The transformation of aging representations: Changing emotional tones in the new Turkish cinema

The aim of this study is to reveal the narrative and emotional transformation of aging representations in post-1990 Turkish cinema through a periodical comparison. To this end, text mining and NRC emotion analysis were employed; subtitle transcripts of 12 purposively sampled films, divided into three periods (1990–2000, 2001–2012, 2013–present) grounded in the structural ruptures of the Turkish film industry, were analyzed across eight basic emotion categories. In the films examined, the negative emotion ratio does not rise in a straight line: it dips to 37.4% in the second period, when melodramatic positivity peaks, and climbs to its highest level, 42.6%, in the third, while the positive ratio falls to its lowest value. Between-film variance narrows across successive periods, and the negative emotional load becomes increasingly standardized at film level. The first period registers the erosion of traditional authority, the second marks the transformation of the elderly into a medicalized burden, and the third is characterized by existential loneliness and communicative rupture. Drawing on Cultivation Theory as a framework for the cumulative meaning-making of representations rather than as a measure of audience effects, the study argues that cinematic representations both reflect and potentially construct societal perceptions of aging, while discussing the ideological function of popular cinema and proposing computational approaches such as text mining and sentiment analysis as a methodological extension to the field of Turkish film studies.