Exhibitor’s Cut: Travelling Cinema and Experiences of Cinemagoing in Taurus Highland Villages during 1960-1980

Based on the New Cinema History approach, this article focuses on the cinemagoing experiences in the Taurus highland villages from 1960 to 1980 in Turkey. No previous study has investigated cinemagoing experience in rural Turkey. We explore who participated in the screenings and what the experiences of audience members were, in which places (fixed or ambulant) and under what circumstances the film screenings took place, who the exhibitors were, and how procurement, distribution and exhibition mechanisms worked. We employed an ethnographic design and collected testimonies through oral history with villagers and also with travelling exhibitors and cinema operators. Our findings challenge a series of antiquated arguments on Turkish cinema history by reflecting upon grounded daily experiences in a often-ignored locality. These findings include issues such as cinema exhibition operated independently from the city, mobility and temporality of cinemagoing experience, performative audience, and open cinema spaces.

Conversely, various studies we conducted in Adana city centre and Taurus highland villages indicate that, since the first days of cinema activities in Turkey, travelling cinema has been practised outside of İstanbul and in a short time ambulant screenings became permanent in cities in Anatolia, but travelling cinema was also being continued intensively outside of the cities.
Despite the dominance of İstanbul and other city centres in Turkish cinema historiography, from 1927 until 1950, 75% of the Turkish population lived in villages and towns outside the city centres. From 1950 to 1970, this rate slowly declined to 60%, but even in 1980, 56% of the population still lived in rural areas. Approximately 25,000,000 people lived in rural areas in 1970-1980. 8 Hobsbawm emphasizes Turkey as being the 'peasant stronghold' 9 in Europe and the Middle East until the 1980s. Although the rural population in Turkey is historically higher than the population living in cities and districts, the number of cinema studies relevant to cinema activities in rural areas is limited. Intellectual interest in cinema activities in rural areas especially began with the rise of the Social Realist Cinema circle and the socialist movement in general throughout the 60s and 70s. Social realist cinema 'echoed the hegemonic power relations of the state, filmmakers, and its audience.' 10 The authors, critics and the researchers from the circle paid great attention to the cinemagoers, who had been excluded from cinema literature for years, in the context of different geographical locations.
Most of these monographs and 'public interviews' published in the cinema magazines of the day.
It is these 'public interviews' published in the Seventh Art (Yedinci Sanat) magazine, which started publication in the late 1960s that inspire the research we have discussed in this article: Çeviker's cinemagoing interview with women working in brothels in Samsun and the audience interviews carried out in Çarşamba district of the same city; 11 audience interviews performed by Atan  Among the scholarly works, the studies conducted on a cinema hall in Ankara 18 , Bulancak-Giresun cinemas 19 and Kader Movie Theatre which used to serve from 1961 to 1977 in Oltu district of Erzurum 20 are among samples of micro history studies. Scholarship focusing on the experiences of cinemagoing in Anatolian cities constitute the major examples of 'New Cinema History' in Turkey. For our work, we also attribute importance to the studies on old İzmir cinemas, 21 especially Yıldız Cinema Hall; 22 Konya cinemas between the years 1910-1950; 23 Van cinemas during Yeşilçam period; 24 Gaziantep cinemas between 1923 and 1980; 25 Yenişehir Cinema (active in the district during Karabük industrialization period); 26 studies examining Ankara cinemas and their screening experience in the city. 27 Last but not least, we draw on a project that translates as Going to Cinema as a Cultural and Social Practice: An Oral History on Audience Experiences in Turkey 28 which explores, through oral history, the cinema culture of İstanbul, Ankara, Kocaeli and Antalya between 1960-1980, conducted by Akbulut and his colleagues. 29 We are framing our work within the New Cinema History approach, following Biltereyst and Meers, we ask: 'What exactly and how should we compare?' 30 Although any study that focuses on a particular period or location is ontologically comparative, there are not many studies in Turkey on cinema history that focus on first-hand spatial comparisons. The comparison of cinema activities in İstanbul and Anatolian cities, however, can be extremely rewarding. Moreover, many practices in rural areas differed from the practices and experiences of İstanbul and also other city centres in Anatolia.
