VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TURKISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE: A SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF ATEŞTEN GÖMLEK FILM POSTERS

Absstract Ateşten Gömlek was adapted for the screen from the novel by Halide Edip Adıvar, one of the most important women writers in Turkish literary history and a direct witness to the Turkish National Struggle. The novel's enduring success, together with its later film adaptations, demonstrates the cultural significance of both the literary work and its cinematic interpretations. The 1950 adaptation examined in this study is among the lost and currently inaccessible films of Turkish cinema. Consequently, the study focuses on the surviving visual evidence, particularly three posters produced for the film. Its principal aim is to investigate how the film has been evaluated by cinema historians and to interpret the prominent signs in these posters through a semiotic framework. The analysis considers the semantic and syntactic relations among visual and typographic elements and discusses their possible denotative and connotative meanings. Drawing primarily on Roland Barthes's semiotic approach, together with secondary literature on visual semiotics, Turkish cinema, and graphic design, the article evaluates how symbols of war, national identity, heroism, gender, and collective memory are constructed in the posters. In this respect, the posters are treated not merely as promotional materials but also as cultural documents reflecting the visual language and ideological atmosphere of their period. Keywords: Turkish War of Independence, Ateşten Gömlek, Turkish Cinema, National Struggle, Film Poster Artists