Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
HoMER 2021 Annual Conference, Dublin, İrlanda, 24 - 29 Mayıs 2021, ss.1
This paper aims to discuss the novelty of New Cinema History approach through a series of researches focus on the cinema experiences of Adana’s urban and rural area from a local perspective. As the city and its surroundings located in the south-central Turkey’s fertile land, it has been home to many coming from various social class, ethnicity and religious backgrounds for decades. Adana’s cosmopolitanism has resulted in a multitude and variety of leisure practices including cinema experiences.
In our attempt to write the history of Adana cinemas, we try to obtain the data by scanning local/national archives and documents such as newspapers and magazines; walk & talk interviews with the employees of the open-air and lounge cinemas, and the neighbourhood middlemen; and oral history interviews. We mapped geospatially over 130 cinema places both the lounge and open-air cinemas that run from 1902 till today in Adana. To gather, triangulate and analysis of geospatial data, we organized a datathon workshop as a participatory method. More interestingly, the ‘history’ started to grow into a more materialized form after we as researchers integrate to the field itself. For example, the studies are accompanied by cinema history tours in the city and film cartography tours by focusing on Yilmaz Güney’s films that we organize. And also, we try to apply materialized and reflexive methodologies, such as reviving cinemagoing experience as ethnographic research, meaning recreating similar historical experiences. Through watching 35mm pellicle films full of scratches and cuts which has been shown hundreds of times in the open air with the audience, we had a chance to observe how cinema invigorate the memories.
So New Cinema History approach provides a mixed method that can combine physical data within the spatial context and the social data which is constructed by using both digital and/or conventional data gathering and analysis techniques. The paradigm itself allows us to relate each step of the research design and transform research workflow into a cyclical and flexible methodology in which every step feeds each other. In the end, our effort to write about Adana cinemas historiography also allows us to give back what we have learned to the original owners. So the novelty of the New Cinema History paradigm lies in its capacity in transforming the research and its results to materialize the social and cultural context of cinemagoing.