filmculture
This homepage is meant to serve as a place for communication between those who seek to improve and disseminate film culture.
The photograph shows a screening in 1963 ( Cinema Şık)
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writings & talks
The Bandit/Eşkıya (forthcoming in a Wallflower Press collection edited by Gonul Donmez- Colin) In 1996, when the long awaited Eskiya was released, the regular moviegoers, consisting mostly of university students, were surprised to see in the movie theatre a long-lost species, housewives, although temporarily, who had returned to cinema. They had come in groups and watched the film in groups. Consuming the food they brought from their homes, and noisily reacting to what was going on on the screen, they were displaying the manners they habituated while watching television in their household. After so many years, Eşkıya/The Bandit had succeeded to bring many types of audiences back to the cinema.
It is interesting to see in the reviews of the film, a tendency to represent the film, not as a work of fiction, but as a mirror which reflects the often harsh realities of Turkey. What all these reviews apparently lack in common is the ability to link the film to the general framework of cinematic experiences.
The Making of Our America: Hollywood in a Turkish Context in Hollywood Abroad, Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), BFI. This chapter examines the ways in which American cinema was represented in Turkey in the 1940s and the evidence that there was a growing connection between American cinema and the popular Turkish imagination in this period. In this regard, my research relies on the popular film magazines of the period as well as the memoirs and observations of writers interested in cinema. Issues of audience demand, of course, pose questions about the cultural identities involved in the experiences of identification and fantasy enjoyed by the film viewer. After describing the historical context in which American cinematic hegemony was established, I consider some of the ways in which Hollywood itself functioned as a kind of fantasy screen for the Turkish viewer.
The Femur In this unpublished essay (originally in turkish), I attempt to investigate how media produced and represented the "event" of a female would-be singer who was shot and had her femur broken just a couple of days before the first public showing. An event which gave an end to her career before it started. Firstly, I "write" yet another story of the "event", a story among hundreds of other stories which appear to be complete, a story whose structure falls into pieces. The success of the text lies in its story's failure.
Femur Kemiği Televizyonun aslında anlatamayacağı bir öyküyü anlatıyor gibi yapmasının hem eğlendirici hem de usandırıcı bir öyküsü var. Olay, Derya Tuna'nın vurulmasıyla, vuruluşunun temsili ve bunun üzerine geliştirilen yorumlar arasından gelişerek ilerliyor. Olay anının tekrar tekrar gösterilmesinin anlamı nedir? Temsilin basitçe tekrarlanması değil sözkonusu olan, temsil tuhaf bir biçimde olay diye bize sunulan şeyin usandırıcı tekrarlarını da içeriyor. Aynı başlangıç noktasından aynı bitiş noktasına kadar ilerleyip tekrar başa dönen ses ve görüntüler, olayın zamansallığıyla oynuyor.
metnin tamamı için tıklayınDerya Tuna, once a partner of a famous singer, Ibrahim Tatlises, was coming out of a night club when she was shot in the femur by a so-called Tatlises fan, who thought her transparent stage costume was not decent enough. Stories of Modernization: Vizontele and Representation In this paper, I attempt to point to the ways in which cinema, as an agent of modernization, represents modernization. I concentrate on a relatively recent film, Vizontele which tells the story of how television was introduced in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Turkey.
Powerless Signs: Hybridity and the Logic of Excess in Turkish Trash [in Mapping the Margins: Identity Politics and the Media Karen Ross, Brenda Dervin, Deniz Derman (eds) Hampton Press/Communication Series 2003] What does it mean to mimic others? What is its relation to a concept of national/cultural identity? Unlike American trash, Turkish trash films cannot be studied without the national concerns they raise. Due to the employment of such terms, hybridity comes along with a set of tensions. I will mainly focus on 'excess' as an outcome of tension. I depart from the assumption that Yesilcam has constructed a hybrid identity whose features might be illustrated as: 1) a blend of Egyptian and Indian melodramas (which are themselves hybrid) and Hollywood narrative; 2) star performance vacillating between the traditions of Turkish drama (eg Ortaoyunu) and method acting; and 3) concurrent employment of the stylistic devices of miniature art and Western cinematography, etc.
The Man who Saved the World is an exemplary trash which became a cult film by the late 90s.
Mute bodies, disembodied voices: notes on sound in Turkish popular cinema, Screen Volume 43, Issue 3, Autumn 2002: pp. 233-249. In this essay I discuss some aspects of a n audio-visual contract in its relation to the body as constituted by Yesilçam, the popular cinema of 1960s and 1970s. For the sake of convenience, I limit my paper to two main issues: 1) dubbing in a framework given by the cinematic apparatus which embodies the configurations of the voice and the body and 2) ‘loss of sight', a recurrent theme of melodramas which is symptomatic in its play on characters' sensory perception.
Yeşilçam'da Bedensiz Sesler, Sessiz Bedenler Bu deneme seyirci ile sinema arasındaki görsel-işitsel bir sözleşmenin bazi veçhelerini, Yesilçam'in kurduğu bedenle ilişkisi çerçevesinde incelemeye çalşıyor. İnceleme, iki konu üzerinde yoğunlaşıyor: 1) ses ve bedenin konfigürasyonlarini müseccem kılan sinematografik aygıtın sağladığı bir çerçevede dublaj ve 2) film karakterlerinin algısı üzerinde oynayan ve sik tekrarlanan bir tema olarak “kör olma”.
Sürtük/ The Street-walker, a typical melodrama by Ertem Egilmez. Note how the looks are articulated.
