Semiotic reading on food scenes in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's cinema

Cinema is recognised as a powerful art form that reflects social and cultural values. At this point, food offers a strong language of expression both formally and semantically in cinema. In particular, food scenes easily communicate with the audience by creating a series of cultural indicators and carry important messages. In cinema, food sometimes appears as a symbol of power and sometimes as a text of conflict, violence or unrest. In addition to being a necessity for human survival, food gains social and cultural meanings through the questions of what, with whom, how, when and why it is eaten. In this context, cinema offers important clues about the inner worlds, social status and power relations of characters through food scenes. The aim of this study is to analyse the food scenes in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films and to reveal the indicators of traditional elements of Turkish culture, social structure, family relations and individual identity represented by these scenes. Throughout the research, an answer was sought to the question of whether the indicators of Turkish culture in the food scenes are conveyed through symbols. The scope of the research consists of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's feature films, which are considered to have rich content for analysis because he is a director who frequently touches upon the details of daily life in his films. In this context, the study utilised the analysis methodology of French semiotician Roland Barthes, which includes the triad of signifier-signified-signified of the distinction between plain meaning and connotation, which is one of the qualitative research methods. As a result of the findings obtained in the research, it was determined that Nuri Bilge Ceylan reflects many images of Turkish culture with symbolic and textual language. Especially in the scenes with the theme of food, both the inner world of the characters and the elements such as gender roles, hospitality and class differences in the society were made visible. In addition, from Ceylan's first film to the present day, it has been observed that the way of expression has changed over time; while symbolic expression was prominent in the early films, in the later films, food scenes gained meaning through dialogues.