Gender and the construction of narration in contemporary turkish cinema: The roles of women characters in the cinema of Zeki Demirkubuz

Zeki Demirkubuz is one of the important directors of the "independent filmmaker" school, which paved the way for the new generation in Turkish cinema after 1990 and returned with awards from the festivals he attended. He is a director who writes the scripts of the films himself, does not use financial resources based on widespread production partnerships, and chooses to stay out of the box office-oriented consumption in the understanding of cinema. It is seen that Demirkubuz chooses the subjects of the films written by him on guilt, loyalty, conscience, reasonlessness, evil, will-involuntary and the psychological states of the human being in the more general category. In this thesis, it is aimed to contribute to the literature by evaluating the position of women in the context of gender roles in Zeki Demirkubuz cinema narrative with the analysis obtained as a result of the analysis of three films of Zeki Demirkubuz films in terms of feminist film theory, in which the woman was chosen as the main character after the 1990s. The films reviewed are The Third Page from 1999, Fate from 2001 and Destiny from 2006. The reason for the analysis of these films is the descriptive discussion of the models of adaptation of the patriarchal view encoded in society by the feminist film theory to the big screen and the gender roles presented in the films. In the thesis study, it has been analyzed and discussed whether common variables such as the aims of both the main and supporting female characters in the selected films, their way of expressing themselves and their struggle for existence are in the same perspective. The socio-cultural status of the female characters in the films examined, their relations with the male characters and their status in the society were analyzed and evaluated, and how the female roles and sexist approaches were defined in the selected films was examined with the text analysis method. Before the analysis of the selected films in the thesis study, the emergence and development of feminist theory were examined, then patriarchy and gender roles that feminism criticized were examined. Subsequently, the feminist movement and prominent themes in Turkey, feminist theory and the image of women in cinema, women's titles in Turkish cinema were examined within the framework of feminist theory, and the change in female characters represented in Turkish films was evaluated in a historical perspective. After the theoretical framework has been created, in another chapter, narrative theory in cinema and narrative issues in Zeki Demirkubuz's cinema are examined. Afterwards, the differences between male and female characters in Zeki Demirkubuz's films and the representation of female characters in Zeki Demirkubuz's films are briefly mentioned. Afterwards, the text analysis method, which is the method to be used in the thesis study, was defined and the selected films were tried to be analyzed according to this method. Accordingly, it has been seen that the female characters in the selected films conform to the female characters opposed by the feminist film theorists, and the female characters in the selected films are mostly expressed as a sexual object or as bad characters that are not compatible with cultural codes. In addition, as mentioned in the narrative theory, when evaluated in the context of the effects of the director's own point of view on the films, we see that Zeki Demirkubuz has chosen female characters who are far from classical representations, but these characters do not contribute positively to the representation of women in the cinema. In this context, in this thesis, it was concluded that the negative approaches to women were reconstructed in Zeki Demirkubuz's films..