Mapping The Cinematic City. Adana In Yilmaz Güney's Film

Abstract

As a structural element of cinema narration, space has always been a part of the film. On the other hand, the film and cinema studies have been the subject of interdisciplinary studies because of its layered and holistic structure. The cinematic geographies tend to use cartography, which has a novel method in the context of cinematic narration. This is because the director does not only use cinematic cityscapes and cinematic landscapes as a background but as the narration itself. This study aims to look at what cinematic geographies are and how its methodology can be applied to a specific director, namely Yılmaz Güney and to an understanding of locality. In this study, a Yılmaz Güney’s film, Seyyit Han: Toprağın Gelini (Seyyit Han: Bride of The Earth, 1968), shoot in Adana are mapped by the cartographic method and then are analyzed contextually. Findings will be discussed through a triangulation of data collected from oral history and cartographic methods. In the conclusion part, cinematic Adana in the frame of Güney’s the movie and present physical Adana as a form of memory will be evaluated by the contextual film analysis method.