City and Anti-Spectacle: Cine-Mythic Images of Istanbul

This paper departs from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and seeks to explore the interrelation between the city and the cinema through construction of the city as spectacle. The structure of the paper is suggested by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. The first part, Cities & Desires, tells of the phantasmagoria and desires in the definition of spectacle. Departing from meta-fetishism, the desire concept is associated with consumption habits and consumed city life. The second part, Cities & Signs, attempts to explain the production of space in relation to the chain of signifiers. City images are represented by the reproduction of space under the influence of social relations and their symbolic codes, which exist deep within the collective subconscious. In the third part, Cities & Eyes, mythic narration and fantastic images are replaced by back streets that define relentless living conditions and disruption of the city image. In line with these three thematic categories, the constructive structure reveals the meanings possessed by the city image in terms of the distinctive representation found in three examples of late Turkish cinema, The Bandit (E？k？ya, Yavuz Turgul, 1996), Cholera Street (A？？r Roman, Mustafa Alt？oklar, 1997) and Istanbul Tales (Anlat Istanbul, Kudret Sabanc？, ümit ünal, ？mür Atay, Selim Demirdelen, Yücel Yolcu, 2004)