Bahram Beyzaie’s dramatic and cinematic oeuvre

In this entry, I trace the trajectory of Bahrām Bayzā’ī’s creative impulse and examine his oeuvre to offer an analytical overview of his aesthetic and thematic concerns and innovations. Before embarking on my chronological overview, however, I need to clarify a few general points. In my writing, I pay attention to a number of key ideas and practices which are central to Bayzā’ī’s vision: (1) modernity, modernization, and democracy, (2) marginalization, trauma, and creativity, (3) outsider gaze, epistemic privilege, and epistemic authority, (4) transgressive and emancipatory framing and reframing, (5) redistributing the sensible by introducing new ways of seeing, doing, and understanding, (6) modalities and transformations of personal and collective identities, (7) desire for belonging, recognition, and self-recognition as incentives for change, (8) constructive curiosity, worldliness, and intellectuality, (9) citizenship and leadership, (10) gender relations and hegemonic masculinity and femininity, (11) totalitarianism, patriarchy, and power, (12) sociopolitical and religious surveillance, (13) reformulation of Iranian and non-Iranian dramatic and cinematic forms to create new artistic forms, and (14) yoking these reformulated forms to particular situations to construct his emancipatory aesthetics.