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Seminar: 22 February 2010

Dr Saeed Talajooy, more ...

Venue: University of East London Centre for Narrative Research, Docklands Campus, West Building, more ...

Iranian Cinema: Gender, Nation and Narration  

Abstract: The New Wave of Iranian Cinema is particularly famous for its use of non-professional actors and mixing documentary and feature film techniques in its use of camera and narrative designs. It is rooted in the poetic docudrama of Foroogh Farrokhzad and the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s, including films by Farrokh Ghaffari and Ebrahim Golestan. This paper will explore several prevalent narrative designs within the movement. I will compare Abbas Kiarostami's feature film Ten (2002 with Manijheh Hekmat's documentary Me, My Friend and My Room. I will also make references to Jafar Panahi's two features The Mirror and The Circle. In Kiarostami's Ten a female filmmaker installs a digital camera on the dashboard of her car to follow the lives of several women who get on her car. The meta-narrative, however, constructs the life of the fictional filmmaker herself. Hekmat's film takes a digital camera into a mental asylum, offering the inmates an opportunity to record some details of their lives. The meta-narrative, however, makes suggestive parallels between the conditions of one of the women with the condition of Iran as a country.    

This page last modified 8 February, 2012 by [UCL Mellon Admin]