🟡 Yunt Talks #6: Early Period Cinema, Sound, and Music in Istanbul

The city, which has been the representation area of civilization since ancient times, appears as a phenomenon whose borders become blurred with the constant change of the physical and social environment. Dynamics such as construction and infrastructure activities, population mobility, environmental sustainability concerns, economic developments and technological advances make it necessary to think about the city. The complex structure of the city shaped by different dynamics brings with it the need to redefine the city. Making this definition has the potential to both understand continuity and changes and project the future of the city while evaluating the development of the city from past to present.

 "Where is the City?" by YUNT The talk program titled "Rethinking the Boundaries of the City", which started to be prepared within the scope of the exhibition, continues throughout the "The Unseen City" exhibition. Prof. Dr. In the sessions to be moderated by Eva Şarlak, it is aimed to popularize the practices of thinking about the city.

 Within the scope of the speech program, speakers will discuss the city's borders from different aspects. Each session will take place under a separate subheading and a reading recommendation will be shared with the participants before the session.

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 Nezih Erdoğan and Özge Özyılmaz share with YUNT participants the first years of cinema in Istanbul, the venues, businesses, their audiences, and the relationship with sound and music in this period when the cinema was silent.

 Nezih Erdoğan will portray the great transformation of our modernization history that came with viewing and cinema, just as he did in his book The First Years of Cinema in Istanbul, in which he traces the first days of cinema in Istanbul, following the footsteps of a lost past with a passion that requires patience and effort, with a meticulousness reminiscent of an archaeological excavation. In his speech, Erdogan asked, "What role could cinema have had in the embodiment of modernity in the geography we call Istanbul?" Based on the question, it will reveal that cinema reproduces the desire to look and be looked at, which is a condition of modern life, over and over again within its own space, and will argue that the arrival of cinema in the city and the penetration of modernity into the fabric of the city should be considered together.

 Early film screenings in Istanbul ranged from garden parties to hotel balls, from military museum screenings to Ramadan festivals and open-air presentations. The audience was quite diverse, from non-Muslims to Ottoman elites and Muslim women and children. In the interview, Özge Özyılmaz will reveal how rich and hybrid the sound and music panorama in the silent era cinema was, in parallel with this diversity of screening venues and audiences, and how the audience of the period reacted to this world of sound.

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 Prof. Dr. Nezih Erdogan

 He teaches Film Theory, Cinema History and Storytelling at İstinye University. He has published articles and book chapters on Turkish popular cinema and Early Cinema in Turkey. He edited the book Shifting Landscapesa: Film and Media in European Context (with Miyase Christensen, 2008). His book , The First Years of Cinema in Istanbul: Modernity and Viewing Adventures, was published in 2017. Together with Ebru Kayaalp, he edited the book Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2023.

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 Assoc. Dr. Özge Özyılmaz

 Özyılmaz, who carried out a postdoctoral research project at Birkbeck College, University of London last year focusing on music and sound practices in silent cinema during the Ottoman period, currently teaches as a visiting professor at Istanbul Bilgi University. Özyılmaz's articles on cinema culture and the transition to sound cinema in Turkey in the 1930s were published in various magazines such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television and Music, Sound, and Moving Images .