Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema and Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (1959-1979)

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 1960 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.