bahareh saeedzadeh

This paper reflects the inversion between the discourse on the Good and that on the khôra in view of the deconstructionist paradigm of the khôral mise en abyme as portrayed by Jacques Derrida and later elaborated on by John D. Caputo. Iddo Dickmann, further describing this paradigm as “lacunal”, schematically illustrates how it can create sameness in difference through reflective repetitions. This schema is used here in a Christian negative theological context and on the accounts of Incarnation and reincarnation to investigate the immanence khôra introduces into transcendence, rendering the Word/Logos as flesh. The present study takes a novel perspective in observing how this self-referential and meta-significatory paradigm can conversely render flesh as the Word, when flesh comes to reflect/interface the Good by negating itself ending up with the elliptical and creative contours that transcribe the Word, and outline a khôral negative-fleshly space that infinitely traces an abyssal “black sun”.

The 1979 religious ideological revolution of Iran brought about a double stance towards the body and its pictorial representations, as to drawing a schism between the physiological and the cultural aspects of the body. Studying this schism is important particularly due to its significance in figuring out the features and functions of what in this article will be called “the ideological body”. Based on Hans Belting’s image trilogy and his concept of the “medium” in it, the present paper aims to investigate the schism between the natural and the cultural body as observable in the ideological body in the context of the Iranian contemporary visual culture. It is shown that this schism appears to be emanating from a dual behavior of pictorial mediality (as introduced by Belting), where the two bipolar limits of the mediality continuum herewithin called the “exogenous” vs. “endogenous” mediality come into a conflict. Through this conflict, the cultural [aspect of the] body which in pictorial terms will be defined to be chiefly the creation of exogenous mediality (i. e., the Shiite ideology’s image-making apparatus) receives glorified representations at the cost of the denial and negation or “(non-)presentation” of the physiological [aspect of the] body produced mainly by the endogenous mediality (i. e., the immediate imaging of a “self”/ an individual without the intrusion of any “other”). This schismatic bodily glorification through negation in the post-revolutionary Iranian visual culture is shown to be the most fundamental definitive characteristic of “the ideological body” the features and functions of which will be investigated in this paper in view of the paintings of the School of Islamic Art and Thought (Hozeh Honari (1979-1992)).

The present study attempts to explore how the so far mainly literary issue of the Unreliable Narratives/Narrators, can be formulated and dealt with in Cinema. Thus, in order to analyze the form and function of such narratives/narrators in Cinema, the present paper tries to discover how the author(s) of the cinematic narrative (the overall collaboration of the screenwriter, the director, the cinematographer, the editor etc.) design(s) unreliability through actions, words, appearance and behavior of characters, story-telling techniques, environmental and audio-visual signs, the mood and atmosphere of the film, its camera work and lighting, editing and its characterization and use of voice-over narration. According to these and depending upon the way the narrative progresses and the order through which story data are revealed, the audience, bringing their own overall knowledge of the world with them to the text, will have different degrees of understanding of how the story must actually be. Since, narratives are created, presented and read/viewed by human beings, with all their mental, emotional and cognitive capacities and properties, the present study adopts a cognitive approach to the analysis of the concept of narrative unreliability, to find out how knowledge of the humankinds’ cognitive faculties can help pattern out and better narratives of the unreliable kind, as we are here interested in, as an author, and be a better reader/viewer in light of what our cognitive knowledge can offer to the task of deciphering behavioral patterns of characters. To achieve that goal, having gained its theoretical roots from David Bordwell’s cognitive approach to film analysis, the present work offers a brief summary of the major thoughts of some other cognitive-minded scholars, such as Noel Carroll, Gregory Currie and Torben Grodal on the subject; in analytic philosophy, narrative theory and film studies (with view to biology and neuroscience), respectively. Then, focusing mainly on Bordwell’s approach, and upon review of the most prominent thoughts given to the concept of the unreliable cinematic narrative, the present paper uses Hansen’s analytic model of how such narratives could actually be represented and formulated in Cinema. Finally, upon study of Hansen’s typology of the unreliable cinematic narratives, and in view of Tamar Yacobi’s five strategies for the naturalization of textual ambiguities and inconsistencies in unreliable narratives in general, and examining filmic examples comprising unreliable narratives, the present paper concludes that different forms of narratives (cinematic narratives as we are here concerned) do not have a limited and predefined pattern and as new narratives are introduced into the world of Cinema, new forms of them can potentially be produced. However, the audience’s experience in reading and viewing texts and films with such narratives can be of great help in deciphering their ambiguities and narratological codes, and enjoying the usually mindful plays on literary/cinematic storytelling at work in them. Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that floating in the pleasurable realms of ambiguity and secretiveness, and being in a state of uncertainty regarding what is actually going on in what we are viewing, has its own unspeakable twilight zone pleasures.

The present study has a cognitive approach to empathy and character engagement in cinema. In discussing how through empathy and engagement with real and fictional characters، we extend our minds and enhance our cognitive abilities، the present paper studies Bahram Tavakkoli’s Wandering in the Fog (2010)، to show how Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s idea of the extended mind as joined with Murray Smith’s tripartite model of cognitive character engagement is at work، both in real life and in film، about how we align with and empathize with other people and things in the world and extend our minds. Tavakkoli’s film is thus analyzed cognitively to describe how we try to extend ourselves by engaging with our environments and other agents، real or fictional. Attempts will therefore be made to discover by studying this film as a miniature model to describe the way extended cognition can build through active externalism.