Turkish Radical Filmmaking: A Retrospective Study

Abstract

This thesis situates the history of Turkish political cinema in conversation with a new parameter and theoretical concept in the discipline of Film and Media Studies, the militant image. The thesis historicizes and contextualizes the key figures and major tendencies of radical filmmaking in Turkey, presenting a retrospective survey from the 1960s to the 2000s. It begins with an analysis of cross-cultural interactions at the heart of an amateur film collective, associated with Genç Sinema Devrimci Sinema Dergisi (Young Cinema: Revolutionary Cinema Journal, 1968-1971), and this collective’s practice of the simple image. The thesis continues with a discussion of the non-professional political filmmaking scene of the middle/late 1970s and the short documentaries that this scene had produced. As a bridge to 1980s (and 1990s) post-militant cinema, the thesis takes Bilge Olgaç as its foci and marks a genealogical intersection between militant cinema and women’s films. Throughout, Yılmaz Güney unsurprisingly appears as an intertext to thematically connect the chapters. This thesis concludes with a brief examination of Özcan Alper’s Sonbahar [Autumn] (2008), framing Alper’s work as an instance wherein the rich heritage of radical cinema serves as a reference point for the contemporary political film.