Download or read book Makhmalbaf at Large written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The name of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is almost synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and over the last quarter of a century, his career as filmmaker and writer has reflected the tumultuous history of his homeland and the fate of its neighbours. Hamid Dabashi draws from his friendship with Makhmalbaf, as well as his direct involvement with Makhmalbaf's films and thought, to give us this deeply engaging book on the tumultuous life and spectacular career of a great filmmaker. This is also the account of Makhmalbaf's transformation, from committed Muslim revolutionary, who was jailed for his part in the revolution, into an artistic humanist of great energy and elegance. His films, including 'The Peddler' and 'The Time for Love', 'Salaam Cinema', 'Gabbeh', 'Silence' and 'Kandahar', confound conventional genres and are always surprising. They represent his own journey and take part in it, in ways that Dabashi explores with great insight. Makhmalbaf's cinematic career started in Iran and has since expanded into Turkey, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and into Europe. Dabashi uncovers how, moving across boundaries, Makhmalbaf's creative genius can illuminate our contemporary world. And this book is in part the story of a friendship. As Mohsen Makhmalbaf writes in its Preface: 'Hamid Dabashi - this pious atheist friend of mine, the man who loves cinema and hates art, this political activist who abhors politics, this thinking, pondering, critical intellect... I have learned much from him. Perhaps he too, has learned from me. The times he and I have spent together have been occasions of discovery and illumination.'

Download or read book Film in the Middle East and North Africa written by Josef Gugler and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A timely window on the world of Middle Eastern cinema, this remarkable overview includes many essays that provide the first scholarly analysis of significant works by key filmmakers in the region.

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 Iranian Cinema Uncensored written by Shiva Rahbaran and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Iranian Cinema is considered by many to be the most fascinating cultural phenomenon produced within the Islamic Republic of Iran. Containing twelve first-hand interviews with the most renowned film-makers living and working in contemporary Iran, this book provides insights into film-making within a society often at odds with its rulers. Reflecting upon the 1979 revolution and its influence on their work, as well as the effect of their films on Iranian audiences, film-makers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi highlight the key issues surrounding the reception of Iranian cinema in the West and also its role in the development of Iran's global image. Through these conversations Shiva Rahbaran reveals that the seeds of the New Iranian Cinema were sown long before the revolution, and that Iranian film-makers gave rise to a cinema which became a global phenomenon despite censorship, sanctions and political isolation.

Download or read book De Westernizing Film Studies written by Saer Maty Ba and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on ‘Western’ ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of ‘the West and the rest’ in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures ‘connect’ globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study. The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics. Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

Download or read book Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism written by Samuel Hodgkin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

Download or read book Corpus Anarchicum written by H. Dabashi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dabashi's newest book is a meditation on suicidal violence in the immediate context of its most recent political surge and a critical examination of the radical transformation of the human body, supported by close readings of cinematic and artistic evidence.

Download or read book A Colourful Presence written by Maryam Ghorbankarimi and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the changes in the representation of women in Iranian cinema since the 1960s, and investigates the reasons and motives for this. Iranian cinema, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, has been closely monitored by the ruling power, and has been utilized to relay messages and information that comply with the ruling ideology. However, it was only after the 1979 Revolution and the subsequent legitimization of cinema by the Islamic rule that cinema became widely accessible to the general public. Within this context, this book explores the changing roles of women in film production and their representation in films made between the 1960s and 2000s. Although some aspects of women’s lives became stricter after the revolution, it was in the late 1980s that women took a prominent role both behind and in front of the camera for the first time. It is demonstrated here that such shifts were due to several factors, including factionalism within the Islamic Republic, shifts in the Iranian film industry, and the emergence of a group of highly educated film production teams, in addition to the fuller integration of women into the film industry, which is analyzed in particular detail. This study explores a number of representative female-centric films, with a focus on their cultural, social and cinematic contexts. Discussing these films with respect to the representation of women, it uses textual analysis as its base methodology. Interviews conducted with filmmakers and people active in the industry also serve to place the films into their historical, social, and political context.

