When people speak of the "Gürses school" in Turkish cinema, they mean a tradition of melodrama that appeals to the audience's tears and excitement, telling of impossible loves, separations and innocents wronged. Muharrem Gürses, regarded as the founder of this tradition, was born in Amasya and died in Istanbul in 1999. He spent most of his life on the stage, on the screen and at the writing desk. He was first a teacher, then a theatre actor and playwright, and finally one of the directors who made the most films in Yeşilçam. Sources give round figures for him, such as "more than a hundred films as an actor and nearly a hundred as a director". The figure he himself gave Serpil Kırel, who interviewed him in 1993, is far higher: he said he had made 149 films up to that time. There is no agreed exact count, but the breadth of his filmography has never been in dispute.

Throughout his life he was both much loved and much belittled. In 1960 Halit Refiğ gave the article he wrote about him the title "Bilinmeyen Muharrem Gürses" (The Unknown Muharrem Gürses), describing him as an "unknown, little-recognised, half-legendary" film-maker. Thirty years later Agah Özgüç called him an important "bridge" in Turkish cinema, but a forgotten "cinema marginal". In the years when he stood at the centre of the critics' target, crowds were jostling in front of the cinemas showing his films and the glass in their doors was being broken. Gürses's story is in part the story of the tension between these two extremes.

Birth and Childhood in Amasya

Gürses's date of birth is given differently in different sources. Most records say 15 August 1913, one encyclopedia entry gives 22 August, and the biographical text of one film site has 1 August. In Kırel's thesis of 1993 the year is corrected to 1915; the basis for this correction is not stated. His birthplace is likewise shown as Amasya in most records and as Merzifon in some. His childhood was hard. He lost his father in the First World War and his mother to tuberculosis, and he grew up with his grandfather.

His passion for the stage was born in these Amasya years. By his own account, as a small boy he would rig up a screen from bed sheets in his room and put on Karagöz shadow plays for his friends. What truly marked him, however, were the travelling theatre companies that came to the town. Among the troupes he watched with envy from his seat in the audience he names the Hafız İhsan Company, which called at Amasya, and Topal Atıf's Melodrama Theatre. Plays such as "Ebul'ula'nın Esrarengiz Katli" (The Mysterious Murder of Ebulula) and "Müthiş İntikam" (Terrible Revenge), which Topal Atıf staged in Amasya to audiences reduced to tears, were the performances that affected him most. Years later he described Topal Atıf thus: "He was a man who lived to cry out the sufferings the people endured. Always on the side of the oppressed, always against the wickedness of the oppressors."

In his unpublished memoirs he describes more plainly the mark these performances left on him. What "gripped him to the core", he writes, were Topal Atıf's melodramas that left the audience "sobbing their hearts out"; watching him, he wept and beat his breast, saying, "if only I too could make this nation weep like that." Back home he would imitate the play, leaning too hard on certain words and declaiming tirades such as "cruel woman, you murdered my child" all alone, as though he were on a stage. The intrigues, the sobbing scenes and the sharp contrast between oppressed and oppressor that Gürses would later carry onto the screen are the product of a school distilled from this Amasya spectatorship. He himself said that he learned what moved people and what made them cry by living it in front of those tents and halls.

The Teaching Years

He began appearing in school plays at the age of twelve. He continued his education at the Istanbul Teachers' School and graduated as a painting teacher. His teacher there was the poet Faruk Nafiz Çamlıbel. After graduating he worked as a village teacher in Samsun; the thesis states that this post lasted a long time, while other records speak of a shorter period. That he had taken up amateur acting at seventeen shows that teaching was only ever a period of transition for him. As a profession he chose the stage over the lectern.

The Theatre Years

When he returned to Istanbul in 1931 he saw an announcement that the City Theatre (Dârülbedâyi) was looking for amateur young people for its operettas, and he applied. He is said to have joined the company with the help of Hâzım Körmükçü, one of the celebrated actors of the day. The City Theatre was then run by Muhsin Ertuğrul, and Gürses's time there did not last long. He always played small parts; one of them was a wordless role as a scavenger in Nâzım Hikmet's play "Ölü Evi" (The House of the Dead). This small role caught the attention of Nurullah Ataç, one of the powerful pens of the time, and Ataç praised him in a newspaper column.

