Ownership, Publicity, Commonality

Abstract

Social issues such as class distinctions, sovereignty, and property began to manifest in cinema with the emergence and popularization of socialist thought in 1960s Turkiye. Metin Erksan, a director of Turkish cinema, led this movement, his films reflecting the societal issues known as “social reality” in cinema. In his films, he chose to explore the issue of property in the conflict between the dominant power over subjects and objects such as water, land, money, and at times women, and the “others” resisting this dominance. This chapter aims to analyze the spaces of everyday life in rural settings in Metin Erksan's cinema through the lens of debates on property, publicness, and commonality. This chapter hypothesizes that property, publicness, and commonality can change and transform within the practices of everyday life, rituals, and conflicts. This analysis will focus on Erksan's “property trilogy” comprising the films The Revenge of the Snakes (1962), Dry Summer (1963), and The Well (1968).