Browsing by Subject "Iranian cinema"
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Item Bahman Ghobadi's hyphenated cinema : an analysis of hybrid authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics(2012-05) Major, Anne Patrick; Kumar, Shanti; Ramirez Berg, CharlesThis thesis examines Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi’s authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics through the theoretical and methodological lens of hybridity. According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity can be understood as a “third space,” in which cultural meanings resist binary either/or logic, and are instead negotiated through a logic that is neither one, nor the other. Thus, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as a “third space” provides a fruitful framework to analyze Ghobadi’s authorship and cinematic style. By analyzing Ghobadi’s neo-realist treatment of Kurdistan’s cultural and physical landscape and hybrid cinematic aesthetics in his first two features, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004), this research calls attention to intercultural processes that generate cultural meaning through indexical and material as opposed to symbolic registers. In addition, this thesis applies Hamid Naficy’s concept of “shifters” to examine how Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and narrative reflexivity garners international audiences in his two latest features, Half Moon (2006) and No One Knows about Persian Cats (2009). This project also examines how Ghobadi’s use of a digital camera and employment of digital cinematic techniques to capture Iran’s underground rock music culture in No One Knows about Persian Cats, testifies to the authenticity of this cultural space while simultaneously structuring the film as a global vehicle for these Iranian musicians’ performances. Ultimately, Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics function as a means to enunciate and globally circulate diverse Kurdish and Iranian cultural identities. In doing so, this thesis illuminates hybrid modes of cultural production and hybrid cultural subjectivities that have emerged in the contemporary globalized landscape.Item "I died, still waiting on the truth" : self-identification and communicating personal ethics in the documentaries of exiled Iranian female filmmakers(2015-05) Hunt, Jennifer, M.A. Anne; Atwood, Blake Robert, 1983-; Mulder, StephennieBeginning in the late 1990's and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, an impressive array of documentaries created by a small group of exiled Iranian female documentary filmmakers about issues arising from within Iran's borders became readily available to audiences living in the United States and Europe. While professed and marketed as nuanced and comprehensive documentations of these topics, this cohort of films, in actuality, function on a second plane--one in which filmmakers employ and appropriate filmic representations of the historical world to construct documentaries in which they themselves constitute the actual subjects of the films they create. To illustrate how these filmmakers accomplish this second function, this thesis explores the ways in which documentarists construct various filmic gazes, or ways of seeing, within their films and participate through these gazes in ethical arguments that prioritize a particular way of existing within the historical world they are documenting. Form this analysis, this thesis concludes that exiled female Iranian documentary filmmakers construct various filmic gazes to create documentaries that participate in ethical arguments prioritizing processes of self-identification participated in by the filmmaker and filmic representations of the documentarist's socio-cultural identity over comprehensive documentation of a subject in the historical world.Item Re-envisioning reform : film, new media, and politics in post-Khomeini Iran(2011-12) Atwood, Blake Robert; Ghanoonparvar, M. R. (Mohammad R.); Hillmann, Michael C.; Brustad, Kristen; Aghaie, Kamran S.; Carter, Mia; Rahimieh, NasrinThis dissertation opens a multimedia archive of contemporary Iranian films, documentaries, newspaper articles, and political philosophies in order to rethink the complicated relationship between cinema and the Reformist Movement in Iran. The existing scholarship has largely reduced interactions between these institutions to modes of mutual support, noting Mohammad Khatami’s backing of the film industry during his tenure as Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance (1982-1992) and his liberal cultural policies as president (1997-2005). However, the research presented in this dissertation indicates that Iranian cinema and the Reformist Movement crucially informed one another, and the dynamics of their exchange functioned on an ideological level. More than just benefiting from the Reformist Movement, certain films and filmmakers helped to shape and articulate its emerging political discourse. At the same time, the dialogue between Khatami’s Reformist Movement and Iranian cinema have generated a unique set of aesthetic qualities that includes a revival of mystic love, the use of Tehran as a metaphoric site of social and structural reformation, and reconfigurations of perceptions of time. I examine films that were released during Khatami’s tenure as Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance, his presidential campaign and presidency in order to interrogate the relationship between film and reform and to theorize the visual language that has emerged to enunciate this relationship. I also consider a film and a music video released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended. They did not benefit directly from his cultural liberalism but nevertheless participate in central reformist debates. Their experimentation with form suggests that the reformist aesthetic possesses a momentum that permits it to develop and transform without explicit contact with the political movement that inspired it. I argue, therefore, that the Reformist Movement marked a change on the political landscape at the same time that it signaled a new trend in the country’s cinematic history. I connect innovations in film to current trends in new media and youth culture and propose a new reformist model for the study of cultural productivity in contemporary Iran, one that moves past the reductive category of “post-Revolution.”