Zeynep Gültekin Akçay (Sivas Cumhuriyet University, Dept. of Radio, Television and Cinema / FMSP): “Remembering the Cinema Experience of 1950s to 1970s in Sivas”

June 10, 2025
4 pm 
Campus Westend, IG 1.414 
 
Hey, damn dear viewers! You smoke cigarettes from the balcony and throw the butts down. They fall on the precious fedora hats of the gentlemen sitting below and burn them!!!!…
(The common shouts in Sivas Cinemas…)
 
With its many functions that allow people to watch movies, then socialize, see others and be visible, cinema is both affected by and affects society. In this respect, movie theaters, which are public spaces and ‘urban discovery’, are important in tracing the memory of an urban area with their heterotopic and chronotopic structures. Cinema is a spectrum of remembrance that expands temporal and spatial spaces. Cinema, as an urban routine, is a micro dynamic and field of experience of new cultural and social practices in the early twentieth century.  The main claim of this project, which researches cinema experiences in the cultural memory of Sivas, is that cinemas, which are the micro-dynamics and experience areas of social practices, have an undeniable place in the cultural memory of the city. In light of this claim, it is aimed to give voice to the city’s memories of cinema, which have never been written down before and are inevitably fading away, and to reveal the role of the venues where movie were screened in the daily lives of moviegoers, based on the social, historical and cultural contexts of the city between 1950-1980.  
 

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zeynep GULTEKIN AKCAY completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Radio, Television and Cinema at Gazi University in Ankara and her PhD in Journalism at the same university. In 2016, she visited Malmö University with the Erasmus exchange program. She is currently working at Sivas Cumhuriyet University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Radio, Television and Cinema. Her main research interests are: sociology of television, media and children, popular culture and media, gender and media. She is currently working on the project titled “Remembering the Cinema Experience of 1950s to 1970s in Sivas”. At the FMSP of Goethe University Frankfurt, she will research the cinema experiences in the cultural memory of Sivas people living in Germany. In her previous research ‘Child games hybridized with the television screen’ she studied how traditional children’s games are hybridized through television.