Synopses & Reviews
Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iranandrsquo;s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republicandrsquo;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 cameraandrsquo;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 womanandrsquo;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 Bayzaandrsquo;i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinemaandrsquo;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.
Review
andldquo;Displaced Allegories is an extremely timely book. Negar Mottahedeh treats the issues of nation-building and the veiling of women together, demonstrating the various ways they are co-implicated in Iranian films. Questions of feminine sexuality and desire are shown to have a national-political purchase in Mottahedehandrsquo;s analysis. This not only produces more complex interpretations of the films than a focus on just one issue or the other would have allowed; it also andlsquo;updatesandrsquo; the still important but by now slightly tired feminist concerns that have motivated a significant strand of film theory since the mid-1970s.andrdquo;andmdash;Joan Copjec, author of Imagine Thereandrsquo;s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation
Review
andldquo;Displaced Allegories is a compelling and provocative book. With a remarkable talent for closely reading and analyzing films, Negar Mottahedeh examines some of the most important films produced in post-Revolutionary Iran. She offers a multilayered analysis of the tension between continuity and change, transgression and submission, and compliance and resistance inherent in the films.andrdquo;andmdash;Farzaneh Milani, author of Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers
Review
andldquo;Finally, a book about post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema that is not another general or political history of that cinema but an innovative, sustained, and rigorous analysis of it using film theory. Displaced Allegories is a highly original work.andrdquo;andmdash;Hamid Naficy, author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking
Synopsis
An analysis of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in relation to gender and nation.
About the Author
Negar Mottahedeh is Assistant Professor of Literature and Womenandrsquo;s Studies at Duke University.
Table of Contents
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Producing a National Cinema, a Woman's Cinema 1
1. Nationalizing Sense Perception: Bahram Bayza'i 15
2. Cleansing Vision: Abbas Kiarostami, Le Secret Magnifique 89
3. Negative Aesthetics: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema and 1970s Feminist Film Theory 140
Notes 169
Bibliography 183
Index 193