Issue 40
Topic: Turkish Cinema
Issue Editor: Doç. Dr. Yusuf Ziya Gökçek
Release Date: July 2025
Submission Date
Start: 15 March 2025
End: 31 March 2025
Call for Paper
Turkish Cinema has more than a century of experience and a tradition that includes the facilities of this accumulation. Turkish cinema, which carries many new crises of its own along with the opportunities and challenges of Turkey’s modernization process in this century-old tradition, has been the source of the most intense debates in terms of the number of people it deals with from its inception to the present day. The fact that each of the films produced by the cinema industry is watched and talked about makes it stronger than other cultural forms. Evaluations on cinema are made on the street, in institutions, in all areas of daily life. In universities, on the other hand, it is handled together with various aspects such as the acquisition of professional formation regarding the production process of films and the cultural contexts of films, the historical process they correspond to, and the points of understanding of the phenomena they produce. However, it would take about half a century after the invention of the cinematograph for cinema to find its place in the academy as both a vocational education and a research subject. Although cinema in Turkey was visible in universities in the 1950s through workshops, it started to be taught as a course only in the 1960s. The fact that cinema is the subject of an academic research and that it is evaluated within this framework and a part of scientific knowledge has been in question with the doctoral theses produced in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The effort to make cinema a unique academic field of study gained momentum with the start of graduate programs called cinema in the 1980s and the establishment of faculties in institutional structures where these studies were carried out in the 1990s. All these academic developments have led to the realization that cinema is not only a subject of “general knowledge” but also a valuable field in terms of social and human sciences and to the autonomy of the field. The increasing academic institutionalization in the 1990s allowed more opportunities to write graduate theses in a short time, while on the other hand, the publication of copyrighted and translated works in the field of cinema increased significantly compared to previous years. In Turkey, cinema finds a place for itself both in non-academic grounds and in the academy, and the introduction of both current and academic journals to the readers continues to be a driving force of cinema literature.
It has been decided to discuss the experience and accumulation of the phenomenon of cinema in Turkey, which has been a professional field of activity for more than a hundred years and a subject of academic study for more than half a century, in the special issue of Turkish Cinema of The Journal of İnsan ve İnsan. In this context, we are trying to concretize our intention to discuss Turkish Cinema, to make it understandable, to correct and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the literature created by the knowledge produced in both academia and non-academia related to the field, and to approach the mistakes we encounter. Within the scope of the 40th issue, we expect researchers, writers and academics to reconsider the important discussion areas in the Turkish Cinema in a new and original way. We invite researchers to contribute to the Turkish Cinema issue, which will be prepared with the aim of publishing case/approach/problem-centered film criticisms of Turkey’s century-old cinema accumulation, which prioritizes conceptual and theoretical efforts with both macro and micro dimensions instead of studies centered on single film analysis, with the following sub-themes:
-Turkish Cinema History Literature Discussions
– Turkish Cinema Identification and Naming Problems
-Turkish Cinema in Ideology and Post-Ideology Debates
-The Relationship Between Turkish Cinema and Politics
-Turkish Cinema and Intellectuals
-Turkish Cinema and Technology
-Cinema Industry in Turkey
-The Relationship of Turkish Cinema with Other Arts
-Turkish Cinema and Its Origins
-Tradition and Modernity in Turkish Cinema
– Sociology of Turkish Cinema
-Turkish Cinema and Digitalization
-Turkish Cinema and Genres, Themes
-Turkish Cinema and Melodrama
-Turkish Cinema and Art Cinema
-Turkish Cinema and Religion
-Turkish Cinema and Philosophy
-Turkish Cinema and Adaptations
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yusuf Ziya Gökçek
The Journal of Insan ve Insan
P.S.: The manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the Journal’s Ethical Principles and Publication Policy, and Writing Rules.