Body‐less faces: Mutilating modernity and abstracting women in an “Islamic cinema”

Abstract

The figure of woman in post‐revolutionary Iranian cinema is the site of a relentless contestation between a metaphysics of concealment and an esthetics of revelation. By concealing, Islamic metaphysics intimates a “Truth” which always awaits discovering; by revealing, the esthetics of revelation dismantles the metaphysical assumption by exposing the profane moment of its sacred claim. Iranian filmmakers must situate their art somewhere between those two categorical imperatives. However, like artists everywhere, they are not in full control of the esthetic signifiers through which they speak: they must negotiate their art through a ruthless theocratic censorship. This dialectic of power and resistance, consensus and contestation, is the premise on which the Iranian culture is defined.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.