Mute dreams, blind owls, and dispersed knowledges : Persian poesis in the transnational circuitry / Michael M.J. Fischer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fischer, Michael M. J., 1946-

Series:

e-Duke books scholarly collection.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Iran--History.

Motion pictures.

Iran--Civilization.

Iran.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (487 pages)

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Speaking after Zarathustra : ritual, epic, and philosophical forms of reason

Yasna : performative ritual, narrative mnemonic

Shahnameh : parable logic

Coda : illuminationism, philosophical allegory

Seeing after film : textual and cinematic forms of ethical reason

Awaiting the revolution : surrealism Persian style

Filmic judgment and cultural critique : the work of art, ethics and religion in post-revolution Iranian cinema

War again : Qandahar, 911

figure and discourse in Iranian cinematic writing

Coda : balancing acts (after 9/11)

Beyond "Mobile Armies of Metaphors": Scheherezade films the games.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [433]-448) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9786613023728

9781283023726

1283023725

9780822385516

0822385511

OCLC:

220951190