Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ECREA 2022 - 9th European Communication Conference, Arhus, Danimarka, 19 - 22 Ekim 2022, ss.61
Until the 1990s, when the global production and distribution companies dominated the Turkish film market, Turkey had an established film industry known as Yeşilçam. Despite making dozens of films every year, Yeşilçam producers had to be content with limited financial and technical resources so that studios never became widespread in Turkey. Instead, most films were shot in real locations, either partially or entirely. Some filming locations were used so systematically that they started to replace Yeşilçam’s non-existent studios over time. Consequently, public spaces, historical ruins, countrysides, and abandoned sites became popular filming locations. As the popularity of Yeşilçam increased, cinema enthusiasts and fans of stars started to visit filming locations during the shootings to view how the movies were shot and meet the actors and the actresses they admired. Although measures were taken to prevent the interruption of the shootings, the audience was never entirely precluded from visiting and watching. The public interest was much more significant, especially if the shootings were done in the periphery of Istanbul or rural Anatolia.
In this paper, we focus on the interaction between the spectators, film enthusiasts, fans, and cinema
professionals during the shooting of a film. We believe that the experience of visiting the filming locations of a
movie and watching the shootings should be studied as part of the social and cultural history of cinema within
the context of the New Cinema History paradigm. For defining this practice, we propose ‘backlot-going’ as a
new term and concept inspired by the notion of ‘cinema-going’. Just as cinema-going does not only mean
watching a movie, but it is also a social and cultural process, backlot-going does not mean watching the
making of a film in the narrow sense but creates a new field of encounters and interactions between the fans,
spectators and the cinema professionals. For this inquiry, we benefit from two primary sources: First, we refer
to the testimonies of Yeşilçam professionals written in autobiographies, memoirs, and interviews. Second, we
delve into oral history accounts, mainly collected testimonies through the research projects conducted by
Çam and Şanlıer Yüksel in the entire Çukurova region. Although visiting filming locations is widely carried out
as a tourism activity today, these historical accounts show that backlot-going is an authentic and unique
social and cultural experience, just like the cinema-going.