Exploring the City in the Cinema of Bahram Beyzaie

Abstract

This article explores five of Bahram Beyzaie's urban films over the last four decades to study their critique of the process of modernization and social changes that have taken place in Iran. These include The Journey (Safar, 1972), The Crow (Kalagh, 1977), Maybe Some Other Time (Shayad Vaqti Digar, 1987), Killing Mad Dogs (Sag Koshi, 2001) and When We Are All Asleep (Vaqti Hame Khabim, 2009). It examines the impact of modernization on the architecture and landscape of the city and consequently on the local community. It then studies the increasing complexity of ascertaining the real and unreal within the city. Finally, it looks at the changing values, the fears and threats within the city and the impact these have on its inhabitants, particularly women and their movement within the city.

Notes

¹Barbara Mennel, Cities and Cinema (New York, 2008), 14.

²David Bell and Azzedine Haddour, City Visions (Harlow 2000), 1.

³Mark Sheil and Tony Fitzmorris, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Studies in Urban and Social Change Series; Studies in Urban and Social Change (Oxford, 2001), 5–x6.

⁴C.E Bosworth, V. Minorsky, B. Hourcade and J. Calmard, “Tihran,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Brill Online), http://brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-1220 (accessed July 16, 2011).

⁵Bosworth et al., “Tihran.”

⁶Planhol further states that even though the reason for Shah Tahmasp's interest in Tehran has been explained to be the tomb of their ancestor buried in the nearby Shah ‘Abdul Azim Mausoleum, or Tehran's long history as an active Shi‘i center; the decision to turn Tehran into the capital might have been more strategic. The Ottoman threat on the West had led Shah Tahmasp to move his capital from Tabriz further east to Qazvin. Tehran, some 150 kilometres to the east of Qazvin, “could potentially provide his forces with a convenient fall back.” See Xavier de Planhol, “Tehran i. A Persian City at the Foot of the Alborz” (July 2004), Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Iranica Online), http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/tehran-i-a-persian-city-at-the-foot-of-the-alborz (accessed July 25, 2011).

⁷Talinn Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste’: the Early Pahlavi Modernists and Their Society for National Heritage,” Iranian Studies 37, no. 1 (March 2004): 18.

⁸William J.R. Curtis, “The Skyscraper and the City,” in Design for High-Intensity Development, ed. Margaret Bentley Sevcenko (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 15.

¹⁰Bosworth et al., “Tihran.”

⁹Geoffrey Neol-Smith, “Cities: Real and Imagined,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford, 2001), 104.

¹¹Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste,’” 36.

¹²Lina Khatib, “The Contested City: Beirut in Lebanese War Cinema,” in Visualizing the City, ed. Alan Marcus and Dietrich Nuemann (New York, 2007), 98.

¹³Quoted in Khatib, “The Contested City,” 98.

¹⁴Maybe Some Other Time was made in 1987 and released in 1988.

¹⁵Interestingly, the orphan theme first raised in The Journey is resurrected here.

¹⁶For a discussion of city, family and identity in The Crow and Maybe Some Other Time, see Saeed Talajooy, “Khaneh, Khanevadeh va Shahr: Bahram Beyzaie va Ravayat-e Tajadod dar Kalagh (1356) va Shayad Vaqti Digar (1366),” Iran Nameh 27, no. 1 (1391/2012): 45–69.

¹⁷Grigor, “Recultivating ‘Good Taste,’” 39.

¹⁸Deborah Stevenson, Cities and Urban Cultures (Maidenhead, 2003), 13.

¹⁹Bosworth et al., “Tihran.”

²⁰Jean-Jacques Guibbert, “Symbols, Signs, Signals: Walls of the City,” in Reading the Contemporary African City, ed. Brian Brace Taylor (Singapore, 1983), 75.

²¹ Pardehs are large, painted screens illustrating Shi‘i religious narratives, or stories from the Shahnameh and used for poetic recitations and narrations of religious or epic stories in public spaces.

²²“Mahv-e Shabaneh-ye Chand Hezar Metr-e Moraba’ Naqqashi Divari-ye Shahnameh dar Mashhad,” in BBC Persian, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/2011/06/110607_l41_pics_mashad_graffitti_removed.shtml (accessed August 5, 2011).

²³Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA, 1988), 171.

²⁴Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 167.

²⁵Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 167.

²⁶Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 171.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nacim Pak-Shiraz

Nacim Pak-Shiraz is Lecturer in Film and Persian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of Shi‘i Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film (London, 2011).