The Peri Cinema is the old theater where Feridun began filming Broken Lives in May 1981. For Kemal, its set is at once a working film location and a place of uneasy contrast: he watches Papatya perform while Füsun, whose own acting ambitions he has tried to keep away from the film world, sits idle at home less than ten minutes away.

Setting and Transformation

The production used the Peri Cinema for scenes in a traditional-music nightclub. Its theater seats had been removed and replaced with tables, turning the auditorium into a performance venue; the stage was broad and deep, though smaller than those at Maksim’s and the Çakıl Gazino. The change of use drew on a familiar cinematic and social setting: from the 1950s through the 1970s, such venues, modeled on French cabarets, hosted singers, comics, acrobats, and magicians, and provided settings for musical melodramas.

In that convention, a heroine might first voice her consuming pain before a nightclub audience and later win applause and tears from another crowd. The cinema therefore served not merely as a backdrop but as a space where the film’s melodramatic story could be staged in a venue associated with public performance and popular entertainment.

Filming Broken Lives

At the first visit Kemal describes, the set manager was scolding extras for looking into the camera. Kemal watched from a distance as Feridun called for the scene to begin. Papatya then descended the catwalk with a microphone, flanked by the audience. Her performance brought the distracted set to attention: dozing extras revived, and even waiters carrying kebabs stopped to watch.

The adapted screenplay recast the story associated with Halit Ziya’s novel. Papatya played a woman who becomes famous as a singer in the nightclubs and patiently plots revenge against the man who took her virginity. Kemal sees the performance as an instance of Turkish cinema’s mixture of fairy-tale effect and vulgarity, but also regards Papatya as compelling in the role. The theater’s converted auditorium makes that transformation tangible: an old cinema becomes the nightclub in which the character’s grievance is displayed as entertainment.

Kemal, Füsun, and the Cinema

Kemal’s response to the set is divided. He enjoys watching the filming, yet the thought that Füsun is sitting at home in Çukurcuma, so close by, troubles him. He fears that if he misses supper at the Keskin home, Füsun will think he has chosen the film world over her company. After leaving the cinema, he walks down the cobblestone hill to the family’s house, driven by guilt as well as by the happiness he expects from seeing her.

The episode exposes a contradiction in his claim to protect Füsun from the film industry. He is glad to have kept her away from what he considers its sordid environment, but recognizes that she longs for the excitement of working on a set almost as much as she longs for fame. His attendance at the Peri Cinema thus brings him close to the world she wants while reinforcing the exclusion he has imposed on her.

A Place Preserved in Objects

The filming became part of the private history Kemal later organized through collected things. On May 17, 1981, the day filming began at the Peri Cinema, he collected three of Füsun’s cigarette butts. He describes their folded, compressed shapes as recalling her awkward silence and her effort to conceal what upset her. The cinema’s importance consequently extends beyond the scenes shot there: the day’s production and Füsun’s unspoken reaction survive together in objects that Kemal treats as records of feeling.