Bir Seyirci Araştırmasından Etnografik Deneyimler ve Hikâyeler

Researching the audience in the field of film studies, mostly criticized as being textcentered. That’s why the concept of researching and understanding audience has evolved from “film” to more inclusive concept called as “cinema”. The spectator watches the film, receives and makes a sense of it. But beyond that, while the spectator comes to the cinema hall and watches the film on various conditions and contexts, he/she interacts with other audiences in the cinema, and has a different set of actions on the way to cinema. This process, called the experience of cinemagoing, varies in different historical, social, economic and cultural contexts. This article, based on the project which is supported by TUBITAK and titled “Cinemagoing as a Cultural and Social Practice: An Oral History Study on Spectators’s Experiences in Turkey 1960s’ and 1970s” with number 115K269. This paper also describes the mass audience watch cinema films in Turkey increasingly based on the 1960s and 1970s and focuses on the oral history interviews process used to identify and explain the spectator experiences these years. In the article, which deals with the ethnographic experiences that are collected based on the axis of the researcher and spectator while working with the audiences in the field, through oral history interviews with hundreds of people in Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Kocaeli, both the spectator experiences in field and the experiences lived by the researchers while they were working with the spectator were interpreted in a self-reflexive way.