THE AESTHETICS OF SETTING AND LOCATION IN METİN ERKSAN’S MOVIES
METİN ERKSAN SİNEMASINDA ÇEVRE VE MEKAN ESTETİĞİ

Author : Ali Sait LİMAN
Number of pages : 79-93

Abstract

The relationships that cinematographic components associated with setting and location have played an important role in the development of cinema during the process since its invention. Director’s competence of correctly decoding and reflecting these relationships to his movies is also among the subjects of film aesthetics. Cinematic setting and locations have been in the centre of this dramatic structure in these relations’ integrity, which is determinative of the development of cinema into the art of modern times and founding a language of its own after going out of being an entertainment in fairs that photographically repeats the reality of outer world on 2D screens. Stories and characters of movies meet the audience in the setting and locations of this fictional world and they convincingly get the audience to live in that atmosphere. Particularly, in this action, which is valid for classical narrative cinema, sometimes in artificial locations (decor) constructed in studios and sometimes in movie sets fictionalised in authentic locations cinematic narration is visualised. Both the narration itself and the characters’ characteristics and relationships with their surroundings ‘become true’ in an cinematic setting that develops into an integrity with these locations and these locations’ parts that stay outside the frame. When we look over the movies produced in Turkish cinema through this aspect of view, it can not be said that directors had distinctly reflected the awareness about setting and location mentioned above throughout the time period from its first years to 1970s. In most of the movies filmed in those years, cinematic setting and location could not go beyond more than being a background for the story of the movie, yet more in some movies they strained credibility because of leaving impressions of decor. Technical, economical and aesthtetical problems peculiar to Turkish cinema have an important share in this situation. When we study the movies of Metin Erksan, who entered the cinema business after1950, it is possible to see that there are signs of a distinct and successful approach in this regard. It is noticeable that the director, who has a certain amount of knowledge about history of art and aesthetics, prefers reflecting the setting and location, especially in his black and white movies, with other cinematographic components significantly and in ‘aesthetic forms’ instead of using them as a background for cinematic narration.

Keywords

Cinema, cinematic setting/location, Turkish cinema, Metin Erksan

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