s Golden Boll. A copy was taken abroad and shown at Cannes in 1971. Umut is accepted as the first film with which Turkish cinema “entered” world cinema; but its importance for us is another: for the first time in Yeşilçam a film showed poverty not as décor or melodramatic material but as a relation of production.

Ağıt, Acı, Umutsuzlar, Baba (1971): the feudal world and the market

The four films of 1971 are the films in which Güney begins to dissolve the “Ugly King” figure from inside. In Ağıt, Çobanoğlu, smuggling in the stone valleys of Urfa, shows how a man who carries a gun to make a living is cornered. In Umutsuzlar there is the end of a gangster in Istanbul’s underworld: the gun does not save the hero, it destroys him.

Baba is this series’ clearest class allegory. Cemal is a poor boatman in Istanbul. A rich businessman’s son commits a murder; the father offers Cemal money to take the blame: “For your family’s future.” Cemal accepts, and gets twenty-four years. Years later, out on amnesty and remission, his family is broken: his wife has become the rich man’s mistress, his daughter has fallen into a brothel, his son has grown up in the rich man’s house and does not know his father. The film shows how the ideology of “sacrifice for the family” works: the poor man, even when he sells his own body and freedom, is not saved, because the side that buys has bought not only his freedom but his family.

Arkadaş (1974): the mirror of petty-bourgeois life

Arkadaş is the first film Güney shot after his 1972–74 imprisonment, and it holds a special place both in his cinema and in Turkish society. Azem visits his old friend Cemil, an engineer, in a summer-house compound near Istanbul. Cemil has come out of the village, studied, “risen,” married a rich woman, and sunk into a life of drink, gambling, casual relations and emptiness at the summer house. Azem’s presence in this world is like a foreign body: he speaks little, does not drink, does not play, asks questions. Cemil’s niece Melike, as she comes to know Azem, begins to see the meaninglessness of this life and changes. Cemil cannot bear to face his past, his village, the ideals he abandoned; the film ends with his suicide.

The effect of Arkadaş in the autumn of 1974 is hard to describe today. When the film opened Güney was already in prison again over Yumurtalık; this made the film something like a last testament. But the real effect was in the content. In the Turkey of 1974 a generation crushed by 12 March was getting to its feet again; university youth was shifting massively to the left. Arkadaş held up to this youth the mirror of its own family, its own class origin: the engineer, the doctor, the civil servant who comes out of the village, studies, “becomes someone,” and then is alienated from his people. Cemil was this generation’s father; Azem the person it wanted to be. Melike, played by Melike Demirağ, became a figure with whom hundreds of thousands of young women identified after the film. The revolutionary intellectuals of the period — Onat Kutlar, Uğur Mumcu — hailed the film as a stage in Turkish cinema.

The film was doing something unseen in the cinema of that period: it treated the class question not as the showing of poverty but as a critique of the petty-bourgeois way of life. For the first time in Turkish cinema the enemy was not a wicked agha or a boss but a way of living: consumption, emptiness, the selling of the ideal. This was a mirror Güney held up to his own life as well; we will see it in section six.

Today there are criticisms of Arkadaş in some left circles: that the figure of Azem is too flawless, almost a “revolutionary fetish”; that the women characters, especially Cemil’s wife and her circle, are put down by a male gaze. These criticisms are partly right, and the film carries the sexist limits of 1974’s left culture. But the thing that is the film’s real concern — the emptiness of petty-bourgeois life, a reality even those who live that life cannot deny — still holds today.

Endişe (1974): the wage struggle

Endişe tells of the bargaining seasonal cotton-pickers in Çukurova enter into with the landowners over the wage per kilo. Güney began shooting this film in the fields where he was born, with real workers; when he was arrested in Yumurtalık, Şerif Gören completed it. For the first time in Güney’s cinema the film centres a collective subject — not an individual hero, a community of workers. The answer to Umut’s search for an individual way out is Endişe’s collective bargaining. Watching the two films one after the other shows the road Güney travelled in four years.

Sürü (1978): dissolving feudalism, the swallowing city

The first great film written from prison. The Halilan tribe, living in the highlands of Siirt, is in conflict with the Veysikan tribe, with whom it has a blood feud, and is at the same time dissolving: livestock no longer keeps them. The tribal chief Hamo (Tuncel Kurtiz), his son Şivan (Tarık Akan) and Şivan’s wife Berivan (Melike Demirağ), who came as a bride from the Veysikans, take the herd by train to Ankara to sell it. Berivan, a victim of the blood feud, has stopped speaking after losing a child. Along the journey the herd perishes, in the city Berivan dies, Hamo loses his mind, Şivan in desperation commits a murder.

