Documentary cinema and cinematographic narrative elements: Cinematographic elements in the films of Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu Hakan Aytekin and Cenk Demirkıran

Documentary cinema is a sub-genre of the art of cinema, and like all art, documentary cinema has a creator. This creator is the director. Each film bears traces of its creator. The director creates his/her film by bringing together the elements of cinematography. Cinematography, which reveals the soul of a film, includes technical elements that shape visual meaning and narrative. These technical elements are used to create the atmosphere of the film, reinforce the narrative and convey the emotional state of the characters. How documentary cinema, which has an important function in informing, influencing and persuading the audience, is interpreted by directors and their work in the field of documentary is an important issue that needs to be examined in terms of Turkish documentary cinema. It is seen that there are not enough academic studies on Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu, Hakan Aytekin and Cenk Demirkıran, who have made important works in terms of the history of Turkish documentary cinema and who are among the first names that come to mind when documentary cinema is mentioned. This study focuses on how Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu, Hakan Aytekin and Cenk Demirkıran use the cinematographic elements that make up the narrative in their documentary films. In this context, the aim of this study is to conduct a comprehensive cinematographic analysis of the documentary films of Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu, Hakan Aytekin and Cenk Demirkıran using the critical film analysis method put forward by Bordwell and Thompson, and to reveal the narrative and aesthetic forms of the directors. In order to achieve this goal, a detailed analysis was made on how Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu, Hakan Aytekin and Cenk Demirkıran use cinematographic elements to create narrative in their films.