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How Frightening Your Makings: Epidemics, Mass Metamorphoses, and Anguished Bodies of the Iranian New Wave Cinema

March 11, 2022

How Frightening Your Makings: Epidemics, Mass Metamorphoses, and Anguished Bodies of the Iranian New Wave Cinema

Farbod Honarpisheh

Abstract:

"How Frightening Your Makings: Epidemics, Mass Metamorphoses, and Anguished Bodies of the Iranian New Wave Cinema" Images of contagious disease abound in the cinema and literature produced in Iran in the post-World War Two era. Holding a critical glance at the intersections of representation and materiality, this talk juxtaposes these diseased bodies next to other tropes and instances of alterity-becoming such as possession/trance practices and mass metamorphoses. Films that deserved to be part of the international canon will be closely analyzed, like Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black, Nasser Taghvai’s Wind of Jinn, and Dariush Mehrjui’s The Postman. Along with cinematic and literary works, passages from writings of the public intellectuals of the time will also be discussed, particularly those of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Dariush Shayegan, and Ehsan Naraghi. This transformative juxtaposition of the cinematic, the literary, and the political, will, in time, allow the modernist contours of these texts to come to the fore.
 
Bio:
Dr. Farbod Honarpisheh is a Research Scholar with the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University, where he first arrived as a postdoctoral associate. His dissertation, “Fragmented Allegories of National Authenticity: Art and Politics of the Iranian New Wave Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s,” was completed at Columbia University. He also completed at Columbia an MA degree with a thesis called “In the Labyrinth of Yeşilçam: Transient Cosmopolitanism, Passing Images of a Street, and a Theater in Istanbul.” Before that, he obtained BA and MA degrees from Concordia University, Montréal. He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the SSHRC Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Kenneth Dietrich School Humanities Center Fellowship in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, the Ehsan Yarshater Postdoctoral Fellowship from Yale University, and multiple awards from Columbia University. Dr. Honarpisheh’s academic publications include: “From the Body of Ruin to the Ruin of Body: On Materiality and the Iranian New Wave Cinema, 1960-1979”; “The Oriental ‘Other’ in Soviet Cinema, 1929–34”; “You Are on Indian Land: Between Borders, Styles, and Authors”; and “Koşucu’nun Tasviri: Devrim Sonrası İran Sinemasının Önemli Bır Filmine Gösterilen Tepkiler Üstüne Bir Çalişma” (“Representing The Runner: A Reception Study of a Major Film From Post-Revolutionary Iran,”). His research interests include film and media theory, critical theory, Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas and visual cultures, comparative modernist studies (visual and literary), intermediality, decolonization, postcolonial theory, indigeneity, documentary studies (particularly in its ethnographic and diasporic variants), and transnationalism.