For instance, financing methods of film production were different for the İstanbul cinemas and Anatolian cinemas which utilised bond system and regional business model. Distribution policies also differed as the film's screening rights were directly transferred to the cinema enterprises in İstanbul, whereas sale of the film with the percentage model or sub-sales were common practices in Anatolian cities. In terms of the programming practices, open-air cinemas in Anatolian cities and villages were distinctive with 'two-in-one' screenings combining a melodrama and an adventure feature, and irregular screening programs. Furthermore, the city centres hosted the venues constructed as a cinema hall with regular screening programs, while 'pop up'/travelling venues of the rural areas had irregular screening programs. In the context of the audience, there was a 'disciplined'/passive viewing in the hall cinemas of the city centres, while the performative viewing was experienced in the periphery of the villages and cities. These research topics and respectively methodologies present the researchers with a large area of comparative study.
However, we cannot attribute the differences we list here as spatial boundaries specific to urban/ rural spatial distinction. After all, we can witness the performative viewing in periphery cinemas in İstanbul or a more regular programming in a village in a given year. Therefore, instead of looking at a binary context and comparing two categories, we try to look at the differentiation of cinemas in İstanbul, in Adana as an Anatolian city and in Taurus highland villages. Comparing non-binary spatial dimensions helps us to reveal the shortcomings of the conventional cinema history and to discuss the possibilities of comparative cinema historiography.

Comparative approaches offered in New Cinema History
Memory and archives are particularly central to New Cinema History studies. 31 Rather than a film and director-oriented cinema history, New Cinema History emerged as a field of study that includes all kinds of cinemagoing, exhibition, production and consumption practices within a social and cultural context. Indisputably, the importance of written and visual archival materials in producing information about this field cannot be denied. However, the methods of oral history and ethnographic fieldwork are both epistemologically and methodologically central to New Cinema History studies, since it explores a period that is -for the most part -still in living memory. 32 It should be noted that there exists research on the history of cinema among the predecessors of oral history studies. Brownlow's study 33 on the American silent cinema between 1916 and 1928 is one of the first examples of oral history research. Oral history studies suggest that events that shape the lives of the vast majority are ordinary, everyday phenomena. Therefore, the facts about daily life -as opposed to unique and unusual cases -are the focus of oral historians. Thus, oral history, as Caunce states, transforms into a tool for unlacing the history to everyone, thus producing an alternative knowledge of history. 34 The claim is that this knowledge is not only about what is told, but also about how history is told. For example, this is about writing the history of the ordinary, of the non-ruling in the periphery, in the countryside or various localities, as an alternative to the practice of urban, metropolitan or power-centred historiography. So the importance of direct experience and testimony in cinema historiography can be as important as where these experiences take place. provides a comparison of active-passive audiences. The studies we draft here provide the analytical framework that enables us to compare urban and rural cinemas using three contexts as the venues and exhibition, the programming and films, and the audience characteristics.

Methodological Framework
Following the works listed above, for our ethnographic research, we are inspired by a column titled "Investigation on Cinema in the Taurus Mountains" written by Osman Şahin that was published in the Yedinci Sanat (Seventh Art) magazine in 1974. The column is about travelling exhibitors who were selling films in the mountain villages. We first aimed to pursue research on cinemagoing experiences in six villages mentioned in this column (Arslanköy, Yavca, Kavaklıpınar, Tırtar, Çağlarca and Yüksekoluk) by pursuing interviews with spectators and possibly exhibitors there, but our journey was not limited to these six villages as testimonies and narratives expanded the scope of the research. We have conducted field research from July until December 2018 and compiled data through in-depth interviews in the villages of Arslanköy, Ayvagediği, Fındıkpınarı, Gözne, Kargıpınarı, Kızılbağ, Yavca, and in the city centres of Adana and Mersin to collect information on cinemagoing experiences both in the rural and urban contexts. 49 Although we had interviews in seven villages, we have compiled the narration of cinema activities and cinemagoing experiences for about 40 villages in the Taurus Mountains. Throughout our research, we triangulated our data consisting of unstructured and/or semi-structured in-depth interviews, with other sources such as observation, local newspaper archives, local government records, and visual materials. In order to make the comparison, we use secondary sources on the cinemas of İstanbul and other city centres, which are reviewed in the first part of this article.
Çukurova, surrounded by the Taurus Mountains, is a region where human mobility has increased along with the radical transformations in the settlement processes since the 17 th century.
Since then, the Yörüks, which constitute an important part of the region's population, have settled in the area between Çukurova Plateau and the Taurus Mountains, but nomadic practices have been kept alive culturally. 50 Most of the villages we have visited during the fieldwork were ethnically Yörük, and some were Arab Alawites. Yörük populations are historically known as conservative, not necessarily in religious terms. 51 As it is revealed in our interviews, during the period we investigate, mosques and coffee houses where men attend, constituted the public space in the villages. Men and women rarely came together in public spaces, except occasions such as film screening or theatre plays. Electricity came to the villages in the late 1960s, which mostly made a living with fruit and animal husbandry.
