The City's Objection

Istanbul has an objection: it objects to the surrender of public spaces to private interests, the plunder of trees, water, and soil, becoming a mundane copy repeating mistakes made in many world cities and losing its personality, the dehumanization of lifestyles, and the suffocating of life with patriarchal values.

Seven years after "Vesikalı Şehir," Feride Çiçekoğlu now traces the imprints of this objection—which brought the city to the brink of rebellion—in films produced before the Gezi Resistance. She connects these films with earlier examples, with the urban development movements in Paris and Italian cities before '68, and with how the changes there were reflected in a generation of films: urban angst, nothingness, emptiness, loss of value and memory, depression, feelings of worthlessness, and outbursts of anger.

When we consider that today we remember the Gezi Resistance with images of the "woman in red," the "dancing" woman, the "slingshot-wielding" woman, and the intense participation of women both in number and in their mode of existence, we understand that this objection is fundamentally a defiance of the city of men.