Download or read book Displaced Allegories written by Negar Mottahedeh and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran’s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republic’s system of modesty, had to ensure that women on-screen were veiled from the view of men. This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema. Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics.
Download or read book Abbas Kiarostami and Film Philosophy written by Mathew Abbott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deflationary, anti-theoretical film-philosophy through the cinema of Abbas KiarostamiMathew Abbott presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostamis films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, NoAl Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostamis most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love.
Download or read book Allegory in Iranian Cinema written by Michelle Langford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iranian filmmakers have long been recognised for creating a vibrant, aesthetically rich cinema whilst working under strict state censorship regulations. As Michelle Langford reveals, many have found indirect, allegorical ways of expressing forbidden topics and issues in their films. But for many, allegory is much more than a foil against haphazardly applied censorship rules. Drawing on a long history of allegorical expression in Persian poetry and the arts, allegory has become an integral part of the poetics of Iranian cinema. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explores the allegorical aesthetics of Iranian cinema, explaining how it has emerged from deep cultural traditions and how it functions as a strategy for both supporting and resisting dominant ideology. As well as tracing the roots of allegory in Iranian cinema before and after the 1979 revolution, Langford also theorizes this cinematic mode. She draws on a range of cinematic, philosophical and cultural concepts - developed by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz and Vivian Sobchack - to provide a theoretical framework for detailed analyses of films by renowned directors of the pre-and post-revolutionary eras including Masoud Kimiai, Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Kamran Shirdel, Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Asghar Farhadi. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explains how a centuries-old means of expression, interpretation, encoding and decoding becomes, in the hands of Iran's most skilled cineastes, a powerful tool with which to critique and challenge social and cultural norms.
Download or read book Iranian Cinema in a Global Context written by Peter Decherney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iranian films have been the subject of much critical and scholarly attention over the past several decades, and Iranian filmmakers are mainstays of international film festivals. Yet most of the attention has been focused on a small segment of Iranian film production: auteurist art cinema. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context, on the other hand, takes account of the wide range of Iranian cinema, from popular youth films to low budget underground films. The volume also reassesses the global circulation of Iranian art cinema, looking at its reception at international festivals, in university curricula, and at the Academy Awards. A final theme of the volume explores the intersection between politics and film, with essays on post-Khatami reform influences, representations of ineffective drug policies, and the representation of Jewish characters in Iranian film. Taken together, the essays in this volume present a new definition of the field of Iranian film studies, one that engages global media flows, transmedia interaction, and a heterogeneous Iranian national cinema.
Download or read book Reform Cinema in Iran written by Blake Atwood and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is nearly impossible to separate contemporary Iranian cinema from the Islamic revolution that transformed film production in the country in the late 1970s. As the aims of the revolution shifted and hardened once Khomeini took power and as an eight-year war with Iraq dragged on, Iranian filmmakers confronted new restrictions. In the 1990s, however, the Reformist Movement, led by Mohammad Khatami, and the film industry, developed an unlikely partnership that moved audiences away from revolutionary ideas and toward a discourse of reform. In Reform Cinema in Iran, Blake Atwood examines how new industrial and aesthetic practices created a distinct cultural and political style in Iranian film between 1989 and 2007. Atwood analyzes a range of popular, art, and documentary films. He provides new readings of internationally recognized films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Time for Love (1990), as well as those by Rakhshan Bani, Masud Kiami, and other key Iranian directors. At the same time, he also considers how filmmakers and the film industry were affected by larger political and religious trends that took shape during Mohammad Khatami's presidency (1997-2005). Atwood analyzes political speeches, religious sermons, and newspaper editorials and pays close attention to technological developments, particularly the rise of video, to determine their role in democratizing filmmaking and realizing the goals of political reform. He concludes with a look at the legacy of reform cinema, including films produced under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose neoconservative discourse rejected the policies of reform that preceded him.
Download or read book Mothers of Invention written by So Mayer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection belongs on the bookshelves of students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist and queer media studies, labor studies, filmmaking and production, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Libidinal Currents written by Joseph Allen Boone and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-02-03 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to scholar Joseph Allen Boone, modern fiction with its strong currents of sexuality creates a poetics of the perverse with the power to influence how we think. Challenging common theories, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. A landmark work in the study of modernist fiction and the study of sexuality and gender.
