SECRETS HIDDEN IN THE MIRAGE: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA IN THE TURKISH MIND

Authors : Sinan Akıllı

Pages : 7-26

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Publication Date : 2016-08-12

Article Type : Research

Abstract :Recent scholarly debates on British imperial historiography that call for an interdisciplinary study of “inter-imperial influences” in terms of their cultural and artistic expressions have strong implications for the field of adaptation studies. As an attempt to scrutinize the film adaptations of some specific “inter-imperial” historiographic material and literary non-fiction with historical value, this article offers readings of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926) that is his autobiographical account of the Arab revolt during World War I, Turkish director Lütfi Ömer Akad’s film İngiliz Kemal Lawrens’e Karşı (1952), and David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Illustrating how negatively the legend of Lawrence of Arabia was constructed in the Turkish public imagination mainly through domestic and foreign film productions, and in complete disregard for the sympathy T.E. Lawrence felt for the nationalist Turks which he expressed in his own account of the Arab Revolt, the article proposes that the study of the selected texts provides an insight into the possible socio-cultural consequences of audiences encountering adaptations that chronologically precede their source texts in terms of their availability.
Keywords : T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926), İngiliz Kemal Lawrens’e Karşı (1952), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), sinematik anlatım, kurgusal olmayan anlatım, uyarlama çalışmaları, tarihçilik