Sociological analyze of national and international documentaries that were filmed about Istanbul

Cinema art has been used by societies both scientifically and educationally senses, since its emergence. Documentary films, which are the non-fiction films of the cinema, play significant role with the fact of reality it has, by contributing to documenting the events, informing the masses, promoting, and creating new thoughts on the event. However, documentary films have shooted about cities and places throughout history, have played an important role about shaping of social and cultural memories of societies. In this study, it was focused on how stereotypical orientalist images created in the 19th century also appeared in different ways on the documentary films, which filmed about Istanbul. In this context, first part consisted of the emergence of modern society, invention and historical process of photography and cinema, the development of television broadcasting and the birth of the idea of documentary. In the second part of the study, the concept of orientalism and its historical process are explained. In the third part, the documentaries that were shot after the first world war about our main subject Istanbul, were tried to be analyzed by putting them in a theoretical framework.