From social realism and socialist cinema, to the Turkish 'new wave' and the nascent Kurdish cinema, this dissertation traces the mutual implication of the production of Turkish national space and of Doğu ("The East") as cinematic space. Doğu emerged as part of a discursive formation within the Turkish state's address to eastern Turkey; it entered national cinema as a result of the journey of social realism to the region in the aftermath of the military coup in 1960, which allowed for the bourgeoning of the socialist public sphere and enabled filmmakers to cinematically reflect on the region. However, the state's renewed security-oriented interests, triggered by the resurgent Kurdish movement within both Turkey and Iraq, permeated the region and enforced limits on the representation of Doğu as a new cinematic space. Although in its cinematic incarnation 'Doğu' was hardly a perpetuation of state ideology, a cartographic anxiety--informed by the desire for spatial modernization--shaped the politico-aesthetic parameters of the region's cinematic presence. In recent years, the representation of the region within the nascent Kurdish cinema can be understood as a deconstructive turn problematizing the foundation of Turkish national space and the cinematic Doğu. / text

Proposing melodrama as an aesthetics of victimhood, my dissertation examines the intermedial itineraries of notable feminist Halide Edib’s Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut]. Originally serialized in 1923 and published as a novella in 1926 in Ottoman Turkish, Vurun Kahpeye was translated into modern day Turkish in 1946. The melodramatic story was then adapted for screen three times in 1949, 1964, and 1973, respectively, by Ömer Lütfi Akad, Orhan Aksoy and Halit Refiğ. With the circulation of these films on TV, the title Vurun Kahpeye has since the 90s morphed into an idiom designating the unjust treatment of the innocent. The persistent repetition of Vurun Kahpeye across media, I suggest, signifies melodrama’s aesthetic durability due to its affective excess: its efficacy in making a disaffected public experience its own victimhood. Thus, my dissertation provides an archeology of melodrama as a political technology through a reading of each of Vurun Kahpeye’s media iteration as embedded in its socio-historical context. In this account, the affective medium of cinema emerges as the main site for the formation of a secular mass public by linking secularism to structures of feeling rooted in victimization, suffering, and injury. And yet, the affective excess of melodrama, I demonstrate, renders Vurun Kahpeye’s normative project unstable and uncontainable with each iteration. At different moments in time, Vurun Kahpeye is a queer text exposing the heteropatriarchal nature of secular nationalism; lays the infrastructural, spectatorial, and aesthetic foundation of the classical cinema of Turkey; and serves as the project of a social realist, counter-populist, and anti- Western theory of cinema. Therefore, this dissertation traces the conflicting projections, aspirations, and feelings central to Turkish republican modernity that congeal and clash in, through, and around Vurun Kahpeye. / 2021-01-11

This study investigated the cinematic representations of women in ‘Climates’ ‘Three Monkeys’ and ‘Once upon a time in Anatolia’ created by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It explored the image of women and the ideologies that affects them in the aforementioned films. For the analysis, semiotics is used and feminist film theory is applied. The findings indicated that the women images are affected by patriarchal ideology. Female characters were portrayed as weak or weakened by men regardless of their representative social group. The results showed similarities to Mulvey’s argument and to Friedan’s definition of feminine mystique. Male gaze dominates the visual pleasures and the female characters showed similar features as described by Mulvey and Friedan.

This thesis highlights the significance of patriarchal structures and their reproduction in women&rsquo / s social position through the feminist perspective. Patriarchy is a dominant structure both on production and reproduction sphere. Patriarchy, which is a dominant structure in every sphere of social life has material basis and controls both women&rsquo / s labour and sexuality. With this framework some concepts such as the types of women&rsquo / s labour, paid and domestic labour, family, honour, violence and masculinity are used in order to understand patriarchy. Patriarchy is not a fixed structure / on the contrary it has been changed according to the different mode of production and different social and cultural structures in which it takes place. In the scope of this thesis, the examples of &lsquo / social realist&rsquo / and &lsquo / national cinema&rsquo / are analysed sociologically. The social, economic and political structure of Turkey in between 1960-70 has some special importance. In addition to that, the institution of cinema had some important changes at the same period. Meantime, it is important that not many studies were done in woman&rsquo / s subordination for this period in Turkey. Not only woman&rsquo / s subordination in the scope of patriarchy, but also mutual relations of men and the role of men in reproduction of patriarchy were analysed in the film analysis.

No description available.

Bilge Olgac, one of the first female directors of Turkey, who shot her first film in 1965, shaped her films according to the developments in Turkey. This thesis investigates how Olgac was affected by the events that took place in Turkey from the 1960s to the 1980s and how she reflected this impact on the representations of men and women in her films. The study seeks answers to the following questions;  *How has political, economic, and social changes in Turkey, influenced Bilge Olgac and her films from the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s to the 1980s? *How are men and women and their relationship represented and how is the gaze indicated in the films? These research questions are tried to be answered by analyzing Olgac’s films Lawless Land (1967), Dark Day (1971), Gulusan (1985) and Ipekce (1987). While analyzing women and femininity and men and masculinity in these films, Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory is used. Findings suggest that between 1965-1975, Olgac tried to keep up with the male-dominated cinema industry on the one hand and tried to impose herself in the industry on the other and directed melodramas in which women were represented as weak and passive and men were represented as strong and active. Olgac, who took a break from cinema in 1975, focused on female protagonists by presenting a different perspective to the audience in the 1980s. However, detailed analyses of the films also reveal that she could not get rid of the dominant ideology and the female characters in her films could not escape from traditional roles. In other words, Olgac’s films reflect patriarchy, similar to the Hollywood films Mulvey has examined.

Dans les quatre pays dominant le Kurdistan, (Turquie, Iran, Irak et Syrie), la question kurde se traduit avant tout sous forme de visibilité/ invisibilité, autour de la question de la reconnaissance des Kurdes en tant que Nation déniée. Notamment en Turquie, le premier des pays à avoir imposé aux Kurdes son modèle d'Etat-Nation, cette question renvoie aux politiques négationnistes étatiques menées contre la culture et l'identité kurdes, considérées dès 1924, comme des obstacles au processus de création d'une identité nationale turque. Dans ce rapport conflictuel entre le nationalisme turc et le nationalisme kurde, également fruit d'une mémorisation traumatique et d'une longue histoire de résistance kurde dans chaque partie du Kurdistan, l'imaginaire des Kurdes renvoie а une dimension historique devenue spontanément une référence essentielle du traitement cinématographique de la « kurdicité », sous forme d’interaction construite par les Kurdes eux-mêmes ou créée par leurs adversaires politiques.Notre thèse s'efforce de montrer cette influence durable du nationalisme sur le traitement cinématographique de la « kurdicité », principalement dans le cinéma turc traitant les Kurdes sans les designer en tant que Kurdes, puis dans le cinéma kurde au service de la « cause kurde » après les années 1990. / In the four countries dominating Kurdistan (Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria) the Kurdish question translates first and foremost under the concept of visibility/invisibility, around the problem of the recognition of the Kurds as a denied nation. This is especially apparent in the case of Turkey, the first of the countries which imposed its own nation-state on the Kurds : this question is associated with the negationist state policies on Kurdish culture and identity,which, since 1924, have been considered as obstacles on the path to the creation of a nationalTurkish identity. In this conflictual relation between Kurdish and Turkish nationalisms – the fruit, among others, of a traumatic memory and a long history of Kurdish resistance inrespective sections of Kurdistan – the imagery of the Kurds refers to a historical dimensionwhich has spontaneously become an essential reference of cinematographic treatment of« Kurdishness » under the form of interactions constructed by themselves or by their own political opponents. The present thesis aims at describing that permanent influence of nationalism on the cinematographic treatment of « Kurdishness » in the Turkish cinema which principally treats the Kurds without designating them as Kurds, then in the Kurdish cinema in the service of « Kurdish cause » following the 1990s.