Esin Paça-Cengiz
Kadir Has University, Radio, Television and Cinema, Faculty Member
- Film Studies, Documentary Film, Historical Films, Turkish Cinema, Narratology, Trauma Studies, and 43 moreVisual Narratology, Cultural Memory (especially in Relation to Cinema And/or Photography), Cinema/cultural Experience and Psychoanalytic Theory, Film History; Photography and Cultural Memory, World Cinema, Cinema Studies, Transnational Film/media, Palestinian Cinema, Lebanese Cinema, Arab Cinema, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cultural Studies, Ethnology, Cultural Production, Film, Art, Theatre, Social Media, Sinema, Turkey, Cinema, Türk Sineması, Film historiography, National Cinemas, Experimental Film and Video, Experimental Film, Documentary (Film Studies), Cult, Experimental and Avant Garde Film, 'Third Cinema' Theory and Third World Radical Films, Memory Studies, Loss and Trauma, Trauma, Cultural Memory, Collective Memory, History and Memory, Middle East Studies, Middle Eastern Cinema, Film Festivals, Kurdish Cinema, Turkish and Middle East Studies, Film History, Storytelling, Film Style and Aesthetics, Feminism, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Minorities in Turkey, Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Collective Trauma, Film Production, Trauma and Cultural Memory, Women's cinema, and New Turkish cinemaedit
- Esin Paça Cengiz has earned her PHD in Media Arts from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on ... moreEsin Paça Cengiz has earned her PHD in Media Arts from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on historical film, trauma and memory studies, experimental film and video, world cinema and cinema in Turkey. She currently teaches at the Department of Radio, TV and Cinema at Kadir Has University, Istanbul.edit
In film scholarship, historical film has been identified as a form that portrays events and experiences that took place in the past. By building on Caruth’s concept of indirect representation, however, this article identifies a new... more
In film scholarship, historical film has been identified as a form that portrays events and experiences that took place in the past. By building on Caruth’s concept of indirect representation, however, this article identifies a new historical film form that is not necessarily set in the past, but engages with questions regarding history, memory and historical representation. It conceptualizes this new form of ‘historical essay film’, and by analysing Voice of My Father, argues that rather than manifesting a desire to represent traumatic events directly, historical essay films refrain from the presumption that the medium of film can represent the reality of past events. To this end, they engage with past traumas indirectly through narratives that are set in the present day. The study further contends that the main thrust of historical essay films is to probe the discursive fields in which certain moments of the past are fixed, narrated and become predominant while others remain overlooked and unaccounted for. The article concludes with the claim that, as a consequence of their unconventional formal structures, historical essay films diminish the temporal distance between the past, present and future while also opening up new possibilities for rethinking what historical representation means.
Research Interests:
... support and love of my family. I am lucky and grateful to have them. I thank Emine Paça and Candan Cengiz who have always been more excited about everything I do more than I am, Mustafa Paça and Mete Cengiz for their unconditional... more
... support and love of my family. I am lucky and grateful to have them. I thank Emine Paça and Candan Cengiz who have always been more excited about everything I do more than I am, Mustafa Paça and Mete Cengiz for their unconditional belief in me, ...
Research Interests:
The 1980s in Turkey were marked by the emergence of new cinematic forms, including films dealing with issues regarding female subjectivity. This article argues that within the scope of an extensive body of films produced about women in... more
The 1980s in Turkey were marked by the emergence of new cinematic forms, including
films dealing with issues regarding female subjectivity. This article argues that within the
scope of an extensive body of films produced about women in the 1980s, Her Name Is
Vasfiye, Aaahh Belinda!, How to Save Asiye, Ten Women, and My Dreams, My Love and
You opened up a significant space for discussions about ideological constructions
concerning images of women in cinema. By deploying reflexive and fragmented structures,
laying bare the ideological operations of voice-over and dubbing, and deploying the screen
personas Türkan Şoray and Müjde Ar as cinematic tools, these films offer up a critique of
representations of women onscreen, including the trend of “women’s films.”
films dealing with issues regarding female subjectivity. This article argues that within the
scope of an extensive body of films produced about women in the 1980s, Her Name Is
Vasfiye, Aaahh Belinda!, How to Save Asiye, Ten Women, and My Dreams, My Love and
You opened up a significant space for discussions about ideological constructions
concerning images of women in cinema. By deploying reflexive and fragmented structures,
laying bare the ideological operations of voice-over and dubbing, and deploying the screen
personas Türkan Şoray and Müjde Ar as cinematic tools, these films offer up a critique of
representations of women onscreen, including the trend of “women’s films.”
