Abstract

Cinema arrived in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, in 1896. The first public screening was held in a mostly non-Muslim neighborhood, Pera, at the Sponeck Beer Hall (Özön, 1962: 21). When the first moving pictures were shown in a Muslim neighborhood, at the Fevziye coffee house in the Muslim neighborhood of Fatih, a preexisting setup and screen used for the Karagöz shadow plays was utilized (Özön, 1962: 23). This combination brought together two different cultures and histories of visual and performing arts—one Western, perspectival, illusionistic, and the other non-Western, nonillusionistic, and nonrealistic (Arslan, 2011). ¹ With this kind of a dual existence in its background, the history of cinema in Turkey introduced the sharing of the same screen by two conflicting traditions, thus harboring an “in-between” practice of filmmaking.