Television broadcasts started in 1974, but no quality reception was available until satellite broadcasting began around the beginning of 1990s, because most of the villages are located in deep valleys. Except for Kargıpınarı which is situated by the Mediterranean Sea, all of the villages we visited are located at 1.000 to 1.500 meters high in the Taurus Mountains, with hard-to-reach unpaved roads. The relatively long distances and rough roads between the rural and urban areas of Mersin kept villagers away from the city during the period we investigate.
During our fieldwork, we utilised purposive and snowball sampling and conducted in-depth interviews with 7 women and 32 men. In every village, we started our investigation by visiting local coffee-houses and village governors (muhtar) first. This strategy seemed very fruitful to meet male residents since most of them who are over 40 years old were spending their time in these coffee-houses during the summertime. Unfortunately, we were able to interview fewer women for the following two reasons: first, traditionally, women settled in the village of the man they married. Therefore, many women had not experienced cinema in those villages in which we collected data (nor elsewhere for that matter). Secondly, according to our observations and also in-depth interviews, we witnessed that villages are becoming more and more conservative. Men were visible in public places, such as village coffee-houses, and we were able to meet them, whereas women were at their homes. In most cases, our requests to meet with women were often filtered by men, or our encounters with women were interrupted by men. Three of our participants were travelling exhibitors and two were cinema hall operators. We also wanted to explore how people of different ages and generations experienced cinemagoing. Therefore, the birth year of the participants ranged from 1933 to 1970, with an average respondent's age of 63 years. Although we aimed to document the cinemagoing and screening experiences during the period between 1960 and 1980, we were able to carry the historical narrative back to the mid-1940s in terms of understanding the social, political and economic context.
During interviews with the cinemagoers, we first asked questions to understand the demographic features of the society they lived in and the period covered in this research.
After that, we asked questions try to understand their relationship with cinema/films in general, including questions such as how often they watched films, which films (genres) and/or stars liked during the period scrutinised; how they knew what film was coming to the village or to the neighbourhood cinemas in Adana city centre; how they prepared for the show; with whom they went to watch films; the state of the venue before the show (whether or not music was broadcast, what they and other audience did); experiences during the show (what they felt, and talked about while there, and so on), and the experiences of those who could not go to the cinema. In addition, we asked our participants questions about the economic, cultural, and social structure of the region/villages in which we conducted our research, from 1960 through 1980, including the political situation of the villages; their ethnic structure; whether they identify themselves as conservative or secular; whether there were activities organised by People's Houses (community centre) or People's Chambers (local branches of community centres); whether a school existed in their villages; as well as theatre activities that might have prioritized the cinemagoing experience in the villages. We also tried to understand whether cinema activities had a role in various social relations.
Regarding interviews with the cinema operators and travelling exhibitors such as Ömer Dündar, Nazım Dündar, Sami Dündar, Sinan Öz and Hasan Kınalı, we focused on the economics of cinema activity, attempting to understand why they decided to get into the 'cinema business'; how they raised their capital and learned to operate; the costs of film supplying and other costs; the ticket sales price; the taxes and/or fees they paid and their relations with the local administrators. To be able to collect information on the screening programs, we investigated which films they decided to screen and how they supplied those; how they promoted the screening program; information about the screening schedule of a film (including the number of sessions, number of days); and the characteristics of summer and winter screening seasons. Through our questions, we tried to reveal the daily and seasonal routines of screening. We also asked them about the equipment they used for film screening; audience capacities; characteristics of the venue in which the films were screened; formats they screen (16mm and/or 35mm). Also, cinema operators and travelling exhibitors were asked about the experiences of the audience before, during and after the screenings. Who participated in the screenings, whether the elderly, youth, children, women or men? Were there screenings for women or children exclusively? How was the seating arrangement? Was there a hierarchy between women and men, young and elderly? And, what was their route? The map below ( Figure 1) depicts two main routes that travelling exhibitors have followed. These routes are the ones we traced for cinemas as well. I can say that the first time we saw the ships, the guns, the cannons, the tanks, the horrors of war in that movie. This must have been the actual war that our grandparents who have experienced mobilization told us. Then, when a fighter jet that fires in the movie falls into the middle of the white screen and explodes, I can't forget that the villagers standing near the curtain escaped. 59 After the war movie, another documentary on how American farmers grow corn was screened. Turkish villagers were able to observe American farmers while eating their meals, taking showers and resting.
