Speaker:
Dr. Serkan Şavk
Department of Cinema and Digital Media, Izmir University of Economics
Moderator:
Dr. Peter J. Cobb
Assistant Professor, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Turkey’s domestic film industry Yeşilçam, produced nearly 6000 films from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Most of these films had androcentric narratives depicting women characters as passive and silent subjects. In this seminar, we start by introducing Yeşilçam and the place of women in this industry both behind the camera and within the films’ narratives. We will then introduce DOYeşilçam, an ongoing interdisciplinary research project about Yeşilçam history. Finally, we will focus on a case study of about 20 select woman’s films from the 1980s either directed by Mr Atıf Yılmaz (1925-2006) or Ms Bilge Olgaç (1940-1994). Our goal is to compare how Bilge Olgaç, as a female director, and Atıf Yılmaz, as a male director, include woman characters in their films. With this goal in mind, we apply a data-driven approach, measuring and analyzing how woman characters are shot and how much they talk.
Serkan Şavk received his PhD in 2014 from Hacettepe University’s Department of History. He pursued post-doctoral studies at Princeton University with a focus on digital history (2016–2017). His research interests cover a variety of subjects, including the history of Turkish cinema, Digital Humanities, and image-space-culture relations in a historical context. He’s currently the principal investigator of two research projects: DOYeşilçam A data-driven, digital and open approach to the history of Turkish cinema: Examining stylistic features of Yeşilçam films (funded by TÜBİTAK The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) and Animals as Actors, Vehicles, and Props: Metazoa in the History of Turkish Cinema (funded by Izmir University of Economics). He is the co-editor of the book Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey (with Gökçen Karanfil, Cambridge Scholars, 2013).
This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and the BA in Humanities and Digital Technologies (BaHDT) Programme, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.
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