Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance. Michelle Langford (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Pp. xiv, 278 (hardcover). ISBN 9781780762982

Abstract

Writing in the early 1990s, Bill Nichols observed the ascent of Iranian cinema to the global stage in his landmark article, “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit” (1994). For a theorist like Nichols, the global rise of Iranian cinema was merely an excuse to reflect on the processes by which international audiences make sense of “new” cinemas, especially when they are discovered, venerated, and made accessible by systems of global distribution like film festivals. Nevertheless, the article has become important to the study of Iranian filmmaking by capturing the moment at which Iranian cinema joined the ranks of world cinema: the darling of international film festivals and a mainstay on university syllabi. At the core of the article are important questions about how Iranian filmmakers have embedded meanings into their films. Nichols proposes that certain universal forms, including allegorical and poetic styles, offer an entry point for global viewers as they wade through strange sights and sounds and seek out those deeper messages teeming beneath the plot. Although Michelle Langford’s Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance does not directly reference Nichols’s article, in many respects it picks up where Nichols leaves off. Langford begins her book by explaining that she was “seduced” by Iranian art house films in the 1990s when they “began making their way to international film festivals.” She writes, “I couldn’t help but feel that they were calling me to engage with them more deeply” (1). Perhaps unknowingly, she replicates the central concerns of Nichols’s article by asking how Iranian films attract and sustain global viewership through the promise of hidden meanings. In his article, Nichols suggests that festival audiences make sense of Iranian cinema by capitalizing on their knowledge of the formal strategies of filmmaking to recuperate “the strange as familiar.” This understanding of Iranian films is, according to Nichols, necessarily partial, like that of a “satisfied tourist.” He writes that lurking “at the boundaries of the film festival experience . . . are those deep structures and thick descriptions that might restore a sense of the particular and local to what we have now recruited to the realm of the global.” In what could be a direct response to Nichols’s observation, Langford’s eloquent and thoughtful book supplies expert knowledge as the author analyzes an allegorical tradition that has become synonymous with Iranian cinema since its explosion on the international scene. Combining fine-grained analyses of specific films with a wealth of historical and political context, Allegory in Iranian Cinema is a welcome addition to Iranian film studies—a field that has grown mightily since Nichols first observed the budding presence of Iranian movies at international film festivals nearly three decades ago.