Download or read book Dracula and the Eastern Question written by M. Gibson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-07-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets the writings of Merimee, Le Fanu, Stoker and Verne in the context in which they were written - namely the response to Balkan, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian politics. Gibson analyzes their works to reveal that the vampire acts as an allegory of the Near East through which constitutes a challenge to the 'orientalism' argument of today.
Download or read book Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran written by Pedram Dibazar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran, Pedram Dibazar argues that everyday life in Iran is a rich domain of social existence and cultural production. Regular patterns of day-to-day practice in Iran are imbued with forms of expressivity that are unmarked and inconspicuous, but have remarkable critical value for a cultural study of contemporary society. Blended into the rhythms of everyday life are nonconformist modes of presence, subtle in their visibility and non-confrontational in their resistance to the established societal norms and structures. This volume is about such everyday tactics and creativity as lived in space, visualised in cultural forms and communicated through media. Through its analysis of familiar everyday experiences, Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran covers a wide range of ordinary practices-such as walking, driving, shopping and doing or watching sports-and spatial conditions-such as streets, cars, rooftops, shopping centres and stadiums. It also explores a variety of cultural formations, including film, photography, architecture, literature, visual arts, television and digital media. This book offers new ways of thinking about visual and urban cultures by highlighting a politics of everyday life that is conditioned on concerns over visibility and presence.
Download or read book Where Is Abbas Kiarostami written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2025 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Abbas Kiarostami suddenly passed away in July 2016, he was already an iconic figure in world cinema-and his reputation as a master filmmaker has only grown since. In this book, celebrated scholar Hamid Dabashi offers a new way of looking at Kiarostami's art world, one that questions the very idea of film philosophy. Dabashi's authoritative account of the philosophical resonances of Kiarostami's oeuvre offers an iconoclastic critique of the field's Eurocentrism and, in vivid prose, makes the case for a new method of appreciating the work of this essential figure. The result is a provocative perspective on the totality of Kiarostami's legacy that, with deep roots in Iranian aesthetic and Persian poetic and philosophical traditions, overcomes film's provincial preoccupation with its Western heritage and charts a new path forward for film philosophy."--
Download or read book The Plays and Films of Bahram Beyzaie written by Saeed Talajooy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bahram Beyzaie is one of Iran's leading playwrights and auteur filmmakers. This book examines several of Beyzaie's films and plays and their preoccupation with the modalities and transformations of Iranian contemporary, historical and mythical identity from different perspectives. The chapters analyse Beyzaie's influential plays such as Arash and So Dies Pahlevan Akbar and his filmic magnum opuses such as The Crow, Bashu, the Little Stranger and Killing Mad Dogs from a range of critical perspectives including ecofeminist, sociopolitical, new-historicist, archetypal and psychoanalytical readings. They also explore Beyzaie's dialogue with filmic genres such as noir, different Iranian languages such as Gilaki, Iranian epics and ritual practices such as ta'ziyeh plays and javanmardi chivalry cults. Together, the chapters show how Beyzaie's works negotiate narratives of belonging and undermine the dominant exclusionist discourses in Iran, and how they use the resources of Iranian folk and performance traditions to comment on the position of women, children, intellectuals, and minorities in society.
Download or read book What is Iran written by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Iran? What are its domestic politics? Its history? Its international relations? Here, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam sheds fresh light on these questions, offering a general introduction to everything there is to know about this country. Uniquely, he uses musical pieces as a way to offer a holistic understanding of the full spectrum of Iranian affairs. As a result, even the general reader is invited to traverse a wide array of topics in an interactive format which merges approaches from the social sciences with philosophy, poetry and art. These topics include a variety of themes, issues and personalities: from Trump, Khomeini, the Shah, Saddam Hussein and Qasem Soleimani, to Israel, Syria, Latin America, China and the Gulf monarchies. Ultimately, this book demonstrates in clear and accessible prose the impact of Iranian politics on a global scale, and offers solutions to the various crises enveloping the country in the region and beyond.
