National Cinema Struggle (Book)

The National Cinema Struggle is a work written by Halit Refiğ and published in the İletişim series. The book was first published in 1971. It is one of the foundational texts in which Refiğ established the theoretical framework for the "national cinema" movement.

The subject of the work is the sources of Turkish culture and the issues facing Turkish cinema within that culture. Refiğ argues in the book that Turkish cinema must develop its own understanding of cinema. This understanding is based on the premise that Turkish society's historical, social, cultural and economic structure differs from that of the West, and that this difference must be reflected in cinema as well.

Refiğ contends that the West's artistic and aesthetic concepts emerged from its own feudal (first private land ownership, then industrial) production relations, and therefore that Ottoman/Turkish society, in which land was state-owned, must have a different artistic aesthetics.

The central theme addressed in the book, within the context of the "national cinema struggle," is the position and problems of cinema in Turkish culture and intellectual life. The work focuses on the theme of "conflict between the state and its institutions, the people, and the intelligentsia."

While developing these themes, Refiğ was influenced by the social and historical ideas of the writer Kemal Tahir regarding Turkish society. The book argues that Ottoman society lacked a class concept as understood in the West, and therefore must cultivate an artistic approach based not on individualism but on "public consciousness." In this context, the necessity of foregrounding national values, traditions, and spiritual values unique to Turkish society, along with the East-West dichotomy, forms the main themes of the work.

The work is an analytical study that forms the theoretical foundation of Refiğ's "national cinema" movement. The author supports his arguments with historical and social analyses; for instance, he notes that the historical stages of Western and Ottoman societies followed different paths due to differences in land ownership structures. Refiğ also draws attention to Karl Marx's book Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations to reinforce this argument.