Ethnographic approach to the search for s ignification in cinema: Ercan Kesal in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and All Being Well I Run for the Mayor

This thesis basically aims at reaching societal conclusions within the context of a search for meaning in cinema, by the use of an auto-ethnographic method. In this study, Ercan Kesal, as the artist himself, is a mediator, and the sets of his two films (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and You Know Him) are utilized as the main fields of study. As a physician, filmmaker and politician who has spent the last four decades of his life in a variety of cities, professions and status in Turkey, the study at hand focuses on the spatial and temporal planes proposed by Ercan Kesal's cinema, and how these different spheres construct meaning in the making of his films. This thesis also makes room for an analytical criticism of the social and cultural network of meanings weaved by Ercan Kesal's cinema, besides presenting an approach to the Self, as an individual artist. In other words, subjective experience has been linked to that in the art of cinema and academic context, eventually attempting at revealing the dynamics of the social and cultural structure the filmmaker finds himself in, namely the dynamics in which Kesal was raised, nourished by, and in which he produces his work.