Writing History With Films: A Comparative Analysis of Films About the Conquest of İstanbul

Abstract

Popular historical films strive to capture the audience who create emotional bonds with the past by providing the audience the historical experience they imagined. On the other hand, the worldviews and likes of audiences are not constant and may undergo changes in parallel with historical developments. Popular historical films shot in anticipation of the box office bear the imprint of the expectations of the majority of the target audience. The aim of this article is to explore the transformation of historical representations of films and the reasons for the change by analyzing three Turkish-made historical films describing the handover of the city of Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Empire: The Conquest of Istanbul (Aydın Arakon, 1951), Conquest 1453 (Fatih Aksoy, 2003), and Love Under Siege (Ersin Pertan, 1997). In this article, proceeding from the idea that a historical film is a form of audiovisual historiography, it will be argued that the historical representations of films are mainly related to the target audience that transform in line with the social and political changes, and the production process.