From Iran to Hollywood and Some Places In-Between

Reframing Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

Christopher Gow

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848855267
• eBook ISBN: 9780857720238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The New Iranian Cinema has had a fascinating success story in world cinema and critics have hailed Iranian films as alternatives to the homogenising global influence of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Drawing on seminal ideas of 'art cinema', Christopher Gow examines how the success of this cinema and the films of Abbas Kiarostami, its foremost proponent, can be accounted for by the extent to which they fit into a pre-established notion of art cinema. Gow also expands understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema by examining the links between the New Iranian Cinema and emigre Iranian filmmaking, from the uncompromising German films of Sohrab Shahid Saless, to Vadim Perlman's exploration of the Iranian experience of exile in the Oscar-nominated 'House of Sand and Fog'. He reveals how this large and dispersed emigre Iranian cinema challenges our understanding of New Iranian Cinema itself and of national cinema in general.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Putting the 'New' in the New Iranian Cinema: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema as Art Cinema
• 2. From Iran to Hollywood and Some Places In-Between: Iranian Emigre Filmmaking
• 3. Close Up 1 - Amir Naderi
• 4. Close Up 2 - Sohrab Shahid Saless
• Conclusion: Iranian Cinema in Long Shot
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index