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Seeing, Iranian Style: Women and Collective Vision in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sara Saljoughi
Sara Saljoughi*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between remediation and intertextuality in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008), arguing that the act of absorbing and transforming other texts and media within one film creates new conditions for collective vision within the post-revolutionary Iranian discourse of visuality. Focusing on the faces of 114 actresses as they watch a film adaptation of the story of “Khosrow and Shirin,” Kiarostami challenges the post-revolutionary modesty laws and their emphasis on not looking at women and at avoiding a spectator–image relationship based on the fulfillment of the desiring male gaze. By making women the spectators, the film suggests that there is no collective vision without women's vision.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , June 2012 , pp. 519 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2012

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Footnotes

This is a revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in San Diego, November 2010. I am grateful to Emily Fedoruk, Keya Ganguly, Rembert Hüser, Alice Lovejoy, Jessica Mathiason and Foad Torshizi for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi for his enthusiasm and support, to Negar Mottahedeh for our joyful collaboration(s), and to John Mowitt who has seen this essay through its many iterations.

References

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2 For more on Sepanta's work and the early history of Iranian films based on traditional stories, see Naficy, Hamid, “Iranian Writers, the Iranian Cinema, and the Case of Dash Akol,” Iranian Studies, 18 (1985): 231–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is covered more extensively in Naficy's four-volume A Social History of Iranian Cinema (Durham, NC, 2011), which was not yet published at the time this article was written.

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