Table of Contents

Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Producing a National Cinema, a Woman's Cinema 1
1. Nationalizing Sense Perception: Bahram Bayza'i 15
2. Cleansing Vision: Abbas Kiarostami, Le Secret Magnifique 89
3. Negative Aesthetics: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema and 1970s Feminist Film Theory 140
Notes 169
Bibliography 183
Index 193

Promotional Information

An analysis of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in relation to gender and nation.

About the Author

Negar Mottahedeh is Assistant Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University.

Reviews

"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 a compelling and provocative book. With 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 "Negar Mottahedeh's Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema comes as a unique and worthy addition to the growing English-language scholarship on post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema...Refreshingly, while Mottahedeh's book does takes up censorship and the question of realism as central issues, she moves far beyond these theoretically hollow and cinematically naive critiques of the difficulties of representational authenticity manifested in the necessity of women's veiling...Mottahedeh employs reading strategies that treat film as film, drawing upon both feminist film theory and semiotic theories of cinematic enunciation and deixis. In fact, she asserts that a close analysis of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema will reveal that a new "filmic grammar" has emerged in Iranian cinema that disrupts and violates many of the narrative conventions of "dominant cinema"... I do[...]wish to praise this book and highly commend Mottahedeh for taking the road she did, one of the many roads where Iranian cinema and established theories of film may intersect and make rich and productive contact. Displaced Allegories makes a vital, original and important intervention into the theorisation of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema." Michelle Langford, Senses of Cinema, Issue 52