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
12 Eylül 1980 darbesini konu alan Sen Türkülerini Söyle (Şerif Gören, 1986), Ses (Zeki Ökten,1986) ve Bütün Kapılar Kapalıydı (Memduh Ün, 1990) filmlerini biçimsel olarak inceleyen bu çalışma 12 Eylül döneminin 1980’li yıllarda Türkiye... more
12 Eylül 1980 darbesini konu alan Sen Türkülerini Söyle (Şerif Gören, 1986), Ses (Zeki Ökten,1986) ve Bütün Kapılar Kapalıydı (Memduh Ün, 1990) filmlerini biçimsel olarak inceleyen bu çalışma 12 Eylül döneminin 1980’li yıllarda Türkiye Sinemasında nasıl temsil edildiğini araştırıyor. Böyle bir incelemeyi yapabilmek için bu makale filmlerin hikâyelerini sunarken işe koştukları anlatım tekniklerini irdeleyenerek, bu anlatım stratejileri ile söz konusu travmatik olayların deneyimlenmesi ve anlatısallaştırılması arasındaki paralellik üzerinde duruyor. Bu üç film de 12 Eylül’ün izlerini mahkûm olmuş ve işkence görmüş ana karakterlerinin hikâyelerinde sürüyor. Ses adı olmayan bir karakterin, Sen Türkülerini Söyle Hayri’nin, Bütün Kapılar Kapalıydı ise Nil’in başına gelenleri doğrusal ve kronolojik bir anlatımla ele almak yerine, karakterlerin geçmişlerini şimdiki zamandan geri dönüşlerle (flashback), yani hapishane deneyimlerinden sonraki zaman dilimine odaklanarak sunuyorlar. Üç filmde de geri dönüşler filmin kendi içindeki geçmiş ve şimdiki zamanı kolayca ayırt edemeyeceğimiz bir biçimde tasarlanmış. Geri dönüşler her ne kadar geçmiş zamanı imlese ve karakterlerin hapishane, işkence ve taciz deneyimlerine dair ipuçları sunsa da, izleyicinin karakterlerin geçmişi ve bu geçmiş dönem/zaman hakkında tutarlı ve bütünlüklü bir anlatı kurmasını imkansız kılıyorlar. Kısacası, üç film de 12 Eylül deneyimini bir anlatıya dönüştürmek konusunda direniyor ve dolayısıyla aslında bu geçmişi hikâyeleştir(e)miyorlar.
Research Interests: Turkish Cinema, Narratology, Türk Sineması, Kültürel Bellek, 1960-Ve-1980-Askeri-Darbelerinin-Turk-Siyasal-Sinemasina-Etkileri-The-Efects-Of-1960-And-1980-Millitary-Coups-On-Turkish-Political-Cinem.pdf, and 4 moreSinemada Bellek, Medya Ve Toplumsal Hafıza, Türkiye Sinema Tarihi, and Toplumsal Travma
Research Interests: Turkish Cinema, Historical Films, World Cinema, Cultural Memory (especially in Relation to Cinema And/or Photography), Cinema/cultural Experience and Psychoanalytic Theory, Film History; Photography and Cultural Memory, Popüler Sinema, and 3 moreTürkiye Sineması, Yeni Türkiye Sineması, and Tarihi Film
This article argues that Su Friedrich's 1984 film The Ties That Bind employs what were at the time atypical forms and techniques to push the limits of the traditional historical documentary. Its aesthetic experimentation helps to redefine... more
This article argues that Su Friedrich's 1984 film The Ties That Bind employs what were at the time atypical forms and techniques to push the limits of the traditional historical documentary. Its aesthetic experimentation helps to redefine the idea of historical representation in film, and does so mainly by treating evidence as both partial (in both senses of the word) and contingent, offering a radical challenge to normative history and destabilizing the notion of history as authority. Unlike conventional documentaries, the film marks its own limitations: its inability to provide stable answers or eternal certainties. Questioning her mother's spoken memories, and commenting on them, Friedrich forces a rupture in the 'evidence' of history and establishes a place in which to 'speak' herself. By including the past that her mother is talking about on the sound track, as well as the present on the image track (such as images of her mother's life in the early 1980s, images of intertitles etched into the film emulsion revealing the questions Friedrich asked her mother and her reactions to the things her mother said, as well as images of the filmmaker's visits to historical sites), Friedrich brings the present into the past, and demonstrates how history is, to quote Walter Benjamin, 'time filled with the presence of the now'.