Mapping the cinematic city – Adana in Yilmaz Guney's films

Theories of cinema commonly chooses the movies or their directors as the subject-matter. Moreover, they evaluate these choices with respect to the theories of cinema. This mainstream way of evaluating also effects the history writing. Mostly, such attitudes, which stress the importance of examining the essence of movies, transforms in time and take an interdisciplinary stance. By allowing different methods, history of new cinema paves the way for cartography for both physical and cinematic spaces. On the other side, directors also create the cinematic spaces when they are creating the narratives of the movie. Thus, cinematic spaces as a major element of narratives are not only background images. On the contrary, they are intrinsic features of cinema. If they exist in the physical space, they will be fictionalized. If they do not, they are built anew. Intentionally or not, the director, who builds them in time and space, builds the meaning too. Moreover, the elements that have no meaning or different meanings gain their meanings in the process of building the cinematic narrative. In this sense, the directors are not just "auteur", writers, or painters, as claimed by the cinematic theories. They are also cartographers in the sense that they create the spatial narrative. Thus, it is critically important in this thesis to draw the philosophical borders of this new field. In the first part of the thesis, the literature about the cinematic geography and ontology of cinema will be reviewed. In doing this, the theoretical framework of this study will be drawn. Later, depending on this theoretic framework, the movies of Yılmaz Güney, Seyyit Han: Toprağın Gelini (Seyyit Han: The Bride of the Earth, 1968), Pire Nuri (1968), Umut (Hope, 1970) ve Endişe (Anxiety, 1974), will be mapped by using the cartographic methods. All cinematic spaces of these movies are shot in Adana. Having the cartographic methods in its central, this study also makes use of other methods provided by field studies. In the concluding section, cinematic Adana and physical Adana will be contrasted within the same framework.