Scopus
🔓 Açık Erişim
Spatial Thresholds and Existential Dilemmas in New Turkish Cinema: A Reading of Something Useful
Cinej Cinema Journal · Aralık 2025
Makale Bilgileri
DergiCinej Cinema Journal
Yayın TarihiAralık 2025
Cilt / Sayfa13 · 269-311
Scopus ID2-s2.0-105025529004
Erişim🔓 Açık Erişim
Özet
Cinematic spaces are defined by their ability to create new spaces through reorganizing physical environments, a process facilitated by cinema. Directors use unique spaces in their films to convey specific themes and emotions. In Pelin Esmer's İşe Yarar Bir Şey (Something Useful, 2017), the train serves as the setting for the film's initial segment, offering views of external lives from within through the window. This prompts individuals to reflect, question their existence, and experience diverse emotional states. The objective of this study, which examines the 2017 film Something Useful, is to analyze the spaces utilized and the spatial experiences of the protagonists at the threshold by examining them through the lenses of Gaston Bachelard's (1994) concepts of home, Stavros Stavrides’s (2010) notion of the threshold, and Michel Foucault’s (2008) concept of heterotopia. The train, as an example of heterotopia, facilitates a transition to the protagonists’ inner worlds while observing the external world. This space is characterized by a different experience of time, functioning as a transitional space that is both physical and metaphorical. It is marked by threshold elements, such as glass, which delineate and symbolize the space’s function as a conduit between inner and outer realms. The house is an uncanny space for existential inquiries and suicide. It is a mix of cosmos and chaos.
Yazarlar (2)
1
Özlem Özgür
ORCID: 0000-0003-0907-2687
2
Mehmet Serdar Büyükpala
ORCID: 0000-0001-6985-0976
Anahtar Kelimeler
cinematic space
heterotopia
home
Something Useful
Space
suicide
threshold
Kurumlar
Selçuk Üniversitesi
Selçuklu Turkey