Screening Late Ottoman Memory in Payitaht Abdülhamid

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2019In viewing historical rehabilitations as objects that have the capacity to transform people, this thesis seeks to explain the popular consumption of one such rehabilitation as a function of its resonance with an existential memory of social transformation. This thesis’ deep reading of the Turkish television series Payitaht Abdülhamid, a show about the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876-1909, yields a new vantage point from which to view a cultural product’s inherent historicity – in spite of its historical inaccuracies and revisionist position. This paper demonstrates how, through an analysis of the cinematographic language of Payitaht Abdülhamid, we may access a subtextual articulation of an existential memory that explains its wide resonation today