Performing history: girlhood and the apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q2x19
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1057/9781137388926_13
- Book title
- International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9781137388926
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This chapter makes a new contribution to discourses about Iranian film and film history’s relationship to girlhood. The chapter builds on research from an earlier book chapter about the same film, The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998). While the earlier chapter focused on the film’s relationship to performance and femininity, this chapter argues that the concept of girlhood is foregrounded in a way that has not been seen before. Taking real events as its source and with the real life protagonists, two sisters, re-enacting their lived experiences, the argument addresses a new way of thinking about the representational issues at stake in relation to the ways the young women work with and against the young female film-maker, Makhmalbaf. Building on existing ideas of realism, it is argued that the young women are constructing their own histories through the performative techniques that are used throughout the film. The importance of the argument lies in the way that it utilises known discourses about the girl in film and applies them in new ways and to a film outside of the Western canon of cinema. The wider implications of the argument link current debates about World Cinema to the specific characteristics of the politics of this film. In this way, this chapter advances new ways of thinking about issues of realism, girlhood and who it is that both shapes and constructs historical documents. The chapter helps to widen existing debates, overwhelmingly Western in their perspective, about the different ways that young women shape their own identities in spite of the forces that surround them. The Iranian cultural context of the film is filtered through an understanding of the ways that the global mediated attention that the central protagonists received helped them to go on to live lives that would otherwise have been impossible.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -