Reform Cinema In Iran

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 written by Hamid Reza Sadr and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-09-29 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent, post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has of course gained the attention of international audiences who have been struck by its powerful, poetic and often explicitly political explorations. Yet mainstream, pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, with a history stretching back to the early twentieth century, has been perceived in the main as lacking in artistic merit and, crucially, as apolitical in content. This highly readable history of Iran as revealed through the full breadth of its cinema re-reads the films themselves to tell the full story of shifting political, economic and social situations. Sadr argues that embedded within even the seemingly least noteworthy of mainstream Iranian films, we find themes and characterisations which reveal the political contexts of their time and which express the ideological underpinnings of a society. Beginning with the introduction of cinema to Iran through the Iranian monarchy, the book covers the broad spectrum of Iran's cinema, offering vivid descriptions of all key films. "Iranian Cinema" looks at recurring themes and tropes, such as the rural versus the 'corrupt' city and, recently, the preponderance of images of childhood, and asks what these have revealed about Iranian society. The author brings the story up to date explaining Iranian filmmaking after the events of September 11, from Mohsen Makhmalbaf's astonishing Kandahar to Saddiq Barmak's angry work Osama, to explore this most recent and breathtaking revival in Iranian cinema.

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 The Politics of Iranian Cinema written by Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iran has undergone considerable social and political upheaval since the revolution and this has been reflected in its cinema. Focusing on the practices of regulation, production and reception of films in Iran, this book explores the politics of Iranian cinema in its post-revolutionary context.

Download or read book Representing the Unpresentable written by Negar Mottahedah and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering book, Negar Mottahedeh explores the central issues of vision and visibility in Iranian culture. She focuses on historical and literary texts to understand the use of visual culture and performance traditions in the production of the contemporary nation. Tracing the historical mediation and dissemination of ideas for national reform in the modern period of Iran, the book examines the various discourses that have constituted the image of the unpresentable “Babi” as the figure of Iran’s Other. In her exploration of gender and Iranian cinema, the author powerfully argues that this unpresentable image continues to haunt contemporary Iranian cinema’s representations of the nation. As cinema began to displace other forms of representation in Iran, Islamic culture attempted to keep the motion picture industry free from what it perceived to be the taint of foreign values and intervention. With insight and detail, Mottahedeh looks at the revealing ways in which contemporary Iranian cinema has dealt with representing an unpresentable national modernity articulated through traversals in time and space. These deeply national tropes of traversal shaped the image of the “Babi,” against which nineteenth-century Iran produced its own modernity. This highly original work, signaling a paradigmatic shift in Iranian studies and gender studies, will be an invaluable resource for scholars in cultural, Iranian, or film studies.

Download or read book Whisper Tapes written by Negar Mottahedeh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Lyrical, intelligent, and passionately written, Whisper Tapes reignites a long dormant conversation about the urgency of global feminism.” —Shilyh Warren, University of Texas at Dallas Kate Millett was already an icon of American feminism when she went to Iran in 1979. She arrived just weeks after the Iranian Revolution, to join Iranian women in marking International Women's Day. Intended as a day of celebration, the event turned into a week of protests. Millett, armed with film equipment and a cassette deck to record everything around her, found herself in the middle of demonstrations for women’s rights and against the mandatory veil. Listening to the revolutionary soundscape of Millett's audio tapes, Negar Mottahedeh offers a new interpretive guide to Revolutionary Iran, its slogans, habits, and women’s movement—a movement that, many claim, Millett never came to understand. Published with the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the women's protests that followed on its heels, Whisper Tapes re-introduces Millett's historic visit to Iran and lays out the nature of her encounter with the Iranian women's movement. “In offering a deeply contingent history, Negar Mottahedeh beautifully shows Kate Millett's simultaneous closeness to and distance from the events surrounding her.” —Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University “Lyrical in style and poetic in meaning, Whisper Tapes challenges readers to adopt an intersectional view of Iranian feminist movements while adding layers and dimensionality to Millett’s preexisting literature.” ––Aisha Jitan, The Middle East Journal “Mottahedeh's illuminating study complements Millett's work and offers a more nuanced reading of a historic moment.” —Lucy Popescu, Times Literary Supplement

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.