Iranian Cinema

Bi ismillahir rahmanir raheem

as requested by robert,

Hi, this is my first post on this forum and I'm trying to find out some information about Islamic art. I know tht there's an art forum on here, but it won't let me post in there. Maybe a mod could move this there, or someone else could pose this question in there for me?

Anyway,I'm just about to start a Masters dissertation on Film Studies and my subject is Iranian Cinema, more specifically the new Iranian Cinema of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami etc. The general argument of my thesis is going to be an attempt to critique the usual western analysis of these films which values them highly but in a very politicalised way which sees them as highly influenced by Modern Western aesthetic and intellectual traditions, comparing the alienation and ambiguity/pluralism within them to a particular form of Western oppositionalism (as though anything indiginously Islamic would be much more monolithic and opressive).

In place of this analysis I'm advocating an understanding of these films in terms of a poetic pluralism which I'm tracing through Sufism. My aim is to be able to trace both these Western and Persian forms of pluralism back to common origins in Platonic and Aristotelian aesthetics which through the diffusion of the Classical and Judaeo-Christian (and eventually Islamic) worlds came to influence both aesthetic traditions.

Now I've plenty of material that supports this kind of idea in terms of film and literature, but the last element that is missing to make this comparative dialectic between the two cultures is in terms of painting. I'm aware that a lot of Islamic culture hasn't been particularly interetsed in painting, and that when it has it has been more interested in geometric patterns etc. but this is where I was hoping that someone on this forum might be able to help me. My research into Islamic painting hasn't got me very far, but what I'm looking for (if it exists) is something like an equivalent to Velasquez's Las Meninas, a piece of Islamic art that demonstrates the same kind of ambiguity and pluralism that occurs in Sufi poetry and New Iranian Cinema. Whether it exists or not i don't know, but I thought that if it does, someone on here might know about it.

Any help you might be able to offer here, even if its just the name of an artist or work would be gratefully recieved. Thanks in advance,

Robert Geal.