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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Chapter Twelve: Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make me a Myth
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Abstract
In this final chapter, I wish to turn to singularly emblematic moment in a masterpiece of Iranian cinema, Bahram Beiza’i Bashu: The Little Stranger (1989), when the rebirth of the nation is staged as the second birth of a child to a mother in the absence of her husband and thus as a fatherless immaculate conception. This moment I consider the most radical, the most liberating instance of the rebirth of the nation, aesthetically foretold in a sublime moment in Iranian cinema. By gendering the nation through an immaculate conception, the creative reconceptualization of the very idea of vatan/homeland gives the aesthetic intuition of transcendence a decidedly feminine perspective.