Читать книгу A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Khatereh Sheibani

Cinema, as an artistic form of expression with viewership, affects cultural constituents of a society, thus it is a valuable cultural capital.¹ Motion pictures, worldwide, have artistic and aesthetic values, along with communal, psychological, intellectual, political, and historical values. Iranian cinema is known for its particular artistic and aesthetic value. Many outstanding Iranian films that were made in the past 40 years seem to display a subtle, ambient, and unobtrusive sphere. Less is said in their narratives and more could be “felt” or “read” by audiences in between the lines of narrative. What are the intellectual, artistic, and aesthetic sources of this cinema? How could these low budget, auteur-based movies attract global audiences? To answer these questions, this chapter explores the public aesthetic and artistic values that motion pictures have brought to Iranian society, and to the global community. It investigates some of the most significant individuals, cultural movements, and trends that affected the public aesthetic and artistic values of Iranian cinema.

My case study on Iranian cinema demonstrates that the aesthetic and artistic value of Iranian cinema is closely tied to the intellectual, artistic, and aesthetic values of the cross-cultural values of the Persianate world in the past and present time. This chapter examines some of the most fundamental features of such values. Herein is an overview of the aesthetic evolution of Iranian cinema. The formation of a unique aesthetics in Iranian cinema helped to make it a major non-western cinema and facilitated its favorable reception in national and international film festivals and theatre houses.