Cinema has always been influenced by sociopolitical occurrences throughout its nearly 100 year history in Iran. As such, the 1979 Islamic Revolution also affects the cinema by its foundation of Islamic rules and values. Adoption of cinema as an ideological tool helped the Islamic revolutionary propaganda to expand retrogressive gender policy and practices in which women were represented as second‐class citizens who were to be kept at home as a housewife or a mother with the emphasis on modesty and chastity as the ideal features of a Muslim woman. However, throughout the following three decades after the revolution, and alongside wider sociocultural changes in Iran, the representation of women has been transformed toward reflecting on what women do in real social life and how they contribute to society. Asghar Farhadi, as Iran's most internationally acclaimed filmmaker today, represents examples of this transformation by setting new standards in reinforcing a real portrayal of women's life/role in current Iranian society; women who are crossing boundaries of gender segregation and inequality. This entry looks at the representation of Iranian women within the past 40 years, specifically in Farhadi's two movies,
A Separation
(2011) and
The Salesman
(2016), which were both celebrated by receiving Academy Awards for the best foreign language film in 2012 and 2017.
This paper deconstructs how religious musical eulogies, as the most important discursive practices of Shi’a rituals (Ghaffari 2019), were used as “war songs” serving to construct the Iranian national identity during the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war. These musical practices (in)formed the wider ideological and persuasive rhetoric of Iranians. In this paper, I analyse the textual and musical features of the audio-recorded versions of ten well-known war songs. The Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2016) is used to analyse the discursive strategies and persuasive rhetorical tools within the lyrics. I draw on Machin (2010), Machin and Richardson (2012) and van Leeuwen (1999) to analyse various features of voice and the modality of sounds. This paper concludes that, by reflecting the power of religious discourse in the non-religious and highly nationalistic occasion of war, Iranian war songs were inspired by the religious eulogies in encouraging the Iranian nation to attend the war fronts.
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