According to Şahin, the whole spectacle, even the arrival of US marshals with a motorized vehicle, was fascinating and embraced by the villagers. Only a year later in 1948, after the first US-backed screening, travelling exhibitors -who arrived with the projectors and electric generators they carried on the back of a mule -screened films in Arslanköy. These exhibitors were commercial entrepreneurs. 60   childhood and youth, and sometimes he was captivated by projector beams leaking between the leaves of the trees. 66 Both the screening venues that we have found during our field research and the experiences expressed in in-depth interviews show that there were very different screening spaces from the traditional/conventional cinema venues. Such physical structures of these spaces combine the cinema experience with the physical world, as opposed to the closed and dark halls that make the cinema experience isolated from the physical world as much as possible: projector beams leaking through the branches of trees, a primitive curtain stretched to the mud-brick wall of a school or a coffee shop; projectors installed on a table or rack; flimsy projection booths; seating arrangement set up with chairs borrowed from the coffee shop or desks taken from the schools; those who often sit on rugs. One of our participants even added that 'Those who could not find a chair would bring a mat or a   fixed, but rather flexible in terms of spatial organization.

Programming, the cycle of screening and films
First of all, the films shown in towns and villages were different from those shown in the cities.
Except for the silent films screened by travelling exhibitors in the early 1940s period, only Turkish films were shown in this region. Moreover, these films were highly localised. The local/regional business model is the basic production model of the golden years of Turkish cinema which was initiated after the 1960 military coup and ended after TV broadcasting spread nation-wide in 1975.
According to this model, the country was divided into six geographic districts (centred in the cities of Adana, Ankara, İstanbul, Izmir, Samsun and Zonguldak) and the producers, in İstanbul and elsewhere, were organised around two common models of production and distribution: (1) the film is distributed to commercial cinema operators in exchange for a certain commission of the revenue, which was calculated after the removal of the local taxes and sometimes the advertising costs; (2) the transfer of the film's right to show for a fixed price. In both models, İstanbul-based companies depended on local producers and operators; and after a while, the demand from local partners began to determine the form and the content of the films produced. 69 During our fieldwork, we observed that films referring to local myths and narratives were distinctly remembered. Thus, the narratives and narrative structures of these films are local. Furthermore, the production, distribution, and demonstration of these films are also local and distinctive, characterizing the epoch. Consistent with a local/regional business model, these films met the local demand by featuring local elements belonging to Yörük culture. The films that our All of these recalled films reveal cinematographic and narrative patterns in the manifestation of local stories, of Yörük culture and traditions, of music, of places where the films were shot, and distribution that are outlined in Table 1.

Gülüşan, 1985
The narrative built around nomad myths and/or local stories  Özder was given carte blanche to continue to screen films for years. 'every film shown is already the first screening for the villagers'.

Characteristics of the cinemagoers
As our participants mentioned, almost all village inhabitants attended screenings, and therefore going to the cinema and watching films in villages and towns was a popular activity. However, despite the efforts of People's Houses 'to discipline the audience' 73 and unify them everywhere, the experience of cinemagoing in the villages was quite different from the metropolitan areas, specifically from İstanbul.
In addition, functional components are also different. In 'disciplined' luxury movie theatres, buffets and toilets are typically located in the foyer area, i.e. outside the screening area, while buffets and toilets in the neighbourhood and open-air cinemas are located just below the screen. For example, Cinema Arı in Arslanköy has such characteristics, although it is a hall. At the Cinema Arı, buffets and toilets are located inside the screening space, under the screen. In most cases, city or metropolitan cinemas do not differ from the others, only in terms of the films or the design of the space, but they demand differences from the audience as well. For example, the audience attending the screenings in these cinemas are expected to be 'modern' and 'disciplined': the audience is not allowed to come to these cinemas with local/traditional clothing, for example, shalwar. After the screening starts, the audience is not allowed to enter the theatre and leave before the break; it is accepted as crass behaviour to speak, to make noise or to eat something during the screening and the theatre is non-smoking.
