Cross-cultural adaptations in national and international cinemas: the case of Iranian films
Date
2021
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
National and international cinemas occupy two different territories in critical
reception and criticism with an overlapping realm and unbridged gaps in between. The
study of cross-cultural adaptations in a national cinema demands an understanding of
the cultural, social, and political roles played by those adaptations in their historical
context and in their dialogic relations to the world's literature and cinema with
intercrossing moments of localization and universality. Focusing primarily on
internationally marginalized cross-cultural adaptations in Iranian cinema, this project
explores border-crossing encounters and socio-political intersections that remain
unspoken when a cinema of the Global South adapts and remediates texts of the
Global North while maintaining an air of exotic originality in its international
presence. The case studies investigate the possibilities for transnational dialogues and
intercontinental cultural exchanges across geographical, historical and socio-political
borders undertaken by cinematic adaptations of non-Iranian source texts, from Nasser
Taghvai's internationally marginalized Captain Khorshid (1987), based on Ernest
Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, to Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-winning The
Salesman (2016), based on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The concluding
chapter considers the local and global reasons why cross-cultural adaptations have so
rarely been produced in Iran despite the existing adaptations' significant impact. This
interdisciplinary approach to adaptation theory, intertextuality, film criticism and
cultural studies develops a model that explores adaptations in national cinemas for
their unrealized potentials in initiating cross-cultural initiatives in a world that
oscillates between border-crossing dialogues and border-blocking monologues.
Description
Keywords
Adaptation theory, Film theory, Global cinema, Intertextuality, Iranian cinema, National cinema