Editorial Bengisu Bayrak bengisu.bayrak@nisantasi.edu.tr Nişantaşı University Abstract Volume 7.1 (2018) includes twelve articles by Murat Akser, Mehmet Işık and Zafer Parlak, Selma Köksal, Ayla Kanbur, Caio Augusto Camargo Bogoni and Renate B. Michel, Naveen Mishra, Janet Barış, Richard Andrew Voeltz, Emilie Herbert, Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim and Aliyu Yakubu Yusuf, Özlem Denli, and Elif Kahraman Dönmez; and five book reviews by Jeanine Pfahlert, Patrick Adamson, Sarah Lonsdale, James Hodgson, and Maria Korolkova. Keywords: Halit Refiğ, Western Civilization, Collective Memory, Actor-Director relationship, Landscape in Bollywood, Representation of Arabs, Postcolonial Ghetto, Kannywood, Nollywood, Lars von Trier, American remakes New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Volume 7.1 (2018) | ISSN 2158-8724 (online) | DOI 10.5195/cinej.2018.222 | http://cinej.pitt.edu http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/articles/digpubtype/index.html http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressIndex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ CINEJ Cinema Journal: Editorial Volume 7.1 (2018) | ISSN 2158-8724 (online) | DOI 10.5195/cinej.2018.222 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 2 Editorial Bengisu Bayrak The volume 7.1 is comprised of twelve articles and five book reviews. Murat Akser analyzes Halit Refiğ’s film I Lost My Heart to a Turk (1969) which is depicting a love story of a German woman and a Turkish worker intertwined with issues revolving around the concept of national identity. He identifies the parameters used by Refiğ to position the Turkish identity in his film and emphasize the special role of women in Turkish modernization. “Presentation of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Turkish Media” by Zafer Parlak and Mehmet Işık surveys the Turkish mainstream media to reveal the representation of Ceylan, particularly after the release of Winter Sleep. The writers analyze the discourse of critics and conclude that Ceylan’s portrayal is unfair and raises secondary issues like the relevance of “reel politics” rather than his aesthetics. In “Apocalypse at Painting to Cinema; The End of Western Civilization and Hegemony” Selma Köksal traces the concept of apocalypse in cinema through the visual footprints of art history. Her study juxtaposes the apocalyptic images from several painters with contemporary film makers’, who, she claims, express their distress over the western civilization. In “From Box Office to Memory: Telling Stories is not Innocent Act”, Ayla Kanbur compares the narratives of two films from her “mnemonic coincidences” in order to discuss the contested nature of collective memory. She draws on the assumption that, in terms of narrative both memory and film work similarly. Kanbur relates her argument to the global film industry which ensures the circulation of certain meanings and ideologies. “Interpersonal Relations as a Tool to Film Directing” shows the complexity of being a film director and opens the debate which is rarely issued in film studies. According to Caio Augusto Camargo Bogoni and Renate B. Michel a film director must have and improve the qualities of CINEJ Cinema Journal: Bengisu Bayrak Volume 7.1 (2018) | ISSN 2158-8724 (online) | DOI 10.5195/cinej.2018.222 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 3 social skills such as empathy, objectivity, assertiveness which are invaluable for the personality of directors, equal to his technical and aesthetical knowledge. By taking landscape as a system of signs in “What’s in the Backdrop: Representation of Landscape in Bollywood Cinema”, Naveen Mishra examines the images of landscapes to define Bollywood from a distinctive perspective and claims that landscapes represented in Bollywood serve to construct an illusory social reality and identity for the Indian society. In “Order, Disobedience and Power in Kieslowski’s Dekalog”, Janet Barış evaluates Dekalog with 10 commandments in the series. For her, each one of Dekalog reflects the triangle of order-submission-disobedience, though differently, all of them expose the power relations in Foucauldian sense, that “the power in our era is directed to soul rather than body. “The Black Tent (1956) and Bengazi (1955): The Image of Arabs in two Post-empire Journeys into the Deserts of Libya” focuses on two films in the title as a case study to reveal the beginnings of new mentalities toward the Arab “Other”. Richard Andrew Voeltz observes the transition of orientalist discourse in the line of revolving politics of British-American axis during the period of decolonization and post-World War II. Emilie Herbert in “Violence in the Postcolonial Ghetto: Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome (1994)” evaluates the film to discuss the violence in ghettos it depicts. Employing the postcolonial insights of Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, Herbert asserts that “Onwurah shows the ghetto as a postcolonial space governed by necropolitics”, e.g. “being in a constant state of survival.” Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim & Aliyu Yakubu Yusuf, in “Going Beyond Boundaries: There is a Way and the Use of English Medium in Hausa Film Industry” compare Kannywood and Nollywood industries of Nigeria to question industrial success in terms of language. The writers suggest that English or any non-African language in African films must be debated “within the discourse of postcolonial studies.” In “Political Claustrophobia in Lars CINEJ Cinema Journal: Editorial Volume 7.1 (2018) | ISSN 2158-8724 (online) | DOI 10.5195/cinej.2018.222 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 4 von Trier’s Europa and America Trilogies”, Özlem Denli explores the viability of ‘political claustrophobia’, as a concept for elucidating the director’s ideological stance. She claims that the examined films reflect that Trier subscribes to a particular kind of pessimism that derails any intentions for another world, and traps his well-meaning characters in a feeling of futility, void or despair. And finally, Elif Kahraman Dönmez analyzes the American remake versions of British films and claims that the American remakes put America forward as a cultural product for sale, and makes the British narrative Americanized. Her analysis presents three narrative elements which are setting, intertextuality and Americanization. We hope that you will appreciate these articles; and the elaborate book reviews by Jeanine Pfahlert (Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era), Patrick Adamson (Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film), Sarah Lonsdale (The War that Won’t Die: The Spanish Civil War in Cinema), James Hodgson (Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain), and Maria Korolkova (Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscape of Film and Media). I would like to end this editorial with a personal note. I have been the editor of CINEJ for the last four years, and I feel lucky to be a part of the team of this journal. During this time period CINEJ has become a venue for scholars from all around the world and it has been selected for coverage in the Clarivate Analytics Emerging Sources Citation Index. CINEJ will continue to grow and flourish in the international arena with its new editor in 2019. We would like to thank all the authors, peer reviewers, founders, the University of Pittsburgh staff, and the publishers.