Construction of national identity through cinematic narrative: Turkish national cinema a Deleuzian analysis

The main objective of this thesis is to explore the relations between cinematic narration and the construction of national identity, through a specific focus on Turkish National Cinema. How the transformation of Turkish identity is appeared formally with narrative development of Turkish cinema will be analyzed underlying the specific modernization and nation formation process in Turkey.As it is aimed to broaden our understanding of the way national identity is constructed in Turkish films, Gilles Deleuze?s cinema approach, which is challenging and newly discovered in film studies, have been applied to as a way of examining the issue from a different perspective that will ensure creating new possibilities in studying Turkish Cinema. In this way, two Turkish films the Bridge (Köprü 1975) and the Clouds of May (Mayıs Sıkıntısı, 1999) will be analyzed as an exemplary practice of Deleuze?s two main concepts of cinematographic image and narrative, ?the movement-image? and ?the time image?.