August 31, 2011

Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 1)

In a 1992 essay called “The Status of Islamic Art in the Twentieth Century,” Wijdan Ali makes the familiar argument that industrialization has caused traditional arts in the Islamic world to decline (in the quantitative and qualitative senses of the word) as they were replaced by Western forms.[1] Though I have reservations about Ali’s somewhat nostalgic tone that seems to romanticize the past even as she looks to the future, I agree with her that contemporary artists of the Islamic world do not adopt Western forms so much as they adapt them, changing the content of these forms and re-contextualizing them to reflect their culture.[2] Cinema, for instance, has become a powerful artistic tool in many Islamic countries that not only expresses cultural values but has also been used to pose themes inherited from traditional arts in a new medium. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the thriving film culture of Iran, whose relation to classical Persian art is the subject of this essay.

The general argument of my essay is that Iranian cinema must be examined in the context of classical Persian arts, an orientation that will guarantee a more nuanced understanding of Iranian film culture as the inheritor of various artistic precedents. More specifically, my essay locates thematic and aesthetic influences of Persian painting in the works of writer and director Abbas Kiarostami with the hope that the interpretive framework established in this essay will provide a theoretical and methodological template for future research.

The structure of my essay is simple. First, I analyze the scholarly discourse surrounding Iranian cinema. In this section, I argue that Western scholars often unfairly minimize the Persian cultural and artistic context of Iranian cinema either to emphasize Iranian cinema’s indebtedness to Western cinema or to emphasize the socio-political context of the films. Both courses of inquiry have successfully framed often enlightening discussions, but they are both limited: the former rejects Persian cultural and artistic explanations for central thematic and aesthetic choices and unduly favors the predominance of European and American culture, while the latter is too often exploited as a platform for polemical arguments that distract the reader from the ostensible subject of the discourse. Ultimately, neither course of inquiry is able to adequately elucidate the major thematic and aesthetic concerns of the films. Thus, this section seeks to reorient scholarly discourse by presenting compelling parallels that deserve further examination.

In the second section, I take as a case example the films of Abbas Kiarostami, a renowned filmmaker often credited with introducing Iranian cinema to the global film scene as well as initiating many of the major thematic and aesthetic trends in contemporary Iranian cinema.[3] I build upon the argument established in the first section by demonstrating how studying Persian painting can provide a practical entry point into interpreting Kiarostami’s films, which are sometimes seen as impenetrable or deliberately ambiguous to many filmgoers.

NOTES

[1] Muqarnas 9 (1992), 187.

[2] Ibid., 187-188.

[3] Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 11.

August 24, 2011

Kobo Abe


From Inter Ice Age 4 (1959):

“The real future, I think, manifests itself like a ‘thing,’ beyond the abyss that separates it from the present. For example, if a man from the fifteenth century could return to life today, would he consider the present hell or paradise? Whatever he thought, one thing is quite clear and that is that he would no longer have the competency to judge. It’s the present, not him, that judges and decides.

“I too, therefore, believe that I must understand the future not as something to be judged but something rather that sits in judgment on the present. Thus, such a future is neither utopia nor hell and cannot become an object of curiosity. In short, it is nothing more or less than future society. And even if this society is developed to a far higher degree than the present one, it only occasions suffering in the eyes of those entombed in their microscopic sense of a continuing, predictable present.

“The future gives a verdict of guilty to this usual continuity of daily life.”

August 16, 2011

Upon spontaneous reconsideration

An updated list of my favorite albums from 2010.

1. Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me
2. Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest
3. Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma
4. Janelle Monae: The ArchAndroid
5-6. The Tallest Man on Earth: The Wild Hunt / Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird EP
7. Gonjasufi: A Sufi and a Killer
8-9. Madlib: Slave Riot / Madlib Medicine Show #6: The Brain-Wreck Show
10. The Roots: How I Got Over
11. Vampire Weekend: Contra
12. No Age: Everything in Between
13. Johnny Cash: Ain’t No Grave
14-15. James Blake: CMYK EP / Klavierwerke EP
16-17. Das Racist: Shut Up, Dude / Sit Down, Man
18. TOKiMONSTA: Midnight Menu
19. Shugo Tokumaru: Port Entropy
20. LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening

Also, here are my favorite albums from 2009:
1. Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
2. The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come
3. Leonard Cohen: Live in London
4. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
5. Tune-Yards: Bird Brains
6-7. Shabazz Palaces: Of Light EP / Shabazz Palaces EP
8. DOOM: Born Like This
9. Mos Def: The Ecstatic
10-11. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast / Useless Creatures
12. Nosaj Thing: Drift
13. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
14. Dan Deacon: Bromst
15. The xx: xx
16-17. Serengeti and Polyphonic: Terradactyl / Serengeti: Conversations with Kenny/Legacy of Lee
18. No Age: Losing Feeling EP
19. Ras_G & the Afrikan Space Program: Brotha from Anotha Planet
20. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic