The Soundscape in Diasporic Iranian Cinema

Roshanak Kheshti

Abstract:

This talk explores the question of diegetic film sound in diasporic Iranian cinema. Through Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Mitra Tabrizian’s Gholam and Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats, I consider how the commonly held understanding of diegetic sound (or sounds that emanate from the story world of the film) becomes a troubled notion in this genre, challenging how the narrative world of the film is contained.

Bio:

Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is an anthropologist, feminist, queer and race theorist, born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work sits at the intersection of sound, the senses, film and performance studies with an emphasis on diaspora and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019,3/1 33). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled "We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston's Synesthetic Hermeneutics". She has previously published in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!