Urban poor and the poverty of experience in Iranian cinema: An investigation of the urban poor representation in Iranian cinema

Heydari, Arash; Farahpour, Sara; Mohebi, Milad

doi:10.22059/jsal.2023.92663

Urban poor and the poverty of experience in Iranian cinema: An investigation of the urban poor representation in Iranian cinema

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

¹ Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Science and Culture, Iran

² Department of Urban Design, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Shahid Rajai University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

³ Department of Urban Design, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Shahid Rajai University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jsal.2023.92663

Abstract

Background: Portraying the subaltern has always been one of the contradictory notions in the field of art, and dealing with the urban poor is considered an important issue in critical claim. But the main issue here is that the mere inclusion of urban poor as a content in an artwork cannot have critical characteristics, even if the author claims so. The main issue is about the form in which the poor is depicted, and the critical features of a work should be sought in its depiction or narration forms and not necessarily in the represented content. Therefore, if we consider how the urban poor is represented in a general sense and in cinema in specific, we can speak of patterns that establish different relationships with the life of the poor. These representational forms can be evaluated and their relationship with the current situation can be revealed by showing the origins of their emergence.
Objectives: The present study was conducted with the aim of analyzing the narrative mechanisms of the so-called "Social Genre`" in Iranian cinema. For this purpose, by focusing on a range of popular Iranian movies in the last decade (2011-2021) and analytically studying the narrative structures of these films, an attempt was made to present a categorization of these imaging systems. This classification goes beyond description and its eventuality has been investigated through a conceptual order centered on the notion of "poverty of experience" in Walter Benjamin`s works.
Method: This study is a qualitative research and it was compiled in a mixed methodology. Utilizing the method of Semiotics in the study of Iranian cinema, this research tries to adopt a new approach on social studies. For this purpose, 19 Iranian films between 2011 and 2021 were selected. To analyze the discourse of Iranian journalism in the face of the urban poor in the same period, archives of eight selected newspapers including (Donyaye Ekhtesad, Iran, Keihan, Aftab Yazd, Jame Jam, Resalat, Sharq and Vatan Emoraz) along with online databases related to the press including (Fars, Tasnim, Mehr, Isna, Etemad Online, etc.) were searched with a targeted encounter. In the search for keywords such as poverty, marginalization, day laborer, street hawker, homelessness, and social harm among the mentioned documents,and through the logic of discourse analysis the patterns of representation of urban poor were discussed.
Conclusion: Based on the narrative cores of these films, it was depicted that this narrative order serves a conceptual purpose which we call "dramatizing the life of the urban poor". In close relation to the journalism focused on social harms, which was examined through discourse analysis, the process of dramatizing demonsrates itself in three main strategies: the sanctification, marginalization and condemnation-crimination of the urban poor. This is how the Iranian "Social genre`" confronts the daily life of the urban poor in cinema and journalism and it eventuates as something that serves the desire of the consumer society. In other words, in the articulation of the existing situation, a transformation and a distortion occurs, which indicates the filmmaker's deliberate effort to represent a flawed construction of reality or a dramatized image of everyday life of the urban poor. Therefore, the film loses the social and critical features that claims to reflect and in the final instance it becomes a kind of mere consumer good

Keywords

References

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