According to his own account, the next day Muhsin Ertuğrul called him to his office and asked which acquaintance he had used to get a critic like Ataç to write such a piece. Ertuğrul is said to have suspected a family tie or some similar connection between Gürses and Ataç, unable to find any other meaning in praise for a young man who had only just joined the theatre. In Gürses's telling, Ertuğrul said he could not be friends with those who tried to win fame in his theatre by pretending to be what they were not, and dismissed him. The episode rests solely on Gürses's own statement; Ertuğrul's side of it does not appear in the sources available to us.

He did not give up the stage after leaving the theatre. He worked in travelling tuluat (improvised theatre) troupes and private theatres, wrote radio plays, and served in the drama sections of the Istanbul, İzmir and Ankara radio stations. According to the entry written for Reşad Ekrem Koçu's İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, he worked for a time in the drama section of Ankara Radio before settling in Istanbul, and after coming to Istanbul he appeared at the Ses Theatre. He is also said to have worked at the Istanbul and İzmir city theatres. In the tuluat troupes that toured Anatolia an actor sometimes had to be writer and director as well; that Gürses later both acted and directed in the cinema can be seen as a natural continuation of this school. He himself attached great importance to acting. "He who does not act cannot make others act," he said in an interview, believing that every director should also be an actor.

In 1943, at the age of thirty, he founded the Gürses Theatre together with Sezer Sezin and Hulusi Kentmen. The company performed at the Millet, Sirkeci Şafak and Ses theatres, but it was short-lived. In the same years, at the suggestion of Nizamettin Nazif Tepedelenlioğlu, he began writing serial novels for the newspapers. His career as a writer began in 1945, and his novels were serialised in the newspaper Akşam; he later adapted many of these serials for the screen. His first contact with the cinema also came through his pen. "Köroğlu" (1945) appears in most records as a drama in four acts, while Koçu's encyclopedia refers to it as a novel serialised in a newspaper. The screenplay drawn from this text was turned into a film of the same name by Refik Kemal Arduman, and Gürses worked as assistant director on the production. In 1946 he appeared as an actor in Turgut Demirağ's "Bir Dağ Masalı" (A Mountain Tale), and in 1951 in Orhon Murat Arıburnu's "Sürgün" (Exile). Asked which directors he admired in his early years in film, he would name Turgut Demirağ, Faruk Kenç and Aydın Arakon.

Egyptian Films and the Move to Cinema

Behind the years in which Gürses took up directing lay the Egyptian films that Turkish audiences had been watching with great passion for more than a decade. Beginning with "Aşkın Gözyaşları" (Tears of Love), shown in 1938, this current had filled cinemas with heavy melodramas dubbed in Turkish and set to Arabic melodies, and producers had begun travelling to Egypt to bring back film after film. In 1942 Arabic songs were banned from films, and in 1948 imports too were restricted, but the audience's appetite for the genre continued. According to Emel Akbaş's study of the influence of Egyptian films on Turkish cinema, the first to answer this demand was Muharrem Gürses. He localised the heavily melodramatic subjects of Egyptian films and made film after film, and audiences soon embraced these domestic productions; as a result the need for imported films diminished.

Years later Gürses described this transformation to Kırel in his own words: "At one time Arab films had invaded Turkey. One day I gathered all the producers together and said, 'We will not let Arab films in here.' I was determined. 'We will write works in the melodrama style that will be the very best,' I said, and I did it. And so we broke the dominance of the Arab films." He adds that he sobbed his heart out while watching "Aşkın Gözyaşları" and kept wondering, "How could we make this film?" His answer to those who accused him of imitating Arab films is also typical of him: had he imitated them, the originals would have come in and his own would not have sold; so he must have surpassed them. This account can also be read as a director enlarging his own role, but Akbaş too singles out Gürses in the process by which domestic melodrama replaced Egyptian films.

