The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul

Book excerpt: ‘The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul’ attempts to analyze how Istanbul is captured through the projector; in other words, the ontological relationship between city and film and how it is elaborated within the context of Istanbul and the sense of strangerhood. This book shifts the axis of Istanbul, typically known as a touristic city, to its underlying details through the strangers in the modern city. Five different films set in this region are analyzed in the text that help to reveal and clarify the socio-urban life of modern Istanbul. The characters and stories in these films tell how Istanbul has socially and architecturally become a city of strangers. The films analyzed include ‘A Touch of Spice’ (2004), ‘Men on the Bridge’ (2009), ‘A Run for Money’ (1999), ‘Distant’ (2002), and ‘10 to 11’ (2009). The theoretical framework of this book is based on the works of Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett. These three thinkers have all attempted to look for answers to the sociological question of strangerhood in urban living. This book accomplishes this connection by discussing the similarities and differences between each of their theories regarding the city, cinema and strangerhood.