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.
Author(s): Michelle Langford
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: xiv+278
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance
Chapter 1: Locating Allegory in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
Self-reflexivity and the birth of Iranian film allegory
Allegory in popular genre films: Masoud Kimiai’s Qeysar (1969)
The allegorical turn: Iranian New Wave cinema
Cycles of corruption in Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cycle (1978)
Ebrahim Golestan’s The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (1972)
Conclusion
Chapter 2: The Allegorical Children of Iranian Cinema
The allegorical palimpsest: Kamran Shirdel’s The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (1967)
Children as emblems of a new society: Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997)
Cracks in time: Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997)
Mina through the looking glass
Close listening to disembodied voices
National allegory and the revolutionary geography of Tehran
Conclusion
Some thoughts on the ideological effects of child-centredIranian films
Chapter 3: Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman
Towards an allegorical poetics
Horizontal negotiations
Havva – Negotiating continuity
Ahu – Negotiating narrative agency and the male gaze
Hura – Negotiating the domestic mise en scène
On the way to becoming
Vertical explorations
No conclusion: Towards a molecular becoming-woman
Chapter 4: Allegories of Love: The Cinematic Ghazal
From a cinema of poetry to the cinematic ghazal
Seeking the cinematic beloved: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Time for Love (1990)
Majid Majidi’s Baran (1999) and the cinesthetic ghazal
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Iranian War Cinema
The Sacred Defence genre and the logic of the wound
Gender, Vatan and the Sacred Defence genre
Vatan as woman in need of protection: The Third Day (2007)
Returning to the sacred Earth: He Who Sails (2007)
The scattered wounds of war: Gilaneh (2005)
A crippled nation
Gilaneh as 6,000-year-old dying mother
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Between Laughter and Mourning: About Elly as Trauerspiel of a Generation
Establishing a group dynamic: The collective protagonist
Akhar-e khandeh geryast: A dialectics of laughter and mourning12
From the dissimulating camera to the dissimulating character
Elly as emblematic other
Pensive moments and equivocal images
Elly disappears
The descent into melancholy
About Elly as Trauerspiel
Coda: Allegory Spills into the Streets
Notes
Chapter Introduction – Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter Coda: Allegory Spills into the Streets
Bibliography
Index
