Auteur and Style in National Cinema: A Reframing of Metin Erksan's Time To Love

Abstract

This essay will hunt down and classify the concept of the national as a discourse in Turkish cinema that has been constructed back in 1965, by the film critics, by filmmakers and finally by today’s theoretical standards. So the questions we will be constantly asking throughout the essay can be: Is what can be called part of national film culture and identity? Is defining a film part of national heritage a modernist act that is also related to theories of nationalism? Is what makes a film national a stylistic application of a particular genre (such as melodrama)? Does the allure of the film come from the construction of a hero-cult after a director deemed to be national?

Keywords

• Turkish cinema
• national cinema
• nation state
• Metin Erksan
• Yeşilçam