The Efforts to Extend Cinema Activities in People’s Houses and Its Constraints

Abstract

The main objective of the People’s Houses that were opened in various provinces of Turkey in 1932 was to disseminate the principles of the revolution. One of the tools that were used to achieve this goal was cinema. Since the mid-1930s, the Republican People's Party (RPP) carried out works to ensure that as many people's houses as possible have film projectors, to supply the films to be screened and to assure the screenings take place regularly in the people's houses. However, the Party experienced various problems, particularly in finding "educational films" to be screened in people's houses, tried to find solutions to them, yet by the end of the 1940s, the Party was far from reaching its initial goals. This study which is based on the written correspondences -that are part of the archival records- among various units of the state, party and the people’s houses and local governors, examines the attempts of RPP in making use of cinema, and the problems and constraints it encountered during this process. Thus, it is aimed to provide a basic framework about the attempts to benefit from cinema as a propaganda tool in the first years of the Turkish Republic.