Representations of Cinematic Istanbul: Expressions, Clichés and Transformations
Although Istanbul is a rich city in terms of cinema representation, it is difficult to find competent films that shed light on the modern city. Rather, a large part of these films depicts the city utilising the most popular and stereotypical discourses and images. During the Hollywood and Yeşilçam eras, Istanbul has been cinematised and visualised predominantly through three colours: pink to exoticise, black to detract, and white to sacralise. Hollywood has focused mostly on the Bosphorus Strait and the Historic Peninsula, while Yeşilçam gained insight into the gecekondus (squatters) and internal immigrants’ lives. But, with time, each colourisation and depiction by Hollywood and Yeşilçam turned into a rigid cliché—so much so, in fact, that each social and spatial relationship was shown as being either a mysterious beauty or as a fatal ugliness, as if everything in the city were purely without antithesis. This study paves the way for updating traditional expressions by summarizing the visual and textual corpus of cinematic Istanbul. As a matter of fact, the sociological perspective towards Istanbul is largely built on these cinematic narratives.
Sertaç T. Demir
