Browsing by Author "Cengiz, Esin Paca"

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Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 2
Rethinking the Historical Film Form: Trauma, Temporality and Indirect Representation in Historical Essay Films
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2023) Cengiz, Esin Paca
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.
Citation - Scopus: 1
Two Balloons Can Fly a Minaret: Parody and Fabricated Reality as Integral Qualities of Mock-Documentary in aya Seyahat
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2025) Tuzun, Defne; Akcali, Elif; Cengiz, Esin Paca; Behlil, Melis
This paper takes a close look at the critically acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kutlu & gbreve; Ataman's mockumentary Aya Seyahat (Journey to the Moon, 2009). We discuss the potentials and possibilities that the mockumentary mode brings to the film in detail, and address this mode as an aesthetic and critical manner that Ataman employs in his artistic practice. Through this discussion, we evaluate the ways in which the film is informed by and can be interpreted as a parodic observation of recurrent patterns in Turkish politics and representations of the national pasts. We argue that it exemplifies and endorses mockumentary's politically reflexive capacity to rethink history and the process of historiography in which historical truths are constructed. Mockumentary mode offers layers of meanings, exceeding the obvious narrative of historical parody, and invites the viewers to notice and problematize conventional narrational and stylistic methods of documenting a historical event. Thus, the film provides a criticism and comparison of the public opinion towards politics within two distinct periods in Turkey's history, namely the 1950s and the 2000s. It also opens up a space for a critical engagement with Turkey's troubled pasts and their construction as historical narratives in both cinematic and other representations.