So Strange, So Familiar

Lütfü Akad's 1968 cult film Vesikalı Yarim drags its audience into an extraordinary experience. Everything is as expected from a Yeşilçam melodrama, it is very familiar. But at the same time, there is something very strange in this film - a strangeness that cannot be named, that resists explanation, that distinguishes it from other Yeşilçam films...
Very Strange, Very Familiar, a group work, explores why. He says that it is precisely this feature that makes Vesikalı Yarim an unforgettable work of art, and that although it carries the familiar motifs of the cinema tradition in which it is a part, it brings different narrative and aesthetic solutions to them. This analysis has an analysis style that does justice to the aesthetic features of the film as well as its narrative content. On the one hand, it demonstrates the film's connection with the fundamental problems of Turkish modernization, on the other hand, it reveals the logic of the film's formal structure, which makes contents that were never considered at first possible and paves the way for them.
We present this book as a successful example of how a film, or more generally a cultural product, can be "read". One might ask: Why try to decipher a movie when we can just watch it and enjoy it? One answer is to truly learn what makes art art. But I think another answer is more important: The first condition for being enchanted again is to get rid of previous spells.



Number of Pages: 172

Year of Printing: 2013


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Metis Publishing

First Print Year: 2005

Number of Pages: 172

Language Turkish