Poetry of Image: Key Issues of the History and Aesthetics of Iranian Auteur Cinema

Iranian cinema, with its 100-year history, is an integral part of the world’s spiritual and cultural heritage and cinematographic art. Iranian cinema has a rich and diverse history, one of the most significant points of which is the formation of the Iranian New Wave in the 1960s. As a cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, the New Wave appeared in Iran with its unique cinema school. One of its substantive achievements is the desire to remain loyal to the national life experience and to portray and express its peculiarities. In academic film studies, the New Wave is considered to be the period of the rise of Iranian cinema history, a time of new artistic achievements. In the 1960s and 1970s, a creative collaboration emerged between filmmakers and poets, based on the ideological and content-driven searches in cinema and poetry. Continuing the traditions of Iranian classical poetry (in the sphere of ideological and aesthetic expression of speech and image), the poets exerted a great influence on the author’s “art-house” cinema with their poetic thinking. Iranian auteur cinema was founded in the middle of the 20th century and reached its peak in 1979, after the Islamic Revolution. Iranian auteur cinema developed its own unique and independent cinematographic world. It is essential to recall the special artistic language of auteur cinema, which encompasses several historical civilizational stages. It is imbued with centuries-old religious, mystical literary codes, symbols, and allegories. Children’s participation in auteur cinema is of particular visual significance. It gives the Iranian cinema the ability to create a poetic and mystical inner space, where childhood is seen in all its poetic expressiveness. In recent decades, emigrant cinema has played a significant role, with its ideological and thematic foundation based on nostalgia for the homeland and the bitter experience of exile. The role of Iranian-Armenian filmmakers in the creation and establishment of Iranian cinema is invaluable. In the context of Armenian-Iranian literary, historical, and cultural bonds of many centuries, it is necessary to consider the influence of Armenian auteur cinema on Iranian poetic cinematographic thinking. It is also important to mention that owing to the Armenian annual “Golden Apricot” International Film Festival, multiple generations of the Armenian cinephile community are well acquainted with Iranian cinema. In the last decade, the academic course “The Iranian Cinema” has expanded its educational scope. It is taught not only in film studies institutions, but also in centers for the study of “Civilizations of the Near and Middle East” at leading universities all around the world. It should be noted that Iranian cinema is extensively covered within the master’s program “History of Middle Eastern Cinema,” which is taught at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Yerevan State University. The monograph entitled “Poetry of Image: Key Issues of the History and Aesthetics of Iranian Auteur Cinema” is the first Armenian-language theoretical study dedicated to Iranian cinema, among hundreds of academic and cultural publications. It examines the cultural, historical, and aesthetic foundations of Iranian auteur cinema, presents its development across different stages, and analyzes the artistic characteristics of auteur filmmaking that emerged in the context of the dialogue between cinema and poetry.