Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: The World of Pure Verisimilitude
From Truth to Verisimilitude
Under the Debris of the Fourth Wall
Ostranenie and the Arrested Mimesis of the Body
Framing the Performances, Spacing Performativity
The Liberating World of Pure Verisimilitudes
Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed
Part I Men and Women
1 Men without Women
Lumpens, Intellectuals, Clerics
Searching for Deeper Roots
From Lumpenism to Fascism
Inorganic Intellectuals
Lumpenism in Cinema
The Mythic Gap of a Gender Imbalance
2 Women without Men
The Creative Constitution of a Public Persona
Knowledge of the Unknown
Seven Shades of Memory
Rethinking the Human in Literary Humanism
Gleichschaltung
Writing Women into Humanism
Part II Masculine and Feminine
3 Masculine/Feminine
Men of Honour and Fear of Castration
The Metaphoric Body
The Colonised Masculinity
Dash Akol: The Mythic Man Idolised
Contingency of the Body
In Search of 'Authenticity'
The Dialectics of the Body's Being-in-the-World
Sexual Thralldom
Mutilating the Feminine Body
Where Men are Men ...
... And Women are Not Men
4 Feminine/Masculine
Daybreak
Women at Work
The Mythically Pregnant Reality
Re-Mythologising the Real
Mythologies
Ritual Birth
Urban Legends
Meanwhile, the Ma'arefi Family ...
Metonymic Mythologies of the Present
5 Liberation in Three Moves
The Realism of the Real
Fear of the Real
Towards a Neo-Realism
Reality under Erasure
The Taste of Cherry
The Bread and the Flower Pot
Baran and the Native
6 To Be at Home in the World
Dis-Engaging the Metaphysical
To De-Oedipalise the Oedipal
Re-Configuring the Body
Trusting the Camera
Subjectivity, Sexuality and the Imaginary
Towards a Counter-Symbolic
Visions of the Invisible
'Semiotic Chora'
Part III Home and Exile
7 The Cinema of Solitude
A Nocturnal Journey
Ice as a Floating Signifier
Simple, Solitary and Serene
The Site of the Solitary Unknowing Subject
8 The Ballad of Occidental Exile
The Exile as the Unknowing Subject
Exilic Cinema
Exile on Exile: Amir Naderi on Sohrab Shahid-Saless
Amir Naderi's New York
Born Again in New York
A Migratory and Mobile State of Mind
On the Poetry of Concrete and Steel
Suspended of All Imported Meanings
The Troubadour of the Occidental Exile
Part IV Mysticism and Mythologies
9 The World of Verisimilitude
The Nature and Disposition of Creativity
Towards a Culture of Bodily Denials
Fabling the World
The Metaphysics of the Absolutes
Subjection and Re-Subjection
Against Dead Certainties
A Material Celebration of Life
The Sound of Gabriel's Wing
Towards a Cinematic (Counter-)Culture
Part V Visions Impermissible
10 Visions of the Invisible