From Iran to Hollywood and Some Places In-Between: Reframing Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (International Library of Iranian Studies)

The New Iranian Cinema has had a fascinating success story in world cinema and critics have hailed Iranian films as alternatives to the homogenizing global influence of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Drawing on seminal ideas of “art cinema,” Christopher Gow examines how the success of this cinema and the films of Abbas Kiarostami, its foremost proponent, can be accounted for by the extent to which they fit into a pre-established notion of art cinema. Gow also expands understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema by examining the links between the New Iranian Cinema and émigré Iranian filmmaking, from the uncompromising German films of Sohrab Shahid Saless, to Vadim Perlman's exploration of the Iranian experience of exile in the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog. He reveals how this large and dispersed émigré Iranian cinema challenges our understanding of New Iranian Cinema itself and of national cinema in general.