Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Studies in European Cinema, 2025 (ESCI)
This article reconceptualizes the cinema of Atıf Yılmaz as a stratified cinematic archive that both registers and mediates the multifaceted economic, political, and socio-cultural transformations that shaped Turkey from the 1950s through the 1990s. Far beyond an auteurist oeuvre, Yılmaz’s body of work is approached as a historically embedded and ideologically saturated corpus that intersects with paradigmatic shifts in governance, ruptures in developmental strategies, class antagonisms, and cultural contestations. His cinematic practice actively dialogues with the populist melodramas of the 1950s, the politically engaged realism of the 1960s, the aestheticized crises of the 1970s, and the post-1980 narrative reconfigurations forged through neoliberal restructuring and emergent feminist discourses. Mobilizing an interdisciplinary methodology anchored in film theory, cultural historiography, and ideological critique, this study rearticulates auteur theory through a materialist and historically contingent lens. Drawing on Christian Metz’s semiotics and feminist film theory, selected films are examined as cinematic inscriptions of historically charged conjunctures and cultural tensions. In doing so, the article positions Yılmaz not merely as a chronicler of modernization, but as a cultural agent whose films enact critical interventions into the shifting terrain of national identity, political memory, and hegemonic representation. Thus, Turkish cinema emerges as a dynamic site of aesthetic politics and ideological struggle.