Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for Film Screening and Conversation: “The Culture Industry of War” on Tuesday, April 21, from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm, in the Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.
In the 2013 essay-film The Culture Industry of War (27 min), art historian and filmmaker Hamed Yousefi explores the role of images in Iran’s modern political culture. Focusing on the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), he argues that image-making was a central force behind the production of “an industry of martyrdom.” Other accounts of the war tend to focus on the centrality of religious iconography in the ideology of the Islamic Republic. This film, however, recenters the conversation around the modernity of the war's cultural industry, its use of technological modes of reproduction, and the adaption of avant-garde techniques of immediacy and spontaneity in war propaganda. The film examines the work of numerous painters, photographers, and graphic designers, including the practice of revolutionary filmmaker, Morteza Avini (1947–1993), who dedicated his life to documenting the War. By juxtaposing Avini's war documentaries with Abbas Kiarostami's Life and Nothing More (1992), the film suggests a new understanding of Kiarostami in his original social context otherwise neglected by scholars of Kiarostami's cinema.
Post-Screening Conversation with Hamed Yousefi (Near Eastern Studies) and Natasha Raheja (Anthropology and Performing and Media Arts)
Co-Sponsors: Department of Anthropology, Department of Performing and Media Arts, Nazaara Media Lab, German Studies, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Cornell Media Studies, Southwest Asia and North Africa Program, Department of Government
