Politics in Motion

Abstract

Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema By Hamid Dabashi Mage, 2007 456 pp./$60.00 (hb) Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema By Negar Mottahedeh Duke University Press, 2008 216 pp./$22.00 (sb) Iranian Cinema: A Political History By Hamid Reza Sadr I.B. Tauris, 2006 392 pp./$33.00 (sb). It is pivotal point in Iran's political and cultural history. As Hamid Dabashi puts it in recent Al Ahram article, What is happening in Iran is 'revolution,' though not in mundane politics of despair but in form, in language, in style, in decorum, in demeanour, in and performative sublimity. (1) Judging from the show of green in support of the Iranian people at the Venice Film Festival--where Hana Makhmalbaf's Green Days, which documents the 2009 elections, was added to the program at the last minute Iranian filmmakers will play an important role in the future of cinema. Three recent books address questions of politics and film Iran, and each provides useful angle of analysis, though Negar Mottahedeh's Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema puts forth more careful deployment of film theory and more illuminating readings than the sweeping overviews in Hamid Reze Sadr's Iranian Cinema: A Political History and Hamid Dabashi's Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema Dabashi's Masters & Masterpieces seems to promise auteur criticism, but is more deeply guided by Dabashi's project of historicizing Iran's encounter with colonial European modernity. Like his previous work, Iran: A People Interrupted (200), Masters & Masterpieces provides rich account of Iranian literary and intellectual history. Dabashi covers twelve directors, beginning with the poet Forough Farrokhzad and concluding with Jafar Panahi. Each of these chapters places key film in its literary and political context, often pairing filmmakers with their literary collaborators--Dariush Mehrjui with psychiatrist and author Gholam Hosayn Sa'edi, Bahman Farmanara with surrealist writer Houshang Golshiri, and Ebrahim Golestan, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Bahram Beyza'i's film careers within their own literary work. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These chapters also form two complementary ares tracing formal change along the lines of realism, and marking shifts in political and aesthetic consciousness. The first formal are follows the development of that Dabashi characterizes as poetic in Farrokhzad's The House Is Black (1963), affective in Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror (1965), psychedelic in Mehrjui's The Cow (1969), actual in Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees (1994), and so on, down to the unself-conscious parabolic realism of Marziyeh Meshkini and the visual realism of Panahi. Imposing this formal framework seems forced at times, but it provides insights into cinema that grew out of Farrokhzad's blending of poetics of sound and editing with documentary vision. Directors who followed the lead of this metaphorical founding mother (or Eve to Golestan's Adam, as Dabashi puts it) continued to develop realist mode as it took shape through the literary experimentations of the latter half of the twentieth century. Realism, then, becomes complicated by these different literary aesthetics, until the full-fledged realism of Panahi. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This culmination of formal are in Panahi's work coincides with the end of are of political consciousness, and clears the way for liberatory unself-conscious style. Historically, Iranian filmmakers aimed consciously for a creative constitution of subject with an active historical agency, in defiance of its moral and normative colonization at the hands European modernity (31). But this self-conscious cinema of an earlier generation led to the un-self-conscious work of director like Meshkini whose aesthetics are . …