Download or read book Cinema in Muslim Societies written by Ali Ahmad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collates a comprehensive range of fascinating essays by leading authors on film from across the Muslim world. Responding to political and theoretical misconceptions about Islam and Muslim culture, it covers North African, Arab and Asian cinemas in a rich series of industry histories, single film studies and detailed analyses of celebrated directors. Cinema in Muslim Societies is innovative and timely in its explicit engagement with vexing questions of Islamic aesthetics, political activism, socialism and the role of women in Muslim contexts. The authors explore a wide variety of topics, from cinematic art and poetry to religious identity and pornography. Debated extensively at a programme of public talks and screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2011, this volume remains supremely relevant in a world of polarising identities and political violence engulfing Muslim societies and the West. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third Text.

Download or read book Shi ism written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a Western world anxious to understand Islam and, in particular, Shi’ism, this book arrives with urgently needed information and critical analysis. Hamid Dabashi exposes the soul of Shi’ism as a religion of protest—successful only when in a warring position, and losing its legitimacy when in power. Dabashi makes his case through a detailed discussion of the Shi’i doctrinal foundations, a panoramic view of its historical unfolding, a varied investigation into its visual and performing arts, and finally a focus on the three major sites of its contemporary contestations: Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. In these states, Shi’ism seems to have ceased to be a sect within the larger context of Islam and has instead emerged to claim global political attention. Here we see Shi’ism in its combative mode—reminiscent of its traumatic birth in early Islamic history. Hezbollah in Lebanon claims Shi’ism, as do the militant insurgents in Iraq, the ruling Ayatollahs in Iran, and the masses of youthful demonstrators rebelling against their reign. All declare their active loyalties to a religion of protest that has defined them and their ancestry for almost fourteen hundred years. Shi’sm: A Religion of Protest attends to the explosive conflicts in the Middle East with an abiding attention to historical facts, cultural forces, religious convictions, literary and artistic nuances, and metaphysical details. This timely book offers readers a bravely intelligent history of a world religion.

Download or read book Recasting American and Persian Literatures written by Amirhossein Vafa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading literary and cinematic events between and beyond American and Persian literatures, this book questions the dominant geography of the East-West divide, which charts the global circulation of texts as World Literature. Beyond the limits of national literary historiography, and neocolonial cartography of world literary discourse, the minor character Parsee Fedallah in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is a messenger who travels from the margins of the American literature canon to his Persian literary counterparts in contemporary Iranian fiction and film, above all, the rural woman Mergan in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel Missing Soluch (1980). In contention with Eurocentric treatments of world literatures, and in recognition of efforts to recast the worldliness of American and Persian literatures, this book maintains that aesthetic properties are embedded in their local histories and formative geographies.

Download or read book Islamic Liberation Theology written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-05-14 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a radical piece of counter-intuitive rethinking of the clash of civilizations theory and global politics. In this richly detailed criticism of contemporary politics, Hamid Dabashi argues that after 9/11 we have not seen a new phase in a long running confrontation between Islam and the West, but that such categories have in fact collapsed and exhausted themselves. The West is no longer a unified actor and Islam is ideologically depleted in its confrontation with colonialism. Rather we are seeing the emergence of the US as a lone superpower, and a confrontation between a form of imperial globalized capital and the rising need for a new Islamic theodicy. The combination of political salience and theoretical force makes Islamic Liberation Theology a cornerstone of a whole new generation of thinking about political Islamism and a compelling read for anyone interested in contemporary Islam, current affairs and US foreign policy. Dabashi drives his well-supported and thoroughly documented points steadily forward in an earnest and highly readable style.

Download or read book Post Orientalism written by Hamid Dabashi and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections over many years on the question of authority and the power to represent. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? When initiated in the most powerful military machinery in human history, the United States of America, already deeply engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, such militant acts of representation speak voluminously of a far more deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, a phenomenon that will have to be unearthed and examined. In his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, Edward Said traced the origin of this power of representation and the normative agency that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe, which enabled them to write and represent the people they thus sought to rule. The insights of Edward Said in Orientalism went a long way in explaining conditions of domination and representation from the classical colonial period in the 18th and 19th century to the time that he wrote his landmark study in the mid 1970's. Though many of his insights still remain valid, Said's observations need to be updated and mapped out to the events that led to the post-9/11 syndrome. Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. This is not to question the significance of Orientalism and its principal concern with the colonial acts of representation, but to provide a different angle on Said's entire oeuvre, an angle that argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency. In Dabashi's tireless attempt to reach for a mode of knowledge production at once beyond the legitimate questions raised about the sovereign subject and yet politically poignant and powerful, postcolonial agency is central. Dabashi's contention is that the figure of an exilic intellectual is ultimately the paramount site for the cultivation of normative and moral agency with a sense of worldly presence. For Dabashi the figure of the exilic intellectual is paramount to produce counter-knowledge production in a time of terror.