Screenwriting came before directing. His screenplay "Zehirli Şüphe" (Poisoned Suspicion) was filmed in 1949. He made his directing debut with "Zeynep'in Gözyaşları" (Zeynep's Tears); another title of the film is "Kara Efe". The year of his debut is given in sources as either 1951 or 1952. The filmography records, the encyclopedia entry and Kırel's thesis give 1952, some biographical texts give 1951, and Koçu's encyclopedia is content to say "1951-1952". The film was adapted from Gürses's own serial novel, and in 1952 he also published the same story as a book: "Kara Efe (Zeynebin Gözyaşları)" tells the love story of Efe and Zeynep, who spent their childhood together in a small town in the Aegean region.

In the film Gürses played Mahmut Bey, who is known in the village for his charity and hence called "Angel Mahmut", but who has set his sights on Zeynep. Mahmut abducts the girl and Kara Efe rescues her; Mahmut then drives the two lovers apart with gossip, Zeynep loses her mind with grief, and Efe, learning the truth, shoots Mahmut and is arrested. Although the film is set in a village in the 1910s, it was criticised as far removed from reality because of details such as the abductors dressing like masked bandits and the clothing of the village girls. Giovanni Scognamillo describes the village Gürses brought to the screen as one "where extreme emotions collide, bloody and deadly" and says that "it has no connection whatsoever with reality." The film nonetheless drew great interest; Gürses proved with his very first film that he could make a picture carrying all the ingredients of commercial success and catching the audience's attention, as the doors and frames of the cinemas showing it were broken. With this success he became a director every producer wanted to work with. Kırel also counts "Kara Efe" among the first examples of the efe (Aegean outlaw-hero) films whose influence would last for many years.

His second book, "Bir Avuç Toprak" (A Handful of Earth), dated 1957, deals with the rivalry between a village agha who has lost his heart to the most beautiful girl in the village and the girl's betrothed; the same year Osman Seden filmed the story from Gürses's screenplay. The material he used in his early years was the material that would later be called a school: the village, the agha, love and separation.

A Film Factory in the 1950s

In the 1950s his output rose rapidly. According to Kırel's thesis he made 46 films in his first ten years; in 1954 and 1956 alone he made seven films each. The filmography records list around ten productions for 1953 and 1954, among them "Kubilay" and "Kanlı Para" (Blood Money) in 1953 and "Bir Şoförün Hayatı" (A Driver's Life), "Vahşi Kız" (The Wild Girl), "Gülnaz Sultan" and "Nasreddin Hoca" in 1954. Then came "Köy Canavarı" (The Village Monster), "Sazlı Damın Kahbesi" (The Harlot of the Reed-Roofed House), "Yayla Güzeli Gül Ayşe" (Gül Ayşe, Beauty of the Highlands) and "Yedi Köyün Zeynebi" (Zeynep of the Seven Villages) in 1956, "Allı Gelin" (The Bride in Red), "Ceylan Emine" and "Yanık Kezban" in 1957, "Tütüncü Kızı Emine" (Emine the Tobacco Girl) in 1958, and "Balıkçının Kızı Gülnaz" (Gülnaz the Fisherman's Daughter) and "Pamukçu Güzeli Halime" (Halime, Beauty of the Cotton Fields) in 1959. The thesis dates "Kubilay" to 1952; the film tells the story of an officer savagely killed after being attacked while trying to put down a reactionary uprising. The women's names and village identities that dominate the titles (the highland beauty, the tobacco girl, the cotton-field beauty, the fisherman's daughter) show clearly which audience these films addressed. In these years Gürses took on several roles at once in most films, as screenwriter, director and actor.

