The traces of postmodern identity features on popular Turkish cinema

The aim of this study is to detect how the characters we encounter in popular Turkish cinema perform suitable acts or utter appropriate discourse in parallel to the character features of the Postmodern people. While doing this, analyzing the economic, political and socio-cultural developments and transformations of the long processes called Modernity and Postmodernity is of utter importance in order to enlighten the Postmodern identity. In this long process since the Enlightenment era, the individuals' lives and both their perception of the society and also their own 'self' have changed drastically in the direction of the developing economy, industry and additionally, a parallel political understanding. In Postmodernity, which is the last chain of the aforementioned long process, the images encircling us and the developing media are coming forward among a set of factors that constitute our identities and these are able to affect with the help of the developing technology and a daily life based on consumerism. Postmodern life offers a huge number of products and also experiences without comparison to any of the previous eras. Under these circumstances, self-actualizing has been of great importance for the Postmodern people. The will to self-fulfill oneself creates a kind of "I-am-me" orientation and this situation affects people's identity by transforming their perception of their selves. In this study, the traces of Postmodern identity features that are defined in the frame of the Postmodern "I-am-me" orientation have been analyzed through popular Turkish cinema which has been in an awakening after a long period of recession with the help of "descriptive analysis" and "content analysis" techniques. Keywords: Modernity, Postmodernity, Identity, I-am-me Orientation, Popular Turkish Cinema