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The Interpreter of Desires Iranian Cinema and Psychoanalysis Farshid Kazemi A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies University of Edinburgh © Farshid Kazemi, 2018 DECLARATION I hereby certify that the work contained herein has been composed by me in its entirety, and represents my own scholarly work. Besides Chapter 2, which has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, no part of this thesis has been previously submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signed: Farshid Kazemi ii Abstract The goal of this thesis is the study of the structure of desire and sexuality in post- revolutionary Iranian cinema, through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory. The scholarly literature on Iranian cinema has largely come from fields outside film studies and film theory, and almost no studies exist that focus on the question of desire and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Deploying a psychoanalytic film theoretical perspective, I discuss two distinct movements in Iranian cinema. Part I of the thesis focuses on the well-known New Iranian Cinema, where I foreground neglected aspects of this movement and consider the formal logic of this movement to revolve around the axis between the gaze and voice. I analyze the gaze as the Lacanian object-cause of desire in two filmic examples, and demonstrate that contra to the theory that the New Iranian Cinema is the locus of 1970s feminist gaze theory, I argue that it is one of the exemplary sites of the Lacanian object-gaze and one of the few examples of the cinema of desire in the world. I also foreground the voice as an important object of study in the New Iranian Cinema for the first time, and link Chion’s concept of the acousmatic voice to Lacan’s object-voice as the object-cause of desire, where the voice becomes a love- object in two filmic examples of the New Iranian Cinema. Then as the final example, I analyze a single film foregrounding several motifs such as transgender, and male and female homoeroticism through its female protagonists’ forced gender re-signification and cross-dressing, where the logic of the Lacanian feminine ‘No’ and feminine jouissance become operative. In Part II, I theorize the emergence of a new film movement in Iranian cinema that represents a shift away from the conventions of the New Iranian Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s and deploys elements of the horror genre but with an uncanny dimension that evokes the weird and the eerie. Through a close textual analysis, I analyze two respective films that I situate in this new genre bending film movement. The first film was analyzed through a Lacanian prism that looks at the film’s two-part structure where the first half functions as the world of fantasy and the second as the world of desire – where the traumatic Real of desire appears in all its nightmarish dimension. The last film was also theorized as an example of the uncanny between the weird and the eerie and analyzed through the psychoanalytic notion of the return of the repressed, where the chador-clad female vampire represented the return of feminine sexuality in the Real, due to its repression in the Islamic Republic or the (patriarchal) symbolic order. The common motif that runs through the films of this new movement, both at the level of form and content, is the palpable sense of the nightmarish atmosphere of fear and anxiety in contemporary Iranian society. iii Contents Acknowledgements vii A Note on Transliteration ix Introduction: Iranian Cinema and Psychoanalysis (or Watching Iranian Movies with Lacan) 1 Part I. New Iranian Cinema between Gaze and Voice Chapter 1: A Cinema of Desire: The Object-Gaze in the New Iranian Cinema 35 1.1 The Gaze in Lacan: From Screen Theory to the Object-Gaze 1.2 The Averted Gaze as Looking Awry: An Islamic Theory of the Gaze 1.3 The Film Returns the Gaze: Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin 1.4 The Fantasized Object-Gaze in Baran Conclusion Chapter 2: The Object-Voice: The Acousmatic Voice in the New Iranian Cinema 72 2.1 Chion with Lacan: The Acousmatic Voice and Feminist Psychoanalytic Film Theory 2.2 Veiling and Aurality: An Islamic Theory of the Female Voice 2.3 The Acousmatic Voice in Gabbeh 2.4 The Acousmêtre in The May Lady Conclusion Chapter 3: From Femininity to Masculinity and Back: The Feminine ‘No!’ in Daughters of the Sun 105 3.1 Daughters of the Sun (Dokhtaran-e khorshid) 3.2 Symbolic Castration and the Name-of-the-Father 3.3 The Depressive Position and Melancholic Identification 3.4 Female Homoeroticism and Objet petit a 3.5 Love beyond Law and Feminine Jouissance 3.6 Misrecognition and Male Homoeroticism (shahed-bazi) 3.7 The Lacanian Act and the Feminine ‘No!’ Conclusion Part II. Unheimlich between the Weird and the Eerie: Iranian Cinema Moves On Chapter 4: Dreaming of a Nightmare in Tehran: The Fright of Real Desires in Atomic Heart 146 4.1 Unheimlich between The Weird and the Eerie 4.2 Reality Structured by Fantasy or Fantasy as an Ideological Category 4.3 Ideology and the Structure of Toilets 4.4 Repetition or The Double as the Thing (das Ding) 4.5 Che Voui? or the Desire of the Other 4.6 The Fright of Real Desires 4.7 The Collapse of the Fantasy and the Lacanian Real 4.8 The Enigma of Desire and the Dream within a Dream iv 4.9 Dreaming of a Nightmare in Tehran Conclusion Chapter 5: Return of the Repressed: The Real of Feminine Sexuality in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night 186 5.1 The Return of the Repressed (with a Lacanian Twist) 5.2 Veiling over Feminine Desire: Shi‘ism and the Real of Female Sexuality 5.3 The Reception of the Film in Iran 5.4 An Iranian Nightmare 5.5 Iranian Horror Films (between the Weird and the Eerie) 5.6 A Vampire’s Accent or Accented Cinema 5.7 The Female Vampire as Castrator 5.8 The Vampire Thing, the Death Drive and Obscene Immortality 5.9 Chion with Lacan, Take Two: Athorybos and the Inscription of Desire Conclusion Conclusion 227 Bibliography 234 Filmography 258 v Figures Figure 1. Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh in Europe in 1900. 9 Figure 1.1 Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez 56 Figure 1.2 Actresses watching the invisible film-within-the-film (Shirin) 59 Figure 1.3 The location of the gaze in Baran 65 Figure 2.1 Veiling the voice in A Moment of Innocence 84 Figure 2.2 The image of Na’i in Bahram Bayzaei’s Bashu, The Little Stranger 86 Figure 2.3 The Persian gabbeh carpet on Freud’s couch 92 Figure 2.4 The young lover’s partial acousmatic voice in Gabbeh 96 Figure 3.1 An instance of Lacanian symbolic castration in Daughters of the Sun 117 Figure 3.2 The moment of erotic tension between Aman and Belghis 124 Figure 3.3 Aman’s dancing as an instance of feminine jouissance 132 Figure 3.4 Image of homoerotic culture in the Qajar era 137 Figure 3.5 Amangol burning the weaving sweatshop 142 Figure 3.6 Amongol leaving the burning weaving sweatshop 143 Figure 4.1 An image from Khomeini’s Tawzih al-Masail 165 Figure 5.1 Kabus, the incubus. Demon portrait. 200 Figure 5.2 John Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare 201 Figure 5.3 The female vampire in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr 203 Figure 5.4 The vampire Girl about to suck Saeed’s finger and bite it off 214 Figure 5.5 Arash as Count Dracula meets the Real ‘Dracula,’ the Girl. 218 vi Acknowledgements First I want to my record my sincere gratitude and heart-felt appreciation to my PhD supervisor Professor Nacim Pak-Shiraz. I could not have asked for a better supervisor than Professor Pak-Shiraz, who provided me with all the support, expertise and guidance that I needed at every stage of the writing and researching of my thesis. Her deep knowledge of all things Iranian cinema, not to mention the history, religion, culture and literature of Iran has been a constant source of inspiration. I am grateful to her for the incredible opportunities she gave me to teach courses on Classical and Modern Persian Literature, as well as guest lecture for her class on Iranian Cinema. Among the many things that Professor Pak-Shiraz has done was to save me from extending my life as a postgraduate student when in my second year I wanted to change my thesis topic to the structure of the female voice in Iranian cinema.