Performing the poetics of the Iranian dream on silver screen: Hamoun as a tale of spiritual rebirth

ABSTRACT

Iranian cinema is an artistic forum in which cultural values and national sentiments are discursively performed, rehearsed, and negotiated. It plays a pivotal role in propagating and consolidating various vestiges of national identity. The interplay between cinema and national identity finds its apotheosis in the directorial oeuvre of Dariush Mehrjui, which is characterised by a vested interest in cross-cultural appropriation of canonical literary texts. This study examines the ways Mehrjui appropriates Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964) to project a spiritual spectatorship anchored in Islamic ethos in Hamoun (1990). It builds upon Robert Stam's concept of ‘intertextual dialogism’ to pinpoint the articulation of an alternative texture of ‘Iranian-ness’ within the mythopoetic narrative flow of the film. Hamoun is a character-driven quest narrative in which the protagonist abdicates material life in favour of achieving spiritual salvation. As a filmic discourse, the movie instructs how the narrative trajectory of the refashioned national identity should be conceived in cinema at the turn of the millennium.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• intertextual dialogism
• Hamoun
• Herzog

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hossein Nasr, Sufi Essays (New York: State University of New York, 1972), p. 112.

2 Hamid Naficy, ‘Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 29.

3 Negar Mottahedeh, ‘Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History’, Iranian Studies, 42.4 (2009), p. 535.

4 Khatereh Sheibani, The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film After the Revolution (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2011), p. 3.

5 Shiva Rahbaran, Iranian Cinema Uncensored: Contemporary Film-makers since the Islamic Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), p. ix.

6 Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 57.

7 Ibid., p. 66.

8 Ibid., p. 65.

9 Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (eds.), Formations of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 13.

10 Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 9–10.

11 Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 43.

12 Ibid., pp. 27–28.

13 Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 218.

14 Saul Bellow, Herzog (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 75.

15 Ibid., p. 208.

16 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 53.

17 Bellow, Herzog, p. 207.

18 Ibid., p. 272.

19 Ibid., p. 341.

20 Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

21 Dariush Shayegan, Asia Facing the West (Tehran: Farzan Rooz publication, 2013 [1978]), p. 81.

22 Sadr, Iranian Cinema, p. 254.

23 Ibid., p. 254.

24 Ibid., p. 254.

25 Mehran Kamrava, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

26 Najmeh Khalili-Mahani, ‘Dariush Mehrjui’, in Parviz Jāhid (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Chicago: Intellect. 2012), p. 45.

27 Shahab Esfandiary, ‘Mehrjui’s Social Comedy and the Representation of the Nation in the Age of Globalization’, Iranian Studies, 44. 3 (2011), p. 358. doi:10.1080/00210862.2011.556385.

28 Sadr, Iranian Cinema, p. 128.

29 Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978- 1984 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. xxiv.