Download or read book Modern American Literature and Contemporary Iranian Cinema written by Morteza Yazdanjoo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this monograph addresses the dynamic yet understudied "intertextual dialogism" between modern American literature and contemporary Iranian Cinema, pinpointing how the latter appropriates and recontextualizes instances of the former to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Drawing on Louis Montrose’s catchphrase that Cultural Materialism foregrounds "the textuality of history, [and] the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. The recontextualization of Herzog, Franny and Zooey, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman into contemporary Iran provides an intertextual avenue to delineate the textuality of history and the historicity of texts
Download or read book Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution written by Pedram Partovi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics and academics have generally dismissed the commercial productions of the late Pahlavi era, best known for their songs and melodramatic plots, as shallow, derivative ‘entertainment’. Instead, they have concentrated on the more recent internationally acclaimed art films, claiming that these constitute Iranian ‘national' cinema, despite few Iranians having seen them. Film discourse, and even fan talk, have long attempted to marginalize the mainstream releases of the 1960s and 1970s with the moniker filmfarsi, ironically asserting that such popular favorites were culturally inauthentic. This book challenges the idea that filmfarsi is detached from the past and present of Iranians. Far from being escapist Hollywood fare merely translated into Persian, it claims that the better films of this supposed genre must be taken as both a subject of, and source for, modern Iranian history. It argues that they have an appeal that relies on their ability to rearticulate traditional courtly and religious ideas and forms to problematize in unexpectedly complex and sophisticated ways the modernist agenda that secular nationalist elites wished to impose on their viewers. Taken seriously, these films raise questions about standard treatments of Iran's modern history. By writing popular films into Iranian history, this book advocates both a fresh approach to the study of Iranian cinema, as well as a rethinking of the modernity/tradition binary that has organized the historiography of the recent past. It will appeal to those interested in Iranian cinema, Iranian history and culture, and, more broadly, readers dissatisfied with a dichotomous approach to modernity.
Download or read book Women and Islamic Cultures written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decade of the 21st century witnessed an explosion in scholarly and public interest in women and Islamic cultures, globally. From misguided media representations, to politically motivated state manipulations, to agenda-driven Islamist movements, to feminist and international NGO projects – the subject and image of Muslim women has become iconic and riveting. This volume unpacks the representations, motivations, agendas, and projects by focusing on the advances in scholarly research on women and Islamic cultures in the first decade of the 21st century. The editors of the pioneering Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures bring together leading scholars, discipline by discipline, to critically analyze state of the art research on women and Islamic cultures from 2003-2013. Editors for this volume include Suad Joseph, Marilyn Booth, Bahar Davary, Hoda Elsadda, Sarah Gualtieri, Virginia Hooker, Amira Jarmakani, Therese Saliba, and Elora Shehabuddin. Contributors include Suad Joseph, Azza Basarudin, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Amira Jarmakani, Sajeda Amin, Kamran Rastegar, Robina Mohammad, Annika Rabo, Ahmed Ragab, Vannessa Hearman, Bahar Davary, Michelle Hartman, Hoda Elsadda, Nerina Rustomji, Amaney Jamal, Vickie Langohr, Hania Sholkamy, Zayn Kassam, Rachel Rinaldo, Samar Habib.
Download or read book Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema written by Debbie C. Olson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight. Throughout the over one-hundred year history of cinema, the image of the child has been inextricably bound to filmic storytelling and has been equally bound to notions of romantic innocence and purity. This collection reveals, however, that there is a body of work that provides a counter note of darkness to the traditional portraits of sweetness and light. Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, there are a growing number of cinematic works that depict childhood has as a site of knowingness, despair, sexuality, death, and madness. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema challenges notions of the innocent child through an exploration of the dark side of childhood in contemporary cinema. The contributors to this multidisciplinary study offer a global perspective that explores the multiple conditions of marginalized childhood as cinematically imagined within political, geographical, sociological, and cultural contexts.
Download or read book Cinematic Journeys written by Dimitris Eleftheriotis and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinematic Journeys explores the interconnected histories, theories and aesthetics of mobile vision and cinematic movement. It traces the links between certain types of movement of/in the frame and broader cultural trends that have historically informed Western sensibilities. It contextualises that genealogy with detailed analysis of contemporary and recent 'travel films' as well as older works.The book investigates how movements of exploration, discovery and revelation are activated in specific cinematic narratives of travelling and displacement. Such narratives are analysed with attention to the mass population movements and displacements that form their referential background.Cinematic Journeys also examines the ways in which travelling affects film itself. Case studies focus on films as travelling commodities (with the popularity of Indian films in Greece in the 1950s and 60s as case study); and, through a study of subtitles, on the category of the 'foreign spectator' (who in the encounter with 'foreign' films moves across cultural borders).Films considered in the book include Sunrise, Slow Motion, Hukkle, Death in Venice, Voyage to Italy, The Motorcycle Diaries, Koktebel, Japon, Blackboards, Ulysses' Gaze, and the work of directors Tony Gatliff and Fatih Akin.
