Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaies Cinema and Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (1959-1979)

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Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaies oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema. Beyzaies 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 Beyzaies unique sense of creativity, using an interdisciplinary method of semiotic and cultural analysis to identify its manifestations in Beyzaies films and plays of the 1960s and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaies 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, Beyzaies 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.

Author Bio

Saeed Talajooy is Lecturer in Persian at the University of St Andrews, UK. His publications include chapters on Iranian theatre and cinema, articles on Bahram Beyzaies cinema and theatre, the co-edited volume, Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Studies: Literature, Cinema and Music (2012) and a Special Issue of Iranian Studies on Bahram Beyzaie.