Behind this pace lay a working method all his own. He wrote his screenplays in yellow notebooks in the old Ottoman script, often in a single night. When reading them to producers he acted out every role himself, wept where there was weeping to be done, and, carried away, would go on narrating even after the notebook ran out, as though reading from the blank pages. As he told Kırel, he would take a violin along to the reading: "It is impossible to turn down my screenplays. When I read a screenplay I take a violin with me too. I weep where there is weeping to be done, I read it by acting it out. On one side the violin keeps playing in the background. I make the producers cry too. 'Let's make this film,' they say. Then I use that violin in the film as well." On set he gave great scope to improvisation; there was often little resemblance between the screenplay before shooting and the film that emerged. The screenwriter Bülent Oran recounts that Gürses paid attention to the usually neglected left-hand side of the screenplay page, the section where movement and acting are written, and that he described even emotions impossible to film in a way that showed the actor how to play them.

Nijat Özön writes that Gürses's improvisational way of working, which fitted a film into every two weeks, yielded remarkable results despite all its crudeness, in that it drew on native performance traditions such as orta oyunu (popular folk theatre), meddah (the storyteller's art) and tuluat. In Özön's view, behind the popularity of his melodramas lay a sense of oppression peculiar to the East and a fatalistic perception of life; the resemblance between Gürses's films and Arab and Indian films also stemmed from this.

The Gürses School and the Village Melodramas

The common assessment of the sources is that Gürses was the director who first brought the melodrama formula into Turkish cinema and established it there. The melodramas he started, known as the "Gürses school", were carried on almost unchanged by various directors in the years that followed. According to Mesut Kara's article on village films, 63 village films were made in Turkish cinema between 1950 and 1959, and in this period Gürses stood out as the director of syrupy village melodramas that established the typical features of Yeşilçam. Despite their crude storytelling his films drew large crowds to the cinemas and influenced some of the directors who came after him.

The real founding film of the school is "Yedi Köyün Zeynebi" of 1956. The film, which tells the story of Zeynep, who loses her mind for love, was by Gürses's own account adapted from a work called "Golfo"; Nijat Özön, however, sees its source in Gerhart Hauptmann's play "Rose Bernd". Its cast included Deniz Tanyeli, Saltuk Kaplangı, Salih Tozan, Fatma Bilgen and Gürses himself. The film both created a school and, with its commercial success, made Gürses the director producers sought out. The same year Memduh Ün filmed its sequel, "Zeyneb'in İntikamı" (Zeynep's Revenge), from a screenplay written by Gürses. As Gürses later recounted, "Yedi Köyün Zeynebi" had been remade seven times under different titles without his knowledge: "I make a religious film, they make one too. I make a village film, they do the same. Other crews have even come after me to shoot in the very village where I was filming. I have also had colleagues who took my films shot by shot and put their own signatures under them."

1956 was Gürses's most productive year. "Köy Canavarı", with his regular players Muhterem Nur, Gönül Bayhan and Kenan Pars, tells the story of a sadistic villager who separates two lovers in the big city and commits murder. "Sazlı Damın Kahbesi", which he adapted from his own serial novel, is about Muhteşem, a rich widowed farm owner with a weakness for young men, who breaks up a happy home; in this film Gürses played Kıvırcık, a deaf-mute who helps bring the truth to light. "Yayla Güzeli Gül Ayşe", also drawn from his own serial novel, is the story of a man taking revenge on the wife who wrecked his home. In 1957 came "Ceylan Emine", "Dertli Gelin Şirvan" (Şirvan the Sorrowful Bride), adapted from a song by Malatyalı Fahri, "Yanık Kezban" and "Zeynebin Aşkı" (Zeynep's Love), and in 1958 "Bana Gönül Bağlama" (Don't Give Your Heart to Me) and "Ninni Talihsiz Yetime" (A Lullaby for the Luckless Orphan).

The best-known partner in the formula was Muhterem Nur. Together they made twenty-seven films. In these films, set against a village or small-town background, in which the heroine is tested by poverty, jealousy and social pressure, Gürses's female types fell sharply into two groups. On one side were the innocent women who were deceived, carried off by force or raped, and driven to the edge of madness by love; these were played by Muhterem Nur, Deniz Tanyeli and Nevin Aypar. On the other stood the vamps played by Gönül Bayhan, who seduced lovers and husbands. The type of the innocent, untouched village girl who falls into the villains' trap and suffers every misfortune caught on under the name "Zeynep", and was then used again and again, both under that name and under others.

