A Critical Study on Walter Benjamin’s Flâneurie in Iranian Feature Films from 1990 to 2017, Case Study: White Nights (2002)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of cinema, Faculty of arts, Soore University, Tehran, Iran

10.30480/dam.2022.2372.1503

Abstract

Flaneurie is an innate component of readings on modern urban life which has come to the heart of critical discourses owing to the writings of Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century and the works of Walter Benjamin in the twentieth century. Since the 1990s, new perusals of the flaneur have made it yet again an appealing concept in academic studies which is modernized through blending with the recent subjects and is no longer confined to Europe. This dissertation begins its arguments by iterating Baudelaire's narration of the flaneur. After going over Benjamin's notes on flaneurie and a brief description of Iran's society and cinema concerning urbanism and modernity, the presentment of Benjamin's flaneur in Iranian works of cinema from 1990 to 2017 is specified. To do so, the evaluated films belong to pseudo-genres like “urban films”, “street films” and “social films. “This research assays the embodiment of Benjamin's flaneur as the characters of films and with a statistical view it can be said that although what is known as the “flaneur” by the Iranian film critics has similarities to that of Benjamin’s, they're fundamentally distinct; distinctions that based on the means of production, censorship, pre-revolution cinematic movements, and the Iranian modernity in a broad view. These differences make it necessary to construct a new definition of the flaneur to separate it from the ideal type of it, a definition which is upon the common qualities and motifs of said films. This definition of the cinematic flaneur is an attempt to demonstrate that Benjamin's vision of flaneurie is absent in the Iranian cinema except for some rare occasions and that the film critics and filmmakers, for years with an inaccurate terminology and an askew hermeneutics of this tremendous concept, have turned it into a conserve and dissimilar matter.

Keywords

Volume 12, Issue 26
June 2022
Pages 37-53

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