Architecture and Space in Twentieth-Century Iranian Cinema

This course examines architecture in its broadest sense - urban and rural, interior and exterior - as represented in twentieth-century Iranian cinema, with a particular focus on the pre-1979 period. Through close readings of films by Ebrahim Golestan, Bahram Beyzaie, Nasser Taghvai, Abbas Kiarostami, Forough Farrokhzad, Shahla Riahi, and others, students trace how confinement, exposure, and the boundary between private and public shift across directors, and what these differences reveal about each filmmaker's stance toward modernity. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze cinematic space as argument, showing how architectural choices encode ideological commitments that dialogue, character, or plot alone cannot carry. Comparing directors' divergent treatments of confinement, threshold, and exposure, students will develop a critical framework for understanding cinema as a medium in which ideology is built, quite literally, into space.