Makhmalbaf at Large

Makhmalbaf at Large
Author: Hamid Dabashi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-11-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0857714554

The name of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is almost synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and over the last quarter of a century, his career as filmmaker and writer has reflected the tumultuous history of his homeland and the fate of its neighbours. Hamid Dabashi draws from his friendship with Makhmalbaf, as well as his direct involvement with Makhmalbaf's films and thought, to give us this deeply engaging book on the tumultuous life and spectacular career of a great filmmaker. This is also the account of Makhmalbaf's transformation, from committed Muslim revolutionary, who was jailed for his part in the revolution, into an artistic humanist of great energy and elegance. His films, including 'The Peddler' and 'The Time for Love', 'Salaam Cinema', 'Gabbeh', 'Silence' and 'Kandahar', confound conventional genres and are always surprising. They represent his own journey and take part in it, in ways that Dabashi explores with great insight. Makhmalbaf's cinematic career started in Iran and has since expanded into Turkey, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and into Europe. Dabashi uncovers how, moving across boundaries, Makhmalbaf's creative genius can illuminate our contemporary world. And this book is in part the story of a friendship. As Mohsen Makhmalbaf writes in its Preface: 'Hamid Dabashi - this pious atheist friend of mine, the man who loves cinema and hates art, this political activist who abhors politics, this thinking, pondering, critical intellect... I have learned much from him. Perhaps he too, has learned from me. The times he and I have spent together have been occasions of discovery and illumination.'

Film in the Middle East and North Africa

Film in the Middle East and North Africa
Author: Josef Gugler
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2011-01-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 029272327X

*A timely window on the world of Middle Eastern cinema, this remarkable overview includes many essays that provide the first scholarly analysis of significant works by key filmmakers in the region.

Reform Cinema in Iran

Reform Cinema in Iran
Author: Blake Atwood
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-11-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 023154314X

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.

Iranian Cinema Uncensored

Iranian Cinema Uncensored
Author: Shiva Rahbaran
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2015-12-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0857728725

The New Iranian Cinema is considered by many to be the most fascinating cultural phenomenon produced within the Islamic Republic of Iran. Containing twelve first-hand interviews with the most renowned film-makers living and working in contemporary Iran, this book provides insights into film-making within a society often at odds with its rulers. Reflecting upon the 1979 revolution and its influence on their work, as well as the effect of their films on Iranian audiences, film-makers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi highlight the key issues surrounding the reception of Iranian cinema in the West and also its role in the development of Iran's global image. Through these conversations Shiva Rahbaran reveals that the seeds of the New Iranian Cinema were sown long before the revolution, and that Iranian film-makers gave rise to a cinema which became a global phenomenon despite censorship, sanctions and political isolation.

De-Westernizing Film Studies

De-Westernizing Film Studies
Author: Saer Maty Ba
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136502513

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on ‘Western’ ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of ‘the West and the rest’ in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures ‘connect’ globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study. The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics. Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism

Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism
Author: Samuel Hodgkin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2023-12-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009411640

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

Corpus Anarchicum

Corpus Anarchicum
Author: H. Dabashi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2012-09-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137264136

Dabashi's newest book is a meditation on suicidal violence in the immediate context of its most recent political surge and a critical examination of the radical transformation of the human body, supported by close readings of cinematic and artistic evidence.

A Colourful Presence

A Colourful Presence
Author: Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1443884693

This book analyzes the changes in the representation of women in Iranian cinema since the 1960s, and investigates the reasons and motives for this. Iranian cinema, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, has been closely monitored by the ruling power, and has been utilized to relay messages and information that comply with the ruling ideology. However, it was only after the 1979 Revolution and the subsequent legitimization of cinema by the Islamic rule that cinema became widely accessible to the general public. Within this context, this book explores the changing roles of women in film production and their representation in films made between the 1960s and 2000s. Although some aspects of women’s lives became stricter after the revolution, it was in the late 1980s that women took a prominent role both behind and in front of the camera for the first time. It is demonstrated here that such shifts were due to several factors, including factionalism within the Islamic Republic, shifts in the Iranian film industry, and the emergence of a group of highly educated film production teams, in addition to the fuller integration of women into the film industry, which is analyzed in particular detail. This study explores a number of representative female-centric films, with a focus on their cultural, social and cinematic contexts. Discussing these films with respect to the representation of women, it uses textual analysis as its base methodology. Interviews conducted with filmmakers and people active in the industry also serve to place the films into their historical, social, and political context.

Cinema in Muslim Societies

Cinema in Muslim Societies
Author: Ali Ahmad
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317389611

This book collates a comprehensive range of fascinating essays by leading authors on film from across the Muslim world. Responding to political and theoretical misconceptions about Islam and Muslim culture, it covers North African, Arab and Asian cinemas in a rich series of industry histories, single film studies and detailed analyses of celebrated directors. Cinema in Muslim Societies is innovative and timely in its explicit engagement with vexing questions of Islamic aesthetics, political activism, socialism and the role of women in Muslim contexts. The authors explore a wide variety of topics, from cinematic art and poetry to religious identity and pornography. Debated extensively at a programme of public talks and screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2011, this volume remains supremely relevant in a world of polarising identities and political violence engulfing Muslim societies and the West. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third Text.