The Soldier-Hero On Screen places the narrative history of Turkish Cinema alongside the military institutionally and, therefore, archivally, configures this narrative history as one passed down as part of a patrilineal historiography. Across the chapters, my dissertation demonstrates how this timeline remains consistent and persistent across Turkish society, film, and television, figuratively manifest in what I call the soldier-hero. The soldier-hero is indelibly woven into the very fabric of Turkish narratives, setting a national, ideological, and figural precedent. By following the soldier-hero from the institutional archive into the streaming era, I chart how such highly politicized representational tools travel across multiple registers. Transcribed into the figural, this militarist and ethno-nationalist rhetoric manifests as the soldier-hero, a figure of ideal masculinity presented and constituted within Turkish cinema and culture. My analysis begins by tracing figurations of the soldier-hero, both within the nation’s institutional history and as a transmutable figure embedded within Turkish cinema and television. Malleable in form, representations of the soldier-hero visually connect individual citizens and genres across a homogenous, familial/familiar Turkey. Whether it be the introduction and exhibition of early films or the generic adoption and adaptation of transnationally popular genres, transnational contact informs and shapes national contexts every day. Resurfacing these proverbial losses offers a corrective possibility for how we narrate the histories of cinema we are authoring. Doing so problematizes the assumption that transnational modes of address, particularly in film and television, are inherently detached from the national.