The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul

‘The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul’ attempts to analyze how Istanbul is captured through the projector; in other words, the ontological relationship between city and film and how it is elaborated within the context of Istanbul and the sense of strangerhood. This book shifts the axis of Istanbul, typically known as a touristic city, to its underlying details through the strangers in the modern city. Five different films set in this region are analyzed in the text that help to reveal and clarify the socio-urban life of modern Istanbul. The characters and stories in these films tell how Istanbul has socially and architecturally become a city of strangers. The films analyzed include ‘A Touch of Spice’ (2004), ‘Men on the Bridge’ (2009), ‘A Run for Money’ (1999), ‘Distant’ (2002), and ‘10 to 11’ (2009).
The theoretical framework of this book is based on the works of Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett. These three thinkers have all attempted to look for answers to the sociological question of strangerhood in urban living. This book accomplishes this connection by discussing the similarities and differences between each of their theories regarding the city, cinema and strangerhood.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: THE CITY ON SCREEN

CHAPTER TWO
A TOUCH OF SPICE: THE STRANGER TO NATION

CHAPTER THREE
MEN ON THE BRIDGE: THE STRANGER TO SPACE

CHAPTER FOUR
A RUN FOR MONEY: THE STRANGER TO MONEY

CHAPTER FIVE
DISTANT: THE STRANGER TO SOCIETY

CHAPTER SIX
10 TO 11: THE STRANGER TO TIME

CHAPTER SEVEN
CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
INDEX

Sertaç Timur Demir is a Turkish academic and researcher currently working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Cinema at Gümüşhane University. He completed his BA in Communication and Film Studies in 2007 at Anadolu University. He received his master’s degree in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University, where he also obtained his PhD in Sociology. He has six books, and more than fifty articles published in magazines and journals such as ‘Middle Eastern Analysis’, ‘SETA’, ‘Politics Today’, ‘Human Studies’, ‘Human and Society’, ‘Beytulhikme’, and ‘TRT Akademi’. His research interests cover cinema, urban experience, social theory, media discourse, modernity, digital culture, and time/space philosophy.

Cinema, the city, Istanbul, the stranger, identity, nation-building, deportation, immigration, neoliberalism, urbanization, spirituality, risk society, transformation, time, memory