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Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema and Theatre

Paradigms of Being and Belonging (1959-1979)

Saeed Talajooy author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:20th Apr '23

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Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema and Theatre cover

A detailed analysis of the early film and dramatic works of celebrated Iranian filmmaker and playwright Bahram Beyzaie

Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie’s oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema. Beyzaie’s work reformulates indigenous artistic and ritual forms and cultural narratives in plays and films whose emancipatory aesthetics have influenced several generations of writers, playwrights, and filmmakers. This book examines the origins and development of what the author identifies as Beyzaie’s unique sense of creativity, using an interdisciplinary method of semiotic and cultural analysis to identify its manifestations in Beyzaie’s films and plays of the 1960s and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaie’s early works, such as Downpour and Uncle Moustache, and how they engage with neglected aspects of Iranian culture to challenge mainstream approaches to writing and directing plays and films. In this way, the author argues, Beyzaie’s work questions notions of being and belonging, by subverting exclusionist discourses on art, politics, society, culture, self and other, personal and collective identity, gender relations, intellectuals, heroes and villains, and children.

This book offers a remarkably rich analysis of the works of one of Iran’s most renowned playwrights and filmmakers, Bahram Beyzaie. Focused on Beyzaie’s oeuvre between 1959 and 1979, this unparalleled work of scholarship is indispensable for understanding Beyzaie’s unique engagement with and critique of modernity in the Iranian cultural context. * Nasrin Rahimieh, UC Irvine, USA *

ISBN: 9780755648665

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages