Roman Heroes in Cinema

November 2019 – June 2020 / Akbank Sanat

Coordinator: Prof. Dr. M. Emin Kahraman

This period will explore one of the most popular and ambitious topics in the interaction between literature and cinema – "Novel Characters on Screen" – by both reading and watching. Are novel characters simply characters? In fact, there is no direct correspondence between character development and the creation of novel characters. We could say that a character's development can be a separate subject in a novel. On the other hand, the richness of detail in novels, the streets through which novel characters move, nature, the position in which they are tossed within a network of relationships, sometimes – as in "Crime and Punishment" – being drawn toward behaviors they themselves did not expect, sometimes living unaware while being filled with inexplicable pain through the unique details shown by the writer as in Mrs. Dalloway – all this tells us that what makes a character a "hero" is the novel's overall structure and design. A character's position in a novel can symbolize, for example, the last remnants of an era that bids farewell to chivalry as in Don Quixote, or lay bare the relationship between the state, crime and family that is lived but unseen, as in Puzo's "The Godfather". In this process, unique human beings can emerge before us: Carmen, Zebercet, Meryem, Osman, Jean-Baptiste, Alex and others…