Our knowledge about the relationship Ottoman children had with cinema and about the “Ottoman child cinema audience” is quite limited. This article addresses how Ottoman children, whose social position underwent a transformation in the process of modernization, related to the cinema, and the phenomenon of an “Ottoman child audience.” In this context, the primary purpose of the article and the focus of the first section is to reveal how cinema was addressed in Ottoman Turkish children’s magazines during the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18) in Istanbul. Children’s publications were one of the factors shaping the cinema-child relationship, and the information about the child audience they contain suggests that Ottoman children had an active relationship with cinema during the period. The second part of the study fleshes out the nature of that relationship through accounts about and evidence of a mass child audience and individual examples from the child audience. In the last years of the Ottoman Empire, children’s magazines often encouraged children to go to the cinema. Apart from giving a positive connotation to cinema by identifying it with modernity, technology, and science, they also displayed advertisements for movie theaters and stores selling cinematic items. Moreover, by giving away promotional prizes such as movie tickets and equipment, and by including movie screenings in the events they organized, they offered their young readers the opportunity to experience cinema directly. Children’s magazines, most of which were illustrated, and therefore “viewed” as much as they were read, prepared children for watching movies and becoming a cinema audience. As the demand for cinema gradually increased during the Second Constitutional Period, one of the important factors in the growth of the child audience was children’s magazines. The increase of cinematic content and the presence of cinematic promotions and advertisements in children’s magazines are indications of this growth. Magazines both reflected and nurtured this process. Another noteworthy phenomenon discussed in the paper is the infiltration of nationalism into the cinematic content of children’s magazines in parallel with the rise of nationalism in Ottoman society.
Cinema children’s magazines the Ottoman child audience the Second Constitutional Period nationalism
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Subjects | Communication and Media Studies |
Journal Section | Features |
Authors | |
Publication Date | April 25, 2022 |
Published in Issue | Year 2022 |
sinecine TR DİZİN ve FIAF tarafından taranmaktadır.