Mute dreams, blind owls, and dispersed knowledges : Persian poesis in the transnational circuitry
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Bibliographic Information
Mute dreams, blind owls, and dispersed knowledges : Persian poesis in the transnational circuitry
Duke University Press, 2004
- : cloth
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [433]-448) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Over the past decade Iranian films have received enormous international attention, garnering both critical praise and popular success. Combining his extensive ethnographic experience in Iran and his broad command of critical theory, Michael M. J. Fischer argues that the widespread appeal of Iranian cinema is based in a poetics that speaks not only to Iran's domestic cultural politics but also to the more general ethical dilemmas of a world simultaneously torn apart and pushed together. Approaching film as a tool for anthropological analysis, he illuminates how Iranian filmmakers have incorporated and remade the rich traditions of oral, literary, and visual media in Persian culture.Fischer reveals how the distinctive expressive idiom emerging in contemporary Iranian film reworks Persian imagery that has itself been in dialogue with other cultures since the time of Zoroaster and ancient Greece. He examines a range of narrative influences on this expressive idiom and imagery, including Zoroastrian ritual as it is practiced in Iran, North America, and India; the mythic stories, moral lessons, and historical figures written about in Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh; the dreamlike allegorical world of Persian surrealism exemplified in Sadeq Hedayat's 1939 novella The Blind Owl; and the politically charged films of the 1960s and 1970s. Fischer contends that by combining Persian traditions with cosmopolitan influences, contemporary Iranian filmmakers-many of whom studied in Europe and America-provide audiences around the world with new modes of accessing ethical and political experiences.
Table of Contents
By Way of Acknowledgments:
Divided Selves and Doubled Genealogies vii
Prelude: After Epic, Writing, Painting, and Film 1
I. Speaking After Zarathustra: Ritual, Epic, and Philosophical Forms of Reason
Prologue 17
1. Yasna: Performative Ritual, Narrative Mnemonic 25
2. Shahnameh: Parable Logic 66
Coda: Illuminations: Philosophical Allegory 131
II. Seeing After Film: Textual and Cinematic Forms of Ethical Reason
3. Awaiting the Revolution: Surrealism Persian Style 151
4. Filmic Judgment and Cultural Critique: The Work of Art, Ethics, and Religion in Postrevolution Iranian Cinema 222
5. War Again: Qandahar, 911--
Figure and Discourse in Iranian Cinematic Writing 259
Coda: Balancing Acts (After 9/11) 355
Epilogue: Beyond "Mobile Armies of Metaphors": Scheherezade Films the Games 370
Notes 395
Bibliography 433
Index 449
by "Nielsen BookData"
