Masculinity, Memory and Violence in Karanlık Gece

This article examines Karanlık Gece (A Dark Night, Özcan Alper, 2022) through the relational nexus of masculinity, violence, and social remembrance. Drawing on a rural murder narrative, the film explores how masculinities are constructed, how they enter into crisis, and how they are reproduced through the denial of the past. The study interrogates gendered forms of confronting the past and investigates the place of remembering and forgetting within masculine practices. Through thematic and semiotic analysis, it reveals recurring images and continuities that illustrate masculinity as part of a social consensus built upon violence, power, and silence. Within this framework, the article discusses how masculinity operates as a form of memory that carries both the repressed violence of the past and the regimes of silence of the present. As an inquiry into the theoretical relationship between masculinity, memory, and violence, the article proposes an intersectional framework that situates masculinity within the field of memory studies.