The most distinctive feature of Gürses's cinema was the conflict between good and evil, and the emotion that sustained this conflict was revenge taken for the sake of love and honour. He himself described his aim in these terms: he said he championed the oppressed growing strong against their oppressors, and the good becoming powerful. A pattern often repeated in the village films was the agha of the village coming between the love of a poor village youth and a poor village girl, the girl being carried off to the mountains and violated, and the revenge that followed. Agah Özgüç gave the eroticism of these films, as a form "peculiar to Turkish cinema", the name "eroticism in şalvar" (the baggy village trousers). Halit Refiğ, in harsher language, writes that the most striking examples of sadism in Turkish cinema were provided by Gürses, but adds in the same article that the crumbling, decaying community Gürses built by instinct comes close to the world described by Kafka and Faulkner. In Refiğ's view, "Gürses's cinema is primitive." He also makes clear that he does not use the word only in a technical sense: primitiveness forms the core of the films and the inner texture of characters and situations, and Gürses's people live in the predatory world of "totem and taboo".

Gürses himself objected to melodrama being seen as nothing more than a means of making people cry. "Melodrama is always defined wrongly among us. Melodrama is not only about making people weep. It is a form of storytelling that also contains light comic elements. I always try to put a comic element, something funny, into my films," he said. He therefore made room for comic types in his films; he was one of the first to bring to the screen the "two fat men", Necdet Tosun and Dursune Şirin, whom many directors would later use.

Critics, Producers and the Audience

Because his was a cinema that worked to the audience's expectations, speed and repetition are the most criticisable aspects of Gürses's work; yet the same qualities also explain his commercial success. No other director in Turkish cinema made as many films as he did or earned as much money. He was one of the rare directors who could shoot three or four films in a week, and whose films also did good business. Serpil Kırel gave the article she published in the magazine Antrakt in 1995 the title "Yapımcıların Can Simidi Muharrem Gürses" (Muharrem Gürses, the Producers' Lifebuoy). Bülent Oran, too, says of him that "whatever one thinks of the content of what he made, he was a director who filled the cinemas for a whole period."

The language of criticism, on the other hand, was often merciless. Of "İhtiras Kurbanları" (Victims of Passion), from 1953, Sezai Solelli wrote that the film was "full of 'ah's, 'alas'es and tears from its first line to its last", and that anything that came to mind had been used to make the audience cry. After a while Gürses's name became a unit of measurement. Critics were content to call a film they disliked a "Gürses melodrama", while directors in a tight corner used him as a shield, saying, "Have mercy, look at Muharrem's films, are mine really that bad?" Halit Refiğ summed up this position with the phrase "the hunchback of the cinema". The phrase came from Gürses himself: in the opening credits of one of his films he had introduced himself as "screenwriter, director, and in the role of the hunchback, Muharrem Gürses". In Refiğ's view, to grasp the problems of the cinema one first had to understand the drama of this "hunchback".

Gürses's own complaint was directed mostly at the producers. He relates that on several occasions when he wanted to make films outside the melodrama formula, he was turned down. In the producers' view there was no need to stray from proven, money-making stories: "Are you going to keep your big family happy with art films in times like these?" they asked, telling him it made no sense to chase "art and all that" when the public was holding on to him with both hands. Gürses, a father of five, kept putting off the films he wanted to make to a later date and went on making those that were asked of him. The writer Tarık Dursun Kakınç looks at the matter from another angle, arguing that these films portrayed a Turkey only to the extent that censorship allowed, building a world in which the poor were never shown but in which there was no shortage of consumptive girls and hands stained with blood for the sake of honour.

Urban Melodramas, Comedies and War of Independence Films

Although village melodramas stood at the centre of his filmography, Gürses also worked in other genres. His urban melodramas include "İhtiras Kurbanları" (1953), "Bir Şoförün Hayatı" and "Düşen Kızlar" (Fallen Girls, 1954), "Öldürdüğüm Sevgili" (The Lover I Killed, 1956), "Yavrularımın Katili" (My Children's Killer), "Vicdan Azabı" (Remorse) and "Yavrum İçin" (For My Child, 1957), and "Sokak Şarkıcısı" (The Street Singer) and "Şehvet Uçurumu" (The Abyss of Lust, 1959). In these films the leading figures are grief-stricken women defending themselves against slander for the sake of their honour, and mothers devoting themselves to their children to hold their homes together. Akbaş gives "Yanık Ömer" as a 1952 production alongside "Zeynebin Gözyaşları", while Kırel says 1953; the same list also includes titles such as "Yetimler Ahı" (The Orphans' Lament, 1956), "Talihsiz Yetime-Ninni" (1958) and "Talihsiz Yavru" (The Luckless Child, 1960). According to Akbaş, a glance at the titles of these films is enough to tell that they contain heavy melodrama.

Gürses's theatrical background and his love of Karagöz came out in his comedies. In 1954 he made three comedies. "Dümbüllü Tarzan", in which he cast İsmail Dümbüllü, drew great interest. Many big, burly actors who could climb trees with ease had been suggested to him for Tarzan, but he insisted on a small, scrawny Tarzan, that is, on Dümbüllü. This choice, which at first provoked objections, won the audience over with Dümbüllü's clumsy yells and climbs. Then came "Canlı Karagöz-Mihriban Sultan" and "Şarlo İstanbul'da" (Charlie in Istanbul), modelled on Chaplin's films; the latter was a Turkish-Greek co-production comedy set in Athens and Istanbul. "Curcuna" (Uproar), which he made in 1955, is also a love story with comic elements.

The War of Independence and recent history were also among the subjects that interested him. In 1954 he made "Hürriyet Uğruna Mukaddes Yalan" (A Sacred Lie for Freedom), and in 1959 "Beklenen Bomba" (The Awaited Bomb), about heroism in the war years, and "Dağlar Şahini Yörük Efe" (Yörük Efe, Falcon of the Mountains), about the struggle of an efe during the war. These films too received their share of criticism. Erman Şener wrote that the events, stretched out and repeated within familiar formulas, "did not amount to even a fig seed", and that the director, aware of this, almost always showed a flag on screen and frequently had his actors deliver patriotic speeches.

Atilla Film and the Historical Films

In the 1960s he founded Atilla Film, named after his son Atilla Arcan, and began making his films under his own company. One record gives 1965 as the year the company was founded. He thus also took on the role of producer. In the company's early period he made costumed historical films starring Atilla Arcan. The productions of this period include "Battal Gazi", "Zaloğlu Rüstem", "Akıncıların İntikamı" (The Raiders' Revenge), "Şehzade Murat ve Gülnaz Sultan" (Prince Murat and Gülnaz Sultan), "Bizansı Titreten Adam" (The Man Who Made Byzantium Tremble), "İmparator Atilla'nın Demir Yumruğu" (The Iron Fist of Emperor Attila) and "Malazgirt Kahramanı Alpaslan" (Alp Arslan, Hero of Manzikert). Some sources date "Battal Gazi" and "Zaloğlu Rüstem" to 1966, others to 1967; Kırel places both in 1966 and "Malazgirt Kahramanı Alpaslan" in 1967.

Then came the religious films, beginning with "Hz. Yusuf'un Hayatı" (The Life of the Prophet Joseph). According to the filmography, "Hak Yolunda Hazreti Yahya" (The Prophet John on the Path of Truth) and "Hazreti Yusuf'un Hayatı" were made in 1965 and "Hazreti Süleyman ve Saba Melikesi" (Solomon and the Queen of Sheba) in 1966. Kırel describes this venture as Gürses's "second birth" in Yeşilçam and attributes its success to his combining religious elements with the formulas and folk songs of melodrama. These films, in which deserts were evoked with studio sets, departed from reality but appealed to audience taste and achieved box-office success, opening the door to a brief vogue for what were called "prophet films". "Hz. Yahya ve Prenses Salome" (John the Baptist and Princess Salome), another story of a prophet, came in 1993 among the director's last works.

