Poetic cinema: Trauma and memory in Iranian films

My dissertation, Poetic Cinema: Trauma And Memory In Iranian Films, reads' the works of Iranian New Wave filmmakers---from post 1979 Islamic Revolution such as Forough Farrokhzad, Masoud Kimiayi, Bahram Beyzaie, and Daryoush Mehrjoui, to directors who either continued to work after the Revolution like Abbas Kiarostami, or those who emerged as the new generation of filmmakers such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Tahmineh Milani, and Bahman Ghobadi---as personal accounts of history via testimonial representation. It grapples with the broader theoretical question---how to represent and negotiate the reality of those who have been victimised and traumatized. In this regard, the category of trauma becomes a socially generated phenomenon that often translates itself, affecting each individual member of a society in accordance with social and historical factors. Trauma is a formative factor in Iranian poetry and Iranian cinema, and its representation in different forms of remembrance occupies a focal space in the theoretical argument of my dissertation. The cinema of the post-1979 Revolution era in Iran is interdependent on the history-specific political and cultural events---after the reconstruction and erasure of a condemnable, unspeakable, shameful past. Reading between histories, and taking personal narratives (both fictive and remembered) as witness testimonials, my work examines how human beings---different backgrounds, nationalities, and origins notwithstanding---concur, through social and personal remembrances, in their experience of trauma in analogous ways. And why personal narratives have become palimpsests of contemporary histories.