WOMEN PIONEERS IN CINEMA

KUNDURA CINEMA

Free of Charge
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14:30 - 16:00      PANEL: Pioneering Female Writers and Screenwriters in Cinema
Speakers: Aslı Davaz, Canan Balan, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı

Aslı Davaz “Necile Tevfik’in Sinema Teknikleri, Sessiz ve Sesli Senaryoları ve Hollywood ile İlişkileri (1928-1935)”
There are six documents under the title of cinema and screenplays in Necile Tevfik Archive Annotated Catalog. These documents are about cinema techniques and the scripts she wrote. The document under the title of cinema techniques includes notes by Necile Tevfik explaining how to shoot a movie. Under the scenario title, there are silent and sound cinema. Documents related to silent cinema scenarios are documents covering the period between 1928 and 1935, when Necile Tevfik described the two scenarios she wrote for silent cinema to FBO Studios and Jacques Feyder in Hollywood.

Canan Balan “Hoca ve Asistanı Sinemada:  Halide Edip ve Sabahat Filmer”
While doing her internship at Ordu Film Center, Sabahat Filmer, who worked as an assistant and writer in the fiction films of the period (1919-1920), also held Sultanahmet meetings during the occupation period with Halide Edip, who aslo wrote fiction and essays on cinema. This presentation focuses on the first women who began working behind the camera and Filmer’ and Adıvar’s contributions to the cinema of Turkey.

Elif Rongen Kaynakçı “Beyazperdeye yansıyan kadın senaristler”
What kind of image of a female screenwriter do we encounter in the archive footage we find while tracing the women of silent cinema? It will be a presentation where we will watch and discuss these images.
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15:30 -15:45    interval
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15:45 -17:00    SCREENING
Women of Ryazan
Director: Ivan Pravov, Olga Preobrazhenskaya
Soviet Union, 1927, 67’
Women of Ryazan tells the story of Anna and Wassilissa, sisters-in-law living in the village of Ryazan. The story starts in 1914 just before the outbreak of WWI and focuses on the relationship of Anna with Ivan and Wassilissa with Nikolai. However, once both men are drafted for war, the women's social positions change dramatically; Anna becomes very vulnerable, while Wassilissa gets more assertive and refuses to become a victim of the circumstances.
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Aslı Davaz studied French language and literature at University of Paris VIII. She is one of the founders of the Women's Library and Information Center Foundation in 1990 in Istanbul, Turkey. She is one of a few researchers who specialized in women's archives in Turkey, and for many years she carried out research studies on this subject. Davaz spent much of the past twenty-nine years engaging in efforts aimed to the acquisition, preservation, and dissemination of documents related to women’s history and she has been working in many projects regarding women centred archives and women’s memory. She published three books: *“An Essay” on Reading a Woman's Private Papers: Annotated Catalogue of the Necile Tevfik Private Papers (1924-1954), 2019; *Unequal Sisterhood: International and Middle East Women’s Movements, the 1935 Congress and the Union of Turkish Women, 2014.; *From Hanımlar Âlemi to Roza: Bibliography of Women Periodicals 1928-1996, 1998.  The Annotated Catalogue of Necile Tevfik Private Papers has been a long run study, on the private papers of an early republican feminist. She currently works on women’s history, women centred archives and serves actually as the president of the Executive Board of the Foundation (2019-2021).

Canan Balan has been a doctorate professor at İstanbul Şehir University since 2010. She received her PhD from St Andrews University's film research program with a thesis on Early Cinema and Audience Culture in Istanbul. Since then, she has published articles addressing the intellectual figures who lived in Istanbul at the beginning of the twentieth century on the subject of cinema. She is still working on themes such as cinema watching, film production&writing.

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı is the Curator of Silent film at EYE Filmmuseum, the national film heritage institute of the Netherlands. Since 1999, she has worked on the discovery, restoration and presentation of many presumed lost films. These include Beyond the Rocks (starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, 1922),The Floor Below (starring Mabel Normand, 1918), Az utolsó hajnal (Michale Curtiz, 1917), and many more. Her work often gravitates around the forgotten or overlooked women within silent cinema, such as Rosa Porten, Little Chrysia, Tsuru Aoki, Olive Thomas, etc. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Women Film History International, and the co-organizer of the last Women and the Silent Screen biannual conference, held in Eye in 2019. She is directly involved with the archival festivals Il Cinema Ritrovato, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and Istanbul Silent Cinema Days.​​​​