Download or read book The Global Film Book written by Roy Stafford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Global Film Book is an accessible and entertaining exploration of the development of film as global industry and art form, written especially for students and introducing readers to the rich and varied cinematic landscape beyond Hollywood. Highlighting areas of difference and similarity in film economies and audiences, as well as form, genre and narrative, this textbook considers a broad range of examples and up to date industry data from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia and Latin America. Author Roy Stafford combines detailed studies of indigenous film and television cultures with cross border, global and online entertainment operations, including examples from Nollywood to Korean Cinema, via telenovelas and Nordic crime drama. The Global Film Book demonstrates a number of contrasting models of contemporary production, distribution and consumption of film worldwide, charting and analysing the past, present and potential futures for film throughout the world. The book also provides students with: a series of exploratory pathways into film culture worldwide illuminating analyses and suggestions for further readings and viewing, alongside explanatory margin notes and case studies a user friendly text design, featuring over 120 colour images a dynamic and comprehensive blog, online at www.globalfilmstudies.com, providing updates and extensions of case studies in the book and analysis of the latest developments in global film issues.

Download or read book Conversations with Mohsen Makhmalbaf written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf and published by Conversations. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Tehran in 1957, filmmaker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religious and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972, Makhmalbaf formed his own urban guerrilla group and two years later attacked a police officer, for which he was arrested and jailed. He remained incarcerated until 1978, when the revolutionary wave led by Ayatollah Khomeini freed him and launched his career as a writer and self-taught filmmaker. Since then, Makhmalbaf has gone on to make such highly admired films as Gabbeh and The Silence. The three lengthy conversations collected here, between Makhmalbaf and leading Iranian film critic and scholar Hamid Dabashi, traverse the filmmaker's experiences as a young radical, his critical stance regarding the current Islamic regime, and his fascination with films--both as product and as process. In this in-depth view of one of the most significant Middle Eastern filmmakers of our time, Makhmalbaf reflects on the relationship between cinema and violence, tolerance, and social change, as well as the political and artistic importance of the autonomy of the filmmaker.

Download or read book Makhmalbaf at Large written by Hamid Dabashi and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2008-01-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The name of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is almost synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and over the last 25 years, his career as filmmaker and writer has reflected the history of his homeland and the fate of its neighbours.

Download or read book Gendering History on Screen written by Julia Erhart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In movies about landmark historical events such as wars, occupations, or migrations or historically important personalities, there is an unspoken set of rules for how gender ought to be expressed. Often condemned by critics for being excessively emotional or pathetic, films by female directors featuring female protagonists may be popular with audiences but judged incapable of expressing 'real' history. Audiences learn more about the past from movies than from any other form of entertainment, and historical and heritage cinemas now comprise a burgeoning scholarly field. Yet to date there has not been a book-length analysis of female film directors' innovations in films about the historical past. With and without critical recognition, women are making important stories about the past and bringing new representations of agency and activism to the screen, often construed in ways that mobilise the past for the present, and always filtered through the lens of contemporary feminisms. Julia Erhart's new book situates women filmmakers' work within a context of other women directors from France, Denmark, Iran, Australia, the UK, the United States, and Spain and draws connections between their representational strategies and their concerns with visioning the past within the prism of the present. Written in an approachable yet theoretically informed prose, Erhart compellingly explores how foundational historiographic concepts like valour, memory, and resistance are re-envisioned within uniquely revised sub-genres that include biopics, historical documentaries, Holocaust movies, and films about the 'War on Terror'. Gendering History on Screen demonstrates how directors shape audiences' sense of the past, contour globally-relevant themes and narratives to suit female characters, and map a critique of national policies and institutions on to contemporary feminisms. Gendering History will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical film and women's cinema.