Description
Book SynopsisFollowing the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in order to conform with the Islamic Republic's system of modesty, Iran's film industry was required to ensure that Iranian women who appeared were veiled from the view of men. This work shows that post-Revolutionary filmmakers were forced to create a visual language for conveying meaning to audiences.
Trade Review“
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.”—
Farzaneh Milani, author of
Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers“
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 Mottahedeh’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 ‘updates’ the still important but by now slightly tired feminist concerns that have motivated a significant strand of film theory since the mid-1970s.”—
Joan Copjec, author of
Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation“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.”—
Hamid Naficy, author of
An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic FilmmakingTable of ContentsIllustrations 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
