Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie's Cinema and Theatre

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 1960s and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaie's early works such as <i>Downpour</i> and <i>Uncle Moustache</i> 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.