“Filmler ile Hatırlamak”: Toplumsal Hafızada Filmlerin Yeri: Türkiye’den Örnekler

Cultural memory is one of the key elements in forming a society’s identity and maintaining its connection with the past. Films, as products of cultural memory, play an effective role in the construction of social memory. This study aims to analyze the relationship that films establish with social memory through selected examples and to identify how viewers relate to the representations of social memory within these films. Within the scope of the research, viewing rates have been accepted as a criterion directly proportional to the audience’s interest in films. In terms of scope and limitations, four films that surpassed the five-million-viewer threshold and were screened in movie theaters in Turkey were selected through purposive sampling. While “Fetih 1453” and “Ayla” are based on historical events, “Bergen” and “Müslüm” address social sensitivities such as violence against women and class differences. The study aims to conduct a thematic analysis of the films, identify common themes, and reveal the connection these films establish with collective memory through these themes. For this purpose, content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, was used to determine, code, and categorize the themes. Furthermore, specific scenes were described to explain the connection established with social memory through these scenes. The findings were examined in relation to the theories discussed in the literature section, focusing on the relationship between films and social memory. The main objective of the study is to determine the impact of films as sites of memory in connecting the past and the present. Therefore, the individual and collective traumas reflected in the selected films were evaluated in proportion to the attention these films received, and their roles in identity construction and the cultural traces they carried were explained with examples from contemporary society. The study concludes that the analyzed films not only remind us of the past but also establish meaningful connections with contemporary social issues, playing an important role in the reproduction of collective memory.