Reimagining the Cinematic Gaze: An Analysis of Iranian Mystical Cinema in Majid Majidi’s Baran
Journal of Contemporary Poetics December 24, 2024 Sarah Abdullah
Theories of the gaze developed in the West—such as the male gaze, female gaze, objectifying gaze, and imperial gaze—are inadequate for analyzing mystical cinema from outside the Western mainstream, particularly Iranian mystical cinema. Unlike capitalist, consumer-driven films that cater to scopophilia (the pleasure of looking), Iranian mystical cinema is theopoetic and focuses on ordinary protagonists grappling with mundane experiences to pose philosophical questions about life, death, and the connection between the real and the spiritual. The paper argues for a new concept, the mystical gaze, as a culturally specific framework for processing such films and applies it to Majid Majidi's film Baran.