Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie's Cinema and Theatre

Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie's oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema. Beyzaie's work reformulates indigenous artistic and ritual forms and cultural narratives in plays and films whose emancipatory aesthetics have influenced several generations of writers, playwrights, and filmmakers. This book examines the origins and development of what the author identifies as Beyzaie's unique sense of creativity, using an interdisciplinary method of semiotic and cultural analysis to identify its manifestations in Beyzaie's films and plays of the 1960s and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaie's early works, such as Downpour and Uncle Moustache, and how they engage with neglected aspects of Iranian culture to challenge mainstream approaches to writing and directing plays and films. In this way, the author argues, Beyzaie's work questions notions of being and belonging, by subverting exclusionist discourses on art, politics, society, culture, self and other, personal and collective identity, gender relations, intellectuals, heroes and villains, and children.

Saeed Talajooy is a Senior Lecturer in Persian at the University of St Andrews, UK. His publications include chapters and articles on Iranian theatre and cinema, a co-edited volume entitled Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures: Literature, Cinema and Music (2012), a Special Issue of Iranian Studies on Bahram Beyzaie (2013), a monograph entitled Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie's Cinema in Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (I.B.Tauris, 2023) and an edited volume entitled The Plays and Films of Bahram Beyzaie: Origins, Forms and Functions (I.B.Tauris, 2024).

1. Bahram Beyzaie's Contour in Time: A Theory of Creativity
2. The Puppet Trilogy (1962-3): Beyzaie's Deconstruction of the Hero/Villain Binary
3. Uncle Moustache (1970): Beyzaie's Carnivalesque Deconstruction of Hegemonic Masculinity
4. Downpour (1971-2): The Creative Intellectual and the Meta-Cinematic Subversion of Hegemonic Masculinity
5. The Journey (1972): A Sisyphean Quest for Belonging in a World of Toxic Masculinity
6. The Stranger and the Fog (1974): Rituals of Existence: Homecoming, Becoming and Departing
7. The Crow (1977): City, Home, and the Pitfalls of Iranian Modernity
8. Conclusion: The Revolution and the End of an Era