1

As many of the scholars mentioned above have noted, discussions around gender in post-

revolutionary Iranian film are difficult to have without addressing censorship regulations. The

years immediately following the revolution saw a lack of clarity from policy makers regarding

how exactly to approach the ‘fundamental transformation’ they believed to be required of film,

which eventually gave way to numerous restrictions regarding the depiction of women, among

other mandates.1 While the censorship led to genres such as comedy and war films dominating

the Iranian cinematic landscape, variations within these genres allowed for the representation of

contradictions and dissonances amongst the population.2 Nonetheless, Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad

argues that ‘cinema cannot be considered in isolation from the ideology of the Iranian regime.’3

Thus, understandings of this ideology and its cultural manifestations are essential to readings of

post-revolutionary Iranian film.

Although the limitations have been onerous, filmmakers have often found creative

methods of subversion. Zohreh T. Sullivan describes how post-revolutionary film’s ‘dialectical

reading of the relation between cinematic art and reality’ encourages viewers to look beyond the

myopia promoted by censorship.4 Mottahedeh’s reading of Ali Hatami’s Delshodegan (1992)

demonstrates how a film’s form can resist the Islamic Republic’s attempt to use cinema to depict

1
Sussan Siavoshi, ‘Cultural Policies and the Islamic Republic: Cinema and Book Publication,’
International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 4 (1997): 515.
2
Hamid Naficy, ‘Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update,’ in The New Iranian
Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002),
43.
3
Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic
Republic (New York: Routledge, 2009), 6.
4
Sullivan, Zoreh T. ‘Iranian Cinema and the Critique of Absolutism,’ in Media, Culture and
Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State, ed. Mehdi Semati (London:
Routledge, 2007), 194.
 2

a falsely monolithic Iran.5 One formal element that critics have identified as a means of evading

censorship is the use of melodrama’s generic attributes, as discussed in chapter one.6 In chapters

two, three, four, and seven, the case studies will show how horror can provide filmmakers with a

similar tool.

Directors of the Iranian diaspora do not face the same restrictions as those working

locally, but common traits can be found between films of both groups nonetheless. Naficy

describes this phenomenon through his idea of ‘accented cinema,’ which chapter one also

addresses,7 and which he has applied to the Iranian diaspora in a number of contexts.8 As with

locally made films, auteurist approaches are still common in the literature, and some highlighted

diasporic directors have been Shirin Neshat, Amir Naderi, and Sohrab Shahid Saless.9 One of the

diasporic filmmakers this thesis examines, Marjane Satrapi, has also been the subject of much

critical attention, though it has often focused on the adaptation of her graphic novel Persepolis

(2007).10 Analysis of The Voices thereby contributes to discourse on both Satrapi’s filmography

5
Negar Mottahedeh, Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform
from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2008), 187-233.
6
See pp. 34-6.
7
See pp. 39-40.
8
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001); Hamid Naficy, ‘Making Films with an Accent: Iranian Émigré Cinema,’
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 43, no. 2 (2002): 15-41; Hamid Naficy, ‘Iranian
Émigré Cinema as a Component of Iranian National Cinema,’ in Media, Culture and Society in
Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State, ed. Mehdi Semati (London: Routledge,
2007), 167-92.
9
Valerie Palmer-Mehta, ‘The Rhetorical Space of the Garden in Shirin Neshat's Women Without
Men,’ Women's Studies in Communication (2015): 78-98; Alla Gadassik, ‘A National Filmmaker
without a Home: Home and Displacement in the Films of Amir Naderi,’ Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 2 (2011): 474-486; Michelle Langford, ’Sohrab
Shahid Saless: An Iranian Filmmaker in Berlin,’ Screening the Past (2016).
10
Nima Naghibi, ‘A Story Told in Flashback: Remediating Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis,’ in
Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael Chaney
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 164-177; Stacey Weber-Fève, ‘Framing the
 3

and accented cinema by highlighting what this thesis calls the ‘accent of fear.’11 The accent of

fear’s significance to Iranian diasporic cinema will be further explored through readings of A

Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Under the Shadow (2016).

One key example of a commonality between some locally made and diasporic films is

the influence of Persian literature. Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009), for example, adapts

Shahrnush Parsipur’s Persian-language novella of the same name.12 Within pre-revolutionary

Iran, literary adaptations were a way for filmmakers with artistic ambitions to differentiate their

work from the pulpier filmfarsi.13 Looking beyond the textual relationships of adaptations,

Khatereh Sheibani argues that Persian poetry has been a formal and thematic influence on

Iranian cinema from the New Wave onwards.14 Prose fiction has also been highly influential, as

can be seen in what Michael M.J. Fischer calls the ‘distinctive, surrealist style’ common to many

twentieth-century Iranian films and short stories.15 This thesis examines comparable

manifestations of that style in the readings of supernatural elements of the case studies, which

likewise link them with horror.

“Minor” in Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis,’ Contemporary French and
Francophone Studies 15, no. 3 (2011): 321-328; William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson,
‘Technologies of Memory, Identity, and Oblivion in Persepolis (2007) and Waltz with Bashir
(2008),’ in Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature, ed. Veronica
Thompson and Manijeh Mannani (Edmonton: AU Press, 2015), 233-259.
11
See p. 31.
12
Palmer-Mehta, ‘The Rhetorical Space,’ 79.
13
M.R. Ghanoonparvar, Iranian Film and Persian Fiction (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers,
2016), 40.
14
Khatereh Sheibani, Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film After the
Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
15
Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis
in the Transnational Circuitry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 154.
 4

Shia Islam has been another important endogenous influence on Iranian cinema. Nacim

Pak-Shiraz describes the majority of Iranian films engaging with Islam as ‘propagandist films’

that support the Islamic Republic.16 However, Pak-Shiraz also identifies films such as Under the

Moonlight (2001) and The Lizard (2004), both of which depict Islamic power structures in a

more critical fashion.17 Michelle Langford finds a comparable critique of Islamist governance in

her reading of Baran (2002), which highlights the protagonist’s ‘strong sense of ideal Islamic

devotion’ to Afghan refugees as a contrast to the Islamic Republic’s more ‘pragmatic approach

to the refugee question.’18 In terms of cultural practices, Mottahedeh argues that ta’ziyeh has

impacted the form of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.19 This thesis contributes to research on

the influence of Islam, and particularly Mottahedeh’s work on the relationship between ta’ziyeh

and film, by examining how Fish and Cat (2013) puts ta’ziyeh in dialogue with horror.

In spite of the significance of these local influences, Western reception of Iranian films

has often downplayed their relationship with Persian cultural traditions. The connection between

the West and Iranian cinema dates back to the Qajar dynasty, during which early Iranian

filmmakers often imitated Western films and styles; in contrast, in the 1970s, some exported

16
Nacim Pak-Shiraz, Shi'i Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film (London:
I.B. Tauris, 2011).
17
Nacim Pak-Shiraz, ‘Filmic Discourses on the Role of the Clergy in Iran,’ British Journal of
Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 (2007): 331-349.
18
Michelle Langford, ‘Negotiating the Sacred Body in Iranian Cinema(s): National, Physical and
Cinematic Embodiment in Majid Majidiʹs Baran (2002)’ in Negotiating the Sacred II:
Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, eds. Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Maria Suzette
Fernandes Dias (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), 164.
19
Mottahedeh, Representing the Unpresentable; Mottahedeh, ‘Iranian Cinema’; Mottahedeh,
Displaced Allegories.
 5

their work, as can be seen in the New Wave’s success with foreign audiences.20 However, this

success would later be dwarfed by the popularity at international festivals of post-revolutionary

films, particularly those of acclaimed auteurs such as Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf.21 Scholars

have critiqued this attention for limiting international perspectives on the country’s cinematic

traditions in a number of ways, including through the occlusion of the significance of pre-

revolutionary film.22 Blake Atwood further suggests that festival distribution in the nineties hid

the ‘intimate relationship’ between Iranian films of the time and the political reformism

epitomised by Mohammad Khatami.23 Western presentation and viewership of Iranian cinema

has thereby both found new audiences for it and skewed international perceptions.

The lack of emphasis on local influences has corresponded with inverse attention to the

role of Western genres and ideas in Iranian cinema; while their impact should be considered, it

needs to be balanced with a focus on endogenous traits. For example, Farhang Erfani analyses a

20
Hamid Naficy, ‘Cinematic Exchange Relations: Iran and the West,’ in Iran and the
Surrounding World, eds. Nikki R. Keddie and Ruddi Matthel (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2002), 254-277.
21
Shahab Esfandiary, Iranian Cinema and Globalization: National, Transnational, and Islamic
Dimensions (Bristol: Intellect, 2012); Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics of Iranian Cinema:
Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (New York: Routledge, 2009); Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad,
‘Iranian Intellectuals and Contact with the West: The Case of Iranian Cinema,’ British Journal of
Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 (2007): 375-398.
22
Azadeh Farahmand, ‘'Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema,’ in
The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London:
I.B. Tauris, 2002), 43; Azadeh Farahmand, ‘Disentangling the International Festival Circuit:
Genre and Iranian Cinema,’ in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, eds. Rosalind
Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 263-281; Christopher
Gow, From Iran to Hollywood and Some Places In-Between: Reframing Post-Revolutionary
Iranian Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
23
Blake Atwood, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 14.
 6

series of Iranian films through Western philosophical lenses.24 More frequently, critics have

made comparisons between Iranian cinema and European art film movements such as Italian

neorealism and the French New Wave.25 Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan lambasts these analogies for

being ‘hackneyed associations’ that misunderstand Iranian film.26 But scholarly discourses about

the relationship between films of Iran and Western genres are not limited to the art-house, as the

discussion of melodrama demonstrates.27 Most relevant to this thesis is Pedram Partovi’s reading

of Girls’ Dormitory (2004), which analyses the film through its relationship with horror.28 While

Partovi offers much insight in his examination of the film’s indebtedness to Iranian folklore, this

thesis’s reading will intervene by situating the film within broader cinematic trends and

understanding it through the theoretical groundwork established in chapter one. Throughout the

thesis, this array of ideas will guide an intervention in Iranian cinema scholarship by helping to

show how a small group of directors working both inside and outside the country has used the

genre to productively and provocatively speak to experiences of trauma in Iranian culture.

24
Farhang Erfani, Iranian Cinema and Philosophy: Shooting Truth (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
25
Hamid Naficy, ‘Neorealism Iranian Style,’ in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History
of a Film Style, eds. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2011), 226-239; Stephen Weinberger, ‘Neorealism, Iranian Style,’ Iranian Studies
40, no. 1 (2007): 5-16; Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, ‘The Open Image: Poetic Realism
and the New Iranian Cinema,” Screen 44, no. 1 (2003): 38-57.
26
Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan, ‘Dark Light,’ in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, eds. Sheila
Whitaker and Rose Issa (London: National Film Theatre, 1999), 113.
27
See pp. 34-6.
28
Pedram Partovi, ‘Girls' Dormitory: Women's Islam and Iranian Horror,’ Visual Anthropology
Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 186-207.