Transfer of cultural memory through cinema: Example of Malakan community in Turkey

Cultural memory is transmitted in many different mediums, from oral tradition to audiovisual environments. However this transfer varies according to the original characteristics of each medium. The transmitters of cultural memory in oral culture are narrators and rituals, while it is rituals as well as texts and interpretations of these texts in written culture. Visual culture, another transmitter of cultural memory, is the transfer of cultural codes to society as it is recorded. Photography, cinema, television, etc., which are visual and audio transmission tools in the historical process, allows us to read and make sense of every recorded image by opening another field with a broad perspective that includes verbal and written transferring forms as well as providing the recording of everything seen and heard due to the function of recording with arts. With its unique patterns and aesthetics, cinema records cultural codes and makes them visible by revealing the cultures that have disappeared or are about to become extinct. Cinema, like the transmitters in the oral and written periods, interprets cultural memory through films. The films "Deli Deli Olma" and "Kars'ın Solan Renkleri: Molokanlar" discussed in our research have conveyed cultural codes of Molokans, those who once lived in Turkey, by interpreting, thus, they have shown that cinema can contribute to the formation of the memory for an ethnic group. In these films, similar to narrators sentence sequence and use of stereotyped expressions in oral culture or the transfer of cultural rituals and doctrines into texts in written culture, as well as directing and shaping cultural codes in films by interpreting and shaping cultural codes through images, it is revealed that in films directors and screenwriters provide the transmission of images by interpreting and formatting cultural codes.