The sense of image: Phenomenology and the new cinema of Turkey

Drawing on film-phenomenology which underscores the importance of bodily experience in cinema, this thesis departs from the question whether the New Cinema of Turkey offers a multisensory and materialist experience. It firstly discusses major problems in contemporary film-phenomenology, and exposes the fact that while centering on the spectator's body, this theoretical framework overlooks the technical, physical, and photochemical processes embodied by the filmic image. Then, creating a dialogue between Siegfried Kracauer's materialist approach and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existentialist phenomenology, this thesis proposes materialist film-phenomenology as a new method and examines Masumiyet (Innocence, Zeki Demirkubuz, 1997), Yumurta (Egg, Semih Kaplanoğlu, 2007), Şimdiki Zaman (Present Tense, Belmin Söylemez, 2012), Baskın: Karabasan (Baskin, Can Evrenol, 2015), Bulantı (Nausea, Zeki Demirkubuz, 2015), and Kaygı (Inflame, Ceylan Özgün Özçelik, 2017). The analyses show that, constituted by the conjunction of image and body, the filmic experience comprises the senses of smell, touch, and taste. Owing to both its representational capacity and its indexical images recorded mechanically, the film medium forms a multisensory experience, touching our perception, our whole body, and the world we live in. Keywords film-phenomenology, Kracauer, Merleau-Ponty, physical reality, sensory experience, materiality, body