Iranian cinema in long shot

This thesis aims to facilitate a broader understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaking, by way of an analysis of the New Iranian Cinema and Iranian cinema in exile and diaspora, and the various relationships between these two cinemas. Thus far no significant attempt has been made to consider these two cinemas in relation to each other. This thesis therefore represents a significant contribution to this line of research. Along the way it addresses several key concepts of long-standing importance in film studies, such as notions of art cinema, authorship and national cinema, in particular how such concepts have been used as a means of studying the New Iranian Cinema. Exilic and diasporic Iranian filmmaking represents a challenge to traditional understandings of these concepts. The first chapter therefore examines how the New Iranian Cinema has been received and constructed as an archetypal 'art cinema' in Europe and North America, in addition to how this cinema invites, at the same time as it resists, such interpretations. Thereafter follows a consideration of Iranian emigre filmmaking across Europe and North America, and how it has changed over the past thirty years, gradually shifting from an exclusively exilic to a pan-diasporic outlook. Chapters three and four are individual case studies of Iranian emigre filmmakers Amir Naderi and Sohrab Shahid Saless respectively. As two of Iran's most important and influential pre-revolutionary filmmakers, the works of Naderi and Saless represent not only interesting divergences from the evolutionary understanding of Iranian emigre cinema outlined in the second chapter, but also form two of the most compelling links between the New Iranian Cinema, and it exilic and diasporic counterpart. This thesis concludes by arguing for a more flexible and open-ended conception of national cinema more generally, as well as more comprehensive, nuanced and deterritorialised understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaking