Literature of Cinema Books Focused on Directors in Turkey in the Context of Auteur Cinema: A Categorization Attempt
Auteur theory is an approach that considers cinema as an independent art branch
such as literature, architecture, painting, music, and the director as an artist
producing in this art branch. In the cultural climate of the post-World War II, a
group of young film analyzer gathered around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema
(Cinema Notebooks) under the leadership of Andre Bazin, with their analysis of
Hollywood movies, introduce the concept of “writer-director” to cinema and start
an ongoing discussion. Within this discussion, which problematizes the role of the
director in cinema, it has become possible to deal with the history of cinema
through directors and to contextualize the subject in a sociological ground. On the
other side, the term “auteur director” emerged to distinguish the directors who
regard cinema as a branch of art and who have a unique language from the others,
and it has been debatable which director will enter this group. The discussion is
also resonated in Turkey, and it is mostly accepted that the auteur cinema started
with the films of Lutfi Ö. Akad and Metin Erksan in there. In this study, in the light
of this information, books written on director cinema in Turkish cinema literature
will be examined, and it will be proposed to contribute to the prevalent debate and
the general discussion on the features of the phenomenon of director in Turkish
cinema. Predominantly based on data contained in the database created within
the scope of the Turkish Cinema Research Project, first, the conceptual and
historical context will be given briefly, then there will be an attempt to classify
books related to literature of auteur/director cinema in Turkey.