Cinemagoing and exhibiting experiences we have listened to at Taurus highland villages are reminiscent of the studies conducted by Srinivas in India. 74 Srinivas states that spectatorship in India is quite different from a more disciplined experience. For instance, in India, cinemagoing takes place not as an individual but as a kind of communal experience. Sometimes a group composed of peers or sometimes families with members of all ages go to the cinema. Watching the film is accompanied by intense noise in the form of jokes, shouting, laughter and sometimes crying. Based on this comparison, experiences in the Taurus highland villages are very similar to that in India. It also conforms to a 'rural' experience: the notion of cinemagoing as an extremely individualised and highly disciplined action is also contested in some European cases. There is also a marked difference between urban, first-run cinema experience and more rural or neighbourhood cinemagoing experience.
Spectators go to the cinema to Arslanköy in groups from closeby plains. Moreover, both residents of villages such as Arslanköy or Yavca and potential participants of the screenings in these villages, who live in the nearby plains, are mostly members of the same family. Almost all of the people who fill the hall or the area where the screening takes place know each other. Therefore, going to the cinema is considered as a gathering; they gather to go to the cinema, gather for screening, and 'gather to re-narrate the film on the days after the screening event'. 75 Depending on all these gatherings, the experience of spectatorship starts well before the show and ends long after it. The coming of travelling cinema is announced much earlier and those working in the fields or gardens excitedly prepare to watch the films. Furthermore, hours before the screening, the travelling exhibitor begins playing songs from the record player or tape-recorder to call the crowd to the day's event. 76 Thus, cinemagoing experience includes an exciting preparation period and this excitement continues during the screening.
As outlined earlier, according to the conventional Turkish cinema history paradigm, the audience is asked to watch the film in awe with absolute silence and almost captivated. The audience is expected to be a silent witness during the screening and an invisible witness before the film, as Elsaesser and Hagener write: In the classical cinema the spectator is an invisible witness -invisible to the unfolding narrative that does not acknowledge his/her presence, which is why neither direct address nor Moreover, the performative watching continues even after the film ends: Immediately after the screening, the scenes in the film are re-played by the audience, especially by the children. The audience narrates the film to those who do not watch; films become the main subject of daily conversations until the next screening. The cinemagoing experience, which begins hours before the screening, sometimes continues for days after it. In this process, the audience is never passive in front of the screen; on the contrary, highly active and performative. In this respect, it has almost no resemblance to the 'modern' notion of audience and the cinemagoing experience, and it has the characteristics that Srinivas states regarding spectatorship in India. 86

Rural cinemagoing as a sign of cultural accomplishment
The history of modernity, city, and cinema has been written together and these three are often thought of being in a symbiotic relationship. However, the relationship between cinema and modernity has been strongly established even without the intermediary of the city. First of all, it is suggested that cinema is directly the art of modernity and that no art can represent modernity better than it. According to Mario Pezzella, cinema is the art of modernity (un'arte della modernità). 87 For Jean-Paul Sartre, cinema is the most obvious means of representation of time: It is an art which seems easy but is really extremely hard and, if it is approached in the right way, very profitable; because by its nature it reflects civilization in our time. Who will teach you about the beauty of the world you live in, the poetry of speed, machines, and the inhuman and splendid inevitability of industry? Who, if not your art, the motion picture. 88 Hobsbawm states, 'Yet no art represents the requirements, the unintended triumph, of an utterly untraditional artistic modernism more dramatically than the cinema'. 89 Orr, furthering the relationship between cinema and modernity, argues that cinema, 'as an innovative form […] challenges both the conventions of the modern artwork and modernity itself'. 90 As the literature cited above, going to the cinema is the most important activity of modern city life and thus, in a way, going to the cinema is a necessity of modernity. So, it follows that going to the cinema, which is modern art, is a necessity of being urban and a marker of being civilised.
It is noteworthy that during the study we conducted in the Taurus highland villages, the participants often used some of the references attributed to cities, especially metropolitan areas, for their villages. 91 Biltereyst and colleagues' collection 92 offers similar arguments of historicizing film exhibition, cinemagoing and spectatorship within the context of modernity. In one of our interviews, for instance, Bilal Ay 93 states that the inhabitants of Arslanköy are not only from one ethnic group, but also from many different parts of Anatolia, especially in Çukurova Region, and in this respect, the village is highly 'cosmopolitan'. For this reason, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the village hosts fixed-location and travelling cinemas or uses its cinema halls for concerts, theatre plays or other cultural activities. Sami Dündar, who takes his name after his grandfather, the founder of Cinema Arı, who still lives in Mersin but spent most of his childhood in Arslanköy, makes the same emphasis, and states that Arslanköy stands out with its educated residents, culture, cinema and theatre and adds that the village is 'cosmopolitan'. 94 Within this context, it is also important that Sami Dündar defines staying away from cinema as 'cultural deprivation and recession'. Going to the cinema means being educated, independent of literacy, and being civilised. Between 1960 and 1980, when fixed-location and/or travelling mobile cinemas worked effectively, in a period when the interactions between the city and the village were hardly established, women watching films together with men is considered as a modern cultural activity: Everyone came to the cinema with women and men at that time. No one found this odd.