In the same years he remade successful films of the 1950s. "Tütüncü Kız Emine" (1969), "Yayla Kızı Gül Ayşe" (1969), "Ceylan Emine" (1970) and "Yanık Kezban" (1970) are these remakes. In the 1970s he turned increasingly to films with songs and folk music. In these choices one can see the reckoning of a producer combining proven stories with well-known names and music. In the same period he also tried his hand at fantasy and adventure: "Altın Prens Devler Ülkesinde" (The Golden Prince in the Land of Giants) and "Şehzade Sinbad Kaf Dağında" (Prince Sinbad on Mount Qaf), both from 1971, are among these. The entry written for Koçu's encyclopedia also records that in these years, alongside his feature films, he directed photo-novels and made short television films for Italian, French and American television; the details of this television work are not found in other sources.

Gürses as an Actor

Alongside directing he never gave up acting. From his first film onwards he took a role himself in almost all of his productions. In his films he played a school principal and a policeman, a village headman and a mayor, a grocer, a judge, an agha, a cleric and even a prime minister. He portrayed bosses, aghas and heads of family who carried a comic note, exaggerated and short-tempered but kind-hearted at bottom; with his facial expressions and deep voice he was a character actor instantly recognisable.

The role that stayed in the memory of the wider public is that of the school administrator in the Hababam Sınıfı series. Sources refer to him in the role of "school principal Muharrem Gür"; in one he appears as "the owner of the school". Adapted from Rıfat Ilgaz's novel, the series became, under Ertem Eğilmez's direction, one of the most watched comedy series of the 1970s. Gürses's filmography includes "Hababam Sınıfı" and "Hababam Sınıfı Sınıfta Kaldı" (1975), "Hababam Sınıfı Uyanıyor" (1976), "Hababam Sınıfı Tatilde" (1977) and "Hababam Sınıfı Dokuz Doğuruyor" (1978). In the same years his productions came very thick and fast; according to the table he had a role in sixteen films in 1975 alone, most of them as an actor. In 1979 he took on more than one role in "Nemrud", while as an actor he appeared in comedies and adventure films such as "Korkusuz Korkak", "Süper Selami", "Kanun Gücü" and "Tatlı İstanbul Geceleri". "Gerzek Şaban" (1980), "Tövbe" (1981), "Kiracı" and "Yakışıklı" (1987) come towards the end of this period.

Selected Filmography

The filmography tables help show the genres through which Gürses ranged over the decades. Between 1960 and 1964 one sees titles such as "Ve Allah Aptalları Yarattı" (1960), "Can Mustafa" (1960), "Gönlüm Yaralı" (1961), "Çılgın Aşk" (1961), "Seni Benden Alamazlar" (1961), "Haram Lokma" (1963), "Mukadderat" (1963) and "Ana Bizi Eversene" (1964). In the same years he also turned to patriotic subjects and everyday life: "Çanakkale Aslanları" (1964), "Fabrikanın Gülü" (1964) and "Kasımpaşalı Recep" (1965) are among them. Koçu's encyclopedia lists "Sazlı Damın Kahbesi", "Yavrularımın Katili", "Pamukçu Kızı Halime", "Tütüncü Kızı Emine", "Kırık Keman", "Talihsiz Yavru", "Haram Lokma" and "Yayla Kızı Gül Ayşe" as examples of his films between 1958 and 1970. From the early and mid-1950s the list also includes near-parody titles such as "Dümbüllü Tarzan", "Şarlo İstanbul'da" and "İngiliz Kemal Lawrence'e Karşı".

The early 1970s bring "Bu Yumruk Sana" (1970), "Öksüz Gülnaz" (1970), "Ali Cengiz Oyunu" (1971) and "Gençliğin Rüyası" (1971). Titles such as "Pir Sultan Abdal", "Vurun Kahpeye", "Kızgın Toprak" and "Arap Abdo" follow in 1973, "Beyto", "Bir Ana Bir Kız", "Cafer'in Nargilesi" and "Yayla Kızı" in 1974, and "Çapkın Hırsız", "Şaşkın Damat" and "Sevimli Frankenstein" in 1975. In the source tables Gürses's name appears as an actor in most of these films, while screenwriting and directing credits are marked mainly in his own productions. Films such as "Batan Güneş", "Töre" and "Petrol Kralları" in 1978 and "İnsan Sevince" and "Yorgun Savaşçı" in 1979 are added.

