Counter-Memories (M. Foucault) are subjugated memories that are not allowed to enter history. They have the potential to destabilize official narratives and normative orders of remembering. Inside the main stream of memories those memories stay invisible, marginalized by power effects and epistemic oppression. A genealogic and archeologic perspective as proposed by Foucault remembers history against the grain (Benjamin), excavates silenced experiences and reactivates buried struggles.
Due to the “non existence of a uniform censorship” (Bani-Etemad) and the tactical interventions of Iranian filmmakers the history of Post-revolutionary Cinema is also structured by counter-memories: impure, not 'purified' memories that challenge the officially fabricated success stories of revolution, war and sacred defence (defa’-e moqaddas), interrogate hegemonies and epistemic exclusions, produce frictions between political promises and social realities so that eccentric perspectives interact with mainstream ones. There are, on the one hand, films without screening permission in the context of underground cinema – like Mohammad Rasoulof's Manuscripts don’t burn (2013, Dast-Neveshtehaa Nemisoozand), concerned with the chain murders of 1980-88, or Massoud Bakshi’s A respected family (2012) about the psycho-social and bureaucratic aftermaths of war, including archive footage of wartime. On the other hand there are officially approved or (temporary) un-banned films. Mohsen Makhmalbafs anti-'sacred defence'-movie Marriage of the Blessed (1988, Arousi-ye Khouban) changed the perspective on revolutionary subjectivity through dealing with post-traumatic memories of a war photographer who is not only under shell shock but also under the shock of the unredeemed promises of the revolution. Tahmineh Milani’s film The Hidden Half (2001, Nimeh-ye Penhan) brought up counter-memories referring to the repression unleashed by Islamic fundamentalists against 'gauchistes' and politically committed women after 1979. In the same year as Milani’s film was released, Rakshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City (Zir-e pust-e shahr) opened to wide popular acclaim, a film set 1997 during the presidental elections that resulted in the unexpected victory of Mohammad Khatami and the reform movement. Rakshan Bani-Etemad’s urban realism makes class differences and social exclusions visible and audible, and by doing so she confronts the empty promises of the reform program with social realities. A lot of more examples could be given.
In the framework of the conference, we are focusing especially – but not exclusively – on the mnemonic redistributions that can be found in contemporary Iranian cinema. An archeological perspective looks for ruptures, gaps, frictions, sudden redistributions instead of continuities. The counter-memories we are trying to carve out create a tension between 'remembered time' and 'time of remembering'. They re-configure present and past in the sense of a Walter Benjaminian telescopage of the past through the present, proposing a multiplicity of possible options of the past as an alternative history of the present (Foucault). Thus, we don’t want the term 'memory' to be narrowed down to filmic forms of flashbacks or images with subjective markers. Our concerns regard images and sounds, trauma- and memoryscapes, afterimages of revolution and war that change the rules of what can be said, seen and remembered. This would be the intervention political cinema provides: an intervention out of the present into the present and its perspective on the past.
We call for proposals that may include the following questions and topics:
- What memoryscapes can be found in contemporary Iranian Cinema that establish resistant points of re-membering and might become the source for new discourses about the history of revolution and war, post-revolutionary society and social tensions, about old promises and new challenges?
- Which forms of reassessing the past, creating constellations between past and future, which tactics of reactivation and excavation emerged in different periods of the Islamic Republic of Iran: from revolution (1978/79) and wartime (1980-88) across the so called 'reconstruction period' under the presidency of Rafsanjani, the reform movement of Khatami (1997-2005), the green movement after the re-election of president Ahmadinejad (2009) to Iran’s recent “no future-movement” (Hamid Mohseni) under president Rohani. Both diachronic and synchronic, archeological and genealogical perspectives are conceivable here.
- How are those times and periods remembered, configured and layered in contemporary Iranian Cinema (be it underground or official cinema)?
- What about returns to cinematic legacies that date back to times before the revolution (anthroplogical cinema, new wave, luti genre) in contemporary cinema?
- What can be said (1) about the potential of digital interventions as tactics of implementing counter-memories and (2) about correlations between 'state controlled cinema' and 'dissident cinema' in relation to memory politics?
- Which 'memorology of resistance' has been developed between social media and cinema aesthetics or between memoryscapes developed in popular Iranian TV series and cinema? Which intersections and 'image migrations' can be found between those different, but connected fields of shaping history, society and memory?
- Which theories of trauma and memory can be reactivated or newly formulated on the basis of those observations? Is there a cinema inspired theory of trauma and memory?
- Beginning on December 28th 2017, continuing into 2018, millions in Iran have taken to the streets, not only with anti-government, but also anti-system protests. The demands and the social configurations have been different than those of the Green Movement in 2009. During the last years, the attention of international and maybe also domestic film festivals has covered first and foremost films that depict problems of the middle class. Are “the people missing” (Deleuze) or reappearing again on the screens? What can be said about the relation between memory struggle and class struggle in Contemporary Iranian Cinema?
Please send abstracts which should not exceed 600 words accompanied by short biographical notes to: matthias.wittmann@unibas.ch.
Since the conference talks should become part of a projected book publication we are looking for original contributions!
Abstract submission deadline: 30.4. 2018
Notification of acceptance: 31.5. 2017