Interpreter of desires: Iranian cinema and psychoanalysis
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Date
09/07/2019Author
Kazemi, Farshid
Metadata
Abstract
The goal of this thesis is the study of the structure of desire and sexuality in post-revolutionary
Iranian cinema, through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic film
theory. The scholarly literature on Iranian cinema has largely come from fields outside
film studies and film theory, and almost no studies exist that focus on the question of
desire and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Deploying a psychoanalytic film theoretical
perspective, I discuss two distinct movements in Iranian cinema. Part I of the thesis
focuses on the well-known New Iranian Cinema, where I foreground neglected aspects
of this movement and consider the formal logic of this movement to revolve around the
axis between the gaze and voice. I analyze the gaze as the Lacanian object-cause of
desire in two filmic examples, and demonstrate that contra to the theory that the New
Iranian Cinema is the locus of 1970s feminist gaze theory, I argue that it is one of the
exemplary sites of the Lacanian object-gaze and one of the few examples of the cinema
of desire in the world. I also foreground the voice as an important object of study in the
New Iranian Cinema for the first time, and link Chion’s concept of the acousmatic voice
to Lacan’s object-voice as the object-cause of desire, where the voice becomes a love-object
in two filmic examples of the New Iranian Cinema. Then as the final example, I
analyze a single film foregrounding several motifs such as transgender, and male and
female homoeroticism through its female protagonists’ forced gender re-signification
and cross-dressing, where the logic of the Lacanian feminine ‘No’ and feminine
jouissance become operative. In Part II, I theorize the emergence of a new film
movement in Iranian cinema that represents a shift away from the conventions of the
New Iranian Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s and deploys elements of the horror genre
but with an uncanny dimension that evokes the weird and the eerie. Through a close
textual analysis, I analyze two respective films that I situate in this new genre bending
film movement. The first film was analyzed through a Lacanian prism that looks at the
film’s two-part structure where the first half functions as the world of fantasy and the
second as the world of desire – where the traumatic Real of desire appears in all its
nightmarish dimension. The last film was also theorized as an example of the uncanny
between the weird and the eerie and analyzed through the psychoanalytic notion of the
return of the repressed, where the chador-clad female vampire represented the return of
feminine sexuality in the Real, due to its repression in the Islamic Republic or the
(patriarchal) symbolic order. The common motif that runs through the films of this new
movement, both at the level of form and content, is the palpable sense of the
nightmarish atmosphere of fear and anxiety in contemporary Iranian society.