ABSTRACT
Starting from the late nineteenth century, European cinematographers travelled around the Ottoman territories shooting films that featured cityscapes, landscapes as well as the social, religious and entertainment life of that period. European cinematographers filmed in the entire Ottoman territory, namely the Balkans, Istanbul, Anatolia, the Arab peninsula and, finally, North Africa. Some of those short non-fiction films were screened for locals but most of them were screened for audiences in European movie theatres. Pointing to the camera’s Oriental gaze and the woman as its object of desire, this chapter analyses how these forgotten films documented the cultural heritage of the Ottoman period.
