Turkish Film Resources
Cinema in Turkey: A New Critical History by ISBN: 9780195370058Date: 2010-11-03Boasting nearly 7,000 titles, Turkey has produced more films than any other country in the Middle East or the Balkans. Examining both popular genres and art films, Cinema in Turkey deals with the country's entire cinematic tradition, including not only its high point with Yesilcam-Turkey's popular film industry of the 1950s to the 1980s-but also its early years and current revival. In addition to surveying the cinematic landscape and recounting its history, Cinema in Turkey analyzes the arts conventions from which the first films emerged, region-specific permutations, and the cultural ramifications of Turkey's distinct forms of modernization and nation-building.
Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film by ISBN: 9780415187039Date: 2001-10-12Each chapter covers the history and major issues of film within that area, as well as providing bibliographies of the leading films, directors and actors. The areas covered are: Central Asia, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, The Magreb, Palestine, Turkey.
Directory of World Cinema: Turkey by ISBN: 9781841506203Date: 2013-07-15Since the 1990s, filmmakers in Turkey have increasingly explored notions of gender, genre, cultural memory, and national and transnational identity. Taking these themes as its starting point, this book provides an extensive historical overview the country's cinema since the early 1920s. In chapters organized by genre--such as fantasy and science fiction, contemporary blockbusters, women's films, Istanbul films, and transnational or accented cinema--leading scholars of Turkish cinema offer reflections on the country's most important film movements and filmmakers.
New Cinema in Turkey: Filmmakers and Identities between Urban and Rural Space by ISBN: 9781443812726Date: 2016New Cinema in Turkey: Filmmakers and Identities between Urban and Rural Space focuses, with a very precise overview, on Turkish cinema that, since the mid-'90s, has seen the emergence and consolidation of a strong and original authorship, which has been accompanied by a growing recognition at the international level.
New Cinema, New Media: Reinventing Turkish Cinema by ISBN: 9781443856881Date: 2014-05-15This volume covers approaches concerning the relationship between innovation in cinema and the politics of filmmaking in new cinema practices in Turkey. The contributors focus on historiography, genres, mainstream and art cinema production, and transnational cinema, as well as changing narratives and identities. The new cinema movement in Turkey is here analysed from perspectives of new technologies, new production and distribution structures, the impact of film training, the televisual industry, new actors in commercial and art cinema, as well as the impact of the film festival circuit.
New Turkish Cinema by ISBN: 9781845119492Date: 2010-02-15Asuman Suner explores the emergence of the new wave Turkish cinema against the backdrop of the drastic transformation of Turkey since the 1990s. Suner argues that this new cinema, including both commercial and independent productions, persistently returns to the themes of belonging, identity and memory; it is how films address these themes that constitutes a dividing line, with big budget popular films tending to settle contradictions into comforting resolutions, while independent movies demonstrate their paradoxical nature.
The Routledge Dictionary of Turkish Cinema by ISBN: 9780415666268Date: 2013-12-11The first critical and analytical dictionary of Turkish Cinema, this book provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish cinema from its beginnings to the present day. Addressing the lacuna in scholarly work on the topic, this dictionary provides immense detail on a wide range of aspects of Turkish cinema including; prominent filmmakers, films, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, producers, significant themes, genres, movements, theories, production modes, film journals, film schools and professional organizations.
Turkish Cinema, 1970-2007 by ISBN: 9783631566541Date: 2008-09-19This handbook on Turkish cinema tries to provide a basis for those who are interested in Turkish cinema in general and for those who wish to do research in the field of Turkish cinema. It comprises two parts, a bibliography and a study on the history of Turkish cinema.
Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and its Minorities on Screen by 
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ISBN: 9781501306464Date: 2016-01-28Looking at films that represent the experience of displacement in relation to Turkey's minorities, Aesthetics of Displacement argues that there is a particular aesthetic continuity among the otherwise unrelated films. Ozlem Koksal focuses on films that bring taboo issues concerning the repression of minorities into visibility, arguing that the changing political and social conditions determine not only the types of stories told but also the ways in which these stories are told. Focusing on aesthetic and narrative continuities, the films discussed include Ararat, Waiting for the Clouds and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia among others.
Bordered Places — Bounded Times: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Turkey by ISBN: 9781898249382Date: 2017-08-08Building on similarities and exploring differences in the way scholars undertake their research, this volume presents crossdisciplinary communication on the study of borders, frontiers and boundaries through time, with a focus on Turkey. Standing at the dividing/connecting line between Europe and Asia, Turkey emerges as a place carrying a rich history of multiple layers of borders that have been drawn, shifted or unmade from the remote past until today: from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to the period of early states in the Bronze Age, from the poleis of classical antiquity to the period of the empires defined by the Roman expansion and Byzantine rule, from the imprints of the Ottoman state's expanded frontiers to contemporary Turkey's national borders.
Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism, and Turkey by ISBN: 9781443841337Date: 2013-05-01In Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey, the editors put together a series of bold and innovative essays that engage the question of transnational cinema in the context of Turkish national identity. This collection is essential reading for those who are interested in transnational and Turkish cinemas as well as those who research issues of migrant cultures, hybrid identities and new forms of belonging.
Kurdish Documentary Cinema in Turkey: The Politics and Aesthetics of Identity and Resistance by ISBN: 9781443897983Date: 2016Without a doubt, this decade's most discussed and developed documentary productions in Turkey come from Kurdistan, a name that provokes nationalist panic in Turkey, yet delineates distinct cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries nonetheless. Documentary film productions by Kurdish filmmakers from Turkey determine the major tendencies of this emergent genre, with such productions offering a unique opportunity for a nuanced understanding of national cinema. Documentary film is proving to be a particularly complex tool for the Kurdish social and political existence, as Kurds lack the official tools of history-writing and cultural preservation that are categorically associated with the capacities of a state.
The Provincial and the Postcolonial in Cultural Texts from Late Modern Turkey by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9783031046650Date: 2022-07-27This book explores Turkey's complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order by tracing the ambivalent ways in which it is constituted in contemporary Turkish cinema and literature. Includes chapter, "Fatih Akin's Crossing the Bridge: Turkey as Europes Tasra, or Limitations of a Metaphor."
The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in the Contemporary Turkish Cinema by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9783319716992Date: 2018-03-27This book explores how politics, religion and cinema encounter and re-invent each other in contemporary Turkish cinema. It investigates their common origin--the spectacle, which each field views as an instrument of governmentality. The book analyses six recent, some of which are internationally known Turkish films: The Messenger (Ulak), A Man's Fear of God (Takva), Let's Sin (İtirazım Var), SixtyOne Days (İftarlık Gazoz), The Imam and The Shadowless (Gölgesizler). Thwaites discusses how the cinematic nature of politics and religion unfold amidst the increasing media visibility of religion in contemporary Turkey.
Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging by ISBN: 9781861893703Date: 2008-11-15Films often act as a prism that refracts the issues facing a nation, and Turkish cinema in particular serves to encapsulate the cultural and social turmoil of modern-day Turkey. Gönül Dönmez-Colin examines here the way that national cinema reveals the Turkish quest for a modern identity. Marked by continually shifting ethnic demographics, politics, and geographic borders, Turkish society struggles to reconcile modern attitudes with traditional morals and centuries-old customs.
Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium by ISBN: 9781782386650Date: 2014-09-01In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape.nbsp; Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.
Women, Islam and Cinema by ISBN: 1861892209Date: 2004-11-04Film critic and author Gönül Dönmez-Colin explores the role of women as spectators, images and image constructors in the cinemas of the countries where Islam is the predominant religion, focusing on Iran and Turkey from the Middle East, drawing parallels from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, and Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia, the prominently Muslim Asian countries with a challenging film industry.
Women and Turkish Cinema by ISBN: 9780415674652Date: 2013-02-08Since 2000, there has been a considerable effort in Turkish cinema to come to terms with the military's intervention in politics and subsequent national trauma. It has resulted in an outpouring of cinematic texts. This book focuses on women and Turkish cinema in the context of gender politics, cultural identity and representation. The central proposition of this book is that enforced depolticisation introduced after the coup is responsible for uniting feminism and film in 1980s Turkey.
The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan by ISBN: 1784538167Date: 2018-02-12Film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's meditative, visually stunning contributions to the 'New Turkish Cinema' have marked him out as a pioneer of his medium. Reaping success from his prize-winning, breakout film Uzak (2002), and from later festival favourites Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014), he has quickly established himself as an original and provocative writer, director and producer of 21st century cinema. In an age where Turkey's modernisation has created societal tensions and departures from past tradition, Ceylan's films present a cinema of dislocation and a vision of 'nostalgia' understood as homesickness: sick of being away from home; sick of being at home.
Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from Iran and Turkey by ISBN: 9781841505480Date: 2012-09-15Updated collections of recent interviews with filmmakers whose works represent trends in the film industries of Central Asia and the Middle East, these two new geospecific editions expand upon the earlier volume Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia. Following an introduction delineating the histories of the film industries of the countries that make up the Middle East and Central Asia--including Iran, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan--both books contain interviews stretching over a decade, which position the filmmakers and their creative concerns within the social or political context of their respective countries.
Fatih Akin's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe by ISBN: 9780253037886Date: 2019-01-09In Fatih Akın's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German filmmaker and auteur Fatih Akın. The first minority director in Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Akın makes films that are informed by Europe's past, provide cinematic imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and multilingual European citizenry.
Six Turkish Filmmakers by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9780299315405Date: 2017-10-30Examining the vanguard of New Turkish Cinema, Laurence Raw shows how these films reveal the effects of profound socio economic change on ordinary people in contemporary Turkey. In analysis of and personal interviews with Dervis Zaim, Zeki Demirkubuz, Semih Kaplanoglu, Çagan Irmak, Tolga Örnek, and Palme d'Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Raw draws connections with Turkish theater, art, sculpture, literature, poetry, philosophy, and international cinema.
- Times and Winds (dir. Reha Erdem, 2006)
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- Bliss / Mutluluk (dir. Abdullah Oğuz, 2007)
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- Coffee Futures (dir. Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, 2009)
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- Once Upon A Time In Anatolia / Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)
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- Watchtower (dir. Pelin Esmer, 2012)
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- Winter Sleep (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014)
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- Mustang (dir. Deniz Gamze Erguven, 2015)
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- Kedi (dir. Ceyda Torun, 2016)
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- Saf (dir. Ali Vatansever, 2018)
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Additional Resources on Selected Major Turkish Films
Head-On (Gegen Die Wand) by ISBN: 9781844576722Date: 2015-05-15When Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was hailed as a turning point for German cinema. Not only was this unconventional love story the first German film in eighteen years to win the prestigious award, but the success of writer-director Fatih Akin was also celebrated as the revival of German auteur cinema. Meanwhile Turkey claimed Akin as its own prodigal son and his film a victory for Turkish cinema.
- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals This link opens in a new window Searches film and television articles in the International Index to Film Periodicals (1972-current) and Treasures from the Film Archives, which contains silent film-era listings from archives.
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- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Articles and reviews from a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, circus, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Former database title: International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) Full Text.
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- Sinema yıllığı Chiefly in Turkish; includes plot summaries in English.
- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals This link opens in a new window Searches film and television articles in the International Index to Film Periodicals (1972-current) and Treasures from the Film Archives, which contains silent film-era listings from archives.
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- Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies This link opens in a new window Annotated bibliographies for topics in the field of Cinema and Media Studies. Combines encyclopedia-style introductions with expert recommendations of the most important reference works, books, journals, and primary sources on the topic.
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- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Articles and reviews from a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, circus, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Former database title: International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) Full Text.
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- JSTOR This link opens in a new window Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books.
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- EBSCOhost This link opens in a new window Search platform for over 50 databases, from Academic Search Complete to Women's Studies International.
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- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles.
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- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Index to doctoral dissertations from 1637 to the present, with abstracts since 1980. A number of master's theses are also indexed, with abstracts since 1988. Many are available for download in pdf format. UCLA has access to all full text dissertations in the database. Non-UCLA users may use Dissertations Express to purchase digital or print copies of individual dissertations.
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- TSA: Center for Turkish Cinema Studies Published by the Foundation for Sciences and Arts’ Center for Turkish Cinema Studies, TSA.org.tr is an online platform that provides users with the established body of knowledge on Turkish cinema, follows the current trends, and represents cinema using specific criteria, while also incorporating systematic records of films, individuals, books, magazines, interviews, and theses related to cinema and conducting archive database studies pertaining to written, visual, and audio documents in the background.
- Turkish Cultural Foundation Directorate General of Press & Information - History of Turkish Film Article
Selected Turkish Films
Times and Winds (dir. Reha Erdem, 2006)
"Young teen Omer (Özkan Özen) contemplates the unthinkable as he bitterly struggles under the loveless emotional yoke of his scornful Muslim cleric father. Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), Omer's best friend, obsesses over a beautiful schoolteacher. Yildiz (Elit Iscan) recoils from burgeoning womanhood, and from the sordid carnal realities she has grown too old to ignore."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
Bliss / Mutluluk (dir. Abdullah Oğuz, 2007)
"Based on the acclaimed novel by Zülfü Livaneli and set amidst Turkey’s natural wonders, Bliss is a riveting tale about love, honor, freedom and redemption. When a 17-year-old girl, Meryem, is found unconscious and disheveled by the side of a lake, her family believes the worst – that her chastity has been lost. To uphold the family honor they turn to an ancient moral code that condemns Meryem to death. A distant cousin, Cemal, is ordered to carry out the task. Instead, Meryem and Cemal embark on a surprising journey across traditional and modern-day Turkey in this unforgettable film."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
Coffee Futures (dir. Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, 2009)
"COFFEE FUTURES weaves individual fortunes with the story of Turkey's decades-long attempts to become a member of the European Union. Promises and predictions made by politicians, both foreign and domestic, are juxtaposed with the rhetorics and practices of coffee fortune telling."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Alexander Street Press. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
Winter Sleep (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014)
"A hotel owner and landlord in a remote Turkish village deals with conflicts within his family and a tenant behind on his rent. Winner of the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the César Awards."
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Mustang (dir. Deniz Gamze Erguven, 2015)
"This Oscar-nominated drama follows five free-spirited sisters in a Turkish village. While playing innocent games with their friends, a neighbor passes by and reports what she considers to be illicit behavior to the girls' family. The family overreacts, removing all "instruments of corruption," like cell phones and computers, and essentially imprisoning the girls, subjecting them to endless lessons in housework in preparation for them to become brides."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.