It was considered as a different culture. Just like today, everyone can go to the cinema.
There is nothing wrong with that. At that time, we are talking about the 70s and a closed society, especially in Arslanköy, this was not considered odd in any way. 95 Although women were attending the screenings, which become a public space where everybody can mingle, in more conservative villages, there was visible gender segregation: Of course, women came to the screenings as well. But they would sit behind the men.
Older men were sitting in front and then younger men. Women were behind those men and children, especially those who don't have money to pay for the ticket would stay at the back of the audience… We were lining up the chair in rows. The seniors, the notables of the village sitting at the forefront. The youngest ones are at the back. For example, sometimes most wouldn't have money. I would say to them, 'You sit there and watch', just about 9-10 years old.
He wants to watch. There was so much poverty by then. No-one had a motorcycle or a car, even electricity had just arrived. There were a lot of people who had never been to the city. 96 Almost all of the participants that we interviewed during our research, with nostalgia, identify both the art of cinema and the cinemagoing activities as being civilised and/or being accultured. This corresponds to the aforementioned assumptions: going to the cinema is associated with being cultured in the city or village; conservatively rejecting cinema is considered as not developed or uncivilised. Furthermore, we can say that those who live in these villages have equally as great cinemagoing experiences as many of the residents of cities. In the summer season, which starts in April -May and ends in September -October in Taurus highland villages, travelling exhibitors and cinema operators would offer weekly changing programmes. Also, year-round film screenings are held in theatres, cinemas, schools or coffeehouses. Sami Dündar reports that for years, 300-400 people watched films at Cinema Arı in Arslanköy in a given screening. All of these show us that cinema is not only a city-specific phenomenon but even in the most remote villages the experience is intense.
Therefore, the correlation between city (and being urban), cinema (and spectatorship) and modernity is not a necessary one; such relationships can be established for the villages as well. There are various locations where diversified cinemagoing experiences have been realised. Again, accordingly, the relationship between city, cinema, and modernity does not have to be a symbiotic relationship based on a triple condition. Modernity, like cinema, is a phenomenon experienced outside the cities in different geographies. As Berman aptly asserts:

Conclusion: Taking a fresh look at the cinemagoers
To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows. 99 Of course, we cannot claim that the inhabitants of the Taurus highland villages are in search of a total form of reality, beauty, freedom and justice. However, during our study, we witnessed all these emotions have been experienced more or less through cinema. Consequently, we need new perspectives on the relationship between city, cinema, and modernity.
However, we also need to review the preconceptions and prejudices of the traditional/ conventional approach to cinemagoing and exhibiting experiences. In addition to films, screenings Srinivas, who researches cinemagoing experiences taking place in the Indian context by employing ethnographic methodologies, says that film studies in her country were conducted under the leadership of educated middle-class researchers who were alienated from popular cinema.
Therefore 'the indigenous dialogue between audience and cinema has […] gone unnoticed.' 101 The distance between researchers' subjective interest in the art of cinema and widely experienced cinemagoing practices and the audience makes the relation and relevance between two groups almost impossible. This provision made by Srinivas also explains some significant problems of film/ cinema studies in Turkey. These problems include firstly the fact that cinema studies in Turkey mostly focus on films and/or the directors and genres; secondly, the fact that İstanbul is located at the very centre of national cinema history; thirdly, that most of the studies about our history of cinema are detached from originality and repeated and conducted through secondary sources instead of primary sources. In addition, the assumption situated in most of the scholarship is that the audience also belongs to an upper-middle-class and are the residents of cities just like the researcher. This is combined with the adoption of conventional modern propositions as the only approach to explaining almost any issues related to cinema, and has led to the formation of a  any audience to try to feel any film before attempting to understand it. When the audience is ready to feel, the film will show and explain everything. We propose to re-frame Bresson's proposition within the new cinema studies paradigm: When the researcher is ready, the audience will have much to offer.