Cities, Cinemas, Spectatorship, and History

This book aims to enrich Turkey's cinema history with the unique cinematic heritage of its cities, tracing the still-vibrant remnants of cinematic experiences and venues in those cities. The work reveals how the increasingly deepening free-market economy has transformed and devalued urban spaces, approaching cinema history not only through films but also in the context of urban space and social transformation.

Once a part of multicultural daily life, cinemas are examined within a broad framework, from the first reflections of the Republic to the process of nation-building, from the effects of political power on the city to the transformative power of the free-market economy. Through oral history studies and archival research conducted in various cities such as Mersin, Ankara, Istanbul, Aydın, Adana, Kocaeli, Antalya, Manisa, Çanakkale, and Nevşehir, the cinematic experience is re-evaluated within the axis of social memory.

This book, which examines cinema history through different cities, also connects the transformation of cinematic spaces with the recent history of Turkey, alongside concepts such as political power practices, modernism, daily life, the social and cultural fabric of the periphery, class, and ethnicity.

Table of Contents:

• Mehtap Özsoy / Introduction
• Mehtap Özsoy- Aydan Özsoy / Cinema Experiences in Ankara from the Republic to the Present: On Cinemas, Films, and Spectator Culture
• Aydın Çam / Political Power and Spectator Experience with Examples from Adana's Early Republican Period Cinema History
• Senem Duruel Erkılıç / Cinema Venues and Spectator Experience in Mersin: Güneş Cinema (1939-1980)  
• Hasan Akbulut / Preserving Cinema Memories: Reflecting on the Cinema Experience in the Context of Ephemera
• Arda Kaya / “I was a Kartal Tibet fan. My sister was an Ediz Hun fan”: Going to the Cinema as a Practice of Social Identification
• Ali Gençoğlu / Watching Sex Films Together but Alone: The Erotic/Pornographic Film Craze and the Experience of Going to the Cinema in Rural Areas (1970-2000)