New trends in Turkish film studies: Ecocriticism, ecocinema, and film as an ecological text

Environmental or ecological communication, media, cultural, literary and film studies all emerged in the USA after mid-1900s, and today, they have spread worldwide. That various ecological problems have become apparent and threatened both human and nonhuman lives has heated the debate over the so-called nature/culture duality in Western thought, and created an awareness that nature and the nonhuman have considerably been ignored in texts, discourses, cultural constructions and reality. Established in the last decade of the twentieth century, ecocriticism has not only deeply affected the literary studies, but contributed to the ecocinema initiatives that were embarked upon at the very beginning of the twenty-first century. While ecocinema initially focused on a number of avant-garde films and eco-documentaries, an ensuing view that any film can be examined from an ecocritical perspective has received broad acceptance, followed by another that cinema itself both implicates and has a bearing on ecology, as a result of which the scope of ecocinema has dramatically been expanded. This study, which adopts the pluralist understandings of ecocinema, aims to examine the environment, environmental problems and other related inequalities in contemporary Turkish films. Following the emergent approaches to ecocriticism and ecocinema, I analyse environment, the missing component in recent studies on contemporary Turkish cinema which has taken a new turn since mid-1990s, in Home (2011), Fish (2014) and Grain (2017). The findings obtained from the textual analyses of the films show that not only is environment an essential constituent of the films, but they also address a myriad of ecological problems and concerns. In conclusion, it is recommended that ecocriticism and ecocinema be widely employed as critical and pedagogical tools for Turkish film studies. Keywords: Environment, Nature, Ecocriticism, Ecocinema, Turkish cinema