Displaced Allegories by Negar Mottahedeh
Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran’s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republic’s system of modesty, had to ensure that women on-screen were veiled from the view of men. This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema. Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics.
“Displaced Allegories is a compelling and provocative bookWith 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 Filmmaking
“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 Filmmaking
Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor in Literature and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008) and Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (2007).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780822342755 |
| ISBN 10 | 0822342758 |
| Title | Displaced Allegories |
| Author | Negar Mottahedeh |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Duke University Press Books |
| Year published | 2008-11-14 |
| Number of pages | 216 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |