REPRODUCTION OF MELODRAMA IN CONTEXT OF KADER AND MASUMİYET FILMS

Abstract

The genre of melodrama has manifested itself as the most popular and thebest-loved genre for long years in Turkish cinema. Melodrama lost its popularitydue to both censorship and a decrease in people’s interest in mid 1990s. However, ithas been seen that melodrama has been reproduced both semantically andstylistically since mid-1990s thanks to the leading directors of New Turkish cinemawho have been trying to re-attract their audience to cinema. Zeki Demirkubuz, oneof these directors, is different from his generation with his tendencies to draw hischaracters into a disaster, extreme emotionality and agony. One of the most important indicators of such codes of melodrama very settled in our socialperception is the fact that they are still reproduced through films in the culturalrealm. The goal of this study is to denote that the codes of melodrama that the basiccodes socially internalized are still used in contemporary Turkish cinema in contextof the films Masumiyet (1997) and its prequel, Kader (2006) by Zeki Demirkubuz.The exemplary films have been analysed through the method of genre analysis.However, considering the fact that a single method would be insufficient for a filmanalysis, the method of sociological analysis will be applied to understand therelation of the film with social structure.

Keywords

• Melodrama
• Zeki Demirkubuz
• New Turkish Cinema