Atatrk on Screen: Documentary Film and the Making of a Leader

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Mustafa Kemal Atatrk was not widely known when he led the national resistance movement in Anatolia in 1919. However, the effort and attention that his government devoted to the creation of his public image gradually turned him into a superhuman figure in the eyes of many. Film played a crucial role in the creation and dissemination of this image and helped Atatrk to advance his project of building a new imagined community of the Turkish nation. But despite the impact of film and film-making on the political and cultural life of Early Republican Turkey, there is almost no research that has analysed this footage. Atatrk on Screen uncovers various film archives to reveal the significant, albeit paradoxical, role of film during this period. Enis Din shows that while film-making was crucial for the creation of Atatrks public image and the presentation of Turkeys new modern image to the world, it also posed risks as it could be re-used, re-edited and re-framed for the purposes of counter-propaganda. The main analysis in the book is of the film footage itself, including rare contemporary cinematic sources which have never received comprehensive analysis before. The book also makes use of other primary sources such as letters, memoirs, newspapers, reports, newsletters and production files, providing readers with a multi-layered account of the period.

Reviews

Atatrk on Screenis the first book worldwide on the evolution of the public image of Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the founder of modern Turkey. This well-crafted study also helps us better understand the complex and eclectic early Republican program of state formation, nation-building, and Westernization. -- M. Skr Hanioglu, Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs and Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, U.S
This highly original study, based on unique sources, relates the history of early Turkish cinema to the public self-styling of Atatrk, thus interrogating the foundational myth of modern Turkey. -- Frank van Vree, Professor of History of War, Conflict and Memory, University of Amsterdam, and Director of NIOD Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Author Bio

Enis Din is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Turkish-German University in Istanbul, Turkey. He completed his PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Between 2014 and 2015, he was a visiting researcher in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University, USA.