Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
HoMER 2021 Annual Conference, Dublin, İrlanda, 24 - 29 Mayıs 2021, ss.1
Based on the New Cinema History approach, this comparative research focuses on the exhibitions and cinemagoing experiences of Taurus highland villagers and the films they watched. The main objective is to explore the cinematic experiences of the villagers of Taurus highlands through travelling cinema and/or cinema halls. In order to carry out this studyand to select the villages, we followed the route of Musa Özder, a travelling film exhibitor, and his statements in an interview entitled “Cinema Investigation in the Taurus Mountains,” conducted by Osman Şahin in 1974 for a cinema magazine, Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art). Hence, we conducted in-depth interviews with travelling film exhibitors and 40 villagers, who were born in or before 1970 and lived in Taurus highland villages within the borders of Mersin province between 1960 and 1980. Our findings present how the exhibition practices and places, and moviegoing experiences in these villages may direct us to quite different paths from the Western notions of cinema places, exhibitions, and audience in traditional/conventional cinema studies. And also, one of our findings, “audience-recalled films”, shows how we may integrate traditional way of looking at films and doing research from New Cinema Histories methods as a novel approach.
Taurus highlands is the region where human mobility is increased along with the radical transformations in the settlement processes since the 17th century. Since then, the Yörüks (Nomads), which constitute an important ethnic group of the region’s population and engage in nomadic practices between Çukurova Plato and Taurus Mountains, have been largely settled and nomadism is tried to be kept alive culturally. During our research, some of the films that participants remembered are based on the Yörük myths and legends and some others are based on the stories of writers who were born and raised in these villages. Therefore, narratives and narrative structures of these films are local. Furthermore, the production, distribution and screening practices of these films are also local and distinctive, which would characterize the epoch. These films met the local demand by being equipped with local elements and features through the model of regional management and also they create a forgotten sub-genre: Yörük films. Consequently, New Cinema History approach (and its novel methodologies) capacitates quite wide perspectives to frame interdisciplinary, empirical, and comparative researches on distribution, exhibition, and cinemagoing practices. But our research also shows that this approach has quite potential to integrate film and cinema studies and to make researches on production practices, film aesthetics, film structure, narration, and genres.