1st Edition
Iranian Cinema in a Global Context Policy, Politics, and Form
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.
1. Introduction Blake Atwood and Peter Decherney Part I: Essays 2. Iranian Film Policy in a Global Context Agnès Devictor 3. Re/Form: New Forms in Cinema and Media in Post-Khatami Iran Blake Atwood 4. From Theatre to Cinema and Vice-Versa: Socio-political and Economic Reasons for Professional Circulation Liliane Anjo 5. The Iranian Shylock: Jewish Representation in Iranian Film Orly Rahimiyan 6. A Bad State: Rakshan Bani-Etemad’s Mainline Roxanne Varzi 7. Through the Looking Glass: Reflexive Cinema and Society in Post-Revolution Iran Norma Claire Moruzzi 8. The Rise of "Youth Pop" Films in Contemporary Iran Negar Razavi 9. Iranian Documentary Filmmakers Association and the Fight for the House of Cinema Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri Part II: Short Takes 10. Notes on the Reception of Iranian Films in Brazil Ferdinando Martins and Daniel Marcolino Claudino de Sousa 11. Pomegranates and Cinema: Some Observations on a Decade or so of Selecting and Screening Iranian Films Anne Demy-Geroe 12. Who Are They?: Introducing American Students to Iran through Mohammad Shirvani’s Short Film, The Candidate John Limbert 13. The Haunting Obituary of a Dying Patriarch: A Separation Farzaneh Milani 14. The Contested Social Spaces of Film Practices since 2009 in Iran Mazyar Lotfalian 15. Underground Cinema in Iran Parviz Jahed 16. Censorship in Iranian Cinema ASL19
Biography
Peter Decherney is Professor of Cinema Studies and English and Director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet and Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American.
Blake Atwood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the coordinator of the Persian Language Program and an affiliate of the Program in Comparative Literature.
"Highly original and timely, this book helps us understand Iranian cinema from many perspectives. The authors in this volume don’t shy away from the most difficult questions that have arisen in the past few decades, and seek to complicate received discourses about Iranian film." -- Pardis Mahdavi, Pomona College, USA