His Writing

Gürses's pen was not confined to the cinema. According to the recorded list of his works, he wrote the plays "Köroğlu" (drama, four acts, 1945) and "Nasreddin Hoca ile Keloğlan" (comedy, 1979). His screenplays include "Yayla Güzeli Gül Ayşe" and "Yavrum İçin" (1959), "Yayla Güzeli" (1969), "Sokak Kedisi" (1970), "Gençliğin Rüyası" and "Altın Prenses Devler Ülkesinde" (1971), "Şehzade Sindbad" (1972) and "Kara Bahtım Kem Talihim" (1985). He also wrote for other directors; Memduh Ün's "Zeyneb'in İntikamı" and Osman Seden's "Bir Avuç Toprak" are based on his screenplays. After 1978 he wrote photo-novel scripts and directed some of them: "Kadın Polis" (1978) and "Günahsız Katil" (1979). Besides these there is also a book of his from 1970, "Yüzyıl Genç ve Dinç Yaşamanın Sırrı" (The Secret of Living a Hundred Years Young and Vigorous). This body of work, stretching from the serial novel to the radio play and from the stage play to the photo-novel, makes him a storyteller present in almost every medium the public read, listened to and watched. In Kırel's assessment, the course of Gürses's life mirrors the journey of melodrama itself: he was first nourished by the serial novel and the melodrama theatre, and he fed his films from these same sources on which melodrama drew most.

Later Years and Death

He continued to work in the 1980s. "Fatih Sultan Mehmet" (1983), "Soykırım" (1985), "İlahi Adalet" and "Muhteşem Serseri" (1986), and "Hatıram Olsun" and "Mikrop" (1988) are productions of this period. In most of these he appeared as an actor or took on directing and screenwriting together; which role he played in which film is not always clear in the source tables. When he spoke with Kırel in 1993 he said that he had continued directing until 1988, that he had been away from the cinema for six years because of an illness, and that he was working on new projects. The filmography records, however, also credit him with "Hz. Yahya ve Prenses Salome" of 1993 and "1001 Surat" of 1994, and end in 1994.

Muharrem Gürses died in Istanbul on 7 April 1999, at the age of eighty-five, and was buried in Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. He was the father of Atilla Arcan and Kemal Gökhan Gürses. He left behind hundreds of films, several novels and plays, a film company and a tradition of melodrama that bears his name. In one of his last interviews with Kırel he described his cinema as one he had "found by doing it over and over"; the way an enthusiasm born in the Amasya hall where Topal Atıf made his audience weep grew into one of the most prolific directors of Yeşilçam bears out these words.

Chronology

1913: Born in Amasya; his date, year (1915 in one source) and place of birth are given differently in the sources.

1931: Joined the City Theatre (Dârülbedâyi); left shortly afterwards because of his role in "Ölü Evi".

1943: Founded the Gürses Theatre with Sezer Sezin and Hulusi Kentmen.

1945: Began writing serial novels; worked as assistant director on the film of "Köroğlu".

1946: Appeared as an actor in "Bir Dağ Masalı".

1949: His screenplay "Zehirli Şüphe" was filmed.

1951-1952: Made his directing debut with "Zeynep'in Gözyaşları" (Kara Efe).

1954: Made seven films, among them "Dümbüllü Tarzan".

1956: Created the prototype of the Gürses school with "Yedi Köyün Zeynebi"; seven films in the year.

1965: Began his religious films with "Hazreti Yusuf'un Hayatı"; founded his own film company (according to one record).

1975-1978: Played the school administrator in the Hababam Sınıfı series.

1978-1979: Wrote and directed photo-novel scripts.

1988: His last work as director, by his own statement.

1999: Died in Istanbul on 7 April.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources