Cultural industry and independent cinema: Nuri Bilge Ceylancinema example

It is claimed by many social theorists that the culture industry and thus movies have an impact on the consumer society. In this context, it should be stated that the thoughts of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), a Frankfurt School representative, on the culture industry and popular culture are remarkable. In their work on the conceptualization of the culture industry, conducted with Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who seems to have made significant contributions to Adorno's shaping and expression of his thoughts, they argue that the movies in the grip of the culture industry, which act for commercial profit, turn into an irrational show. Although our age has revealed this dimension of the culture industry quite concisely, it can be stated that Adorno's approach to the culture industry ignores some forms of production. To put it more clearly, to state that the field of cultural production is determined only by dominant subjects and/or systems makes it impossible to analyze the dialectical dimension of cultural production in a meaningful way. That is, the cultural production universe that emerges in a given social structure is shaped by the pressure of the dominant subject and/or systems on the one hand, and the resistance of subgroups to it on the other. According to Stuart Hall (1932-2014), who can be said to have a point of view in this direction, the field of culture is a field of hegemony that presents quite different cultural production efforts and the ongoing struggles between them. Moving from Hall's point of view, it is seen that there are different cinema interpretations beyond the Hollywood cinema desired by the culture industry, and there are directors who reveal a very different cinematic language from this desired production. The production style put forward in this direction is called "independent cinema", and the directors who try to present a new cinema language are called "independent directors". The first purpose of independent cinema was a protest against the pressure of big companies, and independent directors undertake all kinds of tasks from editing to directing the film by preparing their own film content. In this context, the new Turkish cinema that emerged after the 1990s in Turkey presents an example of existence against Yeşilçam cinema.