A Conversation with Dr. Enis Dinç on the Audiovisual Memory of the Early Republic

For the fifth gathering of Memory Talks—a series designed around publications in its library and the selections from Julien Bryan’s New Turkey documentaries held in its archive—Kundura Hafıza Archive and Research welcomes film historian and academic Dr. Enis Dinç.

The conversation with Enis Dinç, centered on his book Atatürk on Screen: Documentary Film and the Making of a Leader, will focus on the role documentary cinema played in the visual representation of Atatürk and the new Türkiye during the early Republican period. It will open up for discussion how cinema was used not merely as a recording tool, but as a powerful medium through which narratives of modernization, representation, leadership and nation-building were put into circulation.

At this gathering, accompanied by film footage from the Kundura Hafıza archive, Enis Dinç will examine the films at the heart of his research within their historical, visual and political contexts, opening up space for an archival reading of the early Republican period. Shaped by a film screening, a conversation and questions from participants, the program invites us to think together through archival materials.

About Dr. Enis Dinç

Dr. Enis Dinç is a film historian and academic at Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. He has been a visiting researcher at Princeton University and conducted research as an academic member of the Cinepoetics research group at Freie Universität Berlin. The author of Atatürk on Screen: Documentary Film and the Making of a Leader, Dinç works on Ottoman and Turkish film history, visual culture and Turkish-German film relations.