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Offers a fresh approach to Iranian New Wave cinema, with an emphasis on women filmmakers and feminist practice.
Projecting Collectivity offers an exciting new theorization of Iranian New Wave cinema—one grounded in hope. Refusing a retroactive reading of 1960s and 1970s Iran based on the outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Sara Saljoughi shows how Iranian New Wave films produced before the revolution imagined ways of living together that were distinct from those offered by the various oppositional factions, the nation-state, and the repressive regime that emerged in the revolution’s wake. These films, she demonstrates, possessed an anticipatory consciousness of an emergent politics of difference that remains unmaterialized. Focusing on the aesthetics and politics of works that have for the most part been marginalized in dominant histories of Iranian cinema, with an emphasis on women filmmakers and feminist practice, Saljoughi argues that New Wave films were preoccupied with the question of how collectivities emerge during a time of nationalist questioning and that they offered answers that exceeded what could be offered by other forms of belonging. Drawing on close analysis of such films as The House is Black, The Son of Iran Has No News from His Mother, The Mongols, The Cow, and The Sealed Soil, Projecting Collectivity historicizes the formal practices of Iranian New Wave films and argues for the political importance of close reading of cinema from the Global South, favoring it against positivist approaches.
"Saljoughi's close readings of films are both insightful and original, bringing theoretical frameworks to Iranian cinema that have rarely been applied before. Equally compelling is her attention to two understudied yet pivotal pre-revolutionary women filmmakers, Forough Farrokhzad and Marva Nabili. By situating feminism within the lives and creative practices of these directors, Saljoughi illuminates the feminist sensibilities of their films and demonstrates how they pushed beyond the social, political, and cinematic constraints of their time." — Golbarg Rekabtalaei, author of Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History
Sara Saljoughi is Associate Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the coeditor, with Christina Gerhardt, of 1968 and Global Cinema.