Seminar: “Cinematic City: Film and Architecture” – Özgür Yaren

Lecturer:
Özgür Yaren, Assoc. Prof. Ankara University

Time and Place:
Thursday, 22nd of November 2018. at 18.00h
Library – Faculty of Architecture
The seminar will be taught in English, and it will include lecture, film clips screenings and class discussion.
The estimated duration of the seminar is 3 hours.

For further information, please contact: yaren@ankara.edu.tr

The history of cinema cannot be written without cities. As a modern medium, cinema was born in city, benefited from urban infrastructure and primarily addressed urban dwellers as its audience. As early as its crawling stage, cinema has been promoted from nickelodeons and fairs to film palaces with their significant aspirational architecture. On the screen, films did not only capture but imagined real, historically specific or phantasmagorical cities.

This seminar will examine the relationship between cinema and architecture with an urban focus. It primarily addresses graduate students in Architecture, and City & Regional Planning departments. The aim of the seminar is to introduce film history with a strong emphasis on urban spaces and architectural elements, thus to provide an alternative perception of space and environment, mediated through cinematic culture.

The seminar will have two foci:

1. We will look at how perceptions of urban environment make people and movie characters who they are. How does city (whether historically specific or fictional) operate in the question of subjectivity?
2. We will also try to analyze films focusing on their architectural and spatial aspects. We will especially attend to the revolutionary impetus in dystopian critiques of urban space and urban utopias posited by the films.

Some topics of interest include:
• Cinematic re-interpretations of urban spaces;
• Fictional cities and urban imagination in cinema;
• Utopias and dystopias through urban environment;
• Modernist & postmodernist city in cinema;
• Subjectification of architectural elements and urban spaces (environment as protagonist; environment as mood or state of mind) and
• Destruction and reconstruction: Rubble films and neo-rubble films.

Biography
Özgür Yaren is an associate professor at Ankara University. Yaren lectures on film and photography, and his research interests include migrant cinema, Turkish cinema, film and aesthetics. Recently he has been exploring Turkish exploitation cinema, and cultural legitimacy in the film field. He is a board member of SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture and a member of the European Sociological Association.

Selected works:
*За цео текст и апстракте, посетите страницу: https://ankara.academia.edu/ÖzgürYaren

Yaren, Ö. & Karademir-Hazir, I. (forthcoming) “Critics, Politics, and Cultural Legitimation: An Exploratory Analysis of the Turkish Film Field”, European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Yaren, Ö. (2018), “Turkish Sex Influx: Exploiting Class, Constituting Desire,” Camera Obscura, 33(1(97)):1-27. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-4336817

Yaren, Ö. (2017), “Turkish Erotics: The Rise of the Sex Influx,” The Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 50, No. 6:1356-1375, DOI:10.1111/jpcu.12627

Yaren, Ö. (2013), “Weddings Scenes as Metaphors for Homeland”, Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey, Gökçen Karanfil, Serkan Savk (ed). Newcastle:Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 154-169.

Yaren, Ö. (2011), “Die Fremde
Det europæiske rum og indvandrerkvinder som ofre” (Die Fremde: European Space and Women Victims in Migrant Films), Kosmorama – Tidsskrift for filmkunst og filmkultur, 247:55-64.

Yaren, Ö. (2010), “Global Fears, Local Dressing: New Turkish Horrors”, Hrvatski Filmski Ljetopis 63:38-45.

Trailer: 24 City (China, Jia Zhangke, 2008).

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