Soon after the Iranian revolution of 1979, both the US and Iran
governments banned the distribution and exhibition of American films
in Iran. The film industries in the two countries, however, used the
political tensions as the subject matter of several products. This
talk focuses on the reception of those American films in Iran which
directly touched upon the causes and effects of the mutual enmity
between the two states. Adopting a historical approach to
transnational media studies and investigating a variety of Persian and
English news items and critical pieces, this lecture analyzes a track
initiated by Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter (1990) and
peaked by Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012). Examining official,
underground, and diasporic responses of Iranian audiences to these
cinematic adaptations of literary works exemplifies how the meanings
of cultural products are constructed and construed against the
backdrop of local and global sociopolitical contexts. Sponsored by:
the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Middle
Eastern Studies
cinema
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25/01/2020 Last update