How Frightening Your Makings: Epidemics, Mass Metamorphoses,
and Anguished Bodies of the Iranian New Wave Cinema
A Virtual Lecture by:
Dr. Farbod Honarpisheh (Yale University, Film and Media Studies)
Time:
Friday March 11th, 2022, 4:00pm EST
Abstract:
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 and Dariush Shayegan. 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.
Biography:
Farbod Honarpisheh is presently a Research Affiliate with the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University. 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 in 2016. 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 multiple awards from Columbia University, the SSHRC Doctoral Dissertation Award, the K. Dietrich School Humanities Center Fellowship in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and the E. Yarshater Postdoctoral Award from Yale. His research interests include film and media theory, critical theory, Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas, comparative modernist studies (visual and literary), intermediality, postcolonial theory, indigeneity and film/media, transnationalism, and documentary studies (particularly in its ethnographic and diasporic variants). He is currently working on a monograph based on his dissertation.