Farshid Kazemi is Sessional Lecturer in Film Studies at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Canada. He holds a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His research interests combine an interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to film and media studies, film theory, Iranian studies, and Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. His book on the film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021.

Acknowledgements

A Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Iranian Cinema with Psychoanalysis (or Watching Iranian Movies with Lacan)

Part I. Desire between Gaze and Voice

Chapter 1: A Cinema of Desire: The Object-Gaze in Shirin and Baran

1.1 The Gaze in Lacan: From Screen Theory to the Object-Gaze

1.2 The Averted Gaze as Looking Awry: An Islamic Theory of the Gaze

1.3 The Film Returns the Gaze: Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin

1.4 The Fantasized Object-Gaze in Baran

Chapter 2: The Voice as Love Obejct: The Acousmatic Voice in Gabbeh and The May Lady

2.1 Chion with Lacan: The Acousmatic Voice and Feminist

Psychoanalytic Film Theory

2.2 Veiling and Aurality: An Islamic Theory of the Female Voice

2.3 The Acousmatic Voice in Gabbeh

2.4 The Acousmêtre in The May Lady

Part II. The Fright of Real Desires

Chapter 3: From Femininity to Masculinity and Back: The Feminine 'No!'

in Daughters of the Sun

3.1 Daughters of the Sun (Dokhtaran-e khorshid)

3.2 Symbolic Castration and the Name-of-the-Father

3.3 The Depressive Position and Melancholic Identification

3.4 Female Homoeroticism and Objet petit a

3.5 Love beyond Law and Feminine Jouissance

3.6 Misrecognition and Male Homoeroticism (shahed-bazi)

3.7 The Lacanian Act and the Feminine 'No!'

Chapter 4: Dreaming of a Nightmare in Tehran: The Fright of Real Desires

in Atomic Heart

4.1 Atomic Heart between The Weird and the Eerie

4.2 Reality Structured by Fantasy or Fantasy as an Ideological Category

4.3 Ideology and the Structure of Toilets

4.4 Repetition or The Double as the Thing (das Ding)

4.5 Che Voui? or the Desire of the Other

4.6 The Fright of Real Desires

4.7 The Collapse of the Fantasy and the Lacanian Real

4.8 The Enigma of Desire and the Dream within a Dream

4.9 Dreaming of a Nightmare in Tehran

Conclusion: The Darkness of Desire or the Desire of Iranian Cinema

Bibliography

Filmography