Stylogeny in the style of Yeşilçam Film Poster (Turkish Hand-Painted Afiş)

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Pictorial & machine age · 1950–1988 · Middle East & North Africa

Yeşilçam Film Poster (Turkish Hand-Painted Afiş)

Also known as Yeşilçam afişi, Turkish film poster, Beyoğlu cinema painting, Sinema feneri

Painted publicity of Turkish popular cinema by workshop artists such as Mehmet Bal, Kemal Borteçin and İbrahim Enez. Working from set photographs and plot briefings, painters sketched for approval, then painted gouache on paper for posters; facade lanterns used earth pigment and glue. Latin-script titles are hand-lettered in saturated colour. Painters were mostly anonymous, posters unsigned, originals often lost; the industry declined after the 1980 coup, ending 1988.

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A painted vintage-style film poster features large portraits of a dark-haired woman in a red headscarf and a mustached man above smaller figures of an armed running man and a woman in green. A waterfront mosque skyline, ferry, burning ship, and red car on a coastal road surround oversized yellow and red lettering reading “SON RÜZGAR.”
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Paint the lead actors' portraits large, working from set photographs and plot briefings and sketching for approval, so that the star's face is the main selling point.
  • Stack the heads and a smaller action or melodrama scene in one crowded, full-bleed composition.
  • Hand-letter the Turkish title in heavy Latin display capitals with a dark outline or hard shadow, so it can be read across a street.
  • Use saturated, many-hued colour that holds in print and on rain-exposed cloth.
  • Adapt the mood to the genre: romance, comedy, crime or action, and show the cast names in the lettering below the title.
  • Make the artwork once by hand and let the print shop reproduce it, so the poster is both an original painting and a mass-produced sheet.

Istanbul, Turkey. The Yeşilçam industry is named for Yeşilçam Street in Beyoğlu, home to its studios and producers; poster painters worked in Beyoğlu and nearby print shops and painted both printed afişler and large cloth cinema lanterns (fener)

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Modular grid, Generous white space, Typography only, Non-representational, Grotesque & neo-grotesque, Monochrome, Rational & objective, Brush & pen calligraphy

Palette

  • #d7263d
  • #f5c518
  • #1e63b5
  • #2e9e5b
  • #f2e6c9
  • #1a1a1a

Typefaces

  • Hand-painted Latin display capitals for Turkish film titles, with diacritics

    Ç, Ğ, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü

  • Outlined and shadowed cast and credit lettering painted by the poster artist

  • Cinema-lantern sign lettering on large cloth panels

Known for

  • İbrahim Enez, poster and cinema-lantern painter; moved to Istanbul in 1961, painted posters for about 500 films until 1975, then went into printing

  • Mehmet Bal, Kemal Borteçin and İbrahim Enez, named as the most prolific poster and lantern painters of the 1960s and 1970s

  • Mithat Ağakay

    began painting posters and lanterns in 1922; his Mimeray became a major poster printer in the 1950s

  • Münif Fehim, 1960s poster painter

    Cennet Fedaisi, O Kadın

  • Ömer Yıldız, lantern painter taking over the Hüseyin Olur workshop at Rumeli Han in 1987

03

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This style Yeşilçam Film Poster (Turkish Hand-Painted Afiş) 1950–1988 · Middle East & North Africa

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Often taken for

Yeşilçam Film Poster has no real works recorded yet, so these are its nearest styles by its choices alone, with the choices that tell them apart.

— means the choice isn’t among the style’s recorded choices. Critics recorded each work’s choices with the styles’ descriptions in view, so this shows whether the descriptions hold together, not proof that they are right.

06

Combine it with

Styles Yeşilçam Film Poster (Turkish Hand-Painted Afiş) pairs well with or plays against, from the research. Each is worked out as a combination: which style gives the type, the colours and the forms.

Every style combination

07

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, 'Yeşilçam' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye%C5%9Fil%C3%A7am), for the industry, its name and end after the 1980 coup (it does not discuss posters)
  2. Sinematek, 'Sinema fenerleri, afişleri ve emekçileri' (https://sinematek.tv/sinema-fenerleri-afisleri-ve-emekcileri/), on painters, lanterns and printing, also describing a digital library with nearly 4,000 Turkish film posters on its site
  3. İbrahim Enez, 'En çok Ekrem Bora'yı çizmeyi severdim' (https://www.ibrahimenez.com/en-cok-ekrem-borayi-cizmeyi-severdim/), on the painter's workflow

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