Sürü compresses Turkey’s social transformation in the 1970s into a single herd’s journey: feudal relations are dissolving, but the capitalist city that takes their place does not even accept these people as workers; it crushes them and passes on. Berivan’s silence is the image of the woman left between tribe and city, with no say in either order. The film won the Golden Leopard at Locarno and showed the world that Güney could direct a masterpiece even from a cell.

Düşman (1979): a day in the life of the unemployed

In Çanakkale, İsmail (Aytaç Arman) is a man who goes every morning to the day-labour market to wait for work, and most days comes back empty-handed. His wife Naciye tries to keep the house going, but the marriage is rotting under economic pressure. At the end of the film the work İsmail can find is poisoning street dogs for the municipality. Who is the “enemy”? The film does not ask; the viewer finds it: İsmail’s enemy is neither his wife, nor himself, nor the dogs. The enemy is the relations that send him to the day-labour market every morning.

Düşman is Güney’s least dramatic, most everyday film, and for that very reason one of his most shattering. It is the image, fifty years earlier, of today’s debates on the “day labourer,” the “esnaf courier,” the “informal.”

Yol (1982): outside is a prison too

Five convicts leave İmralı on a week’s holiday pass. Seyit Ali (Tarık Akan) goes to fetch his wife Zine (Şerif Sezer), chained by her family for having “stained his honour” in his absence; custom expects him to kill her. Walking with Zine in the snowy mountains the woman freezes to death; the pity Seyit Ali shows at the last moment has come too late for custom and for himself. Mehmet Salih (Halil Ergün) has caused his brother-in-law’s death in a robbery; fleeing with his wife in Diyarbakır he is killed on the train. Ömer (Necmettin Çobanoğlu) sees that his brother, who smuggled from their village on the Syrian border, has been killed, and by custom must marry his widowed sister-in-law. Yusuf (Tuncel Kurtiz) is sent back on the first day because he has lost his leave paper. Mevlüt (Hikmet Çelik) can meet his fiancée only under the eye of two aunts.

The film’s thesis is a single sentence: outside is a prison too. The convicts leave İmralı, but they enter a larger prison called family, custom, honour, the border, the army and poverty. This thesis was a direct diagnosis of 12 September Turkey, and the film was shot in the middle of the coup, under martial law. Güney sent the script and the shooting notes from prison; Şerif Gören shot it; Güney did the edit in exile. In the film’s original version the word “Kurdistan” appears at the entrance to Urfa; that single word was enough for the film to remain banned in Turkey for seventeen years.

Yol’s winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes was a blow to the 12 September junta’s international standing. The junta stripped Güney of his citizenship five months later. But the film became what the world thought of when it thought of Turkey: not a general, but a convict and a snowy mountain road.

Duvar (1983): the state against children

Güney’s last film. It tells of a real revolt in 1976 in the children’s ward of Ankara Central Closed Prison. It was shot in France, in a monastery, with Turkish migrants in exile and with children. The film moves through the prison’s four wards — children, women, anarchists, common-law prisoners — but the weight is on the children. Beatings, hunger, abuse, disease; and at the end the revolt the children start with the demand to be “transferred to another prison.” What they want is not even freedom; it is a less bad prison.

Duvar is Güney’s hardest, most uncompromising film; it tires the viewer, it angers them. The reason is that the film is less a prison story than an analysis of the state: the state is most ruthless toward the most defenceless. Güney finished this film a year before he died, as his illness advanced. It has the quality of a last will.

IV. Effect on cinema: the founding of a school

Güney’s effect on Turkish cinema would have been enough even if it had been limited to his own films. But the real effect is seen in the people who grew up around him and after him. Güney is not a director; he is a school.

Tarık Akan. In the early 1970s Akan was Yeşilçam’s brightest jön: romantic comedies with Ah Nerede, Mavi Boncuk, Emel Sayın and Gülşen Bubikoğlu. His playing Şivan in Güney’s Sürü and Seyit Ali in Yol is the clearest example of an actor’s passage from leading-man parts to class cinema. Akan took this passage seriously: in the same years he acted in social films such as Maden (The Mine, 1978), Kanal (The Canal, 1978), Adak (The Vow, 1979); he was arrested after 12 September, wrote his prison memoirs as Anne Kafamda Bit Var (Mother, I Have Lice in My Hair), and did not leave left politics until the end of his life. Akan’s story shows that Güney’s effect could change not an actor’s role but his life.

Tuncel Kurtiz. Hamo of Sürü, Yusuf of Yol. With Güney, Kurtiz created one of the most shattering faces of Turkish cinema; after 12 September he had to leave the country, lived years in exile in Sweden and Germany, and did theatre. Gül Hasan (1979), which he directed himself, is an extension of Güney’s cinema looking at worker migration.

Cüneyt Arkın. To mention Arkın here may at first seem odd; he was the greatest star of jön cinema and of historical adventure films, Güney’s exact opposite pole: the handsome king against the “Ugly King.” Yet if one looks carefully at Arkın’s films in the 1970s, Güney’s effect is visible: Arkın’s hero is no longer the refined young man who marries the rich girl, but the man who stands with the poor against the agha, the moneylender, the boss, the gang. Güney changed Yeşilçam’s agenda; the jöns took their share of that change. Arkın never hid the popular vein of his own profession — medicine — and expressed his respect for Güney at every opportunity. The opposition of the two stars is in fact the document of Yeşilçam’s shifting in a single direction, toward the people.

Directors. Zeki Ökten (Sürü, Düşman), Şerif Gören (Endişe, Yol), Erden Kıral (Kanal, Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde [On Fertile Lands], Hakkâri'de Bir Mevsim [A Season in Hakkari]), Ali Özgentürk (Hazal, At [The Horse]), Yavuz Özkan (Maden), Bilge Olgaç (Bir Gün Mutlaka [One Day for Sure], a Güney script) — the whole social-realist wave of the late 1970s and early 1980s either came through Güney’s assistantship, or shot his scripts, or walked the road he opened. This wave was cut by 12 September; but the independent Turkish cinema that sprouted again from the 1990s — Zeki Demirkubuz, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Yeşim Ustaoğlu — fed on the language Güney established: “ordinary person, real place, distant camera.”

Actors. Melike Demirağ, Şerif Sezer, Halil Ergün, Aytaç Arman, Güngör Bayrak, Necmettin Çobanoğlu — Güney’s films opened a door to faces that did not fit Yeşilçam’s moulds. Güney put the amateur actor, the real villager, the real convict in front of the camera; he changed the concept of “acting.”

The common ground of all this is that Güney changed the class position of Turkish cinema. Before him cinema was a commodity sold to the labourer by showing him bourgeois life. After him cinema also became a field in which the labourer could see his own life. This change could not be taken back; even 12 September could not manage it.

V. Political contribution: artist, convict, publisher

Güney’s politics cannot be separated from his cinema; but he also had a concrete political practice outside cinema.

First, solidarity. In the 12 March period, as the country’s most famous filmmaker, he hid in his house the revolutionaries the state most wanted. He knew what the cost would be; he served two years. He himself told this act not as a heroism but as an obligation.

Second, publishing and theoretical production. The magazine Güney, which he brought out from prison in 1975, held a substantial place in the left debates of that period; Güney was tried in succession for the pieces in the magazine. The prison years are the years in which Güney trained himself systematically in Marxist-Leninist reading; his political writings were later collected. In these writings his stance on the function of art is clear: art alone does not make a revolution, but an artist who holds a correct political view can, with his works, build strong bonds with the masses. He did not put art in the place of politics; nor did he belittle it as a mere instrument of politics.

Third, the Kurdish question. Güney never hid his Kurdish origin; Seyyit Han, Sürü, Yol are set in Kurdish geography and tell Kurdish social relations. In the exile years he openly defended the national rights of the Kurdish people. The “Kurdistan” title in Yol is the first conscious use of this word in cinema. This stance cost him his citizenship and is still, in some circles, the real reason he is “not forgiven.” For us it is Güney’s most concrete contribution to the idea of the fraternity of the peoples of Turkey: to be able to tell the class question without tearing it from the national question, both in the language of cinema.

Fourth, literature. Boynu Bükük Öldüler, Salpa, Soba, Pencere Camı ve İki Ekmek İstiyoruz, Hücrem, Oğluma Hikâyeler (Stories for My Son) — Güney’s novels and stories are the continuation of the social-realist literature in the line of Orhan Kemal and Yaşar Kemal, and deserve to be read in their own right beside his cinema.

VI. Lumpen and petty-bourgeois tendencies: errors and reckoning

This section is the hardest in the piece, and it cannot be skipped. To tell Güney as a flawless revolutionary would be to do him an injustice; because his real greatness is not in his flawlessness but in his openly settling accounts with his flaws.

The ideology of the “Ugly King” films. The great majority of the films between 1963 and 1968 are built on individual revenge, the cult of the gun, a feudal understanding of honour, and the showing of the woman as the man’s property. These films reflected the labourer’s anger, but they offered that anger a lumpen way out: draw the gun, settle accounts alone, die or kill. Güney later admitted this plainly: he said these films put the people to sleep instead of waking them, and turned real anger onto the wrong targets. This self-criticism did not remain words; Umutsuzlar and Baba are the “Ugly King” figure’s being demolished by his own hand: the armed hero, in these films, no longer wins, he is destroyed.

Personal life: drink, guns, violence. Güney’s life in the 1960s was not very different from the characters he played. He carried a gun, drank heavily, got into fights. His first wife, Nebahat Çehre, years later told the public that she had suffered violence in this marriage. It would not be right to pass over this. That a man who grew up in a feudal milieu, in poverty and violence, carried all the dirt of that milieu is explicable; but that it is explicable does not mean it is excused. The Marxist measure is clear here: the person is the product of the relations in which he was raised — but the revolutionary is the person who undertakes to change those relations in his own personality as well.

Yumurtalık. On the night of 13 September 1974, in a restaurant, in a drunken argument, a judge died and Güney was convicted of that death. Güney maintained until he died that he was not the one who fired; in 2023 his family applied for the case to be reopened on the ground of inconsistencies in the ballistic evidence. The subject of this piece is not to debate the forensic truth. But this must be said: that on that night, in that restaurant, the country’s most important revolutionary artist, in the middle of a workers’ film whose shooting had just begun, was found inside a drunken fight, is by itself the document of a lumpen remnant. Güney himself saw it so. He lived his seven years in prison not as a “fate” but as the price of his own error, and in his cell he thought systematically about the sources of that error.

Petty-bourgeois life. Cemil in Arkadaş was not only a generation’s father; he was also Güney himself. At the end of the 1960s Güney was Turkey’s highest-earning filmmaker; he lived in yalıs, in cars, in nightlife. In Hücrem, written in prison, he wrote this plainly: that there were great contradictions between what he thought and what he did, that he had lived “like a filthy bourgeois.” Arkadaş is therefore not an external criticism but a self-criticism; playing Azem, Güney is not judging Cemil, he is settling accounts with his own past.

Individual heroism. In Güney’s political practice too, as in his cinema, there was a tendency to individual heroism: taking risks alone, putting the personal gesture in the place of organised collective decision. This was a general feature of 1970s left culture, and Güney was not immune to it. But in the prison years he questioned this tendency theoretically as well; from Endişe to Yol the individual hero is gradually replaced by the collective subject, then by the showing of the individual’s helplessness inside a web of social relations. In Yol there is no hero; there are five convicts, and none of them is saved. This is the last point of Güney’s cinematic reckoning with the ideology of individual heroism.

Now let us come to what these errors mean for us. Güney’s form of facing them has three features, and all three are instructive.

The first: it is public. Güney worked his errors not in a private diary but in a magazine, a novel, a film. He had become the “Ugly King” before the people’s eyes; he settled accounts with him before the people’s eyes.

The second: it is productive. The reckoning did not end with a declaration of regret; every error became the subject of the next film. The cult of the gun produced Umutsuzlar, the hope of treasure Umut, bourgeois life Arkadaş, individual heroism Yol. Marxist self-criticism is exactly this: not to curse the past, but to overcome the past’s contradiction in a new practice.

The third: it is of class. Güney analysed his errors not as a personal moral problem but as the remnant, in his personality, of the relations he came from — feudalism, the lumpen proletariat, getting rich fast. This is different from moralism. The moralist says “I did a bad thing” and stops; the Marxist asks “from which relations does this badness come, and how do I change those relations.”

VII. Value for the class: what does an enlightenment torch mean?

We use the word enlightenment not in the bourgeois sense but in the Marxist sense: a class’s seeing itself, grasping its own condition not as a fate but as a relation. Güney’s value for Turkey’s labouring classes is, in exactly this sense, to be an enlightenment torch. Four grounds.

1. The ability to tell the person in the street. Güney’s camera, for the first time in Turkish cinema, looked at the labourer not from above but from across. Cabbar, İsmail, Seyit Ali are neither pitiable victims nor romantic heroes; they are people who calculate inside their own conditions, who err, who resist, who break. This gaze comes from Güney’s own class origin: the gaze of a man who grew up in a cotton field, upon the cotton worker. In art the phrase “go to the people” is said a great deal; Güney did not go to the people, he came from the people and did not go back.

2. The demolition of the illusion of individual salvation. The common thesis of all Güney’s mature films is this: in this order there is no individual salvation. The treasure is not found (Umut), taking the blame does not save (Baba), rising kills the person (Arkadaş), migrating to the city is to be crushed (Sürü), leaving prison is not freedom (Yol). The collective solution of this thesis is mostly not shown openly in the films — censorship would not allow it — but it necessarily appears in the viewer’s mind. This is Güney’s pedagogy: to make one think of the right road by showing the end of the wrong one.

3. The exposure of the state and of ideology. In Güney’s films the police are on the rich man’s side, censorship bans the truth, the prison crushes children, custom kills the woman, the army shoots the smuggler at the border. This is not “bad state” propaganda; it is the class working of the state and of ruling ideology, shown each time through a concrete event. Yol’s thesis that “outside is a prison too” is one of the most concise analyses made of the state–society relation in Turkey.

4. The class’s confidence in itself. This is perhaps the most important. Before Güney the labourer, to see himself in cinema, had to aspire to bourgeois life. After Güney the labourer learned that his own life was worth being a film. The people’s claiming of the “Ugly King” is the first and raw form of this confidence; Yol’s Palme d’Or is the same confidence confirmed on a world scale. A class’s knowing that it has the right to tell its own story is the cultural precondition of political organisation.

Comparative table: Yeşilçam’s jön cinema and Güney’s cinema

Yeşilçam’s jön cinema	Güney’s cinema
Hero: Istanbul, handsome, refined, rich or about to be rich	Hero: provincial, “ugly,” hard, poor and will stay poor
Class difference closes with love and a wedding	Class difference is shown as a relation and does not close
Poverty is décor or melodramatic material	Poverty is a relation of production: the horse dies, the work ends
The state is invisible or just	The state is concretely of class: police, censorship, prison, border
The woman is the male hero’s reward	The woman is the double convict of class and of custom (Berivan, Zine)
Studio, dubbing, professional actor	Real place, real people, amateur actor, local speech
It consoles the viewer	It disturbs the viewer and makes them think
Kurdish geography does not exist, or is “Eastern” folklore	Kurdish geography exists, with its own social relations
Happy ending	Blindfolded Cabbar, Zine dying in the snow, children in revolt

If we reduce the table to a single sentence: jön cinema sells the labourer someone else’s life; Güney’s cinema shows the labourer his own life.

Three common errors

The first: to remember Güney only as the “Ugly King.” A nostalgic Yeşilçam figure, a swaggering young man, “our Yılmaz.” This is to freeze him in a figure he himself surpassed. Güney took the “Ugly King” seriously, but he settled accounts with him; to leave him there is to ignore the reckoning.

The second: to make Güney a saint. The flawless revolutionary, the errorless artist. This is to set aside Güney’s own self-criticism, and it is especially dangerous for young comrades: the model of the flawless hero does not teach one to face one’s own errors; it teaches one to hide them.

The third: to remember Güney only by his errors. Yumurtalık, violence, drink. This is the ruling ideology’s favourite Güney narrative: “murderer,” “villain.” The aim is clear: to silence a class’s voice with the personal flaws of the owner of that voice. The Marxist method evaluates the person with his flaws and his contributions together, according to the direction of his movement. The direction of Güney’s movement is from lumpenness to revolutionary, from individual heroism to the collective subject, from feudal honour to the exposure of the woman’s oppression. The evaluation is made according to this direction.

Concrete tasks

For young comrades the best way to enter into a relation with Güney is to watch him and to have him watched.

1. Watch five films in order. Umut (1970), Arkadaş (1974), Sürü (1978), Yol (1982), Duvar (1983). This order follows Güney’s road from the illusion of individual salvation to the analysis of the state. After each film a single question: in this film, what prevents the hero’s salvation — fate, personality, or relations?

2. Watch an “Ugly King” film as well. For example Bir Çirkin Adam (1969) or any Güney film of the 1960s. Then watch Umutsuzlar. To see how the same figure is built and how it is demolished teaches how self-criticism is done in cinema.

3. Organise a screening. In a neighbourhood association, a union hall, a student society, show Düşman or Endişe. These films are the best opening speech for today’s debates on the courier, the seasonal worker and day labour. After the screening run the discussion not through the film but through the work of those in the room.

4. Read his novels. Boynu Bükük Öldüler and Hücrem. The first tells the land relations of Çukurova, the second Güney’s own self-criticism. Both are short and easy to read.

5. Carry the method of self-criticism into your own practice. Do on a small scale what Güney did: instead of hiding an error of yours, name it, look for its source in relations, and make it the subject of your next work. In organised work this is the only way to turn a personal moral problem into a political one.

6. Remember Güney together with the Kurdish question. Against narratives that try to strip Güney of his Kurdishness and make him a “national value,” recall that he told both the class and the national question together. Do not forget that a single word in Yol cost a seventeen-year ban.

7. A screening every 9 September. This date falls three days before 12 September in Turkey. To set the two dates side by side is the shortest way to tell why Güney died in exile.

Comrades,

A child who came out of Adana’s cotton fields first went to prison for a story; then became the country’s most loved actor; then built the greatest works of Turkish cinema on that love; then went to prison for hiding revolutionaries, then on a murder charge; from his cell he directed films that won the prizes of world cinema; he fled, was exiled, was stripped of citizenship, and died at forty-seven in a foreign country. This life is class struggle compressed into the span of a human life.

What Güney left us is two-layered. The first layer is his films: a cinema in which the labourer sees his own face, the illusion of individual salvation is demolished, the class working of the state is exposed. The second layer is his method: settling accounts with his own lumpen and petty-bourgeois remnants in a public, productive and class way. Without the first layer Güney would have been a filmmaker; without the second, only a talented filmmaker. The two together make him the enlightenment torch of Turkish cinema.

Güney was the “Ugly King” because the people saw their own face in him for the first time. Then he held that face to the mirror himself and did not like a part of what he saw. He did not hide what he did not like; he made it a film. That is the most honest thing an artist, a revolutionary and a human being can do.

Blindfolded Cabbar is still turning in circles. To untie the cloth is our work.

Comradely.

“Let friend and enemy alike know: we will win, we will certainly win!”

Sources

Life story and chronology

Bianet — "Who is Yılmaz Güney?"
Anadolu Agency — "The 'Ugly King' of Turkish cinema, Yılmaz Güney" (portrait)
Cumhuriyet — "The 'Ugly King' of Turkish cinema, Yılmaz Güney, left us 37 years ago"
Wikipedia — "Umut (film, 1970)"
Wikipedia — "List of awards and nominations received by Yılmaz Güney"
Agâh Özgüç, Bütün Filmleriyle Yılmaz Güney, Afa Yayınları

The Yumurtalık case and citizenship

Arkadaş and self-criticism

Alper Erdik, "The Yılmaz Güney Film the Left Never Liked: Arkadaş" — Azizm Sanat
EMO — "A Revolutionary, A Human Being, An Ugly King" (PDF)
Yılmaz Güney, Hücrem, Everest Yayınları, 2020
Yılmaz Güney, Siyasal Yazılar, Güney Yayınları

Güney's literary works

Boynu Bükük Öldüler (1971; Orhan Kemal Novel Prize 1972)
Salpa (1975), Sanık (1975), Hücrem (1975)
Soba, Pencere Camı ve İki Ekmek İstiyoruz (1977)
Oğluma Hikâyeler (1976)

Films (in order of priority)

Umut (1970), Umutsuzlar (1971), Baba (1971), Arkadaş (1974), Endişe (1974, completed by Şerif Gören), Sürü (1978, dir. Zeki Ökten), Düşman (1979, dir. Zeki Ökten), Yol (1982, dir. Şerif Gören), Duvar (1983)

Festival records