Description:
Rakhshan Banietemad is one of the first female film directors in Iran. This book, the first English language study of her films and career, Iranian director Rakhshan Banietemad contains chapters by some of the most prominent scholars of Iranian cinema, as well as younger scholars with fresh points of view. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the book devotes special attention to Banietemad's understudied documentaries and films, including Under the Skin of the City (2000) and Tales (2014), while offering new perspectives on well-known works such as The Blue Veiled (1994) and The May Lady (1997). Focusing on questions of aesthetics and poetics, social realism, gender dynamics and the 'afterimages' and 'counter-memories' of revolution and war, the book also includes an in depth interview with Banietemad herself.
Brief description: Maryam Ghorbankarimi is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on women's representation in Iranian cinema, transnational feminist aesthetics, and the intersections of film, politics and cultural memory. She is the author of A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women's Representation in Iranian Cinema (2015) and editor of ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad (2021). She also co-edited The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Iranian Cinema (2024).
Review Quotes:
Aspects of Iranian cinema--race, gender, class, social and artistic history--have been blessed with generations of groundbreaking scholarship. Maryam Ghorbankarimi's edited volume brings together a collection of insightful essays on a seminal figure in Iranian cinema. With impeccable attention to details, full command of archival material, and inquisitive prose, these essays push the boundaries of the whole discipline of cinema studies to unprecedented levels. This book is a model of scholarship for the new generation of cinema studies.
--Hamid Dabashi, author of Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future