The rise of Iranian cinema to world prominence over the last few decades is one of the most fascinating cultural stories of our time. There is scarcely an international film festival anywhere that does not honour the aesthetic and political explorations of Iranian artists. MASTERS & MASTERPIECES OF IRANIAN CINEMA celebrates this remarkable emergence. It focuses on twelve of the most important Iranian filmmakers of the past half-century -- among them, such pioneers as Forugh Farrokhzad, Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jafar Panahi. In his examination of their lives and their greatest works, Hamid Dabashi explains how, despite the censorship of both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic, the creativity of these filmmakers has transcended national and cultural borders. His account traces the ascendancy of Iranian cinema in modern Iranian intellectual history and also probes its links to Persian poetry, fiction, art, and philosophy. In Europe and in North America, in Asia and in Latin America, in Australia and Africa, the thematic and narrative richness of Iranian cinema has met with tremendous acclaim. Indeed, its particular modes of realism -- building on such cinematic antecedents as Italian, French and German neorealism -- have become truly transnational, contributing a new visual vocabulary to filmmaking everywhere. Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema studies the role that prominent film festivals have played in fostering the global success of Iranian cinema, and investigates the reception of these films within Iran, an intriguing story in its own right. This is a book that will reward not only the scholar and the film aficionado but also anyone interested in the cultural history of modern Iran.

An academically acclaimed and globally celebrated cultural critic, Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books and articles on Iran, Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art, among them Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future; Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (editor), Iran: A People Interrupted, and Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation. He lives with his family in New York City.

Abbas Kiarostami planted Iran firmly on the map of world cinema when he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival for his film A Taste of Cherry in 1997. In this book Hamid Dabashi examines the growing reputation of Iranian cinema from its origins in the films of Kimiyai and Mehrjui, through the work of established directors such as Kiarostami, Beyzai and Bani-Etemad, to young filmmakers like Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Qobadi, who triumphed at the Cannes 2000 festival. Dabashi combines exclusive interviews with directors, detailed and insightful commentary, critical cultural context, an extensive filmography, and generous illustration to provide an indispensable guide to a globally celebrated but little-studied cinematic genre. Book jacket.

This volume brings together scholarship from both established scholars and early career academics to provide fresh insights and new research on the cinema of Iran. The book is organised around eight broad themes including cinema before and after the revolution, stylistic innovation, documentary, gender, and genre. Encompassing a diverse range of methodological approaches and disciplinary frameworks including film studies, cultural studies, and political economy, each chapter is a self-contained study on a specific topic engaging with the national and transnational history of Iranian cinema which combined provide readers with original new insights into Iranian film and filmmakers, from fiction films to art house and popular cinema. The Handbook includes analysis of the works of established filmmakers such as Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Banetemad, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as well as the output of emerging voices such as Ida Panahandeh and Shahram Mokri. Covering well-known topics as well as cutting edge ones such the sonic and visual manifestations of the urban environment in Iranian films, this book is a vital resource for understanding Iran and its unique cinematic culture.

The Green Movement in Iran contains Hamid Dabashi's most important writings on the Iran's June 2009 election, its tumultuous aftermath, and the characteristics and aspirations of the emerging Green Movement. These analyses range from close analysis of the nature of the events to the Green Movement's historical background and future political consequences. The writings have been modified and updated for book publication. The volume presents Dabashi's account of the events since June 12, 2009-the Election Day itself-and his recap of highlights of the build-up period to the mass protests. He provides insightful background for events on the ground, dealing with debates about the credibility of the election. He then discusses political continuity in Iran, as well as the characteristics of the Green Movement. Dabashi argues that the reaction of the custodians of the Islamic Republic to the charge of the election being a fraud only affirms its lost legitimacy, and casts the system as being neither "Islamic" nor a "republic." Dabashi also comments on US politics and its relations to Iran and the Green Movement, pointing out shortcomings in American media culture. The role of the Iranian opposition in the Green Movement and American political policies, the political and economic consequence of the U.S. sanctions against Iran, and the way these may be interpreted by Iranian society are all viewed from an enlightening perspective. Dabashi argues that the Iranian regime, suffering deeply from legitimacy issues, makes use of its bureaucratic, economic, and political leverage to stage a show of support and project division among the people.

When Abbas Kiarostami suddenly passed away in July 2016, he was already an iconic figure in world cinema—and his reputation as a master filmmaker has only grown since. In this book, celebrated scholar Hamid Dabashi offers a new way of looking at Kiarostami's artworld, one that questions the very idea of film philosophy. Dabashi's authoritative account of the philosophical resonances of Kiarostami's oeuvre offers an iconoclastic critique of the field's Eurocentrism and, in vivid prose, makes the case for a new method of appreciating the work of this essential figure. The result is a provocative perspective on the totality of Kiarostami's legacy that, with deep roots in Iranian aesthetic and Persian poetic and philosophical traditions, overcomes film's provincial preoccupation with its Western heritage and charts a new path forward for film-philosophy.

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

One of the characteristic features of the linguistic situation of contemporary Iran is the coexistence of two standards of Modern Persian: the written and the spoken. While literature is generally composed in the written variety, the typically “spoken” forms are also to be found in the literary text. Modern spoken Persian in Contemporary Iranian Novels is a study of these. A scrutinous analysis of five carefully selected novels with methods drawing mostly from the register analysis seeks answers to questions such as: what features are characteristic to the spoken variety of language, how are they woven into the literary language, does the relationship between spoken and written registers change over time and how can this process affect the future development of Persian language?

"Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi" is a collection of writings by the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar. A thorough Introduction rigorously frames chapters and identifies in Dabashi’s writings a comprehensive approach, which forms the criteria for selecting the essays for the volume. The Introduction also teases out of these essays the overarching theme that holds them together, the manner they inform a particularly critical angle in them and the way they cohere. The Introduction dwells on the work of one scholar, public intellectual and theorist of modern and contemporary arts to extrapolate more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. These scattered materials and their underlying theoretical and critical logic are a unique contribution to the field of modern and contemporary arts.