Tracing the Mythical Cow in Iranian Cinema: An Example of Myth-based Criticism

There is widespread agreement that since the publication of Northrop Fry's Anatomy of Criticism, the myth criticism has become one of the most important and fruitful branches of literary criticism, which has dominated academic literary study in Britain and the United States. It seems that all samples of all versions of the mythic criticism share the same two features. The first one is the priority of the art works. They always start with the text and then look for the manifestation of myths or archetypes in it. Second, their view of mythology is usually static. They pay little attention to the changes and transformations of mythological elements and themes throughout history. As a result, they seem oblivious to valuable findings of comparative mythology.
In this article, a new approach is introduced that can be called myth-based criticism. It is different from the common examples of myth criticism in both ways. Unlike other versions of mythic criticism, we start with a myth and its historical transformations and then seek for its manifestations in texts. In this approach, using comparative studies and understanding the transformation process of myths, the hidden links of works of art are uncovered.
This article consists of two parts, one is theoretical and the other practical. In the theoretical part, a brief introduction to myth criticism and its history is presented, then the principles of myth-based criticism are offered. In the second part, a practical example of myth-based criticism is provided. First, a brief description of the myths of bull-slaying and the transformation of such myths throughout history, with emphasis on Persian mythology is presented. Finally, the reflection of these myths in two important works of Iranian cinema, the Cow by Dariush Mehrjui and Qeysar by Masoud Kimiaei are examined. The results show that in this way it is possible to decipher some hidden connections and ambiguous points in these two works.
What we have in mind is to establish a new method of art criticism that can be presented as an Iranian criticism method. Myth-based criticism can be considered as an Iranian way of criticism because few cultures like the ancient culture of Iran have a treasure of transformed myths and epics, and this is exactly the starting point for establishing a myth-oriented critique.