Imagining women at the movies: male writers and early film culture in Istanbul

Balan, Canan (2015) Imagining women at the movies: male writers and early film culture in Istanbul. In, Knight, Julia and Gledhill, Christine (eds.) Doing Women's Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future. University of Illinois Press, pp. 53-65. (doi:10.5406/illinois/9780252039683.003.0005).

Abstract

This chapter examines early film culture in Istanbul by focusing on how Turkish male writers constructed cinema-going Turkish women in early twentieth-century and postwar Istanbul. The goal is to analyze gendered concerns about spectatorship emerging in the patriarchal imagination of that time. In order to understand the reception of early cinema in Turkey as well as the cultural status of Turkish cinema among the Ottoman/Turkish intelligentsia and the gender politics surrounding it, the chapter looks at novels, poems, and newspaper reviews. The discussion begins with an overview of film market in post-World-War I Istanbul and cinema-going as a public experience in the Ottoman capital. An analysis of female spectators depicted by male authors reveals a changing culture of spectatorship. This occurred concomitantly with the sociopolitical transition from the declining Ottoman Empire to the rise of the Turkish nation-state. The chapter argues that the change in gender politics during this period triggered the new anxieties that creative writers project onto the activity of filmgoing, and particularly that by cinema-going women.

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