Cultural close-up
Negar Mottahedeh views her native Iran through its film and literature
By Cabell Smith
October 25, 2002 | DURHAM, NC -- Across from Negar Mottahedeh's faculty office on East Campus is Lilly Library, home to a collection of more than 10,000 feature films, documentaries and animation. To this scholar of world cinema, Lilly's lure is irresistible.
"Many nights, after I've gotten ready for bed, I'll change my mind and head over to the library," says the assistant professor in the Program in Literature. "I get so many ideas for the next day's class from watching those movies."
Film is only one of Mottahedeh's wide-ranging interests, which also include literature, history, memoirs, theater and gender studies. "The focus of my work is Iranian cultural studies, in which film certainly plays a large part."
Susan Willis, assistant professor of literature and English, says Mottahedeh brings a valuable perspective to the literature program's interdisciplinary mix. "Many of us are rooted in European and Latin American traditions. Professor Mottahedeh enables us to reverse our gaze and begin to apprehend the world from a very different point of reference."
Mottahedeh was born in Iran and lived there until she was seven. "My parents were growing anxious about the changes that would soon sweep the country," she says. "They had a concept of themselves as citizens of the world and settled, happily, in Norway."
After finishing Norwegian secondary school, Mottahedeh came to the United States to study at Mt. Holyoke, where she majored in international relations. She earned her master's and doctoral degrees in cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.
While at Minnesota, she first experienced the profound power of film as a cultural force. "I saw Pontecorvo's 'The Battle of Algiers,' and it resonated in me," she recalls. "I began to examine the connections between reform and visual culture, especially in light of what was taking place in Iran. I wanted to explore how a cultural product like film can be used to transform culture.
"Everyone thought that with the Islamic Revolution, cinema in Iran would disappear," she says. "But when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in 1979, he said cinema had been used to corrupt our youth and that Iran needed to use film to educate the masses in the Islamic way of life."
After the revolution, Iranian filmmakers, many of whom came from Western film traditions, sought new ways to film realistic scenes in an Iranian context. "Cinematic codes had to be altered," Mottahedeh explains. For instance, because film is in the public domain, women had to be veiled even in situations that would not normally require veiling. "I'm interested in this transition, how the female body shifted the code, how the language of Iranian cinema developed around the veiled woman and its representation of the state."
Iranian directors found other creative ways to work within the constraints of the state system. "Iranian cinema constantly plays with past, present and future, and with the division between fiction and reality," she says. "We are somewhere, but we are also nowhere. We are in the present, but we also live in no-time.
"For example, you see a woman washing her clothes. Then you realize she is also an historical figure, the mother of future Imams. Her two children will die as martyrs in battle many years later, and she is mourning their future deaths even as she washes their clothes. Past, present and future are all there together."
Ariel Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies, says of his colleague, "Negar is studying what I, along with many others, consider the most extraordinary cinema being produced in the world today: the films done in Iran. Her understanding illuminates the main dilemmas facing the cinematic arts in our globalizing age, informing it with a knowledge of theatrical and cultural traditions."
Mottahedeh's first semester at Duke has been an active one. She is teaching two undergraduate courses: film theory and comparative world cinema. Next spring, she'll lead a graduate seminar in contemporary Iranian film.
She is also busy with film projects. Earlier this month, she helped organize a Japanese animé festival and cel animation exhibit. "I'm fascinated with the ways in which animé transforms gender roles," she says. "Women so often become the strong, powerful, heroic characters. You can really talk about questions of gender and identification."
Mottahedeh is also working on an "axis of evil" film festival titled "Reel Evil," to be held at Duke in February. "It will feature films from Iran, Iraq and North Korea, as well as Cuba, Libya and Syria," she says. "These countries all have film industries. The problem is acquiring some of the films."
This creative approach to her field has already gained Mottahedeh admirers among her Duke colleagues, including Dorfman. "At a time when we are plagued with so many false images of the Middle East, Islam and otherness," he says, "Negar brings a refreshingly original perspective which will allow students and faculty alike to reconsider their own presuppositions."
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