Sinemaya Gitmek Ve Seyir: Bir Sözlü Tarih Çalışması

Going to the Cinema and Watching Movies: An Oral History Research For many years the history of cinema has been written relating to the directors and films. When it comes to the history of Turkish cinema, it is seen that the debates concerned about the quest of finding a milestone in Turkish cinema. Besides this, a proposal of cinema periodization based on economic structure is also presented along with a periodization based on fundamental historical and social changes in the history of democracy in Turkey. The development of communication focused studies that emphasize the audience in the process of construction of meaning led to audience based periodization of cinema history. The first examples of this kind of work in the history of Turkish cinema are newly being discussed academically. This study includes 'scattered' opinions regarding to the history of movie watching or audiences, through the oral history interviews conducted as part of course sequences aimed to look at the cultural history of cinema. This study, focusing on the cinema-going experience in Turkey between the years 1960 and 1980, -a period in which hundreds of films were shot per year, movie theaters were opened in every city, the entire families went to the cinema, film stars like Turkân Şoray, Hulya Kocyigit, and Kadir Inanir rushed from one set to another, and melodramas reached their pinnacle-, aims to reveal the experiences of the cinema-going audiences who lived in this period by using oral history method. The interview narratives obtained by an ethnohistorical viewing experience research design, as Annette Kuhn did, were thematically analysed, and social, cultural and political nature of the movie-watching was described. The study aims to ask some questions comes to mind when thinking about the cultural history of cinema rather than give specific answers. In the present research which was designed in a „think aloud‟ method, the cinema-going experience is examined in the contexts of modernisation, memory and everyday life practices, arguing that the oral history narratives of participants (with different age, sex and socioeconomic status) regarding to the Turkish cinema of the 1960s and 1970s produce a middleclass myth