Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Director Metin Erksan, who created himself by expressing himself with images, is one of the names who represent the “filmmakers generation” of Turkey. He is also one of the five most important directors who took up cinema as a profession after the “theater period” of Turkey. Another key trait of his is the attention shown to main principles of cinema aesthetics, i.e. light, color, space/set design and picture composotion, thanks to this education in art history. The black and white film, Sevmek Zamanı (Time to Love), produced in 1965, which has a special place in Metin Erksan’s filmography and in the history of Turkish cinema, is also a film that stands out in terms of cinematic aesthetics. This study seeks to explain how images represent the director and how he recreates them with the theme of “falling in love with the picture”. For this purpose, it is also revealed how the elements of cinema aesthetics function in the creation and design of the image in the movie Sevmek Zamanı. In this study, the psychology of the character who falls in love with a photograph of a woman in the movie Sevmek Zamanı is explained through the mirror-self theory of Jacques Lacan. Finally, this study explains the movie character’s falling in love with the image of a women in a picture and living in his own fantasies through